Semi-Private Spheres as Safe Spaces for Young Social Media Users' Political Conversation: Virtual Haven or Digital Bubbles?

Introduction

Political participation includes in its definition those practices that, from a personal and social significance, contribute to the making of the democratic ideal, pursue collective action and consider “interventions, as small as they might be, in power relationships” (Dahlgren, 2018, p. 25), all this in a scheme in which confrontation is a necessary part of the process (Dahlgren, 2005; Mouffe, 2013). The degree along with the modes of political participation are significant displays of the quality of democracy (Ohme, 2019).

With the growing use of the digital space to perform most of sociocultural habits, new manners of political participation are constantly incorporated to the digital arena (Kligler-Vilenchik, 2017). In this sense, at the beginning of the century some scholars saw Internet as a hopeful opportunity to broaden the public sphere (Castells, 2012; Jenkins et al., 2016) as engagement occurred mostly in open networks and websites (Kligler-Vilenchik, 2017). However, with the platformization of the web (Bucher & Helmond, 2018; Helmond, 2015) engagement has begun to be performed in private online spheres, more specifically on social media. In this regard those political participation repertoires that used to be part of the digital public space have migrated to the social media space, were expressions operate with a great autonomy, flexibility, creativity and potential for the utterances (Bennett, 2008, Bennett et al., 2011;) but at the same time they are private, individual and personal (Papacharissi, 2010). This is even more evident among young people, who have born and have grown up within an entirely online media environment (Ohme, 2019) and are the ones who invest more time in the digital space (Statista, 2020).

Along with that, young people address their civic engagement in a way which is different from that of older generations (Bennett et al. 2010). This is it in many ways. For instance, instead of worrying about traditional issues, such as finance, macroeconomy among others, young sectors have shown more interest on other political issues, such as the environment, gender, human rights and consumer politics (Jenkins et al., 2016). Along with that, if adult generations trust on traditional institutions, such as political parties, for performing their participative actions, young sectors prefer social movements for engaging politically, and horizontal interactions among peers are more significant that those vertical relationships that characterize conservative institutions (Bennett et al., 2011). Furthermore, they are more orientated to individual rights instead of civic collective duties (Bennett et al., 2011). These personal interests lead to participative adhesions that are more expressive and personal, fluid and volatile than those ones that characterize the traditional political participation practices, such as voting (Bennett et al., 2008). In this context, young citizens express their preferences and opinions in digital environments, as part of a society where social fragmentation and a decreasing collective loyalty have led to personalized politics in which the framework of collective action is displaced by connective action and individual expression (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012).In this sense, practices encompassed in online political participation are described by some authors as repertoires typical of armchair activism in which a supportive selfishness is deployed (Resina de la Fuente, 2010). However, other scholars have observed that these novel practices are a different mode of being part of conversations and debates in the digital space (Jenkins et al., 2016; Kligler-Vilenchik, 2017; Ohme, 2019).