Generation Y’s Political Participation and Social Media in Malaysia

Abstract

This paper attempts to study the role of Generation Y in expressing their problems, engaging the government through the media especially the social media, and in deciding and voicing their views in the ballot box during the 2008 and 2013 general elections. Generation Y has utilized the social media after the traditional media, like the print and broadcasting media, give them limited space for them to engage with the government and the oppositions Therefore, a survey had been conducted in studying the perception of Generation Y towards media and political participation. This research was able to gather 1,029 respondents from the age 15 till 25 years old. In overall, the findings show that this generation was a little bit sceptical on the new media but they believe that the new media can be the best tool for the youth to engage more with the government. Therefore, it is clear that the result of the survey election is in line with the importance of social media and Generation Y in dominating the public sphere in Malaysia.

Everyday interactions and political participation of Malaysian youth

“…While the parents of half of the youth join village-level organisations, they are not members of organisations once they leave college or university. Organisation membership is a vital non-political space that has been found to mobilise the youth to participate in protests and petition signing (Bastedo 2015;Jeong 2013) and is a platform for sharing of political news (Shiratuddin et al 2016).…”

“…However, during the election campaigns, the nature of news sharing changes and the content becomes political. Researchers like Shiratuddin et al (2016) have reported that Malaysian youth share political news via social media. The youth in this study are frequent users of the internet, confirming the Malaysia Youth Index Score 2015 which shows that the youth spend 5-6 hours daily on their mobile phone and 3-4 hours per day surfing the Internet.…”

“…Appendix shows the interview guide which was formulated with reference to prior research on conventional and unconventional political participation, exploring, in particular, the influence of socialisation agents (Botsch 2011;Zhang and Yan 2014). Voting in elections, and membership in political parties and labour unions are conventional forms of political activism (Mohd Hed and Grasso 2019), as opposed to sharing of political news and participation in activities that help local society (Shiratuddin et al 2016) which is unconventional political participation. The participants were also asked to give issues and news that they talked about in daily life (Moy and Gastil 2006) to understand their concerns in everyday life.…”

Systematic Literature Review:Online Social Media Interaction in Education and Employment Cluster/ Tinjauan Literatur Sistematik: Interaksi Media Sosial Atas Talian dalam Kluster Pendidikan dan Pekerjaan

“…Bagi tujuan penambahan peluang pendapatan, media sosial dan aplikasi atas talian tidak pernah meletakkan had dan limitasi dalam pengguna yang ingin menjalankan perniagaan atau pemasaran. Semua golongan dan lapisan masyarakat boleh dan bebas menggunakan media sosial Shiratuddin et al (2016) untuk menambahkan pendapatan mereka. Walaubagaimanapun, etika dan tatacara berhemah semasa menggunakan media sosial perlu dipatuhi bagi mengelakkan masalah dan kesilapan semasa berinteraksi atas talian.…”

Association of online political participation with social media usage, perceived information quality, political interest and political knowledge among Malaysian youth: Structural equation model analysis

“…As suggested by Zainon et al (2017), there is a declining trend of youth political participation in Malaysia; hence, there is a need to further investigate youth participation by looking beyond the factors such as social media usage (SMU). To date, research that has been conducted in Malaysian context mainly focused on the general impacts of SMU by the younger generation such as political campaign, election process and electoral turnout (Salman et al, 2017;Shiratuddin et al, 2016;Zainon et al, 2017). These studies however, have not clearly examined youth behavior and motivation towards online political participation (OPP).…”