ECREA Communication & Democracy 2015

1. ECREA Communication and Democracy Conference 2015
The practice of participation: youth’s vocabularies
around on- and offline civic and political engagement
Giovanna Mascheroni
@giovannamas, giovanna.mascheroni@unicatt.it

2. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
THE PROJECT
WebPolEU is aimed at studying the nexus between politics and social media
in comparative perspective from the viewpoint of both citizens and political
actors (www.webpoleu.net).
 How political actors communicate online
 How citizens use the internet during election campaigns
 How citizens use Twitter in relation to politics
 The relationship between engagement with digital media and civic/political
engagement, digital literacy and civic literacy among young people

3. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
THE FIELDWORK
 36 interviews to 14-25-year-olds in Italy and the UK
1. 11 members of political parties, students unions, or engaged in other formal
opportunities for youth participation such as youth councils
2. 14 activists in social or student movements
3. 8 volunteers in youth associations and civil society organisations
4. 3 young startuppers and digital entrepreneurs

4. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
 A paradigm shift in civic and participation patterns, from dutiful to
actualising citizenship
 Each pattern is characterised by different civic styles that are grounded in
different sets of civic competences, communicative practices and logics
(Bennett, Wells & Freelon, 2011)

5. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
 But the relationship between social media use, youth engagement and new
participatory practices is not linear
 Moreover, young people are not a uniform generation adhering to the
actualising model of citizenship.
 Indeed, citizenship vocabularies, as the set of resources that young people
can mobilise for understanding participation and their own potential for action
(Lister et al., 2003; Lyson, 2014; Thorson, 2012), reveal the influence of social
inequalities on youth civic and political participation.

6. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
 An analytical and explanatory tool for examining youth participation and
accounting for differential access to resources (capital) that lead to different
experiences and positions (habitus) in the political field, along the
actualising-dutiful citizenship continuum.
 At the same time, a Bourdieusian approach allows us to identify common
patterns across the diversity of individual lived experiences and
countries.
A BOURDIEUSIAN APPROACH TO YOUTH PARTICIPATION

7. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
Young people who share vocabularies of participation also adhere to a
shared habitus of participation produced by different combinations of
resources and experiences of political socialisation:
1. citizenship orientations
2. citizenship practices
3. and digital engagement
FINDINGS

8. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
Three patterns of self-positioning towards the political system:
1. Alignment
2. Resistance
3. Exclusion
FINDINGS

9. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
 Political socialisation at home
 Engagement in political parties, students unions, and other formal opportunities for youth
participation such as youth councils
 A strong sense of effectiveness and empowerment
 Good level of civic and digital skills
 Dutiful notion of participation, centred around voting and party politics
 Dutiful information style: reliance on selected, authoritative (mainstream) news sources +
personalised and ‘actualising’ news consumption practices
Olivia (22, UK): I have the BBC news app on my phone and whenever I have a moment in the office, when I’m not
doing something immediately, I’ll flick to it. […] I get a lot of headlines from Facebook cause I follow all of the
newspapers on Facebook, so I don’t really use Twitter that much, and I know a lot of people of my age would, but
Facebook… I have BBC, NBC, CNN, the Guardian, Times, the Economist, New Statesman, I have every obvious one and
they pretty much fill my newsfeed actually, yeah and whenever I’m sort of scrolling down the newsfeed, looking at
stuff by my friends it’s interspersed with news all the time.
Simon (24, IT): Facebook… yes, it’s an important source of information, but there’s everything there, you can find
both the most illuminating comment from the public intellectual and the most idiot thing from some marginalised guy. So
you need to discriminate [..] With newspapers you are not required to do so. They do it for you. Newspapers tell you
‘this is a journalist so it’s worth reading’
ALIGNMENT: THE LEGITIMATE PARTICIPATORY HABITUS

10. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
 Socialisation to active citizenship as an everyday practice
 Engagement in volunteering, youth associations, students’ cooperatives
 Key issues: environment, consumer boycott, civil rights, anti-corruption
 Actualising citizenship practices without rejecting voting
 Actualising information style: reliance also on alternative news sources and personal
networks, use of social media for coordination and decision-making, online petitions
Rebecca (21, UK): we realised that some of the products, the rice cakes that we were selling had palm
oil in them, and we had a meeting and we were like ‘oh, what can we do?’ But we were not many of us at
the meeting, so we couldn’t really decide right there what we wanted to do. And then someone said ‘you
can say that also about Granola’, cause it is also very unethical. So we saw you can put, ask a
questions on Facebook, so we asked ‘shall we sell it or no?’ and that is really a good way of
getting more people join the debate, because really, everybody who buys this food is part of the coop,
because it’s nice to have the opportunity to participate.
Amy (21, UK): I think that even if they don’t necessarily achieve what they want to achieve, like 100.000
signatures is going to cause everyone to get the living wage or something, even if they don’t achieve
that, people could have hope that together they can change it and that’s enough to change society,
to think… we have a voice together. And I think before the internet, I don’t really know cause I’m an
internet generation, but I think before the internet it was harder to find people who you are affiliated with
RESISTANCE I: THE ALTERNATIVE PARTICIPATORY HABITUS

11. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
 Habitus shaped mostly by peer relations
 Firm opposition to party politics and the institutions of representative democracy
 Engagement in radical and DIY citizenship practices: protests, occupations, sabotages,
squatting, etc.
 Key issues: anti-austerity, against neoliberal policies, anti-racism, free education, housing
policies, animal rights and veganism, surveillance society
 Critical media literacy and sophisticated media diets, based on based on individual
interests and trusted networks
 ‘Social politics curation’ (Thorson, 2014) and media activism
Alicia (25): But yeah, I mean, especially online, you can just get a confirmation bias via a feedback
loop, so you’ve got, you know, I mean Google perpetuates this. Because you know, when you are
searching on Google from your IP address or if you logged on, even worse, you know, the kind of things
you click on will end up becoming the things more likely to be at the top. So it’s just a confirmation bias,
you’re looking for what you think the truth is and Google tells you that’s what the truth is
Aurora (25, IT): last year we launched an app that generates automatic chains of retweets, inspired
by the Wall Street human megaphone, so as that someone sent a message and everyone replicated it.
So we launched it on occasion of a national demonstration for housing rights in Rome with the aim to
give real time news and fight the dominant framing of mainstream media […] so who installed the
app in a way donated her Twitter account
RESISTANCE II: THE RADICAL-ANTAGONIST PARTICIPATORY HABITUS

12. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
 Lower socio-economic background. More common among, but not exclusive of youngsters
 Highest degree of alienation from politics and the lowest sense of effectiveness
 Dutiful and narrow notion of citizenship, equated with voting
 Engagement with a limited set of mainstream news sources and preference for local news,
celebrity news or issues that affect young people
 Engagement in creative uses of the internet and content production
Sara (14, IT): I don’t look for news myself, I read what I bump into. I mean, sometimes I read articles on
politics, but I am not very interested in it. Or, I read things my friends share, or about actors and
singers, who travel around the world, I am a bit fascinated by that
Emily (15, UK): The internet is a very important part of my life. I spend literally… like 60% of my life on the
internet, ‘cause I just find so much more interesting online… that you can do so much more online, than…
yeah, I like reading online, cause I have like … this website where we can read, people can write
stories and we can read them, we can share them with each other. I have my YouTube channel,
stuff like that […] is about me, about my friends. We all like do videos together. A few of my friends have
YouTube channels as well, so we all, like, do video on each other channel. I do like more about us
videos… like 24 hours about me, stuff like that
EXCLUSION: THE DISAFFECTED PARTICIPATORY HABITUS

13. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
 While resources and experiences are inherited from the family of origin, there are
opportunities to change one’s position in the political field thanks to personal experiences
and resources (however, these opportunities are not equally distributed)
 The habitus is also shaped by the field
Matthew (22): I was in the Board of Directors for that, I have been elected and I was also involved
in the political campaigning for the organisation. So that helped me a lot about campaigning
business and ways of organising within organisations. So it was important, one of the student officers
helped a lot with using their time and things. But as the cooperatives we are very much autonomous,
one of the coop’s principles is autonomy and independence, so we try to within organisations.
PARTICIPATORY HABITUS AS A DYNAMIC PROCESS

14. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
 The legitimate participatory habitus: differences in SES and political efficacy
(far more disaffection in Italy)
 The alternative participatory habitus: different issues (environment and anti-
consumerism versus legality and poverty). Influence of the Catholic culture in
Italy
 The radical antagonist participatory habitus: more consistent across countries
(because of more transnational connections?)
 The excluded participatory habitus: similar age and socio-economic
characteristics as important preconditions of exclusion
CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISONS

15. The practice of participation – G. Mascheroni
 Participation is about different positioning in the political field and unequal
access to resources
 Participatory habitus combine practices and civic styles of both actualising and
dutiful citizenship models, against a clear-cut paradigm shift.
 The relationship between social media and youth participation is specific to
each participatory habitus:
 Alignment: a hybrid social media space including news and relational spaces
 Resistance: media activism and citizen journalism
 Exclusion: creative, non political uses of social media
 Limitations: the sample is limited in size and diversity of young people’s
experiences
CONCLUSIONS