Doctoral Dissertation Research: Social Organizing and Social Media

对许多人来说，社交媒体很有价值，因为它们允许更广泛的声音被听到，对事件的更多样化的描述成为公共记录的一部分。对于对社交媒体如何影响我们的社会感兴趣的社会科学家来说，这些主张提出了一些重要的问题。社交媒体记录与传统档案有何不同？人们通过数字方式产生的“自我”与他们生活在普通人际环境中的“自我”相比如何？该奖项支持的研究将解决这些问题，该奖项将培训一名美国研究生进行基于经验的科学研究的方法。这项研究很重要，因为我们需要了解社交媒体如何影响我们的社会和机构的方方面面。这项研究将由莱斯大学人类学博士生贝尔德·坎贝尔在A.Cymene Howe博士的指导下进行。这位研究人员选择了智利圣地亚哥作为他的研究地点。这是一个合适的地点，因为智利在20世纪90年代末经历了一次显著的政治转型。这在过去和现在之间创造了独特的边界和鲜明的对比，并导致了无数试图通过社交媒体改写历史和改变自己的公众形象的团体的崛起。研究人员将利用这种对比和激进主义，将传统和官方书面记录与当代数字档案进行比较。他还将在积极分子小组中进行参与者观察；采访小组成员的分层样本，将他们的面对面叙述与数字叙述进行比较；进行按年龄分层的焦点小组，以说明代际差异；并通过在线调查收集数据。这项研究的发现将有助于社会科学关于社交媒体、社会记忆和历史之间的关系的理论。它还将帮助政策制定者，他们必须定期评估社交媒体在整个社会中的作用。

For many, social media are valuable because they allow a wider variety of voices to be heard and more varied accounts of events to become part of the public record. For social scientists interested in how social media are affecting our society, these claims raise a number of important questions. How does the social media record differ from a traditional archive? How do the "selves" that people produce digitally compare to those they inhabit in ordinary interpersonal contexts? The research supported by this award, which trains an American graduate student in methods of conducting empirically-grounded scientific research, will address these questions. The research is important because we need to understand all aspects of how social media affect our society and our institutions. The research will be carried out by Rice University anthropology doctoral student, Baird Campbell, with the guidance of Dr. A. Cymene Howe. The researcher has chosen Santiago, Chile, as his research site. This is an appropriate site because Chile went through a marked political transition in the late 1990s. This created a unique boundary and clear contrast between past and present, and led to the rise numerous groups trying to re-write history and change their own public images through social media. The researcher will take advantage of this contrast and activism to compare traditional and official written accounts with contemporary digital archives. He also will conduct participant observation in activist groups; interview a stratified sample of group members, comparing their in-person narratives with their digital ones; conduct focus groups, stratified by age, to account for generation differences; and collect data thorough an on-line survey. Findings from this research will contribute to social science theories of the relationship between social media, social memory, and history. It will also help policy makers who must regularly evaluate the role of social media in the society at large.