ABSTRACT
Against a backdrop of rising income inequality on a global scale and the political upheavals this has led to around the world (Piketty 2014), the role of new media as an agent of change has been interrogated and explained in various and nuanced ways: in some cases, it has been credited with playing a part in enabling political change (Rheingold 2002; Shirky 2011); in others it has been too easily co-opted as a tool of surveillance and control by governments, rendering citizen attempts muted, if not impotent (Rodan 1998; Morozov 2011). With the increasing participation of young people in online political activity around the world, as well as the increasingly pervasive use of digital technologies by young people, a conceptual field linking youth, citizenship and new media has emerged that arguably calls for new understandings of citizenship.
