Media participation: Audience effects on knowledge, interest, and efficacy. How does the American society of 2010 evaluate politics through the use of new media

By every measure, Media penetrate the everyday life of citizens. Traditional media showed a strong influence according to researches throughout the 20th century and furthermore through the 21st. With the advent of the online media, people have changed their media consumption patterns and preferences. The main focus of this study is how politics and online media intertwine with each other and what influence, online media may have on the political behavior of citizens. Online media have many tools that can be used from citizens and through them they can pursuit different uses: blogging for activism, mobile online media for political knowledge on the move, twitter for immediate notifications on political episodes and so on. With the analysis of the ANES 2010 dataset, this study had fresh data to examine and analyze, which is crucial for the field of online media, since rapid changes occur in much lesser time than in other fields where such immense changes can take years and even decades. The specific time frame of the data collection is two years after the Obama elections and one month before the mid term elections in the United States. Citizens seem to have expected more and were not really moved to participate in politics. The statistical procedures that were used proved quite efficient and resulted to concrete findings. Online media may have small effects in general on political knowledge, efficacy and participation in what magnitude is concerned, but there was a positive trend discovered. In other words change seems to be happening in what outlets citizens seem to prefer and what effects these new outlets produce on citizens.