Legal Research

New Pew Report on Civic Engagement

The Pew has released a new report/survey about the internet and civic engagement today. It's quite interesting and shows a few generational changes but not much difference in the profile of the civically engaged offline an online.

The Internet and Civic Engagement

The full report is here.

"Three prominent political scientists who have devoted their lives to studying civic engagement worked with us on this: Kay Schlozman of Boston College, Sidney Verba of Harvard, and Henry Brady of Berkeley.

You?ll see that the report covers four core findings:

First, those engaged with civic life online are very similar to those who participate offline from a socio-economic perspective. It turns out that overall the internet is not dramatically diversifying the class of folks who are civically engaged. The well-to-do and well-educated still predominate online, despite some of the early hope and predictions of activists.

Second, generational change in civic engagement is taking place online. Young adults, traditionally a politically inactive group, show less of a deficit in online than in offline political participation.

Third, new kinds of civic engagement are being created in the social mediasphere ? on blogs, social network sites, Twitter and the like. Young internet users dominate their elders in those areas and there is tantalizing evidence that socio-economic stratification is not as pronounced among the social media participants who are civically engaged.

Fourth, we find that online tools like email, websites, and instant messaging are now embedded in civic activity as groups of all kinds use them to further civic and political goals."

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on September 01, 2009 (boomark / email).