Though Henry Milner's book The Internet Generation: Engaged Citizens or Political Dropouts is written for an academic audience, I think anyone interested in how politics is done in the digital age would find it stimulating. I'm only about a third of the way through and, so far, if I had to sum up what I think he's driving at it would be this: The Internet, social networks and other new telecom and digital tools are not, by themselves, helping to make young people politically active. For those who choose to be politically active, they are great. But the wide use of Internet-based communication tools, particularly among young people, does not appear to have produced any uptick in political participation. (And Milner spends quite a bit of time reviewing the research about what is meant by the term “political participation”).
Here's Milner:
In one section, Milner looks at “political knowlege” (a precursor to political participation) and media use over time, from the generation where news primarily was distributed through newspapers, to the radio era, to the rise of television and then to the Internet.
“The weight of evidence,” Milner writes, “is that the change from newspapers to television — especially commercial television — lowered overall levels of political knowledge … Television's critics persuasively argue that the generations rasied on commercial television have a reduced capacity to make distinctions — between information and entertainment, between news and gossip, between fact and wishful thinking.”
Milner also cites studies that show political engagement among young people is significantly higher in European (particularly northern European) countries than in Canada or the U.S.
Now taking those facts into account, here's a chart Milner provides that shows “self-reported daily newspaper readership” by young people in European countries, the U.S. and Canada at 2004. Note who's at the top and who's near the bottom.
