Proposal for the formation of a critical and active digital citizenship

Faced with the liberal tradition of the exercise of citizenship, mere observers of obligations and individualists, is the republican tradition that emphasizes citizenship for participation and the defense of the common good. Placing ourselves in the digital sphere and from the republican paradigm, the digital citizen would be a person who exercises his or her rights on the Internet from ethical and critical principles consistent with political activism, in order to promote social change. The aim of this work is to make a proposal to educate a critical digital citizenship, committed, active and involved in online actions and intertwined within the educational process. To this end, we start from the profile and needs of digital citizenship that characterize university students (n=250) and that has been evaluated through the Digital Citizenship Scale of Choi, Glassman and Cristol (2017). The results show young university students with high technical and digital skills who also make frequent use of digital devices to carry out academic and more personal activities. However, the profile is clearly deficient in those aspects that have to do with observing a critical perspective and political activism in the digital field or cyberactivism.