Suchergebnisse

Using focus group interviews, this paper studies the way young people in Sweden employed social media to discuss and mobilise during the on-going European refugee crisis, with a special focus on peer pressure, social interaction and connective action.In 2015, an unprecedented influx of refugees, predominantly from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, entered Europe on foot and in dinghies. The refugee crisis caused a lively public debate, put government agencies under stress, created conflict among EU member states and caused a widespread popular mobilisation aided by social media. In September 2015, an explosion of voluntary activities occurred, many of which were grouped under the personal action frame (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013) of Refugees Welcome. Civil society organisations, churches and mosques, and temporary networks set up shop in train stations and in ports, helping refugees with shelter, transport and information, sometimes interfering with official efforts and policy. The outburst of voluntarism was coupled with a boost in popular opinion in favour of continuing Sweden's refugee-friendly policy, also in the face of record numbers (Kärrman, 2015a).As autumn proceeded, the intensity of volunteer efforts waned in spite of steadily increasing numbers of incoming refugees, also reflecting a shift in popular opinion. In November 2015, the Swedish government made an abrupt change in immigration policy, thereby effectively reducing the number of incoming refugees to a minimum (see e.g. Crouch, 2015). The new government policy was met with approval by a citizenry that seemed to have shifted its opinions rapidly in just a few months (Kärrman, 2015b).These extraordinary events calls for revisiting a number of recent theoretical developments in participation research: taking into account the vast societal impact of the refugee crisis and Sweden as a country characterised by high levels of both civic voluntarism and social media use, as well as extreme degrees of individualism and social trust (cf. Gustafsson, 2013: 57f), they can be considered to be a critical case for evaluating Bennett & Segerberg's (2013) notions of personal action frames and connective action, as well as Amnå and Ekman's (2014) standby citizens and latent participation, describing emerging personalised ways of interacting with social and political issues of the day in digitally enabled networks, and occasionally becoming mobilised into action. As one of the core features of connective action is its flexible and individualist characteristics, it is of interest to study how it connects with the fact that political socialisation has been shown in previous research to be associated with influence from friends and family (Lee et al, 2013). What is the relationship between closer friendship networks and the looser connections of local, national and even transnational activism?This research is exploratory in nature and is not trying to test a hypothesis. It is nevertheless guided by descriptive research questions concerning interaction among young peers in social media, political socialisation, identity formation and mobilisation, all framed by the refugee crisis and wanting to engage with the above-mentioned theoretical concepts. The study will provide tentative answers to the following questions: RQ1: How did participants experience discussions with friends, family and others, respectively, regarding the refugee crisis in social media compared to other settings?RQ2: How did participants respond to calls for mobilisation from friends, family and others, respectively, during the refugee crisis, emotionally, socially, and in action/inaction?RQ3: How did participants engage/non-engage with personal action frames (such as Refugee Welcome) connected to the refugee crisis?Focus group interviews with Swedish 16-25 year olds were used to allow young people in a formative stage of life (i.e. when political socialisation usually occurs, see Prior, 2010) and who are not necessarily active or organised in politics or social issues to discuss their attitudes and experiences in relation to the refugee crisis with their peers. Focus groups have been shown in previous research to be a good way of discussing attitudes and experiences concerning digital media and participation with youth (cf. Hundley & Shyles, 2010; Gustafsson, 2012; Cammaerts et al 2014; Vromen et al, 2015).Eight focus groups with a total of 64 participants were recruited. Six of the focus groups were carried during spring and summer 2016 with the two remaining groups scheduled for December 2016. The reason for the time gap was to allow for themes that emerged from the first six groups to be further explored in the second round of interviews. Four focus groups were comprised by 16-19 year olds, enrolled in upper secondary school (gymnasium/high school), three focus groups were comprised by 19-25 year old university students, and one focus group was comprised by 19-25 year olds not enrolled in higher education. The upper secondary school students were recruited by initial contact with schools in southern Sweden (county of Scania) and subsequent engagement with students in class. University students were recruited by engagement with students in various courses at the Lund and Malmö universities in southern Sweden. Participants of the remaining group were recruited through a snowballing technique in social network sites. Preliminary results present a complex image of perceptions of the refugee crisis in the eyes of Swedish youth. The social networks of friends and family and the discussions that take place in within and without social media affect both those who finally choose to engage in an issue and those who refrain from it, as well as those who are interested in politics and those who are not. The issue itself, rather than the fact that friends are involved in the discussion and mobilisation, created emotional responses. Participants were influenced by their networks, but foremost by the larger conversation and atmosphere going on nationally. Still, friend networks are of utmost importance for recruitment and mobilisation purposes. The question that remains is whether connective action can be sustained for a longer period of time, or if it has to be transformed into organisationally enabled networks (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013). Connective action aided by individualised personal action frames might disappear as quickly as it pops up. The results call for further empirical work on the interplay between digitally networked action and other organisational forms. ReferencesAmnå, E. & Ekman, J., 2014. Standby citizens: diverse faces of political passivity. European Political Science Review, 6(2), 261-281.Bennet, W. L. and Segerberg, A., 2013. The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.boyd, d., 2008. Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley.Cammaerts, B., Bruter, M., Banaji, S., Harrison, S., & Anstead, N., 2014. The Myth of Youth Apathy. Young Europeans' Critical Attitudes Toward Democratic Life, American Behavioral Scientist, 58(5), 645-664.Crouch, D., 2015, November 24. Sweden slams shut its open-door policy towards refugees. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/24/sweden-asylum-seekers-refugees-policy-reversalGustafsson, N., 2013. Leetocracy. Political participation, social network sites and inequality. Lund: Lund university, Department of Political Science (diss.).Gustafsson, N., 2012. The subtle nature of Facebook politics: Swedish social media users and political participation. New Media & Society 14(2): 1111-1127.Hundley, H. & Shyles, L., 2010. US teenagers' perceptions and awareness of digital technology: A focus group approach. New Media & Society 12(3): 417-433.Kärrman, J., 2015a, September 27. Kraftig förändring - fler vill se ökat flyktingmottagande [Powerful change - more want to see higher reception of refugees] http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/kraftig-forandring-fler-vill-se-okat-flyktingmottagande/Kärrman, J., 2015b, November 7. Väljarna vänder i flyktingfrågan [The voters turn in the refugee issue] http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/valjarna-vander-i-flyktingfragan-1/Lee, N., Shah. D. and McLeod, J., 2013. Processes of political socialisation: a communication mediation approach to youth civic engagement, Communication Research 40(5): 669-697.Noelle-Neumann, E., 1974. The spiral of silence: a theory of public opinion, Journal of Communication 24(2), 43–51.Prior, M. (2010). You've either got it or you don't? The stability of political interest over the life cycle, The Journal of Politics, 72(03): 747–766.Vromen, A., Xenos, M., & Loader, B., 2015. Young people, social media and connective action: from organisational maintenance to everyday political talk. Journal of Youth Studies, 18(1), 80-100.

