Alternative citizenship models: Contextualizing new media and the new “good citizen”

Much current literature examines ways in which civic norms and practices are being enacted, developed and experimented with in the realm of new media. Yet an open question pertains to the role the new media environment plays in this process: Are changes in civic conceptions reliant on new media, or is it an arena in which such changes are enacted and enhanced? This essay addresses this question by contextualizing citizenship models that theorize the role of new media, as part of a broader paradigm of “alternative citizenship models.” What threads together this paradigm is an argument about a change in what constitutes “good citizenship”; a change seen not as a decline from a previous standard, but as the manifestation of a new citizenship model. This article maps the landscape of alternative citizenship models and investigates the role of new media in reshaping citizenship.