engleski

Going offline: how online initiatives revive offline civic engagement

Building on the concept of a new identity and acknowledging the growing concern about disengaged citizenry, soundly expressed in the accounts of eroding social capital and the crisis of public communication thesis, this paper will develop two assumptions. First, it will argue that online interactions in virtual communities have the potential to create group identity hence providing a source of content that has the capacity to transform virtual into physical communities. Second, it will assume that these virtually created and physical consumed communities have the capacity to induce public action and positively contribute to civic engagement. In order to explore aspects of virtual communities as local e-engagement spaces, this paper will present two case studies – the MoveOn and the Meetup Initiatives.

collective identity; online communication; social capital; crisis of public communication; civic engagement

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