Abstract

Within democratic societies, the mass-mediated public sphere, which professional journalists created, guarantees different forms of community-building communication, social interaction and political participation. However, under conditions of digitization, new areas of communication and social networking emerged and consequently new structures of power and new forms of democratic participation also appeared. In the digital era, everyone can genuinely share in participatory communication and show solidarity ‘with just one click’ as an act of resistance in today’s mediatized worlds. There is an urgent need to reflect on the field of democratic participation under the changing conditions of digitization from a normative point of view and to analyze what challenges arise with these new forms of participation. Mediatization as a meta-process helps to reflect and to classify emergent forms of social interaction and political participation, which professional journalists as well as amateur civic journalists have developed under the conditions of participatory communication.