Young Citizens and Political Participation Online Media and Civic Cultures

The first part of this essay focuses on the theme of civic engagement, set against the dilemmas of democracy confronting the West. It examines the role of the digital media in this regard, while at the same time trying to illuminate the challenges in broader socio-cultural terms. Specifically, it underscores that the Web environment constitutes a key social site, especially for young people in late modernity, and that the contingencies of its use and the potential it offers have significance for the character of democracy. The second part of the essay offers an analytical framework for examining civic cultures. Civic cultures can support democratic agency and are shaped by a variety of factors. The media, however, are of particular importance here. The framework is modeled as a circuit with six mutually reciprocal dimensions, each opening up an avenue of possible empirical research.