users of social media, however no educational or income group falls under 50% usage of social networking platforms anymore. Greenwood, Perrin, and Duggan (2016) report extremely high use of multiple social media sites among online Americans, with Facebook leading the pack at a usage rate of 79% of all online Americans. Instagram, Pintrest, LinkedIn, and Twitter follow with usage rates of 32%, 31%, 29%, and 24% respectively. Three-quarters of Facebook users visit the site every day, and half of them visit it multiple times per day. More than half of social media users visit multiple sites.
The advent of social media was a game changer for community computing. Suddenly, community activities that designers had been trying to support in various civic computing environments were available for appropriation in a handful of popular social networking sites. Many community, civic, and even governmental interactive functions are now accomplished via integrated social media sites.
Social media platforms have been implicated in a variety of political movements such as the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S. (Caren and Gaby, 2011); the 2010–2012 Arab-Spring related uprisings throughout the Middle East including Tunisia (Kavanaugh et al., 2016; Wulf et al., 2013b), spreading to Egypt (Khamis and Vaughn, 2011; Lim, 2012; Tufeckci and Wilson, 2012) and Turkey (Dincelli, Hong, and DePaula, 2016); Karkin et al., 2015; Varol et al., 2014), and elsewhere (Howard and Hussain, 2011); occupied West Bank villages (Wulf et al., 2013a); and other significant populist movements globally (Shirky, 2011). They have played increasingly important roles in elections in mature democracies (Vitak et al., 2011), and are playing significant roles in connecting citizens to each other and to their governments in many emerging democracies (Morozov, 2009). Social media is used increasingly as an important part of digital government initiatives throughout the world. Barak Obama established the @POTUS Twitter tag in early 2015 and became the first sitting American president to join the Facebook social network later that same year. Manipulation of social media to influence elections is one of the biggest stories of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and as of this writing (2018), a newly elected president Donald Trump is blazing a trail as an everyday user of the Twitter microblogging site (@realDonaldTrump) to express thoughts, emotions, and reactions that seem spontaneous and un-vetted.
In addition to direct use for the activities of civic engagement, social media now plays an important role in news dissemination, and hence in information gathering relevant to political action and political opinion. Sixty-two percent of American adults get news from social media sources (Gottfried and Shearer, 2016). Again, the role of news varies considerably depending on the social media site in question. Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter provide the greatest opportunities for exposure to news and information within their platforms, with 70% of Reddit users, 66% of Facebook users, and 59% of Twitter users reporting that they get news from these respective platforms. Thirty-one percent of Tumblr users report getting news from that site. Other sites fall well under 25%. The dominance of Facebook as a social media platform, combined with its large role as a source of news, make it the primary social media source of news for American adults (Greenwood, Perrin, and Duggan, 2016). In earlier reports, a little more than one third (36%) of social networking site users say that these platforms are important for keeping up with political news in particular (Raine and Smith, 2012). Again, at the current time (2018), the organized creation and dissemination of “fake news” to influence political opinion is under increased scrutiny.
Research on the use of social media by citizens to interact with government has focused on three modes of information dissemination: one-way push, two-way pull, and networking (Meijer and Thaens, 2013; Mergel, 2013a). Despite the advent of social media, research to date has shown that government use of social media is largely one-way, with many local governments still using a “push” model in which information flows from the government to the citizen (Mergel, 2013b; Mossberger, Wu, and Crawford, 2013). DePaula and Dincelli (2016) characterized Facebook posts of municipal-level government agencies in the U.S. to be mainly push oriented (policy announcements and public service announcements), secondarily impression management oriented (marketing, political positioning, positive imagery and favorable publicity), in small amounts (<8%) networking oriented (calls for discussion, dialog, and volunteers), and in very small amounts (<3%) pull oriented (requests for feedback, fundraising).
1.4 ORGANIZATION
In Chapter 2, we trace some history of the use of information and computing systems (ICSs) in civic contexts. We divide this history into pre- and post-social periods since the emergence of social media can be seen as a revolutionary turn in the emergence and adoption of ICSs in civic and government contexts. In Chapter 3, we explore theories that arise in the literature frequently. Theories relevant to this book are highly interdisciplinary, coming from political science, sociology, network science, and informatics and information science. In Chapter 4, we take a tour of the many studies of social media and civic engagement, dividing them into engagements with the orderly democratic process and then engagements in situations of protest and resistance. In Chapter 5 we conclude by discussing challenges that have emerged.
CHAPTER 2
History
2.1 DIGITAL CITIES
We can ask to what degree digital cities and community networks are examples of civic engagement. While most have the goal of supporting community involvement, they all have something of a “Chamber of Commerce” quality to them in the sense that their primary goals are to connect businesses to citizens and to publicize and popularize the community to outsiders. The need for significant technical capital in terms of both money and infrastructure meant that large institutions such as telecoms, city governments, and universities needed to work together to make the digital cities a reality. These entities view the community and its needs differently than citizens might. In the next section, we explore the emergence of civic activities on platforms not designed specifically for this purpose and therefore without design constraints on activity.
Van Dijk (2012) identifies four distinct periods in the development of digital democracy: (1) teledemocracy in the 1980s as networked computing environments first appeared; (2) virtual community in the 1990s in which communities of interest and locality could interact and share (with an emphasis on replacing “lost community”); (3) new democracy at the turn of the century in which the global reach of the internet, the possibilities for mass participation became apparent; and (4) Web 2.0 era as the dawn of social media and civic journalism made participatory environments prevalent. We focus in this book on the last era, however in this chapter we spend some time charting how we got here.
As soon as it became clear that information and computing systems would break out beyond large corporations and military and scientific applications, and that their uses were vastly broader than accounting, record keeping, and mathematical calculation, people began to imagine their use in civic and governmental realms. When document processing and hypertext emerged in the 1970s, an early dream was that public documents, which were printed at great cost and either mailed to citizens or kept in publicly accessible places such as post offices and libraries, could instead reside online. By the 1990s, community-level and city-level websites were appearing which informed citizens about and involved them in civic affairs. The so-called “digital cities” movement emerged at this time with many forward-thinking communities developing a cyber-presence for municipalities and their citizens. Often the metaphor was tied closely to real urban spaces, with a community being represented spatially, citizens having “home” pages, and navigation being accomplished by moving from place to place though the simulated environment.
The internet emerged from its development into broader common use in the 1980s, and almost immediately along with it came the dream that people
