Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : the networked young citizen : social media, political participation and civic engagement / Brian D. Loader, Ariadne Vromen and Michael Xenos -- The great equalizer? : patterns of social media use and youth political engagement / Michael Xenos, Ariadne Vromen and Brian D. Loader -- Spaces for public orientation? : longitudinal effects of Internet use in adolescence / Mats Ekström, Tobias Olsson, and Adam Shehata -- Political influence across generations : partisanship and candidate evaluations in the 2008 election / Emily Vraga, Leticia Bode, Jung Hwan Yang, Stephanie Edgerly, Kjerstin Thorson, Chris Wells, and Dhavan V. Shah -- Young citizens and the fine art of disengaging online / Kjerstin Thorson -- Australian reflections on learning to be citizens in and with the social web / Suzanne Mellor -- Perceptions of students and teachers in England about how social media are used (and how they could be used) in schools and elsewhere / Ian Davies and Edda Sant -- "The outraged young" : young Europeans, civic engagement and the social media in a time of crisis / James Sloam -- The contribution of websites and blogs to the students' protest communication tactics during the 2010 UK university occupations / Yannis Theocharis.

"The future engagement of young citizens from a wide range of socio-economic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds in democratic politics remains a crucial concern for academics, policy-makers, civics teachers and youth workers around the world. At a time when the negative relationship between socio-economic inequality and levels of political participation is compounded by high youth unemployment or precarious employment in many countries, it is not surprising that new social media communications may be seen as a means to re-engage young citizens. This edited collection explores the influence of social media, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, upon the participatory culture of young citizens. This collection, comprising contributions from a number of leading international scholars in this field, examines such themes as the possible effects of social media use upon patterns of political socialization; the potential of social media to ameliorate young people's political inequality; the role of social media communications for enhancing the civic education curriculum; and evidence for social media manifesting new forms of political engagement and participation by young citizens. These issues are considered from a number of theoretical and methodological approaches but all attempt to move beyond simplistic notions of young people as an undifferentiated category of 'the internet generation'"--