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As my graduation topic is about social media, I will also pay extra attention to social media in my literature reading.

In the preparation for our assignment for Inclusive Society, our group’s topic of choice was civic engagement. And I also focused on social media, as a platform that enables the participation of most groups, and the role it can play in building an inclusive society.

I read an article that I found very inspiring. Social media and political participation: are Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube democratizing our political system? In this article, it is mentioned that previous efforts to shape public participation with prior Internet tools did not meet expectations. With Social Media, this could change, because participation seems to be the key concept that explains the difference between the ‘old’ web and ‘new’ Social Media. In the Netherlands, Social Media did not significantly influence voting behavior during the local elections (2010/2011). But, during the national elections (2010), politicians with higher Social Media engagement got relatively more votes within most political parties. In addition, another example is that Obama used fifteen Social Media sites to run his campaign. He understood the power of complementing offline work with an online campaign. He systematically linked the online community to offline activities such as fundraising. Obama’s use of Social Media was an important aspect of his overall campaign strategy. The above examples all illustrate how social media can be used by campaigners to raise their profile and canvass for votes during the campaign.

Another relevant topic, I am really interested in, is the concept of the digital divide. Online political participation is not equally represented. Certain people are more interested: the political action on the web are well-educated males with relatively high income and even relatively high age. But, the younger they are, the more they post and participate. In many cases, the politically interested people online, are the same as the politically interested people offline.

Political parties and similar non-profit organizations could benefit from Social Media to improve the way they work with their members and volunteers. However, the various ways to use Social Media and their effects on member participation are not well understood. I don’t think social media has played a valuable role in this. If social media can make it possible for people who are not that interested in politics to express their views on political topics on social media, that is somehow narrowing the digital divide in terms of political participation. Therefore, I am interested in the research questions for further research:

How can non-profit organizations – with community structures – such as political parties increase member participation by implementing Social Media?