Research Project

The turn of the century brought with it a new age of technology and the rise of social media. Early platforms like MySpace quickly gave way to others like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and various others, thereby shaping digital activism into what it is today. Partisan polarization, an older trend, has grown sturdier and uglier since the turn of the century as radicals in each party have (seemingly) grown in numbers. By chronicling the rise of social media and polarization, this paper aims to investigate and contextualize the current issue of partisan polarization, including how digital activism may have contributed to its rise. The discovered literature was reviewed using a CASP checklist, which refined the selection of works to be reread and reanalyzed. Systematic mapping was then employed upon the new selection to synthesize the data, followed by a narrative review informed via a systematic review. Some of the ideas expressed in the works are contradictory. For example, it seems unclear whether higher education does and does not contribute to polarization; further research is necessary to understand this relationship. There also seems to be a hole in the existing literature regarding how effective various forms of digital activism are outside of older methods like hashtags on Twitter or slideshow activism on Instagram; however, this research does not look at polarization but rather the effects on mobilization.