Linking Facebook User Types With Civic Participation: From a Communication Infrastructure Perspective

The rise of social media has coincided with the emergence of an expressive citizenship model that emphasizes the role of expression in networked environments centering on personal interests. Yet relatively little is known about how civic participation might develop from daily, general social media use. Drawing on communication infrastructure theory, this study uses two-wave survey data from Taiwan to investigate which types of Facebook users are more likely to become civic action takers and how. Results show that high public expressers—those who manifest higher levels of public expression (e.g., updating status)—have more integrated connectedness to the civic information sharing network, which in turn facilitates civic participation. This pathway to civic participation is relatively open to users with diverse levels of political interest. Overall, these findings help to explain how general social media users become civic action takers, presenting important implications for addressing inequalities in civic participation.

Neighborhood hotspot and community awareness: The double role of social network sites in local communities

There is a tendency in the literature on local digital media use and neighborhood outcomes to conceptualize Social Network Sites (SNSs) as mere transmission channels, thereby ignoring SNSs’ dynamics and limiting the understanding of their role in neighborhood life. Informed by Communication Infrastructure Theory and social media literature, we propose and test a model to investigate the association between the use of SNSs, appropriated as online neighborhood networks, and neighborhood sense of community. We administered a survey to Flemish online neighborhood network users (n = 590) and found that active localized SNS use brings about an online sense of community and community awareness, which both independently lead to a neighborhood sense of community. Based on these findings, we argue that SNSs, appropriated as online neighborhood networks, function simultaneously as neighborhood hotspots in a neighborhood’s communication action context as well as community awareness media in a neighborhood’s storytelling network.

Connecting Journalists and Community Members

Chapter Two explores an effort to involve residents in the process of making journalism. It follows the case of Curious City, a series produced by WBEZ Chicago public radio that invites listeners to nominate questions about Chicago that they want reporters to explore, using the Hearken digital engagement platform. Curious City undertook a foundation-supported experiment to determine the most effective outreach strategies to elicit participation from residents of historically stigmatized majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods as well as some majority white suburbs. The chapter finds that through offline engagement they strengthened, to a limited extent, what communication infrastructure theory calls “storytelling network” ties –particularly the links between local media and community members. However, because they failed to establish two-way connections with residents, stories were often told about communities without giving residents in those communities opportunities to listen to stories and participate in dialogue.

Community-Centered Journalism

In A Case for Community-Centered Journalism: Solutions, Engagement, Trust, Andrea Wenzel maps out a process model for building trust—not just in journalism, but between different sectors of communities. She details how, in many communities, residents gauge trust in news not only based on factors like accuracy and credibility, but also based on how these are intertwined with the perceived motives of news media, and whether outlets are seen to represent communities respectfully. For this reason, Wenzel contends that more local journalism alone is not enough. Rather, she argues that a different kind of local journalism is needed—a community-centered journalism that is solutions-oriented and that engages and shares power with community stakeholders. Through a series of case studies across the U.S., in urban, suburban, and rural communities, Wenzel uses a communication infrastructure theory framework to explore how local journalism interventions attempt to strengthen relationships between residents, community organizations, and local media. She examines the boundary challenges to dominant journalistic practices and norms that arise from place-based interventions to build relationships of trust. Mindful of dynamics of race, class, place, and power, Wenzel recommends a process that is portable – rather than scalable -- that centers on community stakeholders, and is shaped as much by local assets as by needs. She argues that if they shift away from a model that puts journalists at the center and marginalized communities on the periphery, engaged journalism and solutions journalism have the potential to strengthen not just journalism, but the communication health of communities.

The Case for Shared Community Stories

This introductory chapter offers an overview of key concepts and the book’s argument for a model of community-centered journalism to build trust between local news media and communities. It outlines how the book conceptualizes trust (looking at factors including perceived representation and motives), solutions journalism (reporting focused on responses to social problems), and engaged journalism (practices that involve community members in journalistic production). It then sets out key questions tackled by other portions of the book, including how place-based interventions using engaged and solutions journalism practices can present boundary challenges to journalism norms and influence what communication infrastructure theory (CIT) calls community “storytelling networks”—the links between residents, community groups, and local media which can be indicators of an area’s communication health and predictors of civic participation. Finally, it offers an outline of the chapters that follow.

Shifting Stories with Solutions Journalism

Chapter One introduces an example of how communication infrastructure theory can be used to diagnose the communication health of communities and to design an intervention in response. It also explores the role of place in influencing relationships between actors in local storytelling networks—in this case focusing on majority Black and Latinx communities in South Los Angeles that have historically been stigmatized by negative news representations. The chapter outlines a research-based intervention that sought to strengthen weak connections between local news outlets and community organizations by bringing representatives together to produce a series of solutions journalism stories about South LA. These stories were then discussed with South LA residents in a series of focus groups. While residents responded favorably to the solutions-orientation of stories, they wanted to see local media take steps to address power imbalances and to involve communities more in the process of making journalism.

To Repair, or to Burn It Down?

The concluding chapter summarizes the argument for a community-centered process model that uses communication infrastructure theory to assess local storytelling networks and design interventions that aim to strengthen them. It reviews key questions about how local journalism can share power with and offer more wholistic narratives of stigmatized communities—and how this will require journalists to challenge some norms and practices. The chapter maps out steps in a process, including assessing information needs, convening a participatory design process, and piloting, monitoring, and evaluating interventions. It reflects on how intervention may work to address barriers to trust including perceived negative/inaccurate coverage, polarization, and objectivity norms that create distance between journalists and communities. Finally, it reviews how outcomes of this process will vary depending on local place and power dynamics, and how these cases add to communication infrastructure theory by illustrating how trust operates in local storytelling networks.

The Process Is Portable

Chapter Four makes the argument that while interventions to strengthen local storytelling networks are not scalable, the process of designing them is portable to different regions. The chapter follows an attempt to apply a communication infrastructure theory-based process model developed in Kentucky to areas of Philadelphia. This process includes a research study exploring local information needs and assets, followed by a workshop to brainstorm interventions, followed by piloting interventions. Applying the same process in different places demonstrates how place, and both local communication needs and assets, can shape the nature of interventions that emerge. In this case it shows how in the suburban area the process led to an idea for students to produce solutions journalism stories. Meanwhile in the urban neighborhood, the process led to development of the Germantown Info Hub, an engaged journalism project that focuses on connecting different storytelling network actors through community outreach and discussions.

Developing an Intervention

Chapter Three integrates previous research on solutions journalism and engaged journalism into a communication infrastructure theory framework, which looks at the health of local “storytelling network” ties between local media, organizations, and residents. This framework is used to assess storytelling networks, then design and pilot interventions to strengthen them. It focuses on Western Kentucky, an economically marginalized, but more rural region with a different demographic and political context to previous urban cases. The chapter explores how place identity and political polarization affect ties between residents, community groups, and local journalists. It then looks at a series of pilot interventions that grew out of a participatory design process—including an online and offline town hall, a participatory journalism program, and a series of listening sessions focused on informal rural gathering spaces. It explores how these interventions address key trustworthiness factors, and account for the needs and assets of local places.