Keith N Hampton

I have published a new paper with colleagues from Virginia Tech: Samah Gad, Naren Ramakrishnam, and Andrea Kavanaugh. It was a particular pleasure to work on this paper, as it provided an opportunity to collaborate with some of the folks who I have long admired for their research on the Blacksburg Electronic Village, a community networking project that has a lot of similarities to my Netville, E-Neighbors and i-Neighbors projects. Our paper uses data from i-Neighbors.org to test hypotheses that I original developed in a paper that I published in Internet Use and the Concentration of Disadvantage: Glocalization and the Urban Underclass. In short, the argument is that there is something about social media that enables local social contact and collective action. Moreover, social media can enable social contact in geographic areas that are otherwise, because of digital and more traditional divides, unlikely to experience high levels of civic and civil engagement.

Here is the abstract:

The Internet offers opportunities for informal deliberation, and civic and civil engagement. However, social inequalities have traditionally meant that some communities, where there is a concentration of poverty, are both less likely to exhibit these democratic behaviors and less likely to benefit from any additional boost as a result of technology use. We argue that some new technologies afford opportunities for communication that bridge this divide. Using temporal topic modeling, we compare informal conversational activity that takes place online in communities of high and low poverty. Our analysis is based on data collected through i-Neighbors, a community website that provides neighborhood discussion forums. To test our hypotheses, we designed a novel time series segmentation algorithm that is driven by topic dynamics. We embed an LDA algorithm in a segmentation strategy and develop an approach to compare and contrast the resulting topic models underlying time series segments. We examine the adoption of i-Neighbors by poverty level, and apply our algorithm to six neighborhoods (three economically advantaged and three economically disadvantaged) and evaluate differences in conversations for statistical significance. Our findings suggest that social technologies may afford opportunities for democratic engagement in contexts that are otherwise less likely to support opportunities for deliberation and participatory democracy.

Want to read more, you can find a copy of the paper here:

Gad, Samah, Naren Ramakrishnam, Keith Hampton & Kavanaugh, Andrea (2012). Bridging the Divide in Democratic Engagement: Studying Conversation Patterns in Advantaged and Disadvantaged Communities. 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Informatics, Washington D.C.

I have a new paper, How new media affords network diversity: Direct and mediated access to social capital through participation in local social settings, in print in New Media & Society. Co-authored with my former students Chul-joo Lee (The Ohio State) and Eun Ja Her.

This paper is based on data that I collected with the Pew Intenret Project in 2008. The paper addresses two important questions:

1. Are people\’s social networks (the real stuff, not just Facebook) less diverse as a result of their participation in mediated activities? In other words, does the Internet create silos?
2. If ICTs are are associated with higher levels of diversity, how does the diversity associated with online engagement compare to the diversity associated with offline engagement (in public spaces, voluntary groups, church, cafes, neighborhoods, etc)?

I explore the relative contribution of traditional physical settings to social network diversity and answer the question of whether virtual community really is like a public spaces or a \”3rd space\”. The conclusions contrast with the notion of \”networked individualism\”. I suggest that there is a duality in how ICTs influence social relations: they support relationships globally and locally – \”glocalization.\” That is, ICTs afford social participation that is both unbounded from shared time and geography (\”global\” and not dependent on place) and tied to participation in foci of activity that are very \”local\” (contextual and tied to place). Different uses of new technologies afford one or both of these trends.

Findings provide very limited evidence that place-based relations have less resonance with internet users. A claim that the structure of personal networks has shifted from place-to-place to person-to-person underplays the continued role and technological affordances that are associated with traditional social settings. Place is not lost as a result of the affordances of new technologies — place-based networks are reinforced and made persistent. I argue, in contrast to a belief that networks would be more easily abandoned in the electronic age, social networks may be more persistent now than at any point in modern history. Not only are networks persistent over time, but they are increasingly pervasive and visible across what were once clearly articulated and bounded cliques. New technologies, such as the \”status update\” offered by many social networking services, afford opportunities for \”pervasive awareness,\” whereby individuals are regularly broadcasting and receiving information from their networks.

The pervasive awareness afforded by many new technologies has more in common with a traditional village-like community than it does with individualized person-to-person contact. Pervasive awareness provides a shared history, familiarity of daily labor, shared context, density, and public life that is reminiscent of traditional village life. The fundamental difference between a village-like community and the person-to-network structure that characterizes contemporary networks is the possibility for personal networks that are larger and more diverse than at any time in human history. I go on to explore how newer technologies, such as \”social search,\” in which the use of the internet to search for information privileges or limit exposure to information
collected or accredited by members of a person’s social circle, may promote prevailing ideology and information while omitting important bridges, divergent views, and unique resources that exist between networks — possibly reversing the trend found in this paper and the advantages of network diversity.

Find the n the NM&S website, or a draft on my site.

New report out today with the Pew Research Center\’s Internet & American Life Project. We report on the findings of a large, national survey of 2,255 Americans interviewed in November 2010. In many ways, this is a followup to the report on social isolation that we released in 2009 – with a stronger emphasis on the relationship between the use of social networking sites (SNS) (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace) and the size and structure of people\’s \”real\” overall social networks (not just those people they interact with online or using SNS). As with the last report, the aim was to provide actual evidence to either substantiate or refute the claims that we regularly see reported about how SNS use leads to isolation, cocooning, or otherwise damage social relationships.

There is a good summary of the findings in the press release, and in the summary of the report. This includes the findings that:

Internet users in general, but Facebook users even more so, have more close relationships than other people (that is, people with whom they discuss important matters).

Facebook users are more trusting than other people.

Facebook users get more overall social support, and in particular they report more emotional support and companionship than other people. And, it is not a trivial amount of support. Compared to other things that matter for support – like being married or living with a partner – it really matters. Frequent Facebook use is equivalent to about half the boost in support you get from being married.

Facebook users are much more involved in politics than other people. Facebook users are more likely to vote, more likely to attend political meetings, and more likely to try and persuade someone to vote for a specific candidate than similar people – or people who use the Internet in other ways.

However, unless you dig a little deeper into the report you may miss what I think are some of the really interesting methods we used and findings:

We measured the size of people\’s overall social networks – not just their online friends, but a measure of how many people they really know, in total. The average American has 634 social ties. There is a great deal of disparity in the size of people’s social networks comparing those who use the Internet and those who do not – almost all of that can be explained by the digital divide. The only technology use associated with a difference in the number of people a person knows is the use of a mobile phone and use of instant messaging – both associated with knowing more people.

It gets really interesting when we compare the size of people’s overall social network (on and offline) to the size of their \”friends\” list on SNS. The average SNS user has friended about half of the total number of people that they know. A small number of people actually have more Facebook friends than the number of people they report that they know overall. Only a small fraction turn out to be strangers – most are dormant ties and friends of friends (great potential social capital).

Many of the questions we asked were questions that we also asked as part of the last report in 2009. There has been a modest upswing in some of these measures. For example, people were more likely to report that they know their neighbors, that they volunteered, and that they trusted other people.

We also revisited a question where we asked people to give us the names of people with whom they discussed important matters. When we asked this question in 2008 it was in response to findings from the GSS that reported a decline since the 1980s in the number of most people\’s very close social ties and an increase in social isolation (see the paper on our 2008 findings here). Compared to when we asked this question in 2008, there is less social isolation in America and the average American reports having more close confidants. Facebook users are even more likely than other people to have more of these close confidants.