More people voted in the final for the US television show American Idol than in the last US presidential election. Against that backdrop, how do youth learn what it means to be a citizen? The answer suggested by Tom Regan in What if civics class were an online game? could be MySpace.com and online games.

Regan writes:

It's one of the biggest problems facing any established democracy - how to encourage the notion of citizenship among its populace. At a time of dwindling voter participation, and when the whole notion of what it means to be a citizen is in flux because of issues like immigration and assimilation, citizenship can be hard to define, and even harder to promote.

This is particularly true of young people, who may feel cynical, distant, and uninterested in learning about what citizenship means.

He goes on to quote Joe Twyman of YouGov:

'It's a two-stage process,' Twyman told me later. 'Social-networking sites like MySpace and MMORPGs take the notion of citizenship outside what the state has defined - a common language, region, etc. Instead, in these online groupings, the members find themselves in communities that are multiracial, multinational, and multilingual. And they can break this into smaller subsections of people they like or [those] with similar interests.

'And young people,' he continued, 'who have very little idea and notion of the concept of citizenship - it's something that happens to other people - are developing an understanding that there are behaviors that they need to belong to a community: the rules of the game.'

Twyman says the idea that understanding the rules of association online can help you understand the rules of association in the real world has more potential than reality at the moment. But as 13- and 14-year-old members of social-networking communities and MMORPGs grow up, we could see that start to change. These young people may relate back to what they learned online.

In a world where people use MySpace as a search engine and SecondLife is lived in by more than 200,000 people, the citizen leasons we learn will be online.