Youth’s Civic Awareness Through Selfies: Fun Performances in the Logic of ‘Connective Actions’

Abstract

Can we raise the youth’s civic awareness via selfies? This is the bet that several non-profit organisations aiming at raising the youth’s civic awareness have made. In injecting a fun dimension to civic mobilisation, campaigns via selfies place the young participants’ performance as a constitutive element of their civic action. This chapter analyses six youth campaigns based on selfies (#DiversifyMyEmoji, #SuperStressFace, #UpdateYourStatus, #WeAreAble, #MakeItHappy, #ShowYourSelfie) and shows that they privilege awareness techniques that fall under the ‘actualizing citizenship paradigm’ (Bennett et al. Journal of Communication 6:835–856, 2011), in which self-expression and ‘connective action’ (Bennett and Segerberg, Information, Communication & Society, 15(5):739–768, 2012) are favoured, instead of more traditional collective actions.