CHS: Small: Understanding and Designing Information Communication Technologies to Improve Communities

本项目将考察社交媒体使用、社区依恋、社会资本和公民参与之间的关系。人们普遍担心，我们越来越多地使用个性化技术，如个性化互联网，可能会威胁到公民参与，从而威胁到我们社区的健康。公民参与的社区犯罪率、贫困率和失业率较低，健康和教育比例较高。本研究寻求一套最佳实践或指导方针，供社区成员使用，以促进互联网背景下公民参与的增加，参与式设计活动将为所研究的三个社区中的每个社区的特定公民活动提供合适的工具。通过关注农村环境，这项研究也将有助于我们理解未被充分研究的人群如何为社会目的使用信息和沟通。在目前的社交媒体研究中，女性（在农村社交媒体用户中数量超过男性）和农村居民的代表性普遍不足。该项目的参与式设计部分将有助于设计有用的工具，以增加公民参与，并将有助于对设计方法的批判性论述。这项工作建立在当前通过社交媒体、技术和社会变革发展社会资本的研究基础上，产生了一个社交媒体和公民参与之间关系的模型，该模型提供了对社交媒体如何促进合作努力的更细致的理解。这个模型将解释用户如何决定使用哪种社交媒体，在什么条件下，出于什么目的，以及他们的使用如何影响集体公民努力。将对农村和城市社区的参与者进行访谈，以了解如何利用社会媒体为公民参与服务。

This project will examine the relationships among social media use, community attachment, social capital, and civic engagement. Concerns have been widely expressed that our increasing use of individualizing technologies such as a personalized Internet potentially threatens civic engagement and thereby the health of our communities. Civically engaged communities experience lower rates of crime, poverty, and unemployment, and higher rates of health and education. This research seeks a set of best practices or guidelines that can be used by community members to facilitate increased civic engagement in the Internet context, and the participatory design activities will produce situated tools for specific civic activities within each of the three communities to be studied. By focusing on rural contexts, this study will also contribute to our understanding of how an understudied population uses information and communication for social purposes. Both women, who outnumber men among rural social media users, and rural residents generally are underrepresented in current studies of social media. The participatory design components of the project will help design useful tools for increasing civic engagement and will contribute to a critical discourse on design methods. This effort builds on current research in the development of social capital through social media, technology and social change to produce a model of the relationship between social media and civic engagement that provides more nuanced understanding of how social media facilitates collaborative endeavors. This model will explain how users decide which social media to use, under what conditions, for what purposes, and how their use impacts collective civic endeavors. Interviews will be conducted with participants in both rural and urban communities in order to understand how social media can (or cannot) be leveraged in service of civic engagement.