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

该项目将研究社交媒体使用，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，可能威胁到公民参与，从而威胁到我们社区的健康。 公民参与社区的犯罪率、贫困率和失业率较低，健康和教育率较高。本研究旨在寻求一套最佳做法或准则，可用于社区成员，以促进在互联网背景下增加公民参与，参与式设计活动将产生具体的公民活动的工具，在每个三个社区进行研究。通过关注农村环境，这项研究也将有助于我们了解一个未充分研究的人口如何使用信息和通信的社会目的。 在目前的社交媒体研究中，女性和农村居民在农村社交媒体用户中的人数都普遍偏低。该项目的参与性设计部分将有助于设计有用的工具，以增加公民参与，并将有助于对设计方法进行批判性讨论。这项工作建立在当前通过社交媒体，技术和社会变革发展社会资本的研究基础上，以产生社交媒体和公民参与之间关系的模型，从而更细致地了解社交媒体如何促进协作努力。该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，出于什么目的，以及它们的使用如何影响集体的公民努力。将与农村和城市社区的参与者进行访谈，以了解如何利用社交媒体为公民参与服务。

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.