Since the late 1990s, social cohesion and civic participation have become one of the main aims of the European Union. Several official documents confirm this fact and these documents are the support of the widespread conviction that our societies need to active and responsible citizens. However, this support is not reason enough to cease calling into question. Attempting to avoid an empty speech derived from the mere acceptance of what is stated in official documents, this paper will analyse, in a first section, the concepts of “active” and “responsible” from a philosophical perspective. When performing this analysis I will draw on the ideas of the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Lévinas. On the one hand, Hanna Arendt devoted much of her work to the study of political action as the most exalted of human activities; an action which is not possible but through the speech between equal human beings –“Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction” (Arendt, 1998, 175)–. On the other hand, Emmanuel Lévinas always focused on the concept of “responsibility”. According to Lévinas, solely a theoretical foundation of ethical responsibility as groundwork and as guiding principle could regain a humanity that had lost its way –“It is responsibility before a face looking at me as absolutely foreign that constitutes the original fact of fraternity” (Lévinas, 1979, 214), which is the basis for social cohesion–. Despite their discrepancies both authors believed that times and spaces of solitude (neither isolation nor loneliness) are required before the encounter with a multiplicity of others at public sphere takes place. From their point of view, solely times and spaces of solitude enable the individual to appear as a subject who acts responsibly from one´s own self-identity.

In a second section, the paper will focus on new technologies, specifically on social networks, as an important educational tool nowadays. It is widely recognised that social networks have become essential tools in achieving active citizens. O´Reilly (2005), who made popular the term web 2.0, emphasised the increasing user participation as one of the greatest benefits of the New Computer Age. This new age stood of internet quite ahead of devices like television which had been strongly criticised for condemning the individual to passivity (Buckingham, 2000). The individual in the Knowledge Society is supposed to be an independent and autonomous person. Phenomena like online activism and e-democracy among others have been profoundly addressed from different fields proving the possibilities of social networking (Clift, S., 2003; Himanen, 2001; Ayers, M. D. and Mccaughey, M., 2003). Nevertheless, the primary use of social networks is not public but private. While there is a fairly large body of research related to this private use, above all from Law and Psychology fields, relatively little has been written about philosophical and pedagogical implications of it. In this section, I will take it into consideration in the light of theoretical arguments addressed in the previous section.

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