Respect and Disrespect in Deliberation Across the Networked Media Environment: Examining Multiple Paths of Political Talk

There is extensive research dedicated to civility in online deliberation, but empirical studies on mutual respect are still scarce. By adopting a systemic approach to deliberation, this study identifies different targets of disrespect (conversation partners, arguments, actors and groups involved in a certain conflict, profanity without a clear target), and investigates their relations with deliberation in different online contexts. This paper argues that the nature of digital affordances related to anonymity and homophily influences the expression of foul language, but not as significantly as was originally assumed. Analysis reveals that online social norms help to explain the configuration of interactions and practices of reasoning together in YouTube, blogs, and Facebook; and the extent to which profanity affects justification and reciprocity.     

Civic engagement among educated Chinese youth: The role of SNS (Social Networking Services), bonding and bridging social capital

This study conducted a stratified and cluster sampling on Chinese college students (N = 654) to investigate how SNS usages and social capital elicit impact on civic engagement. The results of path regression model shows that using SNS to meet new people is positively correlated with bonding and bridging social capital in the virtual world, using SNS to contact existing friends contributes to both bonding and bridging social capital in the real world. Online bonding and bridging social capital are positively related to online civic involvement, but not significantly related to offline civic behaviors. Offline bonding and bridging social capital are positively associated with offline civic participation, but not significantly related to online civic participation. The direct effect of using SNS to meet new social ties on civic engagement is partially mediated by social capital, whilst the effect of using SNS to connect friends on civic participation is completely mediated by social capital.     

The effects of collective MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) play on gamers’ online and offline social capital

This study examines the impact of collective MMORPG play on gamers’ social capital in both the virtual world and the real world. Collective MMORPG play is conceptualized as the frequency of joint gaming actions and gamers’ assessment of the experience in MMORPG guilds and groups. Social capital at the individual level refers to the resources and support provided by bonding and bridging social networks; collective-level social capital refers to people’s civic engagement. A two-wave online survey was conducted to collect data from 232 Chinese MMORPG players.Two structural equation models were developed to test whether collective play influences offline social capital via the mediation of online social capital; the results did not demonstrate the existence of mediation effects. Specifically, collective play positively influences gamers’ online bonding social capital, online bridging social capital and online civic engagement. The effect of collective play on offline bonding and bridging social capital is not significant; the effect of online bonding/bridging social capital on offline bonding/bridging social capital is not significant either. The study finds a significantly positive impact of collective play on offline civic engagement. The effect of online civic engagement on offline civic engagement is not significant. In contrast with collective play, the time of gaming is found to negatively influence online and offline social capital.This study contributes to the knowledge of social capital because it tests the effects of new media on online and offline social capital in the Chinese culture. In addition, this study provides empirical evidence for the positive effects of online games and highlights the social experience in MMORPG play and how it influences gamers’ social networks and collective participation.     

Local News Chatter: Augmenting Community News by Aggregating Hyperlocal Microblog Content in a Tag Cloud

Being aware of local community information is critical to maintaining civic engagement and participation. The use of online news and microblog content to create and disseminate community information has long been studied. However, interactions in the online spaces dedicated to local communities tend to only garner very limited usage, and people often do not consider microblog content as a meaningful source of local community information. Local News Chatter (LNC) was designed to address these challenges by augmenting local news feeds with microblog content and presenting them in a tag cloud that displays news topics of varying popularity with different tag sizes. Our study with 30 local residents highlights that LNC increases the visibility of hyperlocal community news information and successfully utilizes microblog as an additional information layer. LNC also increases one’s community awareness and shows the potential for leveraging community knowledge as a deliberation platform for local topics.     

