Abstract

Over the past two decades, a wide variety of researchers have documented the dramatic decline in traditional political participation activities among young people and a corresponding increase in a more expressive form of citizenship focused around social media. This paper will briefly outline the sociological and political debate about the changing nature of citizenship and then reflect on this debate in light of our own multi-year qualitative citizenship research project. Our findings indicate that many of the transformative claims made about young people's Digital Citizenship orientations are overstated.