The purpose of the current paper is to contribute to the field of e-participation by presenting a design concept for mediating technology that incorporates current information technology such as social and collaborative media designed for the purposes of civic engagement in society. Such technology could empower people to mobilize and engage themselves in proactive consensus-seeking and co-creation. Social media are broadly adopted in the reactive mobilization of citizen-initiated participatory activity in society such as protests like the London riots and the Occupy movements. In our view, there is a demand to organize mobilized crowds to collaborate in a consensus-seeking manner. For instance, there does not yet exist online applications that specifically serve the purposes of massive simultaneous co-editing of documents by citizens seeking consensus in societal issues. However, as we argue, there is no reason for such not to be integrated from existing technological components that are commonly accessible.

This study explored the attitudes of a broad sample of politically interested Swedish voters towards Internet voting. A total of 5683 participants completed a web-based survey concerning participation and security aspects of Internet voting. Attitudes towards Internet voting were positive on the whole and the acceptance of participation in democratic elections using Internet voting was spearheaded by: women, groups with relatively short education, the unemployed and the self-employed. Unlike previous studies, it was found that age was not a significant factor in determining the attitudes towards participation in elections by means of Internet voting. Concerning the security challenges of Internet voting, men were more optimistic than women and participants’ confidence in security increased with age and education length.

This study aimed to examine differences in influence between online news (e.g., New York Times) and social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) on attitudes in political campaigns. In a web-based experiment, campaign, polls and election between two fictitious candidates were simulated. Participants’ explicit and implicit attitudes as well as voting behavior were assessed using self-report items and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The results reveal that information emanating from online news had a significant influence on explicit and implicit attitudes while that of social networking sites did not. Overall, negative items had a stronger impact than positive ones, more so in online news compared to social networking sites. Negative information from either type of media was more likely to change participants’ explicit attitudes in a negative direction and as a consequence also change their vote. Practical implications of the findings and limitations of the study are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on how potential circumventing media and communication technologies could potentially assist the information flow when authoritarian regimes decide to block the main channels, such as the Internet and the mobile phone networks. The point of departure is the recent Internet blackouts in countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), such as Egypt, Bahrain and Libya. We discuss several applications that were developed as a response to state repression in these countries, and their future potential that would allow people to communicate more freely despite Internet and mobile network blackouts.

This article elaborates a concept of co-creative media that aims to support citizens’ democratic engagement by facilitating participatory and co-creative processes. The research adopts a concept-driven design approach to theoretically underpin and empirically inform the concept. This was accomplished by adopting theoretical resources from the framework of actor-network theory (ANT), identifying criteria in an analysis of existing socio-technical systems for democratic engagement, and building on the results from four research studies. The main contribution of the article, namely the concept of co-creative media, could serve as a basis for further theoretical reflections and a point of departure to support future participatory design processes where relevant stakeholders collectively contribute to the implementation and evaluation of co-creative media. Co-creative media have the potentials to provide citizens with a new approach to democracy and could broaden citizens’ democratic engagement by means of creating virtual spaces in which new ideas, initiatives, knowledge, and solutions could emerge.