With the primaries in full swing and the upcoming elections, one cannot but ponder what role new technologies such as the Internet are playing in facilitating citizens’ engagement in the political process. Is the Internet actually making a difference?
The Internet has certainly lowered the barriers of participation – if one wants to get involved, there [...]

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press has just released a new survey on the role of the Internet in the 2008 US campaign. The report shows that almost half (42%) of 18 to 29 year olds learns regularly about the campaign from the Internet, double the number in the 2004 campaign (20%). [...]

Yesterday the New York Times published an article on Italy and its current political malaise and a very good video on the Beppe Grillo phenomenon - Beppe Grillo, comic, now blogger (after being banned from television for his political satire) has managed to rally together a new political movement of people who are disaffected [...]

The Italian Government has recently proposed a draft law aimed at reorganising the legislation of the publishing sector, which requires every citizen engaging in publishing and editorial activities to register them with a central registry. This law covers different media, including the Internet, in practice requiring every Internet user who posts information online (thus carrying [...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXaT1Ty6JTY

As discussions about the digital divide have been slowly fading into the background (in spite of the persistent inequalities in Internet adoption both between and within countries), the new focus has been shifting on the inequalities in the way the Internet is used by drawing attention to the media skills (or media literacy) which are [...]

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford has just released its 2007 Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS) report - covering findings and trends comparing the 2003, 2005 and 2007 surveys.
You can download the report here and you can read the BBC press coverage the report has received here. The OxIS surveys are [...]

Itching for statistics, insights and data on the use of second life for political and educational purposes - who are the people who tune in? probably the usual suspects - but what do they think about the whole process? is the technology living up to their expectations? are these online forums a valuable form of [...]

A first hand view on e-democracy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9RqHEAxN9g

A forthcoming book ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy’ by Andrew Keen is questioning the euphoria which is surrounding Web 2.0 and user-generated content online from blogs to social networking sites to Wikipedia and citizen journalism. Keen questions current online contents and practices highlighting how [...]

There is lots of talk about how the Internet and new media are transforming political communication and the political process – however, little talk about another major issue related to this: what are the best research methods to go about studying these changes? Are ‘traditional’ methods from survey analysis of users to content analysis of [...]