Social Media and Civic Engagement. Scott P. Robertson

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 et al., 2014), and Whoo.ly for extracting and summarizing local tweets (Hu, Farnham, and Monroy-Hernández, 2013).

      The development of Whoo.ly provides a good example of how a hyperlocal system might be developed in a user-centered manner. The researchers first examined how community members use existing local information sources. They found that most community members are information consumers, not producers; that many people are local information pushers, usually via retweets; that some individuals become local information hubs and acquire many followers; and that people desire information passed along from other community members even when it is otherwise available through local news, blogs, and other sources. An examination of tweets relevant to local matters (in Seattle) revealed the following top ten categories in decreasing frequency:

      • Neighborhood affirmations (bragging about the neighborhood)

      • Business updates

      • News

      • Recommendations

      • Civic activity

      • Ads

      • Social events

      • Crime/Road reports

      • Deals and coupons

      • Talks and classes

      This information allowed the designers to understand their potential users and the types of information that users would be hoping to see in a hyperlocal community tweet collection. Whoo.ly extracts local events, top local topics, active local people, and popular local places from Twitter and presents summaries to users in the relevant locality. An evaluation of Whoo.ly found that it was easier to use than the main Twitter feed and most useful to people who were not already skilled in Twitter filtering. They also found, however, that many users wished for more personalization and that providing all information about the locality was still something of an information overload issue.

      CiVicinity (see Carroll et al., 2015 for an overview) provides another example of participatory development of a hyperlocal civic information aggregator. CiVicinity combined multiple sources of local information, including unusual sources such as electronic calendar entries and users’ annotated photographs. The latter provide snapshots of smaller, more personal activities, which may enhance the sense of community engagement. The developers refer to this as “superthresholding,” and compare it to small, neighborly acts such as commenting on the weather or showing someone a picture of a family member. The CiVicinity interface mixed maps, calendars, news, events, and stories. Formative evaluation showed that individuals found this integration of material provided a more comprehensive and cohesive information environment. There was some evidence that local news was perceived as being more important when presented in the community portal.

2.6 SUMMARY

      We have traced the development of community networks from their inception, as listservs and portals designed and curated by community leaders; through the digital city metaphor; to the establishment of official e-government portals and services; to the smart city enabled by ubiquitous sensors and open data; and finally, to the rise of hyperlocal applications that mine the continuous and massive stream of user-generated and un-curated social media. While this reflects an evolution of technologies, it can also be seen as a change in the perception of what a digitally augmented community should be. Instead of being simply a provider of information and services, social media enabled the development of a community of discourse and, ultimately, a new definition of place.

      CHAPTER 3

       Theory