Comparative Study of Youth Perspectives on Justice in Cyberspace and Policy Making

There is a gap between everyday definitions of justice and policy texts. Purpose of this study is to investigate the definitions of justice in these two areas in order to eliminate possible gaps. Types of definitions including distributive, procedural, interactional and epistemic justice extracted from theoretical texts were selected for theoretical sensitivity and virtual ethnography and thematic analysis were used to examine cyberspace and policy texts. The results show that young people's definition of justice mainly includes distributive and procedural justice and is consistent with the commodity definition of formal discourse, while centralism and differentiation in the distribution of goods seen in policy findings are criticized. Although cyberspace data emphasized the importance of informational and epistemic justice for young people, but informational justice means exposing young people to information and decision-making, and epistemic justice means involving young people in the process of making sense of justice and their presence in policy-making processes has rarely been seen in policy-making texts. Although some youth documents and resolutions have emphasized youth participation in various matters, there has been no codified policy regarding the presence of youth in organizations, parties and non-governmental organizations that are involved in macro-policies. Youth oriented cultural policies also face problems such as disregard for different lifestyles, otherization due to pathological attitudes that lead to policing and judicialization of issues, and outsourcing of their duties.