Tobias Olsson

From Public Sphere to Civic Culture: Young Citizens’ Internet Use

During the last decade or so, basically ever since access to the internet reached a high proportion of people all over the western world, its ability to revitalize the public sphere has been discussed. Within the discussion, utopian as well as less hopeful future visions have been heard. On the one hand, authors have aired and identified new hope for the public sphere on the internet (cf. Malina, 1999; Slater, 2003); on the other hand, sceptical analyses have concluded that the internet is just another extension of corporate powers (McChesney, 1999), or a device selling back to people the ability to interact, an opportunity that one-way media such as radio and television have stolen from them (Holmes, 1997).

‘Let’s Get Them Involved’ . . . to Some Extent: Analyzing Online News Participation

The development of social media applications, such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, has offered new participatory opportunities for everyday media users. This article contributes to research by looking into one specific aspect of the increasingly more participatory media ecology—the news comment feature. Drawing on a quantitative content analysis of 1,100 news pieces, as well as spaces for user comments, the article reveals both how this emerging public space is shaped by the media company and, later, appropriated by their participating users. Our analysis reveals, for instance, that the online newspaper prefers to allow users to comment on lightweight news such as sports and entertainment. The users, however, prefer to post comments on news covering changes in proximity space, politics, and health care, while also clearly ignoring the most available news pieces (sport and entertainment). In the concluding section, the discrepancy in preferences is discussed.

Appropriating civic information and communication technology: a critical study of Swedish ICT policy visions:

With 71 percent of its households owning computers and having internet access, Sweden is one of the world’s leading information and communication technology (ICT) nations. The prevalence of ICT has inspired the Swedish government to ascribe it as a civic tool, capable of cultivating more active citizenship and a stronger democracy. However, despite its lofty intentions, Sweden’s ICT policy has a significant shortcoming: it is uninformed about the everyday lives of citizens. This article aims to shed light on ICT policy through an analysis of the appropriation of the computer and the internet in Swedish working-class households. Specifically, by drawing on semi-structured interviews, observations and media diaries with household respondents, the article critically discusses civic visions in Swedish ICT policy. It concludes with a recontextualizion of the discussion within an international arena.

An Information Society for Everyone

In 2000, a government bill set out Sweden’s aim to become an information society for all its citizens, with an emphasis on building confidence, developing competence and providing access to new information and communication technologies (ICTs). This article grounds these policy objectives in a study of ICT use among Swedish working-class citizens. Following a discussion of the opportunities which ICT access and usage offer for the exercise of Swedish citizenship, the authors highlight respondent-identified obstacles that stand in the way of realizing this vision of the Internet as civic tool, including cost, workplace disparities, language competence and technical difficulties. The article concludes with several suggestions for overcoming these obstacles.

For activists, for potential voters, for consumers: three modes of producing the civic web

During the last decade, numerous studies of the internets civic dimensions have taught us a considerable amount about the form of new technologies. They have, for instance, analysed how the internets interactive character, its multimodality and its open character create civic opportunities, not least for young people. The field has, however, rather neglected a number of important issues. For instance, the category of ‘producers’ of civic content has received little attention. Hence, research has neglected questions such as the following. What interests inspire producers of civic websites? How is the production being carried through? What views of the internet inspire their work? This article begins to redress this neglect by analysing the producers of three different websites. The three websites are brought from different spheres of civil society – party politics, commercial media and activism – and they are analysed through producer interviews. The article reveals and critically discusses differences and similarities between different modes of producing civic web resources.

Developing Self-Actualizing and Dutiful Citizens Testing the AC-DC Model Using Panel Data Among Adolescents

One of the major issues facing contemporary democracies is how the rapidly changing media environment influences democratic citizenship. Rather than strengthening or weakening citizenship per se, the present study analyzes whether traditional news and interactive online media encourage different forms of civic and political engagement among adolescents. More specifically, we use three waves of annually gathered panel data to study Swedish adolescents’ development of self-actualizing (AC) and dutiful (DC) citizen qualities. Overall, the analyses lend support for the AC-DC model and suggest that communicative practices matter. While traditional news media use is related to DC qualities—such as institutional participation, political trust, and external efficacy—interactive online media use promotes AC qualities, including both online and offline cause-oriented activism.