Online vs. Face-to-Face Deliberation: Effects on Civic Engagement

Deliberation is considered to produce positive effects on public opinion, in that it exposes participants to alternative perspectives and rational arguments. However, whereas benefits of face-to-face deliberation have been supported by many empirical studies, the effects of online deliberation remain unclear to date. This research compares the effects of online and face-to-face deliberation in experimental settings. A theoretical review of computer-mediated communication and deliberative democracy suggests that online deliberation is not necessarily inferior to face-to-face deliberation. An experiment was conducted to compare the relative outcomes of a deliberation performed in face-to-face and computer-mediated settings. The results suggest that both online and face-to-face deliberation can increase participants' issue knowledge, political efficacy, and willingness to participate in politics.     

Anytime similarity measures for faster alignment

Image alignment refers to finding the best transformation from a fixed reference image to a new image of a scene. This process is often optimizing a similarity measure between images, computed based on the image data. However, in time-critical applications state-of-the-art methods for computing similarity are too slow. Instead of using all the image data to compute similarity, one could use only a subset of pixels to improve the speed, but often this comes at the cost of reduced accuracy. These kinds of tradeoffs between the amount of computation and the accuracy of the result have been addressed in the field of real-time artificial intelligence as deliberation control problems. We propose that the optimization of a similarity measure is a natural application domain for deliberation control using the anytime algorithm framework. In this paper, we present anytime versions for the computation of two common image similarity measures: mean squared difference and mutual information. Off-line, we learn a performance profile specific to each measure, which is then used on-line to select the appropriate amount of pixels to process at each optimization step. When tested against existing techniques, our method achieves comparable quality and robustness with significantly less computation.     

Changing Deliberative Norms on News Organizations' Facebook Sites

Comments posted to news sites do not always live up to the ideals of deliberative theorists. Drawing from theories about deliberation and group norms, this study investigates whether news organizations can affect comment section norms by engaging directly with commenters. We conducted a field study with a local television station in a top‐50 Designated Market Area. For 70 political posts made on different days, we randomized whether an unidentified staff member from the station, a recognizable political reporter, or no one engaged with commenters. We assessed if these changes affected whether the comments (n = 2,403) were civil, were relevant, contained genuine questions, and provided evidence. The findings indicate that a news organization can affect the deliberative behavior of commenters.     

Understanding civic engagement behaviour on Facebook from a social capital theory perspective

This paper applies the social capital theory to construct a model for investigating the factors that influence online civic engagement behaviour on Facebook. While there is promising evidence that people are making concerted efforts to adopt Facebook to address social issues, research on their civic behaviour from a social capital viewpoint in the social media context remains limited. This study introduces new insights into how Facebook is shaping the landscape of civic engagement by examining three dimensions of social capital – social interaction ties (structural), trust (relational), and shared languages and vision (cognitive). The study contends that these dimensions will influence individuals’ online civic engagement behaviour on Facebook. We also argue that social interaction ties can engender trust, and shared languages and vision among its members, and that shared languages and vision can increase trust among Facebook members. Empirical data collected from 1233 Facebook users provide support for the proposed model. The results help in identifying the motivation underlying the online civic engagement behaviour of individuals in a public virtual community. The implications for theory and practice and future research directions are discussed.     

Civic Technology and Community Building: Interaction Effects Between Integrated Connectedness to a Storytelling Network (ICSN) and Internet and Mobile Uses on Civic Participation

This study draws on communication infrastructure theory (CIT) to examine the extent to which expressive uses of Internet and mobile devices moderate the relationship between integrated connectedness to a storytelling network (ICSN) and offline and online civic participation. Data collected through a Web survey of a U.S. national online panel (N = 1201) reveal that the relationships of ICSN with offline and online civic participation are conditioned by locality‐oriented expressive uses of Internet and mobile media. With these findings, this study discusses theoretical insights, policy implications, and practical applications.     

Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com

This study explores community life on a black social network site, BlackPlanet, to see whether and how participants engage in public discussions; if these discussions center on issues considered to be critical to the black community; and if so, the extent to which participants' online networks are used to foster some level of civic engagement. Participation analysis, content analysis, and a thematic analysis were used to analyze public discussions on the site's community forums. The findings show that participants are deeply committed to ongoing discussions about black community issues. However, none of these discussions moved beyond a discursive level of civic engagement, suggesting that the potential for mobilization through social networking online has not yet been realized, despite the traditional orientation to community service among blacks in America.     

Social gaming,lonely life? The impact of digital game play on adolescents’ social circles

In recent years, there have been rising concerns about the impact of online video game play on users’ socialization, particularly among adolescent players. The current study addresses one of these concerns and evaluates the potential impact of social displacement on the size and quality of users’ social circles due to video game play. Using a representative sample of adolescent players, the results provide support for the emergence of social displacement effects. Increased social online video game play, but not social offline video game play, was found to correspond with smaller, and lower quality, offline social circles. However, further research is needed to assess the impact of these declines on everyday socialization, such its potential negative influence on the development and maintenance of social skills.     

Deliberation and reactivity in autonomous mobile robots

This paper discusses issues related to the design of the control architectures for an autonomous mobile robot capable of performing tasks efficiently and intelligently, i.e. in a manner adapted to its environment, to its own state and to the execution status of its task. We present our developments and experimentations on mobile robot navigation and show how it is necessary to produce representations at several levels of abstraction, that are used by adequate processes for obstacle detection, target recognition, robot localization, and motion planning and control. We also show that deliberation is necessary for the robot in order to anticipate events, take efficient decisions, and react adequately to asynchronous events. We also discuss the organization of the system, i.e. the design of the control architecture.     

Participating in civil society: the case of networked communities

A community computer network facilitates civic participation by providing pervasive local resources online and by connecting people to local communication and discussion channels, public and non-profit organization leaders and members, and many other civic resources. We present findings from longitudinal data (two rounds between 2001 and 2002) of a stratified random survey of 100 households in a mature community network, the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV). We offer exploratory and confirmatory analyses, including a ‘civic effects’ model, that show demographic characteristics (education, age) and psychological factors (extroversion) explain staying informed, collective efficacy, group membership, activism, and using the Internet for civic and political purposes. The model further explains differences in respondents' involvement in local issues once they go online. Informed activists with multiple group memberships become more involved in local issues once going online, whereas informed non-activists become less involved once online. Our study suggests that in order to play a constructive role in creating a more civil society, community networks should explicitly pursue strategies that encourage community activism. One way to do this, given the strong role of association membership in activism, is for ISPs to offer bundled standard Internet applications at low cost to non-profit community groups (e.g. email for leadership, online discussion for members, web space). Community networks should also promote and support the use by local groups of innovative tools for non-experts, such as easy collaborative web-based tools for information production and collaboration.     

Bird in the wire: creativity,resistance, networked citizenships

ABSTRACT

This paper contemplates the extent to which online music-making and sharing practices can be understood as acts of creative citizenship. While the digital is often lauded as a mechanism by which citizens may engage creatively with local or national communities, this paper contends that it may equally represent a means for disengagement with those groups, by instead facilitating participation in the transnational, diasporic communities that have long prospered on the Internet. Possible motivations for this are multifarious and context-dependent, but often signify an act of resistance: against artistic and commercial institutions, against creatively oppressive states, against the cultural isolation of an immediate environment. This paper holds that this type of digitally mediated creative engagement—that which arises as a specific reaction to a perceived inadequacy in one’s civic life—might be best understood through the lens of creative citizenship. In order to assess the relationship between online creative communities and their offline counterparts, it employs Wellman and Castells' notion of ‘networked individualism’, and contextualizes its ideas by referring to recent studies in online amateur music-making in Iran, where the digital is often regarded as a way of circumnavigating the creative oppression of the state.     

