L’espace public en ligne et la jeunesse québécoise: Le cas des élections canadiennes de 2011.

This article deals with the reasons some young adult Quebecers have had to be or not to be involved in political discussions on the Internet during the Canadian elections of 2011. We have worked with Jürgen Habermas' conception of the Public Sphere in order to study, throughout four focus group sessions, a sample made up of Montrealers aged between 19 and 30. The collected data was analysed with an argument extraction method. The results allowed us to expose many reasons that could explain the questioned young adults' level of involvement in online political discussion, regrouped in four themes: the lack of knowledge and the public aspect; awareness and feedback; reaction based on content, the nature of the network and the value of information; face-to-face conversation, anonymity and controversial topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]