Sobre la participación digital de la juventud universitaria en Argentina

Abstract

Civic participation has been deeply transformed by the growing use of social media, especially among youths, who not only utilize these virtual spaces to socialize but also to remain informed and become involved in matters of general interest. This paper looks at how university students in central Argentina engage in civic participation through social media. To this end, we converge the theoretical perspective of Lance Bennett (2008) and his model of actualizing citizenship (AC) with Peter Dahlgren’s ideas (2018) regarding online participation and its links to emotions and affect. Following an exploratory qualitative study, which involved 98 semi-structured interviews, we found that those students who actively participate in a digital context do so motivated by causes that personally affect them, such as feminism or environmentalism. At the same time, they are often discouraged from participating in these online arenas by the anger and aggression they find there. As a result, many have chosen alternative modes of participation, refraining from adding their own comments or opinions in favor of hashtivism or the sharing of emojis – a practice we have termed emojivism.