Motivations for online participation: between self, us and democracy
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | What are the motivations for participation in and through social media and, at the same time, for denial of such engagement? The numerous attempts to mobilize and empower the Czech citizens to participate in public and political processes via social media mostly work with simple assumptions: that people tend to be democratic and that the affordances of social media enable them to be publicly active. However, our research suggests that social media should be conceived only as a part of the story and that the motivations for the participation include more than the normative tendency to “be democratic”. The paper shows that the motivations are firmly situated in everyday contexts of the social actors and are strongly structured by social and cultural capital and by the performative nature of the mediated public and political spaces. Consequently to this, the paper offers a typology of the motivations and participatory agency of the Czech users of social media. The paper is based on qualitative and quantitative data from the ongoing research on old and new media, participation and the role of media in everyday life and on illustrative cases from the Czech Republic. On the theoretical level, the paper builds upon Carpentier's and Dahlgren's notion of participation, Bourdieu's theory of social and cultural capital and social constructivist approaches to everyday life. |
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