Exploring the Role of Digital and Socio-civic Skills for Promoting Youth Participation and Digital Citizenship

<p style="text-align: justify;">The emergence of digital technologies and a more global and digital society has brought about the need to develop and educate in Digital Citizenship, as well as to study how youth are taught to participate and learn citizenship in a digital age. This paper aims to explore the role of digital and socio-civic skills development, as facilitators for youth participation and analyses the relationship between sociodemographic variables (sex, age, educational level, and political ideology) with the participatory profile of participants. This is a study with a quantitative methodology, where, based on non-probabilistic convenience sampling, 534 young people between 16 and 35 years old from Spain, completed an online questionnaire regarding the development of digital and socio-civic skills. The results indicate how a participant’s participatory profile is related to other variables. In addition, significant differences are observed between the different participation profiles and digital and socio-civic skills, underlining that the development of digital and socio-civic skills are essential for educating in digital citizenship.</p>

Interaction of Internet Addiction with FoMO

This study shows that digital media increases internet addiction and FoMO due to the impact of digitalization. As digitalization expands day by day and becomes a platform that can be addressed in its needs such as socialization, people's dependence on the internet is also increasing. Currently, digitalization also uses digital citizenship and digital identity as auxiliary elements. Without digital citizenship and digital identity, the impact of digitalization will also decrease. Digital citizenship and digital identity separate people from the normal and physical world and involve them in the digital plane. In this process, internet addiction is exposed due to the need to socialize, and individuals become even more dependent for socializing reasons. FoMO, on the other hand, is another indicator that addiction is growing. FoMO is increasing digital needs as there is a fear of missing out on the processes that are happening. As a result, internet addiction and FoMO are directly proportional to the increase in digital citizenship and digital identity.

Determinants and Consequences of Citizens' E-Participation

This article aims to discuss the determinants of digital active citizenship behaviors such as the e-participation using reporting urban apps. The article makes a comparative analysis between two groups of citizens: a) 98 users of a reporting app (MyHomeCity) who were selected for the case study); and b) 148 non-users of reporting apps. Users of MyHomeCity revealed higher scores for the satisfaction for life in the city, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and perceived happiness, for all place attachment dimensions and all digital citizenship dimensions except for political activism (online and offline) and critical perspective. The probability of being an app user is predicted by satisfaction for living in the city, place identity (attachment), and digital citizenship dimensions. The implications for public decision makers, app developers, and citizens' organizations are discussed.

Renaming Citizenship

As the world is becoming more and more digitalized with technology, the focus on the issue of identity and citizenship in the context of public sphere evolves into a new (digital) sphere. Defined briefly as an ability to participate online society, digital citizenship is also seen as a disparity in access to computers and the internet among different layers of social entities. Starting from its roots, this study presents a comprehensive and detailed account of citizenship with its altered and diversified forms up to now. The larger focus of the study centers around the evolutionary process of digital citizenship with all its aspects involved.

Digital Citizenship and Its Dimensions

Digital citizenship is a concept that has gained importance, especially after the 2000s, with the increasing prevalence of digitalization. This study aimed to examine the thoughts of the students who took the Digital Citizenship and Society course at Gaziantep University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Journalism in the 2020-2021 academic year. The statements taken from the students reveal what the digital citizenship sub-dimensions mean in students' lives, which sub-dimension is more important to them, how they perceive the problems they encounter most in digital life, and the relationship between digitalization and participatory democracy. According to the results of the research, students have a positive attitude towards the concept of a digital citizen. Digital commerce and digital communication are the dimensions they are most associated with in their daily life. The most problematic dimensions are digital security, digital ethics, digital commerce, and digital law. Increasing digital citizenship qualities will facilitate participatory democracy.

Surveillance Society in a Digitalized World

Although the surveillance society discussions have been carried out for a long time, they have recently moved to a different stage with the increase of digitalization. There is a new situation that changes the entire historical context of surveillance, and this new situation is briefly called digital surveillance. However, to make sense of digitalization and digital surveillance, it is necessary to explain how digital citizenship contributes to this process. Digitalization without digital citizenship is unthinkable. In short, this study will show the continuities and breaks of the phenomenon of surveillance in the historical process by shifting from classic surveillance practices to digital surveillance forms. Digital surveillance is considered to be much more complex, sophisticated, incomprehensible to all, and transcends all kinds of time and space boundaries compared to classic surveillance.

Esports Business and Cyberbullying

Esports are the form of organized, multiplayer video game competitions and an area that develops and attracts attention day by day. However, cyberbullying, briefly defined as a user deliberately and repeatedly doing acts of threat, humiliation, and fooling into another user in cyber environments, is seen as a danger for players and esports. This study is expected to contribute to the literature by dealing with the concepts of esports and cyberbullying and to shed light on both academicians and practitioners about cyberbullying behaviors, types, potential risks, and precautions in esports business. Esports can make a significant contribution to promoting digital citizenship skills, as it contributes to the development of community awareness of cyberbullying that is necessary not only for the players but also for the whole society and esports business.