TY - JOUR AB - Citizen participation in the news-making process has been a hopeful promise since the 1990s. Observers hoped for a rejuvenation of journalism and democracy alike. However, many of the enthusiastic theoretical concepts on user engagement did not endure close empirical examination. Some of the major fallacies of these early works (to whom the author contributed himself) will be outlined in this article. As a bleak flip side to these utopian ideas, the concept of “dark participation” is introduced here. As research has revealed, this type of user engagement seems to be growing parallel to the recent wave of populism in Western democracies. In a systematization, some essential aspects of dark participation will be differentiated. Finally, the benefits of (also) looking at the wicked side of things will be discussed. AU - Quandt, Thorsten DA - 2018-11-08 DO - 10.17645/mac.v6i4.1519 KW - citizen engagement KW - dark participation KW - fake news KW - news-making process KW - participatory journalism KW - populism KW - propaganda KW - user-generated content LA - eng N1 - Media and Communication 6 (2018) 4, 36-48 N1 - Finanziert durch den Open-Access-Publikationsfonds 2018 der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) und der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster (WWU Münster). PY - 2018-11-08 TI - Dark Participation UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hbz:6-14199434308 Y2 - 2024-12-26T21:41:27 ER -