Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: Digital Politics: Technology, Communication, and Changing Political Participation

博士生Charles Pearson将在Alan Klima博士(加州大学戴维斯分校)的指导下，从事支持当代政治运动建设的新社交媒体结构的发展和影响的研究。集中化的广播媒体模式曾经是许多国家政治运动的关键力量，现在却在不断变化。新出现的取代它们的模式似乎既更具协作性，也更注重自下而上或“草根”的沟通。这一重要的政治参与转变的性质和后果将是本研究的重点。对数字政治的研究为理解以下问题提供了丰富的概念基础：a)当前沟通和政治参与的转变；b)新兴开放系统中参与和监管的逻辑；以及c)技术和社会日益相互交织。这项研究将在美国在线和线下环境中进行。研究人员将采用定性研究方法的组合，包括人种学田野调查和有针对性的定性访谈，采访主要参与者和分布在全国的媒体专家。他还将跟踪和分析特定信息的移动，以衡量特定的基于因特网的分布式结构在管理信息流和比对方面的有效性。这项研究很重要，因为它将帮助社会科学家了解新技术是如何影响当代民主政治的。更广泛地说，这项研究将有助于媒介与信息关系的理论研究。资助这项研究还支持社会科学家的教育。

Doctoral student Charles Pearson, under the guidance of Dr. Alan Klima (University of California, Davis), will undertake research on the development and effects of the new social media structures that support contemporary political movement building. Centralized broadcast media models, once a key strength of political movements in many countries, are now in flux. The models emerging to replace them appear to be both more collaborative and more focused on bottom-up, or "grass-roots," communication. The nature and consequences of this important shift in political participation will be the focus of this research. A study of digital politics provides a rich conceptual site for understanding: a) current shifts in communication and political engagement; b) logics of participation and regulation in emerging open systems; and, c) the increasing intertwining of the technical and the social.The research will be carried out in the United States in both online and offline settings. The researcher will employ a mix of qualitative research methods, including ethnographic fieldwork and targeted qualitative interviews with key participants and media experts distributed nationally. He will also track and analyze the movement of specific messages in order to gauge the effectiveness of particular Internet-based distributed structures for managing information flows and alignments. The research is important because it will help social scientists to understand how new technologies are affecting contemporary democratic politics. More generally, the research will contribute to theories of the relation between media and message. Funding this resarch also supports the education of a social scientist.