Show and Tell

From Driscollwiki

Show and Tell, Lana Swartz, Civic Media and Youth Engagement Research Group

Contents 1 What's up with social capital? 2 Putnam, "Bowling Alone" 3 Fandom as challenge to Time Displacement hypothesis 4 Possible case study: Pricescope 5 Questions 5.1 Third spaces

What's up with social capital?

Social capital, confusing term

• Used in numerous ways
• Unclear if it is a cause or effect
  • Do you have social capital (that enables you to do things)?
  • Is social capital the outcome of various activities?
• Used in context of community
• Describing quality of life
• Allows for civic engagement

Bonding: connections among homophilious groups

• Related to emotional support
• In-group behaviors
• Gittel and Vidal, 1998

Bridging: out-group ties

• Among people who do not have a lot in common
• Gittel and Vidal, 1998

Expressive action: emotional support

• Conserving things that groups already have
• Protecting norms, values, resources
• Associated with Bonding activities
• Lin, 2001

Instrumental action: procuring new resources

• Change
• Proactive
• Requires bridging to other groups
• Lin, 2001

Network approach

• Dense (v. loose), everyone knows everyone else in the group
  • Dense:Bonding::Loose:Bridging
• Open (v. closed), lots of connections + flows moving in and out
• Strong (v. weak), large possibility for information flow
• Monge, among others

Measuring with a Scale approach

• Williams, 2006
  • Bonding
  • Bridging
• Valenzuela, Park, Kee, 2009
  • Life satisfaction
  • Trust
  • Participation

Putnam, "Bowling Alone"

Thesis: Social capital in U.S. in decline

• Hypothesis: Time displacement theory
  • People watch TV instead of engaging with other kinds of activities (Elks Club)
• Inspired comm research based

Critique of Putnam's findings:

• Quality/quantity of socializing
• Content of media choice
  • News, entertainment, sports, etc.
• Patterns of use
• Interactive media v. TV
  • Porting time displacement hypothesis to new media
  • Information exchange
  • Supplement or supplant?
  • Create new forms of interaction, expression
  • Effects in countries were offline expression is limited

Fandom as challenge to Time Displacement hypothesis

Fandom: television + social interaction

• Familiar media to Putnam's concern regarding TV
• Possible site of bridging and bonding

RQ: Why do some fan groups become engaged in civic action and others not?

• Initial hypotheses: different networks, different kinds of action
  • Groups with bridging ties might be more likely to work outside of their fan net.
  • Groups with more dense, bonding groups might be more likely to preserve.
• New hypotheses:
  • Involvement with fandom will positively associate with online bonding
  • Involvement with fandom will positively associate with online bridging
  • Involvement with fandom will not displace offline bonding
  • Involvement with fandom will not displace offline bridging
• How will this affect instrumental and expressive civic action?
• Using Williams Scales: Bonding subscale, Bridging subscale

Scales that won't work well here

• Parasocial engagement
  • One-sided interaction, intimacy
  • e.g., I know everything about [star] but [he/she] knows nothing about me
• Celebrity/character identification
  • Might be useful in case of values expressed within a show/story
  • Doesn't address engagement with a fan community
• Sports team identification
  • sports team is part of your identity construction

Facebook intensity scale

• Measuring community
• Doesn't include identification component

Gaining access

• Many fans are "aca-savvy"
  • Fatigued at being research subjects
  • Critical of academics
• As a result, focusing on "corporate" fandoms
  • Showtime (cable TV network) messageboard users
  • Different kinds of "fandoms"

Possible case study: Pricescope

Consumer information site regarding diamonds

• http://pricescope.com
• Diverse participant population
  • Miners
  • Jewlers
  • Consumers
  • Geologists
• Eager to share expertise
• Similar traits to other fandoms
  • Knowledge economy
  • Social ties activated by information
• "Around the world" forum
  • Not an echo chamber
  • Hot debate about non-gem issues in the past
  • Became "out of control"
  • Different tone from rest of the forum
  • Today, moderators have banned political, religious debate
    • Asserting that the site is soley about gems, diamonds
• What do groups need to support, moderate poltiical engagement?

Questions

• Is there a systemic bias toward certain kinds of fandoms?
• Involvement, investment, engagement?

Third spaces

What might look like Sunstein "echo chamber" is actually a network that provides for a "third space"?

• E.g., bowling alley bartender isn't going to limit people to ONLY speak about bowling. Other topics are expected.
• But in forums on the web, there's expectation that people stick to a topic
• Markets and shopping areas were once the location of public discourse
  • But shopping malls discourage political activity
• Anxieties about commercial discomfit keeps sites like blackplanet, planetout from encouraging very political speech...

Does certain forum software encourage third space development?

• phpBB "random", "anything goes", "etc"
  • http://www.phpbb.com/
• Crawling various forums
  • Could there be cross-community connections
  • Patterns of use, patterns of discourse
  • Repurposing spammer software?