Designing for Democracy

Author(s):  
Jennifer Forestal

Designing for Democracy addresses the question of how to “fix” digital technologies for democracy by examining how the design of the built environment (whether streets, sidewalks, or social media platforms) informs how, and whether, citizens can engage in democratic practices. “Democratic spaces”—built environments that support democratic politics—must have three characteristics: they must be clearly bounded, durable, and flexible. Each corresponds to a necessary democratic practice. Clearly bounded spaces make it easier to recognize what we share and with whom we share; they help us form communities. Durable spaces facilitate our attachments to the communities they house and the other members within them; they help us sustain communities. And flexible spaces facilitate the experimental habits required for democratic politics; they help us improve our communities. These three practices—recognition, attachment, and experimentalism—are the affordances a built environment must provide in order to be a “democratic space”; they are the criteria to which designers and users should be attentive when building and inhabiting the spaces of the built environment, both physical and digital. Using this theoretical framework, Designing for Democracy provides new insights into the democratic potential of digital technologies. Through extended discussions of examples like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, it suggests architectural responses to problems often associated with digital technologies—loose networks, the “personalization of politics,” and “echo chambers.” In connecting the built environment, digital technologies, and democratic theory, Designing Democracy provides blueprints for democracy in a digital age.

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Santho Vlennery Mettan ◽  
Aldo Hardi Sancoko

Indonesian’s Millennials are estimated to reach 70% of the productive population in 2020-2030 (BPS 2018), who cannot be separated from the internet and social media (Harahap 2017). Due to this fact, (Hsu 2018) and (Benini 2018) claim that millennials are afraid of being left behind by ephemeral content which will disappear within 24 hours so that many social media platforms are equipped with these temporary content features and companies are using temporary content strategies to reach more consumers. SMEs on the other hand have low knowledge of ephemeral content, even though 84% of millennials buy products due to the influence of social media, where ephemeral content lies within (Boen 2016). In the other hand, word-of-mouth has a significant impact on customer purchasing decisions until now. Along with the change to the digital era, word-of-mouth is being accelerated with the help of the internet, it called e-WOM, where many businesses use social media or other online platforms to promote business. The results showed that the two variables of ephemeral content and word-of-mouth with the help of the internet had a significant effect on customer purchase intentions, especially the millennial customer for SMEs in Surabaya City. In the future, by implementing ephemeral content in SMEs media social will increases their customer’s e-WOM.


Author(s):  
Misiani Zachary ◽  
Lun Yin ◽  
Mwai Zacharia ◽  
Xiaohan Zhang ◽  
Yanyan Zheng ◽  
...  

Today, traditional media is still a significant part of disseminating weather and climate information, still they have not been able to reach out to all users of the target audience alone. On the other hand, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc. are used as a tool of communicating weather and climate information to various users in a well-organized manner like never before. Using a scientific research methodology of case study, the research was designed to explore how the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD) is using Twitter and Facebook accounts for weather and climate information dissemination to various users.


2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Ghozian Aulia Pradhana ◽  
◽  
Syaifa Tania ◽  

This study aims to reveal how hyperreality is reflected in using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on social media. The death of an African-American, George Floyd, that involved white police, has sparked outrage and demonstrations in many U.S. states. Issues pertaining to racism sparked in relation to the event, and many people protested demanding justice. The demand for justice then went into a wave of massive global protests both in offline and online realities—the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was widely used on social media when protests were held. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag even became a trending topic on several social media platforms, as if everyone was concerned about the issue and aiming for the same purpose. However, we might find several posts that neither reflected nor were related to the case. Some social media users put the hashtag even though their content substance was not related. This phenomenon then led to a condition of hyperreality in questioning reality from a simulation of reality. The method used in this study is content analysis which measures the sentiment of comments on Twitter and Instagram. The study found that social networking sites mobilised online movements even though they were not directly related to the #BlackLivesMatter movement. On the other hand, hashtag activism reduced the true meaning of the social movement. Therefore, the hyperreality in #BlackLivesMatter could not be seen any longer as a form of massive protests demanding justice and ending violence, but merely to gain more digital presence on social media. Keywords: Black lives matter, movement, social media, hyperreality, hashtag activism.


Author(s):  
Şükrü Oktay Kılıç ◽  
Zeynep Genel

A handful of social media companies, with their shifting strategies to become hosts of all information available online, have significantly changed the news media landscape in recent years. Many news media companies across the world have gone through reorganizations in a bid to keep up with new storytelling techniques, technologies, and tools introduced by social media companies. With their non-transparent algorithms favoring particular content formats and lack of interest in developing solid business models for publishers, social media platforms, on the other hand, have attracted widespread criticism by many academics and media practitioners. This chapter aims at discussing the impact of social media on journalism with the help of digital research that provides an insight on what storytelling types with which three most-followed news outlets in Turkey gain the most engagement on Facebook.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (01) ◽  
pp. 2040023 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mamoun Masoud Abdulqader ◽  
Yousof Zohair Almunsour

This research aims to investigate the effects of social media use on higher education teaching and learning as well as the students’ academic performance. A total of 275 students and faculty members from the College of Computer Science and Information Technology at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University took part in the study. The participants answered survey questions to analyse information on their use of social media in education and how that has affected their teaching, learning and grades. A majority of the participants reported that they used social media in training. However, they also stated that social media platforms were beneficial in academic matters. The number of participants who stated that the use of social media in learning helped improve their grades was 43%. The other 57% thought that social media had no impact on their grades or had an adverse effect or were undecided.


