 So I want to say that first of all, thank you very much for my society inviting me here today. I'm very honoured and to be asked to provide the keynote speech is one of the keynote speeches is very nerve-wracking. But thank you very much. I don't have a picture or a map of Canada, but to give you an idea of where I'm from in Canada, I'm from the Northwestern part of Canada. So when you think about the stereotypical Canadian living in an igloo, I will say that I'm actually from the part of Canada where we could live in igloos, it's that cold, but we just choose not to. We have still a couple of feet of snow on the ground. So thank you very much. So in this presentation, what I would like to cover is a couple of the theoretical points about how the internet influences civic and political engagement. You'll see that I'm focusing on three aspects to that theory, the information aspects, the connection aspects, as well as the new opportunities afforded by the internet to provide citizens with a voice and to provide input into government. So one of the things, type of research that I like to do is called a meta-analysis, and that's basically reading all of the studies that I can get my hands on and trying to provide a summary of what this literature is telling us. So the research that I'm presenting today is based on a study of 90 different studies that have tried to examine the effects of internet use on civic and political engagement. So as a spoiler alert, I will tell you that the effects are positive. We absolutely know that. I know that there was some early talk about 2000 about whether the internet would have negative impacts. I hope that I can appease any concerns about negative impacts. But I also want to point into some of the gaps in the existing research. I know 90 studies is a lot of studies to be done, but I think that the research could be improved, and so I'd like to give you some ideas of where I think the research should go to improve our understanding of how the internet affects civic and political engagement. So in a democracy, there's a few different views on how democracy should work. One of them is that citizens should provide input mediated through civic groups. Another version of democracy will look at how we elect representatives, and those representatives are intended to speak on our behalf. And then the last version, our view of how democracy works, basically looks at this idea of citizens providing direct input into government. So things like referendum or participating in online deliberations. This is sort of giving citizens a direct voice in governance. So the common aspect of all of these theories is that citizens need some venue for collecting information so that they can provide input to government. They need the connections, the connections amongst citizens and between citizens and organizations. These connections are very important as I'll elaborate in a few slides. And then the last aspect of this for the internet and democratic society is to provide opportunities for input and engagement. So those are the three themes that I'd like to focus on in explaining how I see the internet influencing civic and political life. All right, so we're all familiar with patterns of disengagement. A lot of the focus is on how the voter turnout is in decline. And this is statistics here from France, the United Kingdom and the United States, and we have similar patterns in Canada as well. There's a few theories about why voter turnout is in decline. Two of the dominant theories is around a lack of knowledge that people lack the relevant political knowledge to participate in democratic practices such as voting. And then the other theory that has been put forth, the more contemporary version, is talking about our lack of connections to each other as citizens. And then the connections between citizens and organizations. And so these are sort of the dominant themes of explaining disengagement. Now disengagement isn't the only story to be told. There's also a story to talk about in terms of patterns of engagement. And so we see the internet coming in and filling in as another opportunity other than voting to participate in civic and political life. But we need to think about these trends when we're talking about the internet's effect because it's going to frame how we see the internet's effect and what we study about the internet. And certainly these patterns of disengagement have fueled concerns that the internet would lead to further demise in civic and political life. So the internet is a key mechanism around gathering information. And so really the problem that the internet was expected to address is these problems of knowledge gaps. So this is one of the dominant explanations for disengagement and looking at how people lack just the basic knowledge about who their member of parliament is. So the internet is certainly helpful in addressing those knowledge gaps. The idea is that citizens will have access to abundance of information and that this could inform their civic and political engagement. The other theory focuses on connections. And so we see the internet discussion of the internet in terms of how it can build social ties among citizens and between citizens and organizations. And these ties are meant to engage citizens. And then the last one is looking at the role of the internet in terms of reducing the costs of being involved in civic and political life. Of course we know that being an active participant requires time and resources and of course knowledge as one of those resources. And we're looking to the internet and how they can shape the cost of participation and hopefully reduce those costs of participation so that a larger section of our population can participate in civic and political life. So there is a lot of research and a lot of commentary out there as has been alluded to about how the internet could affect civic and political life. But the research that I'm trying to address is on a very specific question. It is on the question of whether the internet will have a causal and transformative effect on civic and political engagement. The research hypotheses that are pursued within this area of research are questions like can the internet turn non-participants into participants? Or can greater use of the internet lead to greater participation in civic and political life? The more contemporary version of these research