Recently, the users of Facebook get more and more chances to partake in some civic activities on this social website such as participating in some online social activities, communicating with the government, discussing some social issue, and so on. These behavioral changes of online users reflect that people have gradually got used to involve in civic activities and Facebook indeed has become the newly modern online public sphere. However, domestic researchers seldom focus on overall Taiwan civic engagement in their academic research. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate and analysis the domestic civic engagement on Facebook, and try to figure out whether this kind of online citizen participation can stimulate and proliferate online deliberative democracy.
The subjects of this research are Facebook users. Through online questionnaires, the researcher gained 695 valid samples. The researcher uses “intensity of Facebook use scale”, “Facebook civic engagement scale”, and “deliberative democracy scale” in the questionnaires to analysis the relationship between civic engagement and deliberative democracy of Facebook users.
The result shows positive correlation between intensity of Facebook use and Facebook civic engagement. It also demonstrates the positive correlation between intensity of Facebook use and deliberative democracy, and between Facebook civic engagement and deliberative democracy. In conclusion, using Facebook would increase the users’ civic engagement; moreover, it will accelerate the development of deliberative democracy.
