“Everyday participation” and neighbourhood Facebook groups: how to engage at a local level?
(2023) International Association for Media and Communication Research - IAMCR — Location: Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 - Lyon (9.July.2023)
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- This working paper addresses how residents participate at the local level and aims at presenting online participation in neighbourhood Facebook groups, referring to the concept of “worlds” developed by Howard Becker. Political science research on (online) political participation focuses on how to define the boundaries of the concept, and still debates the repertoire and the domain of actions (van Deth, 2001) that can be associated with political participation. Some researchers (Hooghe, 2014) adopt a pioneering and restrictive vision of political participation, such as Verba and Nie's (1972, p.2): “Political participation refers to those activities by private citizens that are more or less directly aimed at influencing the selection of governmental personnel and/or they actions they take.” Other researchers (Theocharis, 2015) relate political participation to a wide range of actions, propose typologies and theoretical models to classify these actions and indicate those that are political, “pre-political” or “potentially political” (Ekman & Amna, 2012). This research doesn't take a position on the debate about whether activities such as social support or displaying local information via Facebook groups (De Meulenaere et al., 2020) deserve the qualification of “political participation”. In this research, participation is not considered as it should be, but as it is, shaped by those involved in making it. In the same way that Becker observes art as a collective action governed by conventions, participation is observed through the Beckerian concept of worlds, i.e., collective activities made by a network of people cooperating thanks to conventions. Consequently, local participation is studied as: -an activity -a collective activity -a collective activity governed by conventions We conducted an online ethnography of these Facebook groups dedicated to each locality of Mons, a French-speaking Belgian commune with a population of 95,000 inhabitants and composed of the city centre of Mons and 18 other surrounding villages/small towns. We complemented this data collection with 19 semi-structured interviews with members and administrators of these groups. This presentation attempt to answer these four questions: - What kind of activity can be seen in neighbourhood Facebook groups? - How do these activities involve participation? - How does participation via neighbourhood Facebook groups relate to collective action? - What are the conventions used in Facebook neighbourhood groups?
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Amand, L., Roginsky, S., & Renard, D. (2023). “Everyday participation” and neighbourhood Facebook groups: how to engage at a local level? International Association for Media and Communication Research - IAMCR, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 - Lyon. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/219766