Outlining New Paths to DemocracyA Profile of Online Content Creators and its Participatory Effects

Ingrid BachmannTeresa Correa

Homero Gil de Zúñiga

School of JournalismUniversity of Texas at Austin

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ONLINE JOURNALISM

Rationale

The Web increasingly offers greater opportunities and spaces for people to create, interact, and share material online

Scholars have found that these creative behaviors are not randomly distributed among groups Socio-demographic differences Psychological differences

Engaging in these creative activities may be important for the democratic agenda

Creating content

This study focuses on the creation of online political content among US adults, and examines socio-demographic characteristics psychological predictors (personality traits and life satisfaction) political and civic effects (online and offline)

Political content creation: creating blogs posting comments on blogs contributing with citizen news uploading videos to the Internet

Methods

Web-based surveyNational dataValid cases 1,482 (17.3% response rate)

Variables/MeasuresDemographicsLife satisfaction, emotional stability, openness to new

experiences, extraversionMedia use & media trustParticipationOnline content creation

Findings

Content creation Gender Race Education Income Age

Content creation --

Gender .04 --

Race -.04 .02 --

Education -.05 -.12*** -.05 --

Income -.07* -.13*** -.02 .42*** --

Age -.16*** -.12** .18*** .06* -.03 --

* p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001

Findings

Content creation Extraversion Emotional

stability

Openness to new

experiences

Life satisfaction

Content creation --

Extraversion .10* --

Emotional stability -.10** .10** --

Openness to new experiences

-.06# .35*** .18** --

Life satisfaction -.10* .14*** .40*** .10* --

# p <.10, * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001

Findings

Online political participation

Offline political participation Civic participation

DemographicsR2 3.7%*** 13.4%*** 6.6%***

Personality traitsR2 2.5%*** 4.5%*** 4.8%***

Media use and trustR2 22.2%*** 5.7%*** 15.3%***

Online content creationR2 12.5*** 3.0%*** 3.1%***

TOTAL R2 41.0%*** 26.5%*** 29.9%***

* p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001

Conclusions

For certain people (young, lower income, extraverted, less stable, less satisfied with their life) less favorable segments of society, the Web may allow the space for them to contribute to civic society and perhaps mitigate their political frustrations.

Results indicate that the Internet may indeed be providing new paths to foster modern democracies.

As the population of content creators online grows, so does the possibilities for these citizens and other users to engage civically and politically.