The effect of smartphone use on trends in European adolescents’ excessive Internet use

Despite growing public health concerns data on excessive Internet use (EIU) allowing for comparison between countries and over time are scarce. Our study is the first attempt to evaluate the changes and the impact of mobile access on EIU in Europe. It is based on data from 2 surveys of adolescents implemented in 2010 and 2013 in 7 European countries that used identical methodology; a total of 7663 adolescents were recruited by random stratified sampling. The levels of EIU were compared and a regression model was used to assess the impact of smart devices, the number of activities performed online, and the specific online applications. A small but significant increase of EIU levels was observed in Belgium, Denmark, Romania, the UK, and overall. Although smartphone use is a positive predictor of EIU, it is moderated by the increasing number of activities performed online. The increase in levels of EIU is also associated with the daily use of online games and social networking sites.     

Mobilizers Mobilized: Information, Expression, Mobilization and Participation in the Digital Age

This study assesses differences in use of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and relates them to patterns of expressive political participation, mobilization efforts, and traditional civic participation. Relying on data collected in August 2008 from a random sample of respondents designed to represent Colombia's adult urban population, this paper provides evidence that informational uses of ICTs (Internet and mobile phones) are significantly related to expressive participation in the online domain, which in turn results in a host of traditional or offline civic and political participatory behaviors indirectly through mobilization efforts. That these relationships occur within the context of a society in crisis suggests that new communication technologies offer an additional pathway to democratic political engagement in such societies.     

Flexible Multi-Agent Decision Making Under Time Pressure

Autonomous agents need considerable computational resources to perform rational decision making. These demands are even more severe when other agents are present in the environment. In these settings, the quality of an agent's alternative behaviors depends not only on the state of the environment, but also on the actions of other agents, which in turn depend on the others' beliefs about the world, their preferences, and further on the other agents' beliefs about others, and so on. The complexity becomes prohibitive when large number of agents are present and when decisions have to be made under time pressure. In this paper, we investigate strategies intended to tame the computational burden by using offline computation in conjunction with online reasoning. We investigate two approaches. First, we use rules compiled offline to constrain alternative actions considered during online reasoning. This method minimizes overhead, but is not sensitive to changes in real-time demands of the situation at hand. Second, we use performance profiles computed offline and the notion of urgency (i.e., the value of time) computed online to choose the amount of information to be included during online deliberation. This method can adjust to various levels of real-time demands, but incurs some overhead associated with iterative deepening. We test our framework with experiments in a simulated anti-air defense domain. The experiments show that both procedures are effective in reducing computation time while offering good performance under time pressure.     

Is There Social Capital in a Social Network Site?: Facebook Use and College Students' Life Satisfaction,Trust, and Participation1

This study examines if Facebook, one of the most popular social network sites among college students in the U.S., is related to attitudes and behaviors that enhance individuals' social capital. Using data from a random web survey of college students across Texas (n = 2,603), we find positive relationships between intensity of Facebook use and students' life satisfaction, social trust, civic engagement, and political participation. While these findings should ease the concerns of those who fear that Facebook has mostly negative effects on young adults, the positive and significant associations between Facebook variables and social capital were small, suggesting that online social networks are not the most effective solution for youth disengagement from civic duty and democracy.     

The future of online therapy

The digital world, and the Internet in particular, have a significant impact on almost all aspects of our lives. The realm of psychotherapy is an area in which the influence of the Internet is growing rapidly. This paper suggests a model for comprehensive online therapy online with a therapist at its center. We start by explaining the main components of both traditional therapy and online therapy. We discuss the principal criticisms leveled against online therapy and assess the efficacy of various responses. The paper moves on to explain the advantages of online therapy, focusing on the unique aspects of this approach. The paper proposes that online therapy should exploit other online resources, including online techniques for information gathering. This is true both in the therapeutic session and outside of it. In addition, the paper suggests that therapists incorporate online role play, online CBT and intervention techniques using the smartphone. All of these tools are suggested as important components in a process of comprehensive therapy run by a therapist working online.