Sara K. Douglas

Designing Political Deliberation Environments to Support Interactions in the Public Sphere

Little is known about the challenges and successes people face when piecing together multiple social media to interact in the online public sphere when: seeking information, disseminating information, and engaging in political discussions. We interviewed 29 US citizens and conducted 17 talk-out-loud sessions with people who were using one or more social media technologies, such as Facebook and Twitter, to interact in the online public sphere. We identified a number of challenges and workarounds related to public sphere interactions, and used our findings to formulate requirements for new political environments that support the interactions in the public sphere. Through evolving requirements generation, we developed a new political deliberation technology, dubbed Poli, which is an integrated social media environment with the potential to enable more effective interactions in the public sphere. We discuss several remaining questions and limitations to our tool that will drive future work.

Navigating Imagined Audiences: Motivations for Participating in the Online Public Sphere

Little is known about why and how people use multiple social media platforms for political participation, or about the contexts through which social media is appropriated. This paper reports on a qualitative interview study of social media use by politically interested citizens. We interviewed 27 residents of the state of Hawaii who integrated one or more social media tools into their daily lives to participate in the online public sphere. Different social media environments offer both different affordances for action and different audiences, and we describe how media choice is driven by the match between motivations and affordances, and also by the imagined audience. We identified a number of motivations including understanding different viewpoints, formulating perspectives, engaging in positive discourse, repairing Hawaiis image, increasing political awareness and improving civic engagement. We discuss how these goals relate to both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Finally, we examine how social media choice and satisfaction were tied to the physical world context and peoples sense of the audience within any particular medium.

Design Teams as Change Agents: Diplomatic Design in the Open Data Movement

Designers and developers who want to participate in the open data movement should be more than technical experts; they should also be change agents. Realizing open datas promise of innovation and entrepreneurialism requires the support of diverse stakeholders. Government agencies must release accessible and useful data; developers must use the data to build tools; and citizens must adopt the technology. The interests of one group may come at the expense of another. For this reason, we examine the usefulness of a diplomatic design approach, which focuses on the art and practice of conducting negotiations using specialized techniques. We conducted an exploratory case study on a national nonprofit fellowship program as it worked to design not only technology but also organizational and social change in the context of a digital government engagement.

Politics and young adults: the effects of Facebook on candidate evaluation

An increasing number of people are turning to social media to find political information and discuss politics, including the technologically savvy Millennial generation. Our study looks at how young voters use social media to evaluate political candidates. Subjects were shown the Facebook walls of two U.S. politicians running for the seat of governor in the 2011 Mississippi election. Exposure was followed by semi-structured interviews to discover what knowledge they found salient. Content analysis found evidence that the knowledge they gained from Facebook influenced their evaluation of the candidates. Further, we contrast this to a control group that was exposed to related news articles without a social media component. We found that social media produced the additional voting criterion of community, which extends beyond the traditional criteria in political science literature of issues and character. Community interaction influences the vote decision.

Social media mixed with news in political candidate judgment: Order effects on knowledge and affect

In the context of politics, emotions and facts work together to shape opinions about political candidates. While there is considerable research on motivated reasoning about political issues, there is less attention to how affect and rationality combine in the hybrid world of new media. This study examined the interaction of social media comments about politicians with more traditional information sources. Participants were exposed to political candidates’ Facebook news feeds, to news articles about the candidates, and to a political speech. The order of exposure was varied and measures of both knowledge and emotion were taken. When social media was encountered before news about a political candidate, it influenced feelings toward the candidate but did not influence personal mood or perceived knowledge. In contrast, when social media was encountered before information unrelated to the candidates, it negatively influenced all dependent measures. The findings are discussed in terms of motivated reasoning theories, Papacharissi’s concept of “affective publics,” and the implications for civic participation in the new media era.