Gaming Social Capital: Exploring Civic Value in Multiplayer Video Games

Recent research suggests that social interactions in video games may lead to the development of community bonding and prosocial attitudes. Building on this line of research, a national survey of U.S. adults finds that gamers who develop ties with a community of fellow gamers possess gaming social capital, a new gaming‐related community construct that is shown to be a positive antecedent in predicting both face‐to‐face social capital and civic participation.     

Call of (civic) duty: Action games and civic behavior in a large sample of youth

The positive and negative influences of violent/action games, henceforth called “action games”, remains controversial in the scholarly literature. Although debate continues whether action games influence aggressive behavior, little research has examined the influence of action games on civic engagement. The current study addresses this gap by examining the correlation between exposure to action games on civic engagement and on-line prosocial behavior in a sample of 873 teenagers. Results indicated that girls as well as teens who had parents who were more technologically savvy tended to engage in more civic behaviors. Exposure to action games predicted more prosocial behavior on-line, but did not predict civic engagement either positively or negatively. However, exposure to action games and parental involvement interacted to promote youth civic engagement. Action-game-playing-youth whose parents were involved in game play and supervision were most civically involved, compared to youth who did not play action games, or whose parents were less involved. These results indicated little support for the belief that exposure to violence in video games decreases prosocial behavior and/or civic engagement. Conversely some support was found for the possibility that playing action games is associated with small increased prosocial behavior and civic engagement in the real world, possibly due to the team-oriented multiplayer options in many of these games.     

Social media use,community participation and psychological well-being among individuals with serious mental illnesses

BackgroundLittle research exists on social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) use among individuals with serious mental illnesses (SMI). One particular question of interest is the extent to which online social media use is associated with these individuals' community participation, civic engagement and psychosocial outcomes.MethodsTwo-hundred and thirty-two individuals with SMI receiving services at 18 mental health organizations throughout the continental U.S. completed questionnaires on their community participation, civic engagement, quality of life, loneliness, and psychiatric symptoms. They were also asked which social media sites they used; the duration, frequency and importance of, and reasons for, social media use; and the number of contacts they had on social media.ResultsApproximately a third of the sample reported having at least one social media account. Greater frequency, intensity and longevity of social media were associated with higher levels of community participation, and greater intensity of social media use was positively associated with civic engagement. For instance, those who used social media at least 30 min a day had 16.4 more days of participation and voting rates that were higher by 17.4%. Social media use was not found to be significantly associated with loneliness, psychiatric symptoms or quality of life.Discussion and implicationsGreater social media use appears to be associated with greater community engagement without negative repercussions on loneliness, symptoms, or quality of life. Interventions that support social media use among individuals with SMI could have important community integration benefits.     

Colonial Irrigation: Myths of Emptiness

This paper examines the role of public art in urban redevelopment, focusing on the reconstruction of Coventry (UK) in the post-war years. Overseen by the city's Chief Architect, Donald Gibson, this redevelopment has often been described as resulting in a placeless and artless urban landscape indistinguishable from other redeveloped city centres in post-war Britain. To the contrary, here it is suggested that public art was an important feature of Coventry's new urban landscape, with the attempt to create a new civic identity manifest in a series of highly symbolic and distinctive public artworks. Analysing both the official symbolism of these artworks and their reception in the public sphere, it is concluded that, although just one aspect of the urban landscape, the production and consumption of public art encapsulated the tensions that existed between different visions of the city.     

城市历史景观（HUL）视角下1949年后城市地标公共文 化价值多维度识别 ——以重庆为例

随着我国城乡遗产类型与时空谱系的 拓展,1949年新中国成立初期以及1978年改革 开放至今,与革命文化、社会主义先进文化相关 的城市标志性建筑、地段逐渐作为中华文化连 续文明传承见证的空间载体纳入到我国城乡历 史文化保护传承体系中。为此,本文将城市地标 作为城市历史景观构成要素,基于关联性、整体 性、历时性视角,建立了从地标与城市多维度关 联关系识别其公共文化价值的研究方法。该方法提出了区位关系、功能权属、形态特征、称谓方式四大地标特征识别要素和目标导向、权力话 语、审美风尚、社会思潮四项价值解析线索,通过对1949—2019年重庆市中心城区79处地标样本 的解析,揭示出上述阶段重庆乃至全国城市建设与经济、社会、文化历史背景的内在关联逻辑,以 期为1949年新中国成立后优秀历史建筑的普查筛选与保护实践提供判别、指导依据和为我国当 代城市建成环境文脉研究提供理论参考。     

