Introduction

On the two shores of the Mediterranean Sea young people are actively engaged in creating or re-thinking democracy. On the southern shore they are risking their lives fighting to achieve it for the first time. On the northern coast they are defending it as the government ignores democratic rules, placing both freedom and equality in jeopardy. Despite social, political and cultural differences, in both regions young people are using the same methods for communicating their unease, for organising protest and for mobilising themselves by utilising the Web 2.0 for acting out their vision of the world through youth culture.

New Internet-based communication offers both the tools to facilitate a pervasive diffusion of youth culture and an arena in which young people can find free space to renegotiate and as a result reinvent their individual and collective identity as independent social, cultural and political actors. Through the Internet young people can find own lifestyles, combining cultural artifacts (cut-paste-mix) to assert their generational difference from the parental culture (Stevenson, 2001). Moreover, youth and the culture they produce no longer represent a regional or national phenomenon but a transnational experience, expressing universal networks of communication, information-sharing, teenage consumerism and identity politics. As the Internet bridges distance and language barriers, young people around the world now possess the potential to link up in collaborative online discussions and projects, using the Web 2.0 for political and social engagement.

The recent Arab youth's rebellion offers a valuable insight into new forms of online participation, alongside the role of youth culture, for political participation. In the following chapter we commence our reflection with a discussion on the relation of Web 2.0, politics and participation. We summarise the current scientific debate on the advantages and hopes as well as on the disadvantages and fears that are related to civic online participation. Following this, we present some findings from our Up2Youth project and discuss how youth culture may be considered participative. Finally, we analyse the elements of online participation and youth cultural participation throughout the Arab Spring; questioning the media label of a ‘Facebook revolution’. We conclude with some reflections on a possible new meaning of young people's participation north and south of the Mediterranean Sea, inside and outside of Europe, in the second decade of the new millennium.