Investigating the online and offline contexts of day-to-day democracy as participation spaces

ABSTRACT

Citizen-led participation in democracy is explored through studying the online and offline spaces where people work together to influence those in power and improve their communities. The concept of a participation space is introduced to describe these contexts. The spatial theme guides the research, from literature, through methodology, to findings. Case studies of three community/activist groups provide the data to identify participation spaces and model these as Socio-Technical Interaction Networks (STINs) (Kling, McKim, & King, 2003). These participation spaces include social media, email, and blogs, as well as paper media and offline spaces, such as rooms. The STIN models of these participation spaces reveal that the characteristics which influence their use for participation are the same for online and offline spaces. These can be understood in terms of spatial characteristics: the spaces’ perceived boundaries and inhabitants, combined with ownership and access, including costs. As well as recording the roles of these spatial characteristics, the participation space models map the day-to-day activities of participation. Collating these activities reveals that participation primarily takes the form of communication: organising and increasing solidarity, sharing information, encouraging involvement, and trying to influence events. The models also reveal that most of these activities are non-public. This sociotechnical study describes the relationship between the activities of local, grassroots democracy and the characteristics of the online and offline spaces where it takes place.

KEYWORDS:

• eParticipation
• democracy
• social media
• STIN
• assemblage
• social informatics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Ella Taylor-Smith is Senior Research Fellow in Edinburgh Napier University’s School of Computing. Within the school’s Centre for Social Informatics, Ella explores online and offline spaces, and the relationships between them, in the context of grassroots democracy. This work is always focused on people and increasingly focused on social media, especially images [email: [email protected]].

Dr Colin F. Smith is Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University. His research examines the relationships between information and communication technologies, innovation and organisational change, particularly in the contexts of e-government and e-democracy [email: [email protected]].

ORCID

Ella Taylor-Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3407-1029

Colin F. Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0362-2254

Notes

1 This research followed Edinburgh Napier University’s ethics procedures. All participants (people, groups, and places) have been anonymised.

2 The bedroom tax is a popular name for a UK policy to reduce housing benefit according to the number of bedrooms in the property: it is not an actual tax. The policy took effect in April 2013.

3 The term non-public is adopted from Nonnecke, Andrews, and Preece, who use the term to describe lurkers in discussion forums (2006). It is used here to reflect the uncertain privacy levels of online communications.