Introduction: Politics, Participation, and Production

This volume, Communication and Information Technologies Annual: Politics, Participation, and Production, brings together nine studies on the digital public sphere. The contributions illuminate three key areas of digital citizenship, namely political engagement, participation networks, and content production. In the first section, authors address relationships including: new media and efficacy, YouTube and young voters, and political interest and online news. In the following section, the contributions speak to the importance of participation in social, scholarly, familial, and support networks. Subsequently, in the section on production, two contributions offer insight into unequal production, more specifically, gendered digital production inequalities and the varied responsiveness of microbloggers to different kinds of media events and issues. As a whole, the contributions revisit old questions and answer important new queries about netizenship and the digital public sphere.