Doctoral Dissertation Research: New Forms of Sociality and Community Construction within Digital Spaces

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How is the internet changing the ways people create and build connections? By some measures, the internet has hosted platforms that are said to exacerbate social divisions and attenuate the features of daily interaction responsible for reinforcing social ties. By other measures, the internet has increasingly become a key platform for personal expression, fundamentally transforming the way that people communicate, and fostering opportunities for new forms of sociality. This doctoral dissertation project examines how online platforms are being leveraged to create and maintain communities among individuals who are socially marginalized. Because these contexts are relatively new, and by some measure anonymous, the project has the potential of helping scientists better understand what creative processes are necessarily to the formation of new and durable social networks. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, data and findings from the projects with be shared with companies and other organizations to help optimize interaction and communication. The project also broadens the participation of groups traditionally underrepresented in science and technology. This doctoral dissertation research project asks whether there are significant differences in the way that biases and stereotypes emerge and proliferate within virtual spaces, and the ways that forms of community are creatively constructed within contexts of adversity. How is community formed, sociality constructed, and identity curated in digital contexts? Using an online communication and digital distribution platform specifically designed as an application for building communities, the researcher will track the navigational patterns and behaviors of its users. Data collection and analytical strategies include individual and group interviews, nine months participant observation within five different online interactive environments, and narrative and textual analysis of forum and message board archives. The collected data will contribute to theoretical debates about social formation, identity construction, and the science of broadening participation in science and technology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.