Young Citizens’ Socially Mediated Voice in a Cold Economic Climate: Revising Equality and Online Participation

Abstract

Recent protests and campaigns undertaken predominantly by young citizens in Europe, the Middle East and North America, have focused attention on the elective affinity of social media, unconventional political youth cultures and the alienation of a new generation of citizens. The early hyperbole and simplistic accounts of ‘Twitter revolutions’ have been appropriately critiqued by political scientists. However more general discussion of social media still retains a largely unchallenged set of assumptions about its inherent democratic properties and socialising capabilities for engaging young people. Yet such optimism either ignores the well established negative relationship between socio-economic inequality and levels of political participation or it discounts the importance of traditional political concepts such collective action, social justice, participation and the public sphere for democratic governance. Set against a context of high youth unemployment in many countries (e.g. 50% in Spain and Greece, 19% in the UK, 17% in Ireland) and skilled graduates increasingly entering precarious occupations, this panel seeks to explore how socially differentiated (class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality) young citizens interact with social media and are politically influenced by it in pluralistic ways. It will reflect on whether social media use for political engagement ameliorates young people’s political inequality in a distinct period of time when they are experiencing increased social and economic precarity. The panel also seeks papers that will consider the value of research into social media as a means of informing our understanding of both contemporary normative values of young citizens and as evidence for emerging alternative models of political engagement.

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