Foreign experience in researching social and political activity online

Abstract

Over the past decades, depending on the development of information and communication technologies, the understanding of social and political online activity, its meaning, and research methods have been constantly changing. Therefore, the article analyzes new theoretical and methodological approaches and the results of foreign research on public and political online activity. It is worth noting that today the research interest is sharpened by the involvement of more and more citizens and the continuous expansion of online political participation methods in democratic countries. After all, to the huge list of forms of political participation, it is worth adding those that have become available with the development of information and communication technologies, in particular social media — the distribution of political content and the use of social networks to mobilize other people to solve certain political goals. Many research questions have already been raised in the foreign scientific discourse: conceptualization of socio-political online activity, its determinants, predictors, and socio-demographic presentation. In my research, online social and political activism is conceptualized as a form of political participation, meaning citizen activism whose goal or outcome is to influence political and governmental outcomes. The study examines the activity itself because so far this type of activity cannot be called a practice, its normalization and habituation in everyday life have not yet been proven. At the same time, the question of the future of the digital public sphere and its role in democracy is extremely relevant, because it can develop according to at least two opposite scenarios, which directly affects online activism, especially in transition countries. That is why it is so important to study and apply foreign experience in the study of Ukrainian social and political online activism. In general, the article demonstrates that a large gap in Ukrainian research on political participation on the Internet has yet to be filled.