questions are looking at particular uses of the internet such as social networking sites and how increased use of these particular applications can affect people's civic and political engagement. But it is a very select set of research. It's all claiming that there's some causal role for the internet in terms of increasing civic and political engagement. That is going to cause people to be more engaged. So in terms of the information aspects I think you're probably very familiar because there is a lot of applications out there that are meant to address the problems of knowledge and lack of information. So we know that the internet provides access to a wide variety of issues. And from the communications perspective it's really this idea that you don't need to be interested in what the traditional media are covering. The idea on the internet is there's going to be information out there that interests you. So the ideal is that citizens will find an issue that interests them and they can use the internet to become more informed about this issue. More informed also leads to more engagement. That is the pattern of research that we see outside the internet and it certainly is true for the internet. More informed means more engaged. There's also this idea with the internet of this incidental exposure or accidental learning. So the idea here is because we have information and that information is easy to exchange that we can see a transfer of information from people who are highly interested and involved in politics and we can see them pushing out that information to members of their social network who are not interested and engaged. So the idea here and this is especially true for social networking sites we expect to see that news circulates through these sites and will reach people who are not engaged, not informed but they are going to become informed because of this process of information sharing. The other thing that is unique about and again social networking sites is the idea that this information that's being exchanged may have greater impact because it's coming from our family and friends. So we have this not just an abundance of research but it's research that has been filtered through people that we trust, through people we know, through people who will probably follow up with us and say did you read this, I sent it to you, you know there's an accountability in there and so there's an expectation that the information will have greater impacts on our knowledge and our engagement. Of course the internet provides a lot of venues to monitor political life, to find out who your member of parliament is to find out what they are doing in terms of decision making and tracking that sort of aspect we know that that sort of information is readily available now on the internet but overall all of these theories are basically on the assumption that the internet will reduce the effort to become informed and then this being informed is going to lead to more engagement in civic and political life. The other thing that is interesting about the internet is this idea of expanding our social network. So I'm a sociologist and of course one of the things that I'm interested in is how the internet affects the number of people that we are talking to or interacting with on a regular basis and current estimates place the number of Facebook friends and number of followers on Twitter in that 200 to 300 as the typical network size and this is something unique because prior to the internet it was really hard to think of being able to communicate on a regular basis with 2 to 300 of your family and friends, those would be extremely difficult to do. So we know that the internet has impacts on our network size. Network size becomes important because we know that people with larger networks are more likely to be asked to be involved in civic and political life. So there's this opportunity to be mobilized the larger your network is. We know that if you are asked to participate in politics you're more likely to be to actually agree to that recruitment message and to be involved in civic and political life. So these networks really are a critical way in which we see the internet engaging people in civic and political life. We also have a variety of tools and some of you will be presenting possibly on these tools but we have a variety of tools to basically coordinate group activities on the internet and so I've highlighted Facebook groups because that seems to be where the literature has done a lot of research on the role of Facebook groups in terms of recruiting and mobilizing people and getting them talking about politics. And again the idea here, the fundamental assumption around these connections is that it's going to reduce the effort required to connect with other people and to connect with organizations and that this will lead to greater civic and political engagement. And the last aspect is looking at the opportunities presented by the internet. So we know that, well we expect that the internet is going to make civic and political participation in online forms much easier to do. It's readily available in your fingertips, you can sign a petition if you're already set up with change.organization, the change.org, all you have to do is click sign this petition, you don't even have to re-register your name or anything. It's literally that easy. So we see the internet impacting civic and political engagement through this venue, these easy clicks towards participation. One of the things that I like to look at is the way that the internet will transform how the government consults with its citizens. So looking at how online deliberation can be helped and how it can have impact on decision-making. Alright, I know I'm supposed to stick to the microphone but I do need a drink of water. So the research that I'm going to be presenting here today is called a meta-analysis. And what this is is basically taking all of the quantitative studies, so all of the evidence-based studies that have been done in this area and looking at them and trying to find patterns in the findings. So it's basically a summary of a bunch of quantitative studies and trying to get at the impacts of the internet on civic and political life. The value of a meta-analysis is that it's going to overcome any limitations of any single studies. So you'll see studies published and there'll be discussions about, you know, small