Producing Prod-Users : Conditional Participation in a Web 2.0 Consumer Community

Abstract Is contemporary media ecology an ecology that offers unprecedented freedom for producing participators, the “prod-users,” or could it also be understood as an ecology in which various forms of user participation are in fact conditioned, or manufactured, by professional producers? Considering the increasing research attention paid to various notions of user participation, these questions become important. This article critically discusses the theorising of mediated participation by illustrating and analysing ways in which users’ participatory practices in fact can be both conditioned and formatted by producers making strategic use of participatory opportunities. By drawing on an ethnographically inspired case study of a web company, Moderskeppet, this analysis reveals how the actual possibilities for participation thoroughly are conditioned by producers. The paper also analyses strategies and techniques applied by the producers to create a sense of participation among users.

Commenting, Sharing and Tweeting News: Measuring Online News Participation

Abstract Social plugins for sharing news through Facebook and Twitter have become increasingly salient features on news sites. Together with the user comment feature, social plugins are the most common way for users to contribute. The wide use of multiple features has opened new areas to comprehensively study users’ participatory practices. However, how do these opportunities to participate vary between the participatory spaces that news sites affiliated with local, national broadsheet and tabloid news constitute? How are these opportunities appropriated by users in terms of participatory practices such as commenting and sharing news through Facebook and Twitter? In addition, what differences are there between news sites in these respects? To answer these questions, a quantitative content analysis has been conducted on 3,444 articles from nine Swedish online newspapers. Local newspapers are more likely to allow users to comment on articles than are national newspapers. Tweeting news is appropriated only on news sites affiliated with evening tabloids and national morning newspapers. Sharing news through Facebook is 20 times more common than tweeting news or commenting. The majority of news items do not attract any user interaction.

Civic Passion : A Cultural Approach to the ‘Political’

Within media studies the default perspective of “the political” and “the civic” is overly rational. This rational bias can be observed within various research traditions. Two obvious examples are traditional, mainstream research of political communication, and substantial parts of the large body of research drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere. Starting from a short review of the rational view of the political/the civic presented within these traditions, Peter Dahlgren’s notion of civic culture is analyzed as a perspective that offers a complementary view. This article elaborates on its intellectual origins by paying special heed to the connection between the civic-culture view of the political and the civic and the perspectives offered by pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. Departing from these insights, the article presents empirical illustration of everyday workings of civic culture, and concludes with reflections concerning what becomes of the media within a civic culture approach.

Social media and new forms for civic participation

For about 20 years, ever since the early 1990s, the Internet’s potential to change how we think and act about politics has been a reoccurring theme in social science research. Already the Internet’s early introduction into Western societies was accompanied by thought-provoking suggestions regarding its political and civic potential. It was perceived to have the power to substantiate the idea of an electronic direct democracy (Hague and Loader, 1999; Kitchin, 1998), to change our idea of what the public sphere is (Poster, 1995), to facilitate stronger contacts between citizens and local government (Tsagarousianou et al., 1998) and to stimulate new versions of a more active citizenship (Coleman, 2001), to mention a few of the many opportunities that were identified. The fact that these and similar propositions regarding the new information and communication technology’s (ICT) abilities to reshape politics and civic action also became subjects of critical analyses, that called for a less celebratory treatment of the new medium (cf. Margolis and Resnick, 2000; Wilhelm, 2000), did not stop researchers from ascribing the new medium great potential for civic and political change. The Internet was introduced into the Western world at a time when there was a great sense of overall social and cultural change. These changes were often referred to as a transformation from modernity to a state of late modernity (cf. Beck, 1992 [1986]; Giddens, 1990, 1991; Thompson, 1995). The notion of late modernity holds a wide variety of social and cultural transformations in it. It includes, for instance, changing levels of trust in the expert systems of modernity (Giddens, 1991) and an increasing sense of global risks (Beck, 1992 [1986]), such as environmental hazards. The potential 656338 NMS0010.1177/1461444816656338Review Essaynew media & societyReview Essay research-article2016