The Deliberative Politics of the Consultative Layer: Participation Hopes and Communication as Design Values of Civic Tech Founders

Drawing from communication as design and the spirit of technology, this study investigated the political values embedded in consultative layer companies, with particular attention to the influence of normative deliberative democratic ideals in tech design. Interviews with the founders of consultative layer tech startups explored (a) founders' visions for their technologies and how they were incorporated, (b) the imagined user groups for these technologies, and (c) expected broader outcomes as a result of using their platforms. Six interrelated themes emerged in the analysis that illuminate ideologies, ideals, and pragmatic considerations embedded in the consultative layer, raising new theoretical and practical questions about the role of communication in understanding this emerging industry and its reimagining of government in the online space.     

The design of civic technology: factors that influence public participation and impact

Civic technology needs to be better understood in terms of the factors that promote representative public participation and impact. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study of a civic tech platform that enabled the public to provide feedback on public transport to the service providers. The overall aim of this research was to investigate the public’s use of a leading civic tech platform, FixMyTransport. The key findings were that: an effective and easy-to-use civic technology platform enables broad participation; data and process complexity need to be removed; factual information can be captured in situ with impacts, consequences and opinions added later; emotions (if important) need to be explicitly elicited; feedback to, and a ‘conversation’ with, the users is important for engagement, as is a feeling of being part of a community. These findings can contribute to the future design of civic technology platforms.

Practitioner Summary: There is a lack of understanding of how ‘civic tech’ platforms are used and how they may be designed for maximum effectiveness. Multiple data collection methods were used to investigate a well-developed example of civic tech. Effective civic tech can enable broad democratic participation to improve public services.     

Intentions to participate in political crowdfunding- from the perspective of civic voluntarism model and theory of planned behavior

The study has integrated the civic voluntarism and planned behavior model to check the intentions of people towards political crowdfunding. Participation in politics is the civic duty of a citizen in a democratic country and exercising this right leads to government formation. Participation in the political process is behavior influenced by the intention to do so. The study examines the influence of the civic voluntarism model (CVM) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) factors on the intention to participate in political crowdfunding. The study was done in India, the largest democracy in the world, taking a sample size of 374 respondents. Partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyze the data through SmartPLS-3.2. The results of this study revealed that resources - financial, time, and technological - are essential for participating in political crowdfunding. Political engagement, political interest, and political awareness are significantly associated with the intention to participate in crowdfunding. Online community engagement also shows a positive relationship with the intention. Among the three factors of TPB, attitude and subjective norms are significantly influencing the intention towards participation. The results of this study will help the political parties and candidates to identify factors that will help them to get maximum funding and support from the crowd through political crowdfunding. The theoretical implication is that political crowdfunding can come up as a distinct segment of crowdfunding to be studied.     

公共领域的本质与表象

市民生活中公共领域的本质和表象包括有适合于地区中心和建筑所表达的适当的纪念性，同时要建立起具有地方特色的高水准的日常管理。欧林事务所近期在纽约市公共空间改善方面的工作提供了最适宜的和熟悉的公共领域。在这里，作者对欧林事务所在巴特办公园城、布赖恩特公园的设计作品和斯洛文尼亚的卢布尔雅那市的普列兹涅克公共空间的改善进行了比较，两者都表达了一种设计的共产主义观点，即（景观设计）是为日常活动和稳定的市民生活提供引导和建设性构架，而不是感性或形式的表达。     

FixMyStreet Brussels: Socio-Demographic Inequality in Crowdsourced Civic Participation

FixMyStreet (FMS) is a web-based civic participation platform that allows inhabitants to report environmental defects like potholes and damaged pavements to the government. In this paper, we examine the use of FMS in Brussels, the capital city of Belgium. Analyzing a total of 30,041 reports since its inception in 2013, we demonstrate how civic participation on FMS varies between the ethnically diverse districts in Brussels. We compare FMS use to a range of sociodemographic indicators derived from official city statistics as well as geotagged social media data from Twitter. Our statistical analysis revealed several significant differences between the districts that suggested that crowdsourced civic participation platforms tend to marginalize low-income and ethnically diverse communities. In this respect, our findings provide timely evidence to inform the design of more inclusive crowdsourced, civic participation platforms in the future.