sample size, weak measurements, minimal measurements. There's all of these problems with any particular studies. There's trade-offs, there's funding issues that all lead to these limitations in any individual study. So the value of a meta-analysis is that it can look across the different studies and sort of pool resources and say, here's what we know about the impact of the internet on civic and political life. We can look at all of the different ways that it's been measured, all of the different people who have been surveyed and see what the impacts of the internet are on civic and political life. And so my argument or at least the argument that I make when I'm trying to publish this type of resource is basically it's going to get us closer to the truth. And of course I have to put the truth in brackets because I don't want to claim that I know what the truth is. But I certainly think this will get us closer to the truth. This idea that if we can combine all of these studies and look at the patterns of effects that we are going to be closer to some true idea about the impact of the internet on civic and political life. So the other thing that I will say about this is my meta-analysis can only be as good as the studies that I'm employing. So yes, I have 90 studies that are informing my analysis here but my analysis can only be as good as the studies that are feeding into it. And so I will be talking about the research methodologies used in this field of research. Alright, so I've identified 90 studies in this area of research. It spans 20 years of research on the internet's effect on civic and political life. I tried to be very expansive. I wanted to include all research across the globe but I will acknowledge that the limitations of my research is most of the research I suspect is based on well-established democracies and as such my meta-analysis tends to focus more on well-established democracies and summarizing the effects there. So within each study we have multiple estimates of the effects of the internet on civic and political life. So one study will not just claim here's one finding about the internet and its impacts. It'll try to get at multiple findings about the internet's effects. So we have 90 studies but we have 540 survey-based estimates of the effects of civic and political life. So sometimes these multiple effects are explained by multiple measures of internet use. So for example the contemporary literature will look at do you use online news. It'll also have a measure about do you use social networking sites. It'll have multiple measures of internet use and so it'll have multiple measures of the impacts of these different types of use on civic and political engagement. The other reason that there's multiple estimates is sometimes they look at different types of civic and political activities. So they'll look at things like voting and then they'll look at protest and they'll look at participation in boycotts and bycotts. And so you'll see multiple estimates saying here's the effects for this type of behavior and here's these other effects for other types of political behavior. So we have 540 estimates of the causal effects of internet use on engagement in civic and political life. So if you're looking for an orientation to this field of research I thought rather than give you a list of references that is 90 items long what I would do is give you a word cloud that tries to give you an assessment of where this literature, when it's been published and who's publishing this literature. So one of the big names in this area of research you can see in blue here is Bruce Bimber. And to give you an idea of how he's contributed to this research Bimber and Copeland who's in the green they published a study in 2013 about the internet's effect on civic and political life. They actually contributed 30 estimates of the effects of the internet on civic and political life. So the 30 estimates come from a single measure of internet use for accessing campaign information but what they have done is looked at 6 different civic and political activities. So they look at it at donating, they look at voting, they look at 6 different political behaviors and then they looked across 5 different elections. So they have multiple estimates here coming from multiple sources and so what I'm trying to do here is trying to get this piece of information in with the larger body of studies to try to find what the patterns are in terms of the effects of the internet on civic and political engagement. So if you're orienting yourself to this field I would strongly recommend research by Bruce Bimber. We see Valenzuela has done a lot of research on social media and its impact on civic and political engagement. So I will direct you there. And then Devan Shah should be in there as well. He's also done a lot of research focusing on online news and how that affects civic and political life. The research that I'm talking about is all recently published research so about half of my studies were published in 2013. That doesn't mean the data was collected in 2013 because there's a lag period but the idea here is it's all very recent research that has just been newly published in 2013. So not surprising because I did have a spoiler alert but we see that the abundance of findings are basically saying that the internet is going to have a positive effect on civic and political life. So the actual estimate is somewhere around 83% of the coefficients are positive and then we have some that are negative. The ones that come back negative are usually measurements that look at internet use in terms of frequency of use. So how long do you spend on the internet so looking at hours? And then the other set of research that produces a negative coefficient is whether or not you use the internet for playing games and that seems to have a negative effect on your engagement in civic and political life even after controlling for age because we know age and game playing is probably closely tied. So we can appease any concerns that the internet is having a negative effect. We certainly see over and over again across these 540 estimates that the effects are indeed positive. So I know social networking sites have received a lot of attention recently so what I wanted to do is sort of look at whether social networking sites are really something different that is happening online or is it just more of the