Search

Digital media have fundamentally altered how knowledge is produced and distributed, often being blamed for contemporary democratic problems. This short essay examines recent contributions to normative democratic theory, focusing on three questions: 1) characterization of media-related threats, 2) media and communication aspects supportive of democracy, and 3) diagnosis of democracy's core challenges. Our reading reveals that while digital media is seen to contribute to the epistemic crisis, the core problem can be traced back to the profound impact of communicative capitalism on our epistemic infrastructures. We call for political communication scholars to prioritize the study of epistemic inequalities by critically examining and addressing the pervasive influence of market logic in both our work and the subject of study. In doing so, we can make an empirically informed contribution to democratic theory's quest to defend democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User intervention against incivility is a significant element of democratic norm enforcement on social media, and feeling personally responsible for acting is a vital prerequisite for intervention. However, our insight into how users construe their sense of personal responsibility and expectations of other users remains limited. By theoretically foregrounding user perspective, this study investigates the boundaries and nuances of user responsibility to intervene against incivility. Empirically, it draws on 20 qualitative vignette interviews with young people in Germany. The findings show that as contexts collapse in users' newsfeeds, the imagined boundaries of personal public spheres and own social relationships with uncivil users serve as heuristics for hierarchizing and delimiting personal responsibility to intervene. Beyond abstract individual responsibility for the public discourse, practical responsibility is distributed among personal public spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With political self-expression emerging as a prominent practice of political participation on social media platforms, scholars have hypothesized that this practice may have evolved into a norm and component of 'good citizenship.' Empirical findings, however, are inconclusive, as some young people express their politics out of a sense of civic duty, while others view this engagement as a waste of time. Based on the idea that how we define ourselves impacts the normative meanings that we attach to things in the social world, the study explores the role of social identities in people's evaluations of expressive engagement. Empirically, the study is based on qualitative interview data with social media users in Serbia (n = 18). The findings show that engaging in political self-expression does not appear to be a citizenship norm but a personal norm in individuals with pronounced political self-concepts who perceive that their core self-category is at stake in the public discourse. Moreover, people employ social categorizations, such as ideology, partisanship, and social class, to evaluate the content and form of political self-expression as good or bad. Aside from issues of political self-expression, the study challenges the idea that individual understandings of what it means to be a good citizen are universal and static and that people's subjective positionality in social contexts matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how American news media have framed social media as political technologies over time. To do so, we analyzed 16 years of political news stories focusing on social media, published by American newspapers (N  =   8,218) and broadcasters (N  =   6,064) (2006–2021). Using automated content analysis, we found that coverage of social media in political news stories: (a) increasingly uses anxious, angry, and moral language, (b) is consistently focused on national politicians (vs. non-elite actors), and (c) increasingly emphasizes normatively negative uses (e.g. misinformation) and their remedies (i.e. regulation). In discussing these findings, we consider the ways that these prominent normative representations of social media may shape (and limit) their role in political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User intervention against incivility as social enforcement of democratic norms on social media platforms is considered an act of "good citizenship" by citizens and scholars alike. However, between ideals and behavior, multiple social norms are at play in shaping individuals' sense of personal responsibility for intervening. This study explores the role of conflicting norms in situations requiring user intervention against online incivility. By combining the perspectives of norms as expectations and norms as cultural vocabularies, we investigate users' salient norms, and how these norms influence users' justifications for (non-)intervention. Based on qualitative interview data from Germany (N = 20), we identified three distinct reasoning patterns employed to justify (non-)intervention: the pragmatic, the dismissive, and the aspirational. By identifying fault lines, our typology points to normative origins of ambivalence related to user intervention. The findings offer insights into strategies to motivate intervention against online incivility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information disorder and digital media affordances challenge informed citizenship as an ideal and in practice. While scholars have attempted to adapt the normative ideal to contemporary changes and challenges by introducing new metaphors and normative benchmarks, this study investigates citizens' ideals and practices of informed citizenship by deploying the concept of citizenship vocabularies. Drawing on interviews with citizens from different information environments--Germany and Serbia--we offer a conceptual outline of informed citizenship as an individual and collective social effort. Our findings illustrate the role of the information environment in shaping citizenship vocabularies. We advance the idea of informed citizenship as a relational practice, arguing for a social ontological approach to theorizing informed citizenship today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]