Social Media and Civic Engagement. Scott P. Robertson
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criminal, or libelous content);
• accessible and inexpensive, to maximize equitable use; and
• modifiable, whereby the system and services themselves can be changed in a participatory manner by users.
As we will see, these requirements for community networks have interesting resonance with the requirements that political theorists place on open deliberative spaces. The founders of CFN encouraged developers of other “Free Nets” to measure desirable outcomes such as increased community cohesion; better-informed citizens; greater use of educational and training resources over the lifespan; and an “inclusive, ethical, and enlightened democracy.”
The SCN is notable because, like DDS, many local activist groups were involved in its funding. Initially, an environmental group called Sustainable Seattle established a home page on the site, followed closely by a homeless women’s network called the Homeless Network, and a feminist organization called BaseCamp Seattle. BaseCamp Seattle held early meetings combining technology education and awareness with political workshops (Silver, 2004). Growth of SCN was fast for the time, starting with 700 users in 1994 and growing to 13,000 in 1997 (Schuler, 1996).
The Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV), launched in 1993, stands in stark contrast to many of the “free net” projects because of the extensive attention paid to it by behavioral and social scientists (Carroll, 2005). Like CFN, BEV was also a collaboration between a university, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), and its surrounding community. The promise of BEV, and community networks in general, is reflected in this quote from an early research project:
“[C]ommunity networks are a potentially radical medium within which to manage community history: they augment the real, physical communities in which we live our fragmented lives by supporting distributed, asynchronous, personal interactions: we can get to the campfire or General Store anytime and anywhere” (Carroll et al., 1995, p. 6).
Surveys taken during the early days of BEV showed that people’s primary interests in the network were “learning and teaching, civic interests, social relations, support for work or business, consumer information, entertainment, and medical services” (Carroll and Rosson, 1996). When it was founded, BEV maintained a discussion forum for policies related to use of the network, however this forum quickly became a hub for discussion of civic issues such as downtown parking policies and for community issues such as restaurant reviews and birth announcements (Carroll and Rosson, 1996).
BEV initially had two primary goals, to connect citizens with government electronically and to help businesses create and utilize a digital presence (Carroll, 2005). The goal of connecting citizens with each other was not prominent at the outset, but as various local organizations began to develop presences on BEV, many community-building activities began to evolve. Carroll (2005) describes how senior groups, churches, and other organizations successfully occupied BEV and created social communities that might otherwise have not formed.
Early on BEV became a participatory project in which members built their own content. Eventually, as other user-driven content sites became prominent, BEV evolved into an organizational portal. Still, this DIY feature is often referenced as a reason for the long-term success of BEV (Carroll, 2005; Carroll and Rosson, 1996).
BEV successfully navigated the transition from a text-based network to a predominantly graphical network on the World Wide Web. While BEV itself never utilized a strict place-based metaphor such as DDS, a companion project called MOOsburg did graft a geographical coordinate system with landmarks and community meeting tools to the BEV infrastructure (Carroll et al., 2001), but this effort remained largely outside of the mainstream use of BEV.
BEV remained in service until 2015. Its take-down notice recognizes the fate of many early “digital city” and community network services, that commercial providers ultimately won the day: “This transition recognizes the success of BEV in that many of the services that it has provided in a speculative, experimental context are now widely available from a variety of providers” (from the BEV Transition Announcement, http://www.bev.net/transition-announcement).
While early digital cities often made attempts to render their interfaces graphically, none went quite as far in this direction as Helsinki, Finland (Linturi, Koivunen, and Sulkanen, 1999) and Kyoto, Japan (Ishida and Isbister, 2000; Ishida, 2002). In these cases, attempts were made to create a digital urban experience using a virtual city environment in which government services, shopping opportunities, and interaction were enabled via avatars. Digital City Kyoto originated from NTT and Kyoto University in 1998. The concept was to create a virtual space that was isomorphic to the real city. The researchers imagined a three-layer architecture consisting of an information layer, interface layer, and interaction layer. In anticipation of the smart city concept, Digital City Kyoto was envisioned to have sensors and monitors on physical objects that would aggregate data and represent it in a visualization of real urban space. This information layer relied heavily on GIS data and address information to situate the user in a realistic visual depiction of the city. The interface layer generated 2D and 3D representations of space using real images. Finally, the interaction layer was intended to employ chat software for interactions among people through their avatars and chatbots for directing tours and helping in wayfinding.
2.2 E-GOVERNMENT PORTALS
In parallel with the digital cities movement, researchers and practitioners from the areas of political science and public policy have engaged in efforts to develop portals to local and national government services. Researchers began to explore the idea that governments and citizens could interact electronically almost at the birth of the internet (for example, see Braman, 1995; Stenberg, Ayres, and Kettinger, 1983). In general, their concerns were not with the formation of communities or necessarily citizen deliberation, but rather the opening of channels between government and citizens for information dissemination and transaction, productivity and cost impacts, the legal and bureaucratic issues involved in information sharing, matters of transparency and privacy, standards, relations among levels of government, intergovernmental (and even international) boundaries, and the lines between public and private interests in information management. Much of the literature on e-government was (and is) published in the information science literature and, more recently, government- and policy-related journals and conferences (Belanger and Carter, 2012). According to Grönlund and Horan (2005), the information systems field has dominated in conducting research and developing theory in the area of e-government systems (cf. Andersen and Henriksen, 2005; Grönlund, 2004).
Proponents of e-government systems argued from the beginning that they might bring fundamental changes to how government works. Fountain (2002) predicted that information technology in government would bring positive changes to social, economic, and political aspects of government. While adoption of new e-government systems has been consistent and widespread, positive impacts have been seen mostly in productivity and efficiency gains rather than in fundamental practices. In a significant overview of the adoption of information technologies in government, Kraemer and King (2006) concluded the following:
• “[T]echnology [is] useful in some cases of administrative reform, but only in cases where expectations for reform are already well-established. IT application does not cause reform.”
• “IT application has brought relatively little change to organization structures, and seems to reinforce existing structures.”
• “[T]he primary beneficiaries [of information technology] have been functions favored by the dominant political-administrative coalitions in public administrations, and not those of technical elites, middle managers, clerical staff, or ordinary citizens.”
• “Government managers have a good sense of the potential uses of IT in their own interests, and in cases where their interests coincide with government interests, they push IT application aggressively.”
In other words, the adoption of information technologies has been largely non-transformational.
Analysis and benchmarking of government portals (Rorissa, Demissie, and Pardo, 2011) and websites often distinguish