same. And so my finding is actually that it's just more of the same. It's the internet that is having an impact and we see a lot of attention to social networking sites but the other types of internet use so going online to find online information or participating in online opportunities to engage in civic and political life all of these are having comparable effects so they're not more or less likely to provide positive effects here. So for this audience one of the things that I thought might be interesting is to look at how different applications affect engagement in civic and political life. So I wanted to look a little bit deeper in the literature to see if we can find whether Twitter has a different effect than say Facebook okay or maybe whether YouTube is different from Twitter or Facebook and so getting into the nuances of the particular applications and trying to understand where the findings are different. Likewise I'm interested in questions of whether people who access their information through blogs is going to be different than people who look at traditional news websites. Now getting down into these level of details is very difficult. One of the things that academics like to do is they like to ask about 5 to 10 different questions about internet use but then they take all of those questions summarize them into a single variable or a single measurement and they don't look at the details or how there could be differences depending on what types of uses. So it's very hard to do that type of granular research to look at the effects of particular applications. That said I have 90 studies and there was about 10 to 15 studies that looked at specific applications and so here's my findings here around that particular question. One of the things that we are seeing is Facebook is basically coming out with an abundance of positive effects and that is in contrast to Twitter which seems to have a more split sometimes the effects or positive sometimes the effects are negative and blogs and email and news websites are all the balance of the effects are positive effects. So this leads to a few questions about the nature of Twitter and also the nature of the research that has been done in this field. This finding was really surprising to me I shared my slides ahead of time with Tom and Gemma and I know that this is one of the slides that was particularly interesting and so the question is how do I explain the Twitter as being something distinctive here? And so I would say a couple of things one is that we need to look at the weaknesses in our research methodology because I think part of me not being able to explain that finding is because of the type of research that has been done. A lot of the research is based on survey data where we ask people to recall their Twitter use did you use it to recirculate news stories did you do it for all of these different types of activities rather than looking at the details of how people actually use Twitter. So we can't really easily answer this question about why Twitter has these effects because we don't have that detailed analysis of what people are actually doing on Twitter as opposed to what they report they're actually doing on Twitter. So we certainly have some methodological issues that would hamper the explanation of that finding. Now that said I do have some theories about why Twitter may have these types of effects could be a limitation of Twitter, the character size could be the nature of the content of Twitter that explains these effects it could be any number of things something as simply as the research studying Twitter is not as robust as the research that is studying Facebook so I certainly see a lot more studies focusing on Facebook and fewer studies looking specifically at Twitter and it could be something about the research methodologies that are influencing the findings. So that said I think we can provide some conclusions from these 90 studies with 540 effects of the relationship of the internet on civic and political engagement and this findings over 20 years of research is basically we can say that it has absolutely a positive effect on civic and political life. So I argue that it has this positive effect because the internet provides an easy venue for gathering information about civic and political life information on political issues that will pique your interest and cause you to be more engaged in civic and political life. I argue that the internet has this effect because it's building connections amongst citizens and between citizens and organizations and that these connections are basically facilitating political talk which leads to greater engagement in civic and political life and of course the internet provides some new venues for engagement in civic and political life so this will feed into these online forms of engagement are leading into offline forms of engagement I think I forgot to clarify here that the way that these studies have looked at is the online existence and what you do online and how that affects offline political behavior these are the 90 studies have all looked at online uses and how it affects offline behavior. So that said we do know that the effects are positive but we certainly have some challenges in our research that we have conducted here. Some of the problems with this research is they're all based on single point in time surveys asking participants to recall their online activities as well as their past levels of engagement in specific civic and political activities. So we have this problem of recall can people actually accurately report what they've done online? Can we ask a question like how many hours do you spend on Twitter reading news stories and actually get an accurate picture of what people are doing and how much time they are spending online? I would argue that we have some weaknesses in here we actually expect a lot of our survey respondents in terms of recalling their behavior and we need to look more critically at that and whether or not we can reasonably expect them to recall this type of behavior. Likewise when we're asking about civic and political activity the tendency is to ask did you in the past 12 months sign a petition and that is a long time span to try to recall your political behavior and so we have to question are we getting good estimates of whether or not they've actually signed a petition? The other challenge in this area of