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

该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。人们普遍表示关切的是，我们越来越多地使用个性化技术，如个性化互联网，可能会威胁公民参与，从而威胁我们社区的健康。公民参与的社区经历了较低的犯罪率、贫困率和失业率，以及较高的健康和教育率。这项研究寻求一套可供社区成员使用的最佳做法或指导方针，以促进在互联网背景下增加公民参与，参与性设计活动将为要研究的三个社区中的具体公民活动产生适当的工具。通过关注农村背景，这项研究还将有助于我们理解研究不足的人群如何将信息和通信用于社会目的。在目前的社交媒体研究中，农村社交媒体用户中女性的数量超过男性，农村居民的比例普遍偏低。该项目的参与式设计部分将有助于设计有益的工具，以提高公民的参与度，并将有助于对设计方法进行批判性讨论。这项工作建立在通过社交媒体、技术和社会变革发展社会资本的现有研究基础上，以制作社交媒体与公民参与之间关系的模型，为社交媒体如何促进协作努力提供更细致入微的理解。这个模型将解释用户如何决定使用哪些社交媒体，在什么条件下，用于什么目的，以及使用这些媒体对集体公民努力有何影响。将与农村和城市社区的参与者进行访谈，以了解社交媒体如何能够(或不能)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.