Voicing and debating opinions and beliefs
• Taking action
They point out that, although taking action is often considered to be the most desirable form of civic engagement, acquiring information and debating issues are equally important and serve to inform action. This becomes critically important when we consider social media, especially as it has evolved from an information-sharing environment into a more active participation environment.
Along similar lines, Norris (2001) believes that civic engagement with regard to politics entails three important factors:
• Political knowledge
• Political trust
• Political participation
Political knowledge is what people learn about political issues, candidates, and affairs from consuming media and talking with others. Political trust is the sense of support for political institutions and political actors. Political participation involves the various ways that citizens take action to influence how government works or to impact the decision making of politicians. Norris calls out trust because it can be seen as having an impact on confidence in government systems and therefore it serves as a facilitator of participation. Researchers have extensively examined how the internet shapes all of these factors, perhaps leading to increased knowledge, increased trust, and greater participation (Kenski and Stroud, 2010).
Several researchers suggest that computer-mediated interactions have positive effects on community engagement and civic involvement (Donath and boyd, 2004; Hampton and Wellman, 2003; Kavanaugh et al., 2005; Resnick, 2001). For example, internet users are more likely than non-internet users to be involved in civic and political activities such as attending a political rally, trying to influence a vote, and actually voting or reporting intention to vote—and frequent Facebook users are even more highly engaged in these civic/political activities (Hampton et al., 2011; Raine and Smith, 2012). Facebook users maintain many types of relationships within the site and seem to gain and maintain social capital from its use (Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe, 2007; Resnick, 2001; Wellman et al., 2001).
So, “civic engagement” can be construed as any activity performed by people that is relevant to their community, society, culture, nation, or to issues of global citizenship. This covers both active and passive forms of engagement, although these stances toward engagement can be hard to distinguish from each other. For example, an individual might read the posts of a politician and the comments of other citizens on a social media platform, but never post themselves. While this lurking behavior is often classified as passive, it does require that the individual find the material and make decisions about what to look at. Presumably, it is also performed for a purpose related to civic participation, such as learning about a candidate and understanding their positions or judging their popularity.
Perhaps we should view participation as varying on continua across at least two axes: intensity of discussion and intensity of action. Intensity of discussion refers to the content of what is posted on social media. Instead of a dichotomy of participation (posting something) versus non-participation (lurking), we may view participation intensity on an ordinal scale anchored on one end by lurking and on the other by continuous engagement with many others in prolonged discourse. With regard to action, a similar ordinal scale exists with people who take in information at one end and people who participate in real-world activity such as voting, petition signing, demonstrating, and participating in revolt on the other. Social media affords civic engagement by users in all parts of this intensity-action space.
1.3 SOCIAL MEDIA
In this book, we are concerned primarily with the impact of social media on civic engagement. Although bulletin boards and other community-oriented media have been around for a while, social media as we know it today began at the start of the 21st century. The earliest pure social networking sites—Friendster, LinkedIn, and MySpace—were launched in 2002–2003. The first YouTube video was uploaded in 2005. Twitter was started in 2006. Facebook opened to a non-restrictive membership also in 2006. Other rapidly growing social media platforms such as Reddit, Instagram, and Snapchat are even younger.
A definitional part of the concept of Web 2.0, social media includes computing platforms that allow users to interact with each other, to share and augment media content such as news articles, and to post, comment on, and respond to media of all kinds, including text, images, video, and music. A critical feature of social media is that it is a prosumer environment, involving all participants in both the production and consumption aspects of its use (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010). Thus, the content of social media is largely user-generated, although users now post journalistic media, news, and other professionally produced material as well, and social media platforms have evolved a much more seamless integration of these different types of materials. Similarly, while there are different platforms for different media types—Instagram for pictures and YouTube for videos, for example—social media sites are also now moving to integration of material across platforms and are also supporting multiple media types within their own environments. The typical newsfeed on Facebook, by far the most popular social media environment, will contain text posts from friends and friends-of-friends; pictures from friends and acquaintances; embedded videos from friends, organizations, and professional sources; embedded news and magazine stories from multiple sources; jokes and memes from friends and organizations; updates on travel; targeted advertising; links and reposts from microblogs like Twitter or image platforms like Instagram; and so on.
All of these features may be reacted to instantly with a range of emotional expressions and may be commented on in a threaded comment section with text or any other content of the types mentioned above. In other words, these environments have become complex, multifaceted, multimedia, multisource information firehoses that mix social, commercial, civic, and other matters mercilessly. They are accessible at any time through mobile devices and visited multiple times per day by literally billions of users.
Social media can be a stand-alone environment or platform in which users maintain a friend, acquaintance, and/or follower network, and typically intermingle content sharing and information dissemination activities in multiple spheres (e.g., entertainment, politics, news, etc.). Social media can also be an added feature to other application environments, for example as a commenting area on news stories or videos, or as a Twitter feed embedded in a web application. Seamless integration of social networking applications with content-supplying applications has been achieved by many popular platforms. Many traditional online media outlets provide liking and sharing buttons that instantly move content into a social media stream where it can be immediately viewed by friends and followers, embellished, and rebroadcast throughout the network. Most recently, traditional news outlets such as the New York Times have entered into deals to integrate their content directly into social media feeds without the need for sharing. This widespread integration of social media functions within other applications, in conjunction with the fact that many users maintain an open, background social media application while doing other things on the internet, makes it difficult to assess exactly when internet users are engaged in social media activity, or more accurately it makes it difficult to assess when they are not engaged in social media activity. In fact, it is probably best to assume that for many internet users social networking is a constant state, either potential or realized.
The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project has been tracking multiple aspects of the use of social media since its inception. Sixty-five percent of American adults now use social networking sites (Perrin, 2015). The highest usage is by younger people in the age range of 18–29 (90%), although other age groups also report moderate to high usage (77% of 30–49 year olds, 51% of 50–64 year olds, 35% of people over 65 years of age), and of course the growth rate is dramatic. Women use social networking sites slightly more than men (women = 68%, men = 62%). More highly educated individuals with higher
