Online but Still not Taking Part? : Investigating Online Participation Divides in Germany

Millions of people all over the world participate in various online contexts and create content via blogs, wikis, personal homepages, online communities or social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. Social scientists are increasingly researching the forms, drivers and consequences of such online participation, understood as the creation and sharing of content on the Internet addressed to a specific audience and driven by a social purpose. However, most research focuses on political participation on the Internet and its impact on the offline world, neglecting newer and more fluid activities. Furthermore, the nascent field of online participation research is very fragmented and atheoretical. This dissertation addresses these problems and investigates online participation from a holistic perspective, taking a sociological and digital divide approach and going beyond political participation and civic engagement.
It proceeds in four steps. First, a systematic literature review is conducted to assess the current state-of-research and to derive a typology of online participation. Five areas of online participation are distinguished: political and civic participation, business participation, cultural participation, educational participation, and health participation. Second, salient drivers of online participation are researched from a social cognitive perspective. This contribution shows that cognitive factors, namely privacy concerns and online self-efficacy, partly mediate the effect of demographic antecedents (age, gender) and education on different forms of online participation. Third, German users' online participation patterns are differentiated along social milieus. This contribution expands notions of the digital and participation divide with a cultural perspective. Fourth, the single contributions are brought together into a coherent structure and reflected in theoretical terms within the framing chapter as well as the conclusion. The main theoretical contribution of the thesis consists of a thorough analysis of previous research on online participation - including the central aspect of participation divides - and a carefully derived definition of the concept. This understanding challenges previous understandings by being largely descriptive instead of normative and by considering a myriad of forms of online participation, going beyond the political. The main empirical contribution of the dissertation lies in a theoretically substantiated, multi-method investigation of the participation divides in Germany, a country where little research on that topic exists.