Digital Citizenship and the Reconfiguration of Public Participation in Pakistan's Digital Public Sphere: Negotiating Voice, Visibility, and Power

Abstract

In an era of digital technologies, citizenship, communication, and democratic participation have been fundamentally restructured and new forms of civic engagement in digitally mediated public spheres have emerged. Digital platforms have facilitated new ways of publicizing and participating in politics, but they have also created intricate regimes of algorithmic visibility, but also platform government and unequal power that determine who is heard, who is left out, and who is silenced. The study explores the potential implications of digital citizenship in the reconfiguration of public participation in the digital public sphere in Pakistan by engaging the interrelated dynamics of voice, visibility, and power. The study is conducted in a constructivist paradigm, a qualitative research design with semi-structured interviews of various stakeholders, and data interpretation using reflexive thematic analysis. The article posits that while digital platforms offer a democratic chance of civic engagement, they also simultaneously reinforce structural inequalities by means of algorithmic mediation, digital exclusion and unequal access to communicative power.