Comparative Ethnography of Face-to-Face and Digital Political Participation

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This study asks whether democratic participation is changing as people increasingly engage with digital information sources. It focuses on a context where electoral shifts have been attributed by journalists and scholars to the innovation of digital platforms and to political support fostered through social media and user-moderated websites and forums. This study sets out to what relationship, if any, exists between changing media use and electoral shifts. This research project disseminates findings and data widely to scholars and policy makers about how media technologies may be altering forms and norms of democratic participation. The study engages a broader audience by making its data widely accessible, which can foster development of new public education initiatives and campaigns for increasing democratic and civic dialogue. It also trains undergraduate and graduate students in methods of scientific data collection and analysis. This project combines online and offline research methods. The researcher will conduct twelve months of intensive ethnographic research including participant observation and interviews to investigate pathways of information dissemination, what media platforms are most widely used, whether these have changed over time, and how civic participation takes shape more broadly, both locally and nationally. Concurrently, digital ethnography conducted on Twitter and in selective chat rooms will be used to track whether there are observable differences in rhetoric and styles of participation between face-to-face versus digital contexts. In addition to shifting forms of political participation, this study explores people’s changing experiences of their national identity, and how national identities and belonging may be reshaped by digital news and media.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.