ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses to start developing a new framework for shaping theoretical and conceptual ideas that can offer insights for understanding and analysing civic participation in the digital age. It focuses particularly on the relationship between the use of social media and engagement in political culture. The chapter also discusses the dynamics of social media in civic communication in the context of lived political culture. Lived political culture involves everyday experiences, concerns, values, affinities, conflicts, reflection and discussion, networks and knowledge, and these frame practices of communication and discussion in the civic realm. The framework comprises of hybrid engagers within the social relations of civic society, the 'communication, engagement and participation complex' of lived political culture in the digital age, seven distributed nodes of communicative civic–ness. This conceptual and analytical framework will enable an assessment of the relationship between social media and political culture, as well as the significance of that relationship in the wider dynamics of participation.
