ECREA16-Abstract

Thursday, November 10

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The Use of SNS for Informational Purposes and Civic Participatory Behaviors Online and Offline in Chile

A. Alfaro-Muirhead

Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies, COES, Santiago, Chile

Chile, a highly stratified country, with a vast income and education inequalities, is experiencing an expansion in digital media usage among younger

generations. The latter have been framed as disengaged and politically apathetic, leading the declining of civic engagement in the last years. But lately

social network sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter are turning into an important source of information and are becoming relevant actors in the na‑

tional discussion. This paper will examine the relationship between the use of SNS for informational purposes and civic participatory behaviors -online and

offline- among young Chilean citizens from different socio-economical and educational backgrounds. In regard to this last point and focusing on the case

of Chile, local scholars agree that there is an important gap between private schools (for the highest income segment), state subsidized schools (for middle

class segment) and public ones (for low income segments). This paper will group the young Chilean citizens by school type, contrasting their use of SNS for

informational purposes, topics of interests and civic participatory behaviors (online and offline), among other relevant digital media uses. The data used for

this paper are surveys (quantitative N=418) and interviews (qualitative N=21) applied to young Chilean citizens between 15–17 years old, from different

socio-economical and educational backgrounds (9 schools, convenience sample). The sample considers citizens from three different cities of Chile (in two

different regions): Santiago (capital city, population around 6.158.080, 3 schools in the sample), Temuco (province capital, population around 262.530, 3

schools in the sample) and Villarrica (small city and commune, 3 schools in the sample, where one of it is a rural school, population around 49.184). The aim

of this paper is to test the premise of Gil de Zuniga, Jung and Valenzuela, (2012) which argues that digital media use for informational purposes contributes

to foster democratic processes by acting as a positive and significant predictor of people’s civic and political participatory behaviors, both online and offline.

Key words: Social Media, Facebook, Civic Participation.

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Mediated Expressive Culture and Public Connection Across Sociocultural Difference in Norway

T.U. Nærland

Univeristy of Bergen, Department of information science and media studies, Bergen, Norway

The overarching objective of this study is to explore the degree to which audiences’use and reception of various forms of mass mediated expressive culture

(including but not limited to film, drama, music and comedy) work to establish preconditions for a functioning participatory democracy. Theoretically, this

study starts from Couldry et al.’s (2010) concept of public connection asserting that media use and reception may or may not elicit a democratically desir‑

able shared orientation towards a public world where matters of common concern are addressed. The role of mass entertainment and expressive culture

in democratic engagement is a matter of enduring scholarly interest and contestation. Markham & Couldry (2007), for instance, found that audiences’

engagement with celebrity culture did not involve the sustenance of public connection. In this study audiences’affinities to celebrity culture concurred with

a disengagement from matters of shared public interest and with working class backgrounds. Other empirical studies (see for instance Inthorn et al, 2013)

find that audiences’ engagement with mass mediated entertainment and expressive culture may function as a route to political engagement. Moreover,

a number of scholars argue that various forms of expressive culture often function as important means for the public articulation of politics and must be

seen as integral to the anatomy of deliberative democracy. Attending to the Norwegian context, this study provides an empirically based re-examination

of the role of mass mediated expressive culture in sustaining public connection among a socio-culturally diversified audience. The paper presents findings

from an ongoing interview study that includes in-depth interviews of a selection of 50 informants, split across ethnicity, class, gender and age. The paper

illuminates the following aspects of public connection: 1)To what degree is there among socio-culturally heterogonous audiences at all a shared conception

of what counts as matters of public and collective importance? 2) Which forms of meditated expressive culture emerges as resources for public connection,

and conversely: which forms do not? 3) How do audiences of divergent socio-cultural backgrounds experience the various forms of expressive culture to elicit

public connection? By exploring how various forms of expressive culture elicit audiences to orient towards shared public concerns, and the relation between

socio-cultural background and media use, this study thus aims to provide a more fine-grained and sociologically sensitive understanding of the role of mass

mediated expressive as a resource for participatory democracy. Couldry, N., Livingstone, S., Markham,T. (2010) Media consumption and public engagement:

beyond the presumption of attention, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Inthorn, S., Street, J., Scott, M. (2013) Popular Culture as a Resource for Political

Engagement. Cultural Sociology 7. pp. 336–351 Markham, T., Couldry, N. (2007) Celebrity culture and public connection: Bridge or Chasm?. International

Journal of Culture Studies, Vol. 10(4): 403–421 McGuigan, Jim. (2005) The Cultural