Citizen Perceptions of The European Union: The Impact of the EU W ...

providing information for various user groups has become an important element of governance (Coleman, 2005), which is also mirrored in the increase of EU Internet activities and use of these services.⁵

The online interaction between the EU and European citizens was of particular interest here, as this area had, so far, not received enough scholarly attention, but lent itself to studying perceptions and attitudes in order to understand how online experiences feed back into offline beliefs, which in turn inform subsequent online use. Here it becomes apparent that the study of online versus offline perceptions and experiences, and the interconnected study of user compared to communicator perceptions, are of a far broader scope and not merely restricted to the EU context. However, the context of the EU is rather specific and requires further attention—not only in that the EU itself is a transnational communicator but also with regard to the widely dispersed multinational audiences/citizens/users who make up the other side of the communication process, and who perceive and interact with the EU within different national contexts. For this reason, it was thought beneficial to include user perceptions from various countries and national contexts so as to acknowledge and provide for the EU's role as a transnational communicator. The question of which specific countries were selected for inclusion in this comparative study will be answered in detail at a later stage (see chapter 6).

Focusing on citizens’ attitudes and the way in which online perceptions might influence their attitudes towards the EU institutions offline served as a way to limit the analysis to a graspable field—that of online communication—rather than attempting to cover all the media used as information sources about the EU and channels of communication by the EU. This study sought to determine which role the Web site played in the EU's overall communication strategy, and how user perceptions of the output compared to the initial intentions of the communicators. In a way, it can be understood as an analysis of intentions, means, and outcomes when comparing communicator intentions to what users eventually perceived when searching for information on the EUROPA Web site.