The term digital citizen is used with different meanings
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According to the definition provided by Karen Mossberger, one of the authors of Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society, and Participation, digital citizens are "those who use the internet regularly and effectively."
In this sense a digital citizen is a person using information technology (IT) in order to engage in society, politics, and government
More recent elaborations of the concept define digital citizenship as the self-enactment of people’s role in society through the use of digital technologies, stressing the empowering and democratizing characteristics of the citizenship idea
These theories aim at taking into account the ever increasing datafication of contemporary societies (as can be symbolically linked to the Snowden leaks), which radically called into question the meaning of “being (digital) citizens in a datafied society”, also referred to as the “algorithmic society”, which is characterised by the increasing datafication of social life and the pervasive presence of surveillance practices - see surveillance and surveillance capitalism, the use of Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data
Datafication presents crucial challenges for the very notion of citizenship, so that data collection can no longer be seen as an issue of privacy alone so that:We cannot simply assume that being a citizen online already means something (whether it is the ability to participate or the ability to stay safe) and then look for those whose conduct conforms to this meaning Instead, the idea of digital citizenship shall reflect the idea that we are no longer mere “users” of technologies, since they shape our agency both as individuals and as citizens.
In this sense a digital citizen is a person using information technology (IT) in order to engage in society, politics, and government. More recent elaborations of the concept define digital citizenship as the self-enactment of people’s role in society through the use of digital technologies, stressing the empowering and democratizing characteristics of the citizenship idea. These theories aim at taking into account the ever increasing datafication of contemporary societies (as can be symbolically linked to the Snowden leaks), which radically called into question the meaning of “being (digital) citizens in a datafied society”, also referred to as the “algorithmic society”, which is characterised by the increasing datafication of social life and the pervasive presence of surveillance practices - see surveillance and surveillance capitalism, the use of Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data. Datafication presents crucial challenges for the very notion of citizenship, so that data collection can no longer be seen as an issue of privacy alone so that:We cannot simply assume that being a citizen online already means something (whether it is the ability to participate or the ability to stay safe) and then look for those whose conduct conforms to this meaning Instead, the idea of digital citizenship shall reflect the idea that we are no longer mere “users” of technologies, since they shape our agency both as individuals and as citizens.