SoCS: Scaling Social Networks to Social Movements

随着信息技术成为日常生活中不起眼的元素，出现了利用它们来帮助引入和加强人们在健康和健康或环境可持续发展等领域的生活方式和行为变化的机会。以前在这一领域的大多数研究都将个人用户作为主要关注点，首先，互动技术如何让人们更清楚地意识到自己的行为模式；其次，互动技术如何为人们提供改变这些行为的激励和回报。挑战--尤其是对于环境可持续性这样的话题--是如何从个人行为扩大到产生长期影响的那种大规模的社会变化。这项研究考察了一种以技术为基础的行为改变的替代方法，重点是规模问题。我们利用了两个主要来源。第一部分包括对社会运动及其形成过程的社会学调查。第二个是当代人们对社交网络和社交媒体的兴趣。我们的目标是能够将人们联系在一起，形成更大的社会计算系统，与公民参与和社会责任保持一致并激发其积极性。我们将在传统和移动平台上开发、部署和评估在线工具，通过将个人行动与集体相结合来促进社会运动的创建。这些系统将建立在我们的基本原则之上，即社会团体是理解环境行动的一种更易理解、更有说服力的方式，而不是任意的尺度或抽象的科学测量，如二氧化碳吨数。这项研究将提供对社会运动形成过程的新理解，重点是在线工具的作用和社交网络技术的潜力。我们将通过专注于设计实践来操作这些理解。我们的研究提供了对信息技术的潜力的洞察，帮助人们与当地社区联系，增加公民参与，并实现个人期望的行为改变。

As information technologies become unremarkable elements of everyday life, opportunities arise to employ them to help introduce and reinforce lifestyle and behavioral changes in which people are invested, in areas such as health and wellness, or environmental sustainability. Most previous research in this area has taken the individual user as its primary focus, asking, first, how interactive technology might make people more aware of their own behavioral patterns, and, second, how interactive technology might provide people with incentives and rewards for changing those behaviors. The challenge - especially for topics such as environmental sustainability - is how to scale up from individual actions to the sorts of large-scale, societal change that makes for long-term impact.This research examines an alternative approach to technologically-based behavior change with a focus on questions of scale. We draw on two main sources. The first comprises sociological investigations of social movements and the processes through which they are formed. The second is the contemporary interest in social networking and social media. Our goal is to be able to link people together into larger socio-computational systems that align with and motivate civic engagement and social responsibility. We will develop, deploy, and evaluate online tools on both traditional and mobile platforms that foster the creation of social movements through the alignment of individual actions to collectivities. These systems will be built around our fundamental principle that social groups are a more intelligible and more compelling way to understand environmental actions than arbitrary scales or abstract scientific measures such as CO2 tonnage.This research will provide new understandings of the processes of social movement formation, with an emphasis on the role of online tools and the potential for social networking technologies. We will operationalize these understandings through a focus on design practice. Our research provides insight into the potential for information technologies to help people connect with local communities, increase civic engagement, and achieve personally desirable behavior change.