Some excellent resources from the
SAGUARO SEMINAR - Civic Engagement in America: "Technology " section.
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/interestingarticles.htm retrieved Oct. 27, 2007 by JMS
On Harvard's Complexity Blog, Ben Waber
describes research in a German bank using the Sociometric Badge; the badge developed by the MIT Media Lab, is worn for extended periods of time and measures in real time the proxmity of badge wearers to other badge wearers. When coupled with e-mail logs, the data gathered showed that proximity and e-mail use were strongly negative related. Other findings included the fact that the volume of communication was negative related to its perceived quality. Waber's paper is being presented at the
2007 NetSci conference.Weinberg, Bruce & Williams, Christine (2006).
The 2004 US Presidential campaign: Impact of hybrid off-line and on-line 'meetup' communities.Journal of direct, data and digital marketing practice. 8 (1), 46-57. They looked at 820 people who attended meetups for presidential candidates between January 22 and March 10, 2004, they found that meetup attendance was positively related to various imeasures of campaign effectiveness, such as donations, volunteering and candidate support and advocacy (encouraging others to learn about, work for or vote for the candidate). They concluded that "Meetup may be a useful vehicle for acquiring ‘attractive’ customers" and newcomers to campaigns. They classify Meetup as an e2f (electronic-to-face) community that couples the strengths of technology (stronger search, easier to readh strangers, etc.) wtih the strength of face-to-face ties in building trust.
Glenn Sparks and Hannah Kirk (Purdue) conducted experiments (12/06) to see
TV's effect on social interaction. Participants were asked to bring a friend to the sessions, and randomized which pairs were exposed to TV during their 10 minutes in the waiting room. Questionnaires of the participants revealed that people made twice the amount of eye contact with the TV off and their enjoyment of the time with their friend rose about 40% when the TV was off (from 67% to 94%). They have not yet explored how the content of the TV programs affects social interaction.
Thomas Sander,
“E-Associations? Using Technology to Connect Citizens: the Case of Meetup.com” Paper for American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Conference in Washington, DC, September 2005. Another version of this paper available as
a Taubman Center Working Paper.
Vincent Price,
Citizens Deliberating Online: Theory and Some Evidence (2006) from Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice. Todd Davies and Beth Simone Noveck (eds.). Price has conducted two online experiments in discussion and deliberation: one in discussing politics during the 2000 campaign (in Liberal groups, Conservative groups and mixed groups) and one recently on healthcare policy (with segmented or mixed groups of experts, the Attentive Public, and random Americans). All conversations were text-only discussions with minimally intrusive moderators, but Price found that participation in such groups led to modest increases in social trust, civic engagement, political participation, and political efficacy. The discussions were frank but civil, and participants most valued hearing others' perspectives. There was little evidence of serious polarization from these groups and "speaking" in the groups was relatively equitably distributed. And the people who were less politically knowledgeable and less technologically savvy liked participation the most.
Shanyan Zhao,
Do Internet Users Have More Social Ties? A Call For Differentiated Analyses of Internet Use (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(3), article 8) . [But article in our estimation makes the mistake of assuming that all friendships are equal, and that a friend made and sustained on-line in a chat room affords the same social capital benefits that one would get from a friendship sustained in the real, non-virtual world. Our strong hypothesis is that the real-world friend one would be much more likely to trust, would be much more likely to visit you if you were in the hospital, etc.]
The Strength of Internet Ties (Jeff Boase, Barry Wellman, 2006). The report shows how Americans use e-mail to supplement ties to others by phone or in-person rather than using the Internet to replace their other forms of social connection.
Keith Hampton, e-Neighbors: Neighborhoods in the Network Society. 2006. [Paper is under review, but an abstract can be found
here.] A 'flash' presentation of Keith's findings is available
here.
Nancy Baym, Yan Bing Zhang, Mei-Chen Lin,
Social Interactions Across Media. 2004. (New Media and Society, 6(3):299-318.
William Davies has an
interesting booklet written in the U.K. about how technology can be used to enhance communication.Yochai Benkler,
"Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm."112 Yale Law Journal 3 (December 2002) on how and why people collaborate on e-based projects without the hope of financial reward, like Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia), Slashdot, Linux, etc. A few parts are rather technical and quantitative, but the article is quite interesting.
Paul Resnick has an interesting paper '
Impersonal Sociotechnical Capital, ICTs, and Collective Action Among Strangers' (2004). Some of the research on t-government (transformational government) has started to focus on the issue of co-production, like this article by Stephen King,
Citizen Relationship Management: The Rocky Road from Transactions to Empowerment. Co-production, in which the citizens help craft governmental service or are co-producers in the results (like clients taking partial responsibility for improving their health) dates back to this 1980 article: Gordon Whitiker, Coproduction: Citizen Participation in Service Delivery (Public Administration Review).
Benjamin A. Olken's NBER paper
Do Television and Radio Destroy Social Capital? Evidence from Indonesian Villages uses quasi-experimental evidence (which Indonesian villages are blocked by mountains from receiving transmissions) to show that villages with greater TV access and watching are associated with lower levels of social capital. (2006) Duncan Watts and colleagues have an experiment called the
Small World experiment to try to replicate Stanley Millgram's lost letter experiment that produced the '6 degrees of separation' conclusion. In the experiment, volunteers try to find out in how few links through friends they can find others who are very distant worldwide (geographically and socially).
Networks, Netwars, and the Fight For The Future (First Monday, by David Ronfeldt and John Arequilla)