Author(s):  
Timothy James LeCain

AbstractThis essay makes a neo-materialist analysis of the extraction and use of copper in the first half of the twentieth century, using two sites as empirical examples, one American and the other Japanese. By moving beyond the modernist dichotomies that separate mine and city, nature and technology, and the “natural” and built environment, I argue that copper has played a central role in creating modern human spatial relationships and associated cultures. I offer two specific examples. First, the extraction of copper and the resulting pollution challenged the modern capitalist idea that material things could be abstracted into idealized commodities of exchange that were spatially distinct from their places of origin and each other. In actual historical practice, though, this abstracted space of global commodity exchange was repeatedly undermined by local spaces where real commodities often interacted in unanticipated ways. Second, once this extracted copper was formed into far-flung networks of wires, it challenged earlier spatial concepts in which the burning of coal or other energy-rich materials had always occurred very near to the site where the resulting power would be used. By creating what Manuel Castells’ terms a “space of flow” in which power could be instantaneously transmitted over long distances, copper wires created the illusion of an immaterial and even placeless source of power. Ironically, though, this immaterial illusion could only be sustained by surrounding humans with large amounts of very real copper wires. In both of these examples, the extraction and use of copper shaped human space and societies in unanticipated ways, challenging the modernist assumption that humans could fully understand and control the material things they extracted from nature and embedded in their built environments.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clovis Bergère

Abstract:This study explores social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter in particular, as emergent sites of youth citizenship in Guinea. These need to be understood within a longer history of youth citizenship, one that includes street corners and other informal mediations of youth politics. This counters dominant discourses both within the Guinean public sphere and in academic research that decry Guinean social media practices as lacking, or Guinean youth as frivolous or inconsequential in their online political engagements. Instead, young Guineans’ emergent digital practices need to be approached as productive political engagements. This contributes to debates about African youths by examining the role of digital technologies in shaping young Africans’ political horizons.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-301
Author(s):  
Suvojit Bandopadhyaya

This article will explore three crucial parameters that have been taken into consideration to attract millennials towards the Islamic State or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) brand: the first parameter is story creation around the historical significance of Islamic prophecies justifying the ISIS brand. Second is the symbolisms attached to the ISIS brand and its relevance (a flag, a leader, a logo, a caliphate) and, third, the actions or the sense of attachment to the ISIS brand in the form of practising ideology, gaining recognition and appeal to the millennials. The promotion of the brand has been advanced through diverse means – social media platforms, mainstream media organizations, YouTube videos, all orchestrated to gain recognition of a rising state brand on the one end and a brand of fear and intimidation on the other.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norah Khalid Alsufyan ◽  
Monira Aloud

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the way that Saudi universities are engaging their audience via social media platforms by means of the five meaningful themes: visibility, branding, authenticity, commitment, and engagement. The study will answer the questions: how do Saudi universities exploit social media platforms to engage their target audience? What are the recommendations for Saudi universities toward maximizing the value of social media engagement? Design/methodology/approach A content analysis approach was used to study all Saudi universities (26 public, 11 private). Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter were the anticipated social media platforms in this study. Findings The results showed that Twitter is the most frequently used platform to communicate with audiences. While visibility in the anticipated social media platforms was high, the engagement was lacking. On the other hand, authenticity and branding in the anticipated social media platforms were medium, while commitment was low except on Twitter. In general, the private universities exceed the public universities in terms of visibility, branding, authenticity, commitment and engagement in the anticipated social media platforms, which indicates their attention on gaining their audience’s satisfaction, a dynamic of trust which will lead to maintaining current relationships or building new ones. Originality/value Since there are few studies in the field regarding social media platforms usage by Saudi universities, this study aims to understand how Saudi universities are utilizing social media platforms to engage their audiences and propose recommendations for how Saudi universities can build value from social media platforms.


2018 ◽  
pp. 521-543
Author(s):  
Nainika Patnayakuni ◽  
Ravi Patnayakuni ◽  
Jatinder N. D. Gupta

Technical solutions to security have been suggested but found lacking and it has been recognized that security is a people issue as well, and behavioral research on information security is critical. Individual learning about cybersecurity is not formal and linear, but complex and network based. In this paper we develop a model of how social media characteristics impact cybersecurity knowledge transfer using technology threat avoidance theory. In developing the conceptual model we seek to answer the following questions. How do users discover cybersecurity knowledge on social media platforms? What are the platform and interaction characteristics that enable them to find cybersecurity knowledge and share this knowledge with others? In doing so we consider the impact of the threat and protection context on cybersecurity knowledge transfer which is different from knowledge transfer in the other contexts.


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