Social Media and Civic Engagement. Scott P. Robertson

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СКАЧАТЬ civic purposes. Boehner and DiSalvo (2016) note that the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has emphasized several aspects of the human side of computing technology in turn—including cognitive, followed by social, followed by cultural—and now may be turning to “civic.”

      Foth et al. (2015b) argue that civic engagement has finally become a critical issue for HCI for the following reasons.

      • Re-emergence of place: There has been a move from the technology-enabled erosion of distance to place-based media and engagement.

      • Ubiquitous technology: The integration of information technologies with every aspect of people’s lives that have erased boundaries between the physical and digital city.

      • People as producers: The ability for non-professionals to create content and design information systems encourages engagement that can have wide influence.

      They specifically call out the technology trends of mobile/personal devices, broadband connectivity, open data, urban interfaces, and cloud computing as important in changing the outlook for civic engagement.

      The Knight Foundation (Sotsky, 2013) identifies two overarching themes in civic tech: (1) Open Government; and (2) Community Action. Within each theme, several clusters were also described as follows:

      • Open Government clusters:

      ° Data Access and Transparency

      ° Data Utility

      ° Public Decision Making

      ° Resident Feedback

      ° Visualization and Mapping

      ° Voting

      • Community Action clusters:

      ° Civic Crowdfunding

      ° Community Organizing

      ° Information Crowdsourcing

      ° Neighborhood Forums

      ° Peer-to-Peer Sharing

      The Knight Foundation study found lower investment being placed in the Open Government clusters of voting, public decision-making, and resident feedback, and the Community Action cluster of civic crowdfunding. During the two-and-a-half-year study beginning in 2011, the most money was being invested in peer-to-peer sharing and neighborhood forum development, with this money coming primarily from private capital and not grant funding. Grant funding was supporting projects primarily in the data utility, data access and transparency, and resident feedback clusters. More generally, Open Government initiatives were not supported by private investors, who instead preferred Community Action projects.

      In reflecting on interviews with several civic tech innovators in the Atlanta area, Boehner and DiSalvo (2016) found that there was a move toward what they referred to as “Google-style” apps, or apps that emphasized search by information seekers instead of structure by information providers. This emphasis on supporting exploration instead of information design may have many implications for the flattening of governmental bureaucracies or procedures and the relationship between “data holders” and “data seekers.”

      The rise of urbanization and the concurrent spread of ubiquitous networked information technologies has given rise to a new area often called “urban informatics” (Foth, Choi, and Satchell, 2011). As the name implies, urban informatics deals with cities and has place as a central component of its professional identity, although place is considered both physically and digitally (Foth, 2009). Urban informatics as a discipline supports efforts to expose and utilize information to urban planners in addition to citizens who wish to influence and understand the environment in which they live and to engage with others in creating an urban community.

      Foth (2017) distinguishes between “bird’s-eye view” versus “street view” applications in the space of urban informatics. A bird’s-eye view is a top-down approach often advocated by administrators in the service model of government in which digital government spaces are designed for citizens, whereas a street view is a community-centric approach empowering people to create their own urban spaces. The distinction is intended to emphasize citizens as active participants in creating civic space, and indeed to re-conceptualize the city as an interface environment between individuals and their physical spaces via ubiquitous computing (de Waal, 2014; Foth et al., 2015b).

2.5 HYPERLOCAL SOCIAL MEDIA

      After the emergence of social media, development of community portals diminished precipitously. A collection of special purpose review and recommendation sites, for example restaurant review sites, took the place of the services sections of portals. Social media took the place of the discussion forums and bulletin boards that had been so carefully crafted, curated, and studied. This move, however, also resulted in a loss of the local, neighborhood-level quality of portals since service recommender and rating sites typically operate at a national or global level. Similarly, the most widely used social media platforms never implemented neighborhood-level, or even physical-space based networks, although it is possible to create them. Neighborhood-oriented social networks such as NextDoor have not seen the same kind of explosive adoption as sites like Yelp! in the recommender space, or Facebook in the social media space, or Twitter in the microblogging space have seen.

      Nonetheless, some neighborhood and community networks have developed in the current digital environment. Known as “hyperlocal” social spaces, these can take multiple forms, including social media sites, Twitter handles, image sharing sites, and other forms. In contrast to the goals of many social media sites, hyperlocal social media is intended to be geographically bounded, connecting people who live together and presumably, therefore, have common concerns related to their neighborhood.

      Masden et al. (2014) studied NextDoor, a relatively new, neighborhood-based social media environment currently deployed across the U.S. They contrast NextDoor with the earliest community network systems such as BEV, and note that it is one of the first nationwide, top-down efforts to support local social networking. BEV and other networks discussed at the beginning of this chapter all evolved from within their communities. They also point out that NextDoor finds a place in an already existing “civic media ecosystem” consisting of all other social media, and thus needs to provide affordances for a different type of local neighborhood experience. Their findings suggested that NextDoor was utilized by members of a community who already interacted more frequently than average. It was used along with other social media applications, however it was perceived as being more formal and serious than other social media and hence less prone to trolling and incivility. Because users are identified and live in proximity to each other, they did feel constrained in what they could post, citing concerns about privacy and trust. While the geographical boundaries did result in discussions of neighborhood issues, in contrast to other topics, they also hindered discussion of matters that concerned larger geographical areas (e.g., traffic).

      Another approach to hyperlocal social media is to extract locally relevant information from social media feeds and present this filtered information to users. The goal of such systems, as with all community networks, is to create greater community awareness and involvement. However, in this approach the assumption is made that relevant local information is present in the larger stream of social media information and thus the goal is to find it and present it selectively to users within their communities. This has been a theme in several efforts, including LiveHoods to mine tweets and foursquare checkins as a way of modeling urban activity patterns (Cranshaw et al., 2012), CiVicinity for aggregating multiple social media sources (Carroll et al., 2015; Hoffman et al., 2012), Virtual Town Square (VTS) for local news aggregation (Kavanaugh СКАЧАТЬ