SoCS: Scaling Social Networks to Social Movements

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As information technologies become unremarkable elements of everyday life, opportunities arise to employ them to help introduce and reinforce lifestyle and behavioral changes in which people are invested, in areas such as health and wellness, or environmental sustainability. Most previous research in this area has taken the individual user as its primary focus, asking, first, how interactive technology might make people more aware of their own behavioral patterns, and, second, how interactive technology might provide people with incentives and rewards for changing those behaviors. The challenge - especially for topics such as environmental sustainability - is how to scale up from individual actions to the sorts of large-scale, societal change that makes for long-term impact.This research examines an alternative approach to technologically-based behavior change with a focus on questions of scale. We draw on two main sources. The first comprises sociological investigations of social movements and the processes through which they are formed. The second is the contemporary interest in social networking and social media. Our goal is to be able to link people together into larger socio-computational systems that align with and motivate civic engagement and social responsibility. We will develop, deploy, and evaluate online tools on both traditional and mobile platforms that foster the creation of social movements through the alignment of individual actions to collectivities. These systems will be built around our fundamental principle that social groups are a more intelligible and more compelling way to understand environmental actions than arbitrary scales or abstract scientific measures such as CO2 tonnage.This research will provide new understandings of the processes of social movement formation, with an emphasis on the role of online tools and the potential for social networking technologies. We will operationalize these understandings through a focus on design practice. Our research provides insight into the potential for information technologies to help people connect with local communities, increase civic engagement, and achieve personally desirable behavior change.