Engagement in the networked society: How civic and political organizations communicate with young citizens online

This dissertation posits that an important and undertheorized source of youth disengagement from politics has been a disconnect between young people's preferences for civic information and the styles of communication practiced by many institutions of politics. It proceeds to rethink the norms and possibilities of citizens' relationships to civic information by synthesizing research on late modem civic identity and theory on the emerging norms of digital culture. From this are drawn three key elements of a youth information style that distinguish it from the style of information dominant in the 20 th century. First, many young citizens hold an expectation that information experiences will be participatory, that they will have the opportunity to respond to and produce information in addition to consuming it; second, young people tend to gather information from a variety of networked sources rather than from a single authoritative source; and third, whereas older generations of citizens have focused their civic activity on institutional and official targets, young citizens are inclined to understand expressions of opinion to online networks as productive forms of civic activity. Asking where in the contemporary civic sphere young citizens might find communication experiences that resonate with these preferences, the project then turns to research on the changing nature of collective action and political organizing, and develops three central hypotheses: that recently created, online organizations will be more likely than traditional groups to display the three elements of youth- friendly communications; that organizations with clear political agendas will tend to offer those elements less readily than those without overt political orientations; and that the presentation of those elements will be less prevalent on organizations' websites than on a social networking platform with more salient norms of digital culture. Content analyses test these propositions in the websites and Facebook pages of 90 civic organizations dedicated to engaging youth, and support is generally found for the hypotheses. The conclusion discusses the implications of the findings for the future of political organizing, youth civic engagement, and political action in the emerging digital public sphere.