Abstract
The field of critical digital literacy studies has burgeoned in recent years as a result of the increased cultural consumption of digital media as well as the turn to the production of digital media forms. This article extends extant digital literacy studies by focusing on its subfield of digital citizenship. Proposing that digital citizenship is not another dimension or axis of citizenship, but a practice through which civic activities in the various dimensions of citizenship are conducted, this article critically considers how the concept of digital citizenship can furnish further insight into the quality of online civic participation that results in claims to and acts of citizenship. Through interdisciplinary scholarship, drawing from critical media and cultural theory, and media psychology, and deriving new empirical data from qualitative digital ethnography and quantitative focus group and survey studies, it presents original case studies with young people in Southeast Asia, including young Muslim women’s groups in Indonesia and youth public opinion on LGBTs in Singapore. It argues that Southeast Asian youth digital citizenship foregrounds civic participation as emergent acts that not only serve to make society a better place, but also enacts alternative publics that characterise new modes of civic-making in more conservative, collectivistic Southeast Asian societies.
Highlights
This article extends digital literacy through its critical subfield of digital citizenship
We demonstrate the third approach to digital citizenship as a subfield of digital literacy focussing on the online practices and acts of citizenship by young people in Southeast Asia, in Singapore and Indonesia
Participants were able to clearly differentiate between informational cues from mass media and usergenerated comments in social media; citing differences in the roles of the two types of cues to affect their evaluation of the public opinion on LGBTs
Summary
This article extends digital literacy through its critical subfield of digital citizenship. This article extends current scholarship which addresses these competencies in terms of information and skills, to consider how the concept of digital citizenship can furnish new insights into the quality of online civic participation that results in claims to and acts of citizenship. Digital citizenship is broadly defined as the ability to participate online and as an extension of social inclusion. It is not another dimension or axis of citizenship, but a practice through which civic activities in the various dimensions of citizenship are conducted. It refers to the capacity and use of ICTs to plan, organize or conduct activities in the citizenship domains of the social, political, economic and cultural. The Internet may be a space for civic activities and engagement or may be a planning tool to enable these activities to oc-
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