Anything Goes? Youth, News, and Democratic Engagement in the Roaring 2020s

Abstract

In the modern world, every person will come of age in a future that is hard to foresee. However, the way citizens born today will navigate their future world will be affected by the context and the institutions that structure the world of their young life (Sigel 1965). Maybe more importantly than ever, the technologies and the information environment they grow up with shape the ways in which today’s youngsters are socialised into the political world (Ohme and De Vreese 2020). Youth is a reference point that can reveal two important things: the past years of a cohort’s development and an outlook into the future. Every generation is specifically shaped by their formative years which in turn will influence the society in which they come of age, once they enter the job market and end up in positions of responsibility and decision-making power. This is why this special issue focuses on Youth, News, and Democratic Engagement. We want to understand the formation of media habits and democratic engagement practices of today’s young citizens, where they are now, and to develop an idea of where they are heading. This special issue builds and expands on the ‘Communication and Public Engagement’ research project (2013–2019) that studied generational gaps in political media use and civic engagement (see Andersen et al. 2021). Youth, News, and Democratic Engagement takes the temperature of how young citizens navigate today’s digital news media environments, which forms of engagement they prefer or reject, and how these two sets of phenomena are connected. This can help us understand whether and how youngsters today will become politically