This dissertation is about whether social network sites have the potential to bring about more equal participation. It deals with a phenomenon that has changed the underlying infrastructure of how millions of people communicate. It studies the way the use of social network sites affects communication within existing political organisations in addition to networked campaigns. And it goes beyond digital content analysis to use a broad range of methods in order to capture behaviour and attitudes offline as well as online in a contextual setting. Social network sites have not brought about any greater equality in political participation. Using social network sites does not in itself lower the thresholds for participation, as increased accessibility does not outweigh the underlying factors of participation and political interest. Political participation is changing, but what is changing is not related to equality of participation. Instead, the existing system is put under pressure by what is referred to in this dissertation as viral politics and the emergence of temporal elites. Rather than resulting in egalitarian democracy, what we actually have is a leetocracy of sorts, where existing hierarchies are supplemented with new ones. This is shown in six distinct articles, each with its own empirical focus, and an introductory essay summarising the articles and presenting the core argument of the dissertation. An additional goal of this dissertation is to show how the development of political participation in relation to social network sites can be better understood through the framework of competitive elitist democracy than through that of deliberative democratic theory. A methodological goal is to show how a combination of quantitative and several different qualitative methods applied on a set of different empirical cases can be used to yield a fuller illumination of the overarching research aim. This dissertation is an ambitious attempt to study the effects of social network site use on several different forms of political participation. It contains the first representative study of political participation in social media in Sweden and the first study of intra-party use of social network sites in parliamentary parties in the world.

Sweden, with a high level of political participation and an avant-garde position regarding internet access, broadband and social media penetration in the population, is a critical case for studying social media in relation to political participation. Three types of users – members of political parties, members of interest organizations, and non-members – are interviewed in focus groups about their attitudes to political content in the social network site Facebook. The discussions show that although practices and attitudes vary, using social network sites alone does not drive previously inactive respondents to political participation. Respondents who are members of interest organizations view social network sites as valuable tools for participation, whereas respondents who are not refrain from sharing political views with their friends. They are exposed to political content and requests for participation, but prefer generally to remain passive.

In this study, a group of Swedish social media users – politically active as well as "unpolitical" users – are interviewed in focus groups as well as individually about their attitudes towards online political participation, providing a deeper, more informed view of how social media participation works. Sweden, with its high levels of voluntary participation and with an avant-garde position in Internet, broadband and social media penetration, could indeed function as a most-likely case for studying whether social media has any positive effects on participation. The participants in the study are well-educated, young and comfortable using the Internet, further increasing the probability of finding individuals engaged in digital activism. The results are puzzling: on the one hand, there is an almost unanimous contempt for political campaigns in social media among the participants. On the other hand, almost all of the participants are engaging with politics in social media in various ways. The article concludes in arguing that intensive methods must be used in order to gain a richer understanding of the political behaviour of citizens online.

