Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: Digital Politics: Technology, Communication, and Changing Political Participation

博士生查尔斯·皮尔森在艾伦·克利马博士（加州大学戴维斯分校）的指导下，将研究支持当代政治运动建设的新社交媒体结构的发展和影响。集中式广播媒体模式曾经是许多国家政治运动的关键力量，现在正在发生变化。取代它们的新模式似乎更加注重协作，更加注重自下而上或“基层”的沟通。政治参与这一重要转变的性质和后果将是本研究的重点。对数字政治的研究提供了一个丰富的概念性网站，以了解：a）当前通信和政治参与的变化; B）新兴开放系统中的参与和监管逻辑;以及，c）技术和社会的日益交织。研究将在美国在线和离线环境中进行。研究人员将采用定性研究方法的混合，包括人种学实地考察和有针对性的定性采访的主要参与者和媒体专家分布在全国各地。他还将跟踪和分析特定消息的移动，以衡量特定的基于互联网的分布式结构管理信息流和对齐的有效性。这项研究很重要，因为它将帮助社会科学家了解新技术如何影响当代民主政治。更一般地说，这项研究将有助于媒体和信息之间的关系的理论。资助这项研究也支持社会科学家的教育。

Doctoral student Charles Pearson, under the guidance of Dr. Alan Klima (University of California, Davis), will undertake research on the development and effects of the new social media structures that support contemporary political movement building. Centralized broadcast media models, once a key strength of political movements in many countries, are now in flux. The models emerging to replace them appear to be both more collaborative and more focused on bottom-up, or "grass-roots," communication. The nature and consequences of this important shift in political participation will be the focus of this research. A study of digital politics provides a rich conceptual site for understanding: a) current shifts in communication and political engagement; b) logics of participation and regulation in emerging open systems; and, c) the increasing intertwining of the technical and the social.The research will be carried out in the United States in both online and offline settings. The researcher will employ a mix of qualitative research methods, including ethnographic fieldwork and targeted qualitative interviews with key participants and media experts distributed nationally. He will also track and analyze the movement of specific messages in order to gauge the effectiveness of particular Internet-based distributed structures for managing information flows and alignments. The research is important because it will help social scientists to understand how new technologies are affecting contemporary democratic politics. More generally, the research will contribute to theories of the relation between media and message. Funding this resarch also supports the education of a social scientist.