I Like, I Share, I Donate! Exploring Practices of Civic Participation through Convergent Technologies

Research on online civic participation tends to either focus on a specific platform or to be platform-agnostic, ignoring that citizens engage online on multiple settings and that practices of civic participation in one context may depend on users’ activities on other platforms. This paper addresses this gap through an online survey of Greenpeace supporters (N=620) in different countries. The questionnaire examined the respondents’ civic participation on various platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, as well as the Greenpeace email list, and personal blogs. Principle component analysis allowed us to identify five distinct types of civic participation: information retrieval, interaction, entertainment, expressing support, and taking action. However, the types of civic participation and how these were distributed on different platforms depended on the number of platforms used by Greenpeace supporters. Our results further show that users engaging on multiple platforms tend to take more actions, such as making donations or signing petitions.