The digitalisation of lifestyle politics how social media shape lifestyle political engagement

Abstract

Political participation is fundamentally changing under the influence of digital media. While this dynamic has already been intensively researched for election campaigns and protest movements, alternative forms of political participation embedded in everyday life are rarely the focus of communication studies. This paper theorizes the concept of lifestyle politics as a form of political participation and discusses the interplay between lifestyle politics and social media. It begins with the argument that lifestyle politics is systematically defined along the categories of intention and field of action and then further differentiated along the categories of action strategy and action frame. Along these lines, previous research and other case studies are used to discuss the ways in which social media shape and influence various forms of lifestyle politics. The study shows that on the one hand, social media reduce information and participation costs and, as a consequence, support the engagement in lifestyle politics. On the other hand, social media expand the repertoire of lifestyle politics by affording —unlike ever media forms in the past—the technical infrastructure for the exercise of persuasive and collectively oriented lifestyle politics.