research is one of temporal order. So this is the issue of do we know that it's internet use that is leading to engagement in civic and political life or are that the people who are already engaged just using it as a tool? Now this may seem like a very academic pedantic discussion but it has certain implications on our democracy. One of the questions I'm trying to explore as a researcher is whether or not the internet can address participation inequalities. We know that there's certain segments of the population who are particularly disengaged who are not involved in civic and political life and if I want to understand whether or not the internet can help them I need to be able to establish that their internet use happened first and then they became more engaged and we need to look at this question of temporal order and establish that in order to make the argument that the internet is having a transformative effect. The last issue with these types of studies and again it's 90 studies that are 80 of the 90 studies using an identical methodology using survey based research and just a single survey but one of the problems we have is as attribution. How do we know it was the internet that led them to be more engaged and not something else? How do we know that it's the internet that is causing their levels of civic and political engagement and not something else? So academics of course like to control for a variety of things and say that they've ruled out these other explanations but we really can't get at attribution unless we can control who's getting access and looking at how the effects differ for those who have access to the internet versus don't or that use a particular application to have those sorts of comparisons we can really establish that it is the technology that is having the impact. So in terms of improving research I have a few relatively simple suggestions on how we can basically produce better research to understanding internet's effect. One of them is to consider supplementing survey data with other forms of data. So whether we can look at the content of tweets or the content of Facebook images and to see what people are actually being exposed to and what sort of information they're circulating through their social networks. We definitely need that supplementary information that would help us understand why Twitter may have different effects than Facebook. Maybe it's because of the content on Twitter but again we need to have this supplementary information on how these social media are being used in order to answer these questions. The other thing we need to do is we need to look at participants over the course of time and this is basically trying to establish this idea that it's the internet that is actually influencing civic and political engagement. This will help us understand that a little bit better if we can track changes in behavior, offline behavior over time and changes in internet over, internet use over time. These will help us better understand things. And the methodology that I like to use to test my own research is looking at can we assess what people's level of political knowledge, their connectedness their levels of engagement before we introduce a technology and can we get a good picture of what that looks like then introduce the technology and this technology that I've been studying is online news websites then look at them again and say look at how political knowledge has changed after usage of this website. How has connectedness changed after the use of the website and can we look at long-term measurement in terms of how levels of engagement have changed after use of this website. In terms of attributions we don't have any very easy answers or methodological fixes for how to improve the attribution to the internet. One of the ways that I propose we get a better understanding is to do more comparative work and the comparative work that I think would be really helpful for us to understand is look at the effects of the internet in a well-established democracy where the internet is widely used and compare that to another context where maybe the internet is not as widely used and do that cross-national comparative work. So of those 90 studies there are literally a handful I would say about five studies that look at cross-national differences in internet use and civic and political engagement so we definitely have some work to do in this area. The other suggestion that I have for trying to get at attribution is looking at it for different sub-segments of the population. So my research has looked specifically at how the internet has differential effects on civic and political engagement for youth as opposed to non-youth. So I think that was probably one of our best options to try to get at attribution is do some comparisons here. So in summary in this case you didn't get my point or you just had a little nap I'd like to summarize what I've been trying to say. So first of all I want to just repeat my poor finding which is the internet will have a positive impact on civic and political life. We have about 83% of coefficients that says that there's a positive relationship between the internet, internet use in its variety of forms and engagement in civic and political life. My explanation connections and opportunities. So I think the internet is critical in addressing knowledge gaps and providing information to people that they wouldn't have easy access to otherwise. And so this is part of the reason that they are more engaged because they have this information it's contributing to knowledge and this knowledge is leading to engagement in civic and political life. The other way that the internet is different is building these connections. So connections among citizens they can talk online about problems in our society and come up with solutions. They can also provide easy access to organizations. So you can find organizations that are interested in the political issues that you are interested in. You can form these connections and then you can get information about opportunities for engagement on these particular activities. And then the last way that the internet is transforming civic and political life is basically offering these new opportunities for engagement. So things that's easy as signing online petitions but also to participate in online deliberations and other forms that the internet can host. And I believe that's it.