Perceptions of Social Media

Abstract

Abstract While observers have focused on the political use of social media when exploring their democratic potential, we know little about users’ perceptions of these media. These perceptions could well be important to understanding the political use of social media. In exploring users’ perceptions, the article asks whether politicians and voters view social media in a similar way, and to what extent they consider social media to be an apt arena for political communication. Within a Norwegian context, which may prove useful as a critical case, and using the technological frames model, we find that although voters’ and politicians’ opinions are not that dissimilar overall, politicians are more likely to recognize the political communicative role of social media. However, social media do indeed have the potential to become arenas for political mobilization among groups that traditionally are less visible in political arenas.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.