I participated in the Nordmedia 2017 conference last week with a paper titled "Online lurking and offline action: young people, social media, and
(non-)participation." coming from the project "Political participation among young people – from party democrats to social media activists?" where I am cooperating with political scientists Hanna Bäck and Malena Rosén Sundström of Lund university and psychologist Emma Bäck of University of Gothenburg. The project is now in its third and last year and we are in the output phase, so to speak. I presented the paper in the Temporary Working Group Onlife: Digital Media Sociology in a Digital Cross-Platform World and got some excellent comments from Jacob Ørmen of the University of Copenhagen as well as from the audience.
I also had the pleasure of chairing the Political Communication division together with Christina Neumayer of the IT University of Copenhagen, where we had a set of really great papers and discussions. Christina and myself are staying on as chairs over the next Nordmedia conference, which will be held in August 2019 at Malmö university, and we hope that we'll get as good proposals for that conference as we got for this one.
Abstract
Online lurking and offline action: young people, social media, and
(non-)participation.
Research has described political participation as becoming ever more
individualised (eg Bennett & Segerberg, 2013). This has been argued to be
connected to the general individualisation of society, but also to affordances
made possible by new media. One line of research explains political participation
combining selective benefits (Olson, 1965), psychological factors (Klandermans
& van Stekelburg, 2013) and social incentives (Cialdini, 2009). However, it
is not clear how social media and its effects on information, discussion, and
peer pressure influences the socialisation of young people and decisions to
participate on a micro level.
This paper uses focus group interviews to uncover mechanisms
underpinning (non-)participation in relation to social media use and social
incentives. It is based on eight focus group interviews with 59 Swedish participants
aged 16-25. The design includes four focus groups comprised by high school students;
two groups with university students, one group with students in a
post-secondary non-university education programme, and one group with people
enrolled in a labour market initiative. The choice of method allows for young
people to discuss things with peers in a safe setting, teasing out issues that
would perhaps not come out in a one-on-one meeting with an adult researcher, or
in a survey with pre-formulated questions. In contrast to digital methods, it
also allows for the collection of information on cross-platform behaviour and lurking,
as well as information on offline conversations. The focus group discussions evolve
around the political content in social media, news, peer pressure, and (non-)participation).
One focal point is news, discussions and (non-)participation in relation to the
2015 European refugee crisis, which saw a high level of mobilisation as well as
news coverage and public discussion among the Swedish population.
The interviews are transcribed and analysed using micro-interlocutor
analysis (Onwuegbuzie et al, 2009), thereby placing a higher focus on the dynamic
aspects of the focus group interview than is usually done.
A preliminary analysis of
the material reveals a complex situation regarding the interaction between
social media use, peer pressure, offline discussions and participation. Participants
have in general a negative view of young people as uninformed, volatile, and
highly impressable. Political discussions in social media are generally avoided
as they are deemed to be pointless and overly aggressive (cf. Gustafsson, 2012).
Instead,
political discussions are preferably held offline with close peers. News are to
a very high degree consumed through social media (in complex interaction with
the discussions framing topics and stories), and there is a large insecurity
concerning what is fake news and what is proper journalisms and trustable
facts. Active participation is heavily connected to personal influences by
close friends.
References
Bennett,
L. W. & Segerberg, A. (2013). The Logic of Connective Action: Digital
Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cialdini,
R. B. (2009). Influence: Science and Practice, 5th ed. Boston: Pearson
Education.
Gustafsson,
Nils, 2012. The Subtle Nature of Facebook Politics. Swedish Social Media Users
and Political Participation, New Media & Society, 14(2): 1111-1127.
Klandermans,
B., & van Stekelenburg, J. (2013). ‘Social movements and the dynamics of
collective action’ in Huddy, L. – Sears D. O. – Levy, J. S. (eds.), The
Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Olson,
M. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action. Public Goods and the Theory of
Groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Onwuegbuzie,
A., Dickinson, W, Leech, N. & Zoran, A., 2009. A Qualitative Framework for
Collecting and Analyzing Data in Focus Group Research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 8(3): 1-21.
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