How do social media affect Taiwanese people’s participation in social movements under the Ma Ying-Jeou administration between 2008 and 2016

Abstract

This thesis attempts to explore how technology affects people’s behaviour in the public sphere. Particularly, at a time when information communication technologies (ICTs) are rapidly reshaping nearly every aspect of our everyday life, this study asks, has citizens’ civic engagement been affected as well? In addition, this study takes Taiwan, a third wave democracy in East Asia, as a case study, with the aim of demonstrating how Western liberal democratic values can be compatible with socalled “Asian values”, whilst at the same time analysing if and how the civic engagement of Taiwanese people has been affected by the rise of ICTs mentioned above. To make the research scope more focused, this study only focuses on civil society during the years of President Ma Ying-Jeou’s administration from 2008 to 2016. This study focuses on what ICTs have changed, and what these changes can tell us. The main research method deployed is qualitative analysis, which was supplemented by a series of semi-constructed interviews with people who played significant roles in one or more of the major social movements that took place during the Ma administration. The findings and analysis of this study identify the impacts of ICTs on citizens’ behaviour from three perspectives: (1) how do ICTs reshape and revolutionise the way citizens communicate with each other; (2) how do ICTs enable social movement and empower activists; and (3) how do ICTs reshape and redefine the notion of the public and private spheres. In the information age, when technology has profoundly changed our social structure, it is important to continuously revisit people’s perception of their shared values of democracy, their political participation, and their role in a democracy. It is might be equally important to clarify that the idea of citizenship studied in this thesis is viewed more from a sociological perspective rather than a normative one. It is possible that such a changing perception may lead to further academic research on the normative definition of citizenship in future research