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

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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.