The Impact Of Social Media

Introduction The 21st century has been marked by the rise of social media and Internet use. Social media and its impact have been coming to the forefront of academic discussion and studies in many different contexts. One of the standout discussions is that of social media and its impact on civic involvement and voice. As will be demonstrated in the forthcoming literature review, academics agree that among the majority of users, social media has a tendency to increase civic engagement. The discussion however does not examine the question of gender and how the frequency of use of social media affects the amount of civic organizations women are engaged in. Women have historically been at the lower end of all kinds of civic engagement, especially

However, to better frame our argument an important aspect of our research involves social networking sites and the impact that has on the holistic discussion. The article Internet Use and Civic Engagement by Kent Jennings and Vicki Zeitner begin the transition to this addition, but only go as far as to examine Internet use and civic engagement. This article was written in 2003 and the main social media sites of interest like Facebook (est. 2004) and Twitter (est. 2006) had yet to be developed. This article, however, is useful in understanding how Internet on a broad level begun to change civic engagement across the general population. Jennings and Zeitner examine the impact of the Internet on “how formal and informal organizations utilize the internet to distribute information and mobilize political interest” (2003, p. 312), and in turn how that affects the interactions with the individual. They look at the more “sceptical, visions of connections” (Jennings & Zeitner, 2003, p. 312), and how it can be seen as a depolarizing means of disseminating information with the saturation of information on the web involvement civic engagement. This acts as a legitimate to our counter argument to our analysis, which will hopefully use more current information to see if these predictions came to be or if they were in fact too