This paper deals with new forms of political mobilisation and participation in social media, such as blogs, social network sites and the likes. The main focus is on the impor-tance of social networks in providing a "media filter", functioning as a kind of collective gatekeeper to spread news and information perceived as important, in contrast to the image of the single individual media consumer faced with an in-surmount¬able mass of information. I argue that by investing one's personal ethos in spreading information and encourage one's peers in the personal social network to civic engagement and direct action, vital news and calls for action spread quickly across nations and cultures. A form of viral politics ensues that, in con¬cordance with traditional types of mediation and formation of political opinion, pro¬vides an important civic power that might help balancing the biases and failures of ethnocentrism and localism. Drawing on earlier research concerning the effect of social capital created by weak ties on civic engagement, I argue that social networks organised online provide a new type of post-organisational weak ties, functioning as maintained social capital building institutions, encouraging to and organising actions of civic engagement. I also argue that in a cosmopolitan civic culture, it is not important that each and every individual must act with the same amount of time and work effort on each and every worthy social and poli¬tical cause brought to one' attention, and I point to the necessity of temporal elites based on voluntarism, taking responsibility for different cases of cosmopolitan acti¬vism. The aim is not only to describe an existing media situation, but also to point out some possible developments that, if nurtured in a proper way, could spur a common cosmopolitan identity and, in coordination with efforts made by exi-sting formal political structures, enable global political problem solving. More specifically, a case is made for the need for more thorough conceptualisation of new modes of participation: spontaneous, individualised, "unorganised" forms of action. Two concepts, "temporal elites" and "viral politics" are developed for describing how social network membership and density determine how people are recruited to political campaigns. The theoretical assumptions are further illustrated by the preliminary empirical findings of an ongoing study of Swedish Facebook users and their attitudes and behaviour concerning political participation in social media.

This paper deals with new forms of political mobilisation and participation in social media. The main focus is on the importance of social networks in providing a "media filter", functioning as a kind of collective gatekeeper to spread news and information perceived as important, in contrast to the image of the single individual media consumer faced with an insurmountable mass of information. I argue that by investing one's personal ethos in spreading information and encourage peers in the personal social network to political participation, vital news and calls for action spread quickly. A form of viral politics ensues that, in concordance with traditional types of mediation and formation of political opinion, might provide a basis for a new type of political elite in competitive democracy. Drawing on earlier research concerning the effect of social capital created by weak ties on political participation, I argue that social networks organised online provide a new type of post-organisational weak ties, functioning as maintained social capital building institutions, encouraging to and organising actions of civic engagement. More specifically, a case is made for the need for more thorough conceptualisation of new modes of participation: spontaneous, individualised, "unorganised" forms of action. Two concepts, "temporal elites" and "viral politics" are developed for describing how social network membership and density determine how people are recruited to political campaigns. The theoretical assumptions are further illustrated by the preliminary empirical findings of an ongoing study of Swedish Facebook users and their attitudes and behaviour concerning political participation in social media

This article argues that the type of individualized social media activism that has been conceptualized as 'connective action' has affinities to populism, and may have detrimental consequences for democratic procedures and the bureaucratic structures that enable them. We trace the normative allure of individualized digital engagement to the libertarian roots of techno-utopianism and argue that this, in combination with a form of mobilization fueled by digital enthusiasm, has potentially dire democratic and organizational consequences. Digital enthusiasm generated on social media platforms entails self-infatuation, here conceptualized as a form of individualized charismatic authority in the Weberian sense. This individualized form of charismatic authority is fundamentally focused on personalized engagement, and simultaneously interconnected through the technological affordances of social media platforms. If individualized charismatic authority becomes institutionalized as a legitimate and predominant manner of organizing, it may have large-scale implications for societal organizing at large by promoting populism. In sum, we argue that digital enthusiasm not only provides democratic opportunities for protest and contention in civil society, but that the fickleness of the individualized charismatic authority it generates may also put democratic procedures and respect for bureaucratic structures at risk.

