Does youth participation hold the potential to change entrenched systems of power and to reshape civic life? In Youth Power in Precarious Times Melissa Brough examines how the city of Medellin, Colombia, offers a model of civic transformation forged in the wake of violence and repression. She responds to a pressing contradiction in the world at large, where youth political participation has become a means of commodifying digital culture amid the ongoing disenfranchisement of youth globally. Brough focuses on how young people's civic participation online and in the streets in Medellin was central to the city's transformation from having the world's highest homicide rates in the early 1990s to being known for its urban renaissance by the 2010s. Seeking to distinguish commercialized digital interactions from genuine political participation, Brough uses Medellin's experiences with youth participation-ranging from digital citizenship initiatives to the voices of community media to the beats of hip-hop culture-to show how young people can be at the forefront of fostering ecologies of artistic and grassroots engagement in order to reshape civic life.

Does youth participation hold the potential to change entrenched systems of power and to reshape civic life? In Youth Power in Precarious Times Melissa Brough examines how the city of Medellin, Colombia, offers a model of civic transformation forged in the wake of violence and repression. She responds to a pressing contradiction in the world at large, where youth political participation has become a means of commodifying digital culture amid the ongoing disenfranchisement of youth globally. Brough focuses on how young people's civic participation online and in the streets in Medellin was central to the city's transformation from having the world's highest homicide rates in the early 1990s to being known for its urban renaissance by the 2010s. Seeking to distinguish commercialized digital interactions from genuine political participation, Brough uses Medellin's experiences with youth participation-ranging from digital citizenship initiatives to the voices of community media to the beats of hip-hop culture-to show how young people can be at the forefront of fostering ecologies of artistic and grassroots engagement in order to reshape civic life.

The aim of this book is to shed new light on this theoretically and practically significant issue, and questions the role of technology and culture in social change. It challenges us to reconsider and rethink the impact of new information and communication technologies on civil society, participatory democracy and digital citizenship in theoretical and methodological contributions, through the analysis of specific cases in Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, China, Colombia, Kenya, Netherlands and the United States. Access to information and communication technologies is a necessity, and the importance of access should not be trivialized, but a plea for digital literacy implies recognizing that access is the beginning of ICT policies and not the end of it. Digital literacy requires using the Internet and social media in socially and culturally useful ways aimed at the inclusion of everybody in the emerging information/knowledge society. Technology matters, but people matter more.