E-democracy - Civic Engagement of Youth Through The Internet

Civic Engagement of Youth Through The Internet

There has been much speculation about the Internet's potential to facilitate the engagement of younger citizens in politics. This group of young people, under the age of 35, frequently labelled Generations X and Y, have been noted for their lack of political interest and activity for the last two decades. The younger generation is less likely to have established long-standing habits of media use, and is willing to experiment with new technologies and formats. Dr. Michael Macpherson, a "vigorous advocate of e-democracy...acknowledges widespread apathy about politics, particularly among the young, and believes that this would be reduced if it could be seen that individual political activity was effective in a fairly short-term." Young adults view the benefits of new technologies as a means of gaining advantage in education, employment, and in the political realm. Younger people have ease with Internet technology and are more likely than older citizens to use web-based platforms to research and access political information. However, there is no clear consensus about the capacity of new media, including the Internet and social networking websites, to engage young people in the democratic process.

There have been numerous studies and experiments conducted to evaluate the best way to encourage the involvement of youth in politics. The notion of youth e-citizenship seems to be caught between two distinct approaches: management and autonomy. The policy of "targeting" young people so that they can "play their part" can be read either as an encouragement of youth activism or an attempt to manage it.

It would seem at first that defining the status of youth would be fairly easy. John Freeland, for example, constructs youth as a "stage of life between childhood and adulthood." But the implications of such a transitional stage are hard to measure. It is difficult to determine the proper amount of power or freedom youth should employ in the newly developed e-democratic process. Advocates of autonomous e-citizenship and proponents of managed e-citizenship have varying opinions on a wide range of ideas. For instance, autonomous e-citizens argue that despite their limited experience, youth deserve to speak for themselves on agendas of their own making. On the contrary, managed e-citizens regard young people as apprentice citizens who are in a process of transition from the immaturity of childhood to the self-possession of adulthood, and are thus incapable of contributing to politics without regulation. The Internet is another important issue, with managed e-citizens believing young people are highly vulnerable to misinformation and misdirection.

The conflict between the two faces of e-citizenship is between a view of democracy as an established and reasonably just system, with which young people should be encouraged to engage, and democracy as a political as well as cultural aspiration, most likely to be realized through networks in which young people engage with one another. Ultimately, strategies of accessing and influencing power are at the heart of what might first appear to be mere differences of communication styles.