Departing from previous research on digital action networks, this paper approaches the spread and emotional contagion of digital activism slightly differently, looking for it not necessarily inside the social movement itself, but rather outside it. By questioning the implicit assumption that the spread and emotional contagion of digital activism is contained only in the context of social movements, we explore emotional enthusiasm also in the social media engagement of other types of contemporaneous civil society organizations, viewing it as a manifestation of Weber's concept of charismatic authority. Empirically, we study voluntary engagement and mobilization on Facebook in Sweden during the refugee crisis of the fall of 2015. In a mixed-method content analysis of 59 Facebook groups and pages, we trace the use of emotional markers in posts during the period September-November 2015. Our findings indicate that the prevalence of emotional enthusiasm outside of social movement, and the lack of durability of it both in organizations and in networks, points to the lack of stability that charismatic authority entails. As charismatic authority becomes institutionalized as a legitimate and predominant manner of organizing through social media, this may have large scale implications for societal organizing at large. The paper indicates that emotional enthusiasm in the form of charismatic authority not only provides democratic opportunities for protest and contention, but, given its emotional contagion, may also but democratic procedures and respect for bureaucratic structures at risk.

This chapter critically examines the role of networked advocacy groups in the policy making process of intellectual property rights reform. Through analysing the case of la Quadrature du Net, we question the assumption that political intermediaries or elites are dissappearing, leaving space for a more inclusive, direct democracy in which decision-makers interact more directly with citizens. Next to established political actors such as political parties or trade unions, which are integrating Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) into their working practices, internet-based actors are emerging in a wide range of political areas (Chadwick, 2006). Such forms of networked political organisations are usually perceived as less hierarchical than traditional mobilizing groups such as political parties, trade unions and other voluntary organizations (Norris, 2002; Dalton, 2008). This development is often interpreted by techno-optimists as a way out of the iron law of oligarchy in traditional politics, offsetting the professionalization of politics and the transfer of political power to technocrats and anonymous international political actors far away from democratic accountability, thus preparing the ground for a more inclusive grassroots-oriented democracy. However, we argue that intermediary elites still exist. Our discussion will show that internet-based activism constitutes new types of elites in competitive democracy, whose effective forms are heavily dependent on technical and networking skills. Rather than functioning as the base of more egalitarian politics, the growing importance of networked political activism aided by digital media may, on the contrary, create new elites.

The article argues that contemporary protest movements are facing a convergence of what has traditionally been coined as mainstream and alternative media. Traditionally, the broad term 'alternative media' has been employed to embrace a wide range of oppositional media channels that can be considered to carry on the tradition of the early radical and party press: micro-media operating at the grassroots level, discontinuous, non-professional, persecuted or illegal. Today, heavily commercialised media and online communities such as Facebook, YouTube and MySpace constitute a common part of the repertoire of communication channels for activists engaged in alterative politics and protest movements. Are these new media channels a necessary means in order to reach beyond the circles of the likeminded? Or, do the use of these media point towards a mainstreaming process of political cultures of resistance to the establishment, eroding their very raison d'être? Combining a theoretical discussion of the inherent paradoxes in the celebration of new media technology as a source of democratisation and empowerment of civic cultures with an empirical focus aimed at exploring the changing repertoire of communicative tools used by social movement actors, this paper analyses two cases of online media practices in contemporary Scandinavian protest movements: 1) A series of civil disobedience actions and mobilisations of mass demonstrations before and after the eviction and destruction of the Youth House (Ungdomshuset) in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2007-2008; 2) The popular demonstrations in connection with the European Social Forum in Malmö, Sweden in September 2008.

This paper is a pilot study where Swedish Facebook users are interviewed in virtual focus groups - one consisting of politically active participants and one consisting of not politically active participants - using Facebook itself as the platform. The interviews concerned the attitudes of the participants towards political campaigns and recruitment within Facebook. The preliminary results show that there are no major differences between the politically active and not politically active users. Most participants also claim that their participation in political campaigns in Facebook is a form of semi-public identity management.

One reason why people avoid using social media to express their opinions is to avert social sanctions as proposed by the spiral of silence theory. We here elaborate on individual-level sensitivity to social rejection in relation to voicing political opinions on social media sites. Given the uncertainty about sharing political views in social media, and the fact that social acceptance, or rejection, can be easily communicated through, for instance, likes, or a lack of likes, we argue that rejection sensitive individuals are less likely to share political information in social media. Combining an analysis of unique survey data on psychological characteristics and online political activity with focus group interviews with Swedish youth supports our argument, showing that rejection sensitive individuals are less inclined to engage politically in social media. The results extend on previous research by establishing the role of rejection sensitivity in political engagement in social media.

One reason why people avoid using social media to express their opinions is to avert social sanctions as proposed by the spiral of silence theory. We here elaborate on individual-level sensitivity to social rejection in relation to voicing political opinions on social media sites. Given the uncertainty about sharing political views in social media, and the fact that social acceptance, or rejection, can be easily communicated through, for instance, likes, or a lack of likes, we argue that rejection sensitive individuals are less likely to share political information in social media. Combining an analysis of unique survey data on psychological characteristics and online political activity with focus group interviews with Swedish youth supports our argument, showing that rejection sensitive individuals are less inclined to engage politically in social media. The results extend on previous research by establishing the role of rejection sensitivity in political engagement in social media.