Young adults and the digital public sphere: a cross-cultural perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper deals with the engagement of young adults in the digital public sphere and attempts to identify some important issues related to the phenomenon as well as some of the challenges for future research. It has often been asserted that the newer generations are disenchanted with traditional party politics and prefer alternative forms of political engagement. Concurrently, it has been stated that, because of their pervasive involvement with ICTs and the unique opportunities they offer, the digital public sphere has become a place of choice for them to enact these newer forms of political engagement. The hypothesis that young adults are part of a digital generation that has redefined its modes of functioning within society has been a motivating factor for a study conducted among university students in four different countries1 to see how these new practices play out in the various spheres of their lives. Among other issues, we explore to what extent and in what ways the Internet has become a new vector for political participation among young adults. We will use part of these data to support our reflection on young adults’ involvement in the digital public sphere and to re-examine the classical premises of what constitutes the public sphere. We conclude by sharing our insights on this phenomenon and discussing further avenues for research in this area.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".