Being a Young Citizen in Estonia: An Exploration of Young People’s Civic and Media Experiences

The book gives an intriguing insight into how young people in Estonia, twenty years after the establishment of democracy, perceive their own role as citizens. It does so in a theoretical framework that stresses the embeddedness of the civic experiences in a media-dominated environment, thus closely linking civic and media experiences. Based on the analysis of both qualitative interview data and a relatively new method of using the internet as a complementary tool for engaging with open-ended diaries, the study explores the extent to which young citizens experience the media as being interwoven with their everyday lives and, in fact, constitutive of their social reality as citizens. With its particular focus on young Estonians, i.e. on a generation that has been brought up in a context of rapid political, economic and social change and that is well-known for its fascination with new communication technologies, the book is a valuable contribution to the growing international research on media and civic experiences

E-residency – the beginning of a new era or the end of citizenship as we know it?

Estonia, one of the smallest EU member states in the North-Eastern part of the Union might not attract new residents and investors with its outstanding nature, weather conditions or natural resources. Who would like to live in a country where summer means “three months of bad weather for skiing”? As one of the former Soviet satellite states it had to find another strategy to launch itself as an attractive and unique country on a global scale. Early on technology was identified as a solution to all kinds of challenges ranging from democratization to marketization and attracting global businesses

E-Democracy Postponed: Public Policy Design the Key to UK E-Voting

This chapter presents a survey study on attitudes towards political campaigning in social media. During the national election in Sweden in 2010, a considerable amount of resources was invested in online communication with the constituency, not least in social media. Whereas several studies have focused on e-democracy at a macro level, there is a lack of studies examining the phenomenon of campaigning 2.0 as it is perceived by the actual voters. This chapter, therefore, asks the question whether the voters noticed the political campaigning in social media at all, and if so, how they perceived it. The main findings are that respondents who were already interested and politically engaged considered campaigning 2.0, in line with the politicians' rhetoric, as a way to enhance democracy. Respondents who were neither interested nor engaged in politics, on the other hand, showed little interest in this kind of communication. Consequently, the study confirms assumptions about digital divide and continued fragmentation of the citizenry.

Algorithmic Resistance : Media practices and the Politics of Repair

The article constitutes a critical intervention in the current, dramatic debate on the consequences of algorithms and automation for society. While most research has focused on negative outcomes, including ethical problems of machine bias and accountability, little has been said about the possibilities of users to resist algorithmic power. The article draws on Raymond Williams’ work on media as practice to advance a framework for studying algorithms with a focus on user agency. We illustrate this framework with the example of the media activist campaign World White Web by the Swedish artist and visual designer Johanna Burai. We suggest that user agency in relation to algorithms can emerge from alternative uses of platforms, in the aftermath of algorithmic logics, and give birth to complicit forms of resistance that work through ‘repair’ politics oriented towards correcting the work of algorithms. We conclude with a discussion of the ways in which the proposed framework helps us rethink debates on algorithmic power.Peer reviewe

Political Agency at the Digital Crossroads?

This thematic issue presents the outcome of the 2015 ECREA Communication and Democracy Section Conference “Political Agency in the Digital Age” that was held at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. It problematizes changes in the configurations of political agency in the context of digital media. The articles represent a shift from an exclusive focus on political elites to the interrelation between institutionalised politics and political processes in other societal spheres in the field of media and politics research. Political agency as the main notion of the thematic issue draws attention at the (media) practices through which social actors reproduce, reorganise and challenge politics. At the same time, the issue poses questions about the structures—economic, political and social—that allow for, define and also limit these practices. The contributions gathered here suggest an understanding of agency as constituted through the use of knowledge and resources, themselves embedded within structural contexts; at the same time, agency is transformative of the structures within which it is embedded by making use of knowledge and resources in creative and often radical ways. In that context the development of digital media marks a rupture or critical juncture that allows and requires a rethinking of conditions of political agency. Accordingly the contributions critically scrutinize the role of digital media moving beyond celebratory accounts of democratizing potential of digital media. The rethinking of the grammar of political agency is at the heart of this thematic issue

After the crisis: The sharing economy our saviour?

The so called sharing economy is thriving. People increasingly use platforms such as airbnb, uber, TaskRabbit and Rent the Runway to rent or offer their sofa, a ride, services or a designer dress. Some pundits see this growing sector as an indicator for shifting norms: Claire Cain Miller argues that in the aftermath of the Great Recession sharing or renting emerged as new social ideals pushing back against overconsumption and the connected debt accumulation that seemingly caused the crisis in the first place

Digital activism: After the hype

Research on digital activism has gained traction in recent years. At the same time, it remains a diverse and open field that lacks a coherent mode of inquiry. For the better or worse, digital activism remains a fuzzy term. In this introduction to a special issue on digital activism, we review current attempts to periodize and historicize digital activism. Although there is growing body of research on digitial activism, many contributions remain limited through their ahistorical approach and the digital universalism that they imply. Based on the contributions to the special issue, we argue for studying digital activisms in a way that traverses a two-dimensional axis of digital technologies and activist practices, striking the balance between context and media-specificity

Ways of seeing digital disconnection : A negative sociology of digital culture

In this contribution, I do not engage in digital disconnection merely as an empirical phenomenon but as a way of seeing digital culture and as a heuristic. I do not ask whether or not digital disconnection is possible, is good or bad, or should be advocated or overcome. Instead, I adopt Eva Illouz's framework of a negative sociology of social bonds to explore what it would mean to study digital culture from the perspective of negative choice. The conceptual framework is illustrated with three empirical cases that show what it would mean to engage in a negative sociology of digital culture. The shift in perspective from positive bonds to the choice to disengage, not use, or exit certain fora makes visible how digital culture is not only increasingly characterized by polarization, but also how disconnection emerges as a civic virtue that puts the individual user's responsibility at the forefront