New communication technologies have enabled users to overcome barriers of time and space in a variety of ways. And while much of the current literature focuses on newer technologies such as social network sites, people have been using the Internet for support-based purposes for decades. Howard Rheingold was one of the first writers to highlight this affordance of the Internet in his early account of the WELL. He writes:
Because we cannot see one another in cyberspace, gender, age, national origin, and physical appearance are not apparent unless a person wants to make such characteristics public. People whose physical handicaps make it difficult to form new friendships find that virtual communities treat them as they always wanted to be treated – as thinkers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, not carnal vessels with a certain appearance… (Rheingold, 1993, p. 26).
It is this feature of the Internet that helps facilitate the deep and intimate relationships that characterize cyber-support. One of the most positive outcomes associated with Internet communication, cyber-support encompasses a wide variety of behaviors and sites that enable users—often unknown to each other except through their onsite interactions—to provide information and support to each other about shared experiences.
The four papers included in this panel reflect the diversity of cyber-support and point to a number of positive outcomes that can be derived from these uses, ranging from empowering women to forming deeper community bonds.
- Stephanie Vineyard considers recent events in Egypt and Tunisia in her paper, “Technology and Social Capital: How new media tools give opportunities to women.” Employing a social capital framework, Vineyard explores how Internet technologies can give women in disadvantaged regions of the world the power to find and connect with other women like them and rise above many of the location-based restrictions imposed on them by current governmental systems.
- Nick Violi focuses on community-based support in his paper, “Motivation for Participation in Online Neighborhood Watch Communities.” Using an experimental method, he explores motivations to join a neighborhood watch social network site, “Nation of Neighbors” and finds that invitations to join such community may be most successful when they focus on altruistic motivations rather than egoistic, collectivist and principlist aspects of the community.
- Exploring how women prepare for their wedding day, Sara Martucci studies LIWeddings.com, a wedding planning site that features a forum for women to share their questions, joys, and frustrations related to their upcoming nuptials in her paper, “‘The Most Important Day of Your Life:’ Friendship and Support on an Online Wedding Forum.” Using content analysis and interviews, her study supports previous work by Nancy Baym (1998) and highlights the benefits these sites provide in the form of support and camaraderie.
- Ishani Mukherjee brings light to the lives of South Asian immigrants and transnationals in her paper, “My Husband Doesn’t Know I’m Blogging: In Search of Safe Spaces Online.” This study employs the theory of intersectionality to examine South Asian community blogs on domestic violence and makes suggests as to the positive role these blogs may serve in helping women to share their stories with other victims of violence and comes to terms with their split identities.
Abstracts for each of the papers are listed below. Please join us at the conference in College Park, MD (just outside of Washington, D.C.) on April 9th to join in the conversation on this and many other topics related to the social impacts of technology.
Stephanie Vineyard, “Technology and Social Capital: How new media tools give opportunities to women”
Knowledge is Power. As illustrated by the recent Tunisian revolut, those who have access to knowledge control the power. Access and acquisition of knowledge does not exist in a vacuum. Knowledge is acquired and spread through our social networks. Economists look to capital measurements of monetary value or production value or military capital to judge the power and success of a country. What is only recently being studied but has existing since the beginning of cultural formation is social capital. Humans are social beings and build our knowledge and power through the relationships we hold with others, thus our social capital.
Social capital is necessary to facilitate change and development within a society. As Paul Collier in The Bottom Billion notes, successful development requires cultural change that alters the architecture of interactions within a society (Collier, 2007). Dense clusters among homophilic groups are easy to identify and build, but bridges that cut across existing division between these dense clusters must be established. These can exist on a variety of levels – gender, income, ethnicity, and age. Building bridges establishes weak links between network clusters of dense ties, and thus increases the social capital for an individual, a dense network of individuals, and an entire culture.
Women are particularly isolated in countries with less economic opportunity and lack social capital. Recently, development experts acknowledge the importance of bridging women together to build dense networks as well as connecting them to the existent power structure (Coleman, 2010). Studies show women are the key to improving health and education, reducing violence and corruption, and building infrastructure in their communities. In order to establish effective cultural change, women must practice development principles and spread information and knowledge through dense social networks (Watts, 2004).
Today, new technologies help overcome the barriers that isolate individuals and groups within a social structure. For example, social media allows people to communicate across both literal and figurative borders. Enabling people to establish these connections opens up opportunities beyond those of their immediate community. In Tunisia, these technologies allowed individuals to disseminate information and connect with others in their community without the government control. Given their marginalization in social structures, women stand to gain the most from these opportunities. This raises the question: How can new social networking technologies help women build social capital and bridge the gaps to the power structures within their societies.
This paper will be a timely analysis of the role of technology in establishing social capital. While I will use the example of social media in creating social capital for women suffering harassment in Cairo, Egypt via the HarassMap, I will also shed some light on the role social media played in the movement in Tunisia. I will begin by examining social capital and the power with a social structure. I will then explore the role of women in development based on their place in a social structure. After applying these theories to the aforementioned case studies, I will conclude my research based on its ability to answer the question proposed and explore possible implications.
Nick Violi (@nvioli), “Motivation for Participation in Online Neighborhood Watch Communities”
This paper presents a three-part experiment designed to investigate the motivations of users of a community safety and neighborhood watch social networking website. The experiment centers around an intervention into the invitation system that current users employ to invite nonmembers to join the site. The intervention involves several versions of an invitation email which differ by expressing one of four possible motivations for using such a site. The research presented investigates how potential users’ choice of whether or not to join the site is affected by the use case presented by the invitation. Also included is an investigation of the motivations of current users of the site, as reported in an online survey. The experiment revealed that an invitation emphasizing altruistic aspects of the community outperformed the control, it yielded generally positive, though inconclusive results for an invitation emphasizing the egoistic aspects of the community, and it yielded contradictory results for invitations emphasizing collectivist and principlist aspects of the community.
With the increasing popularity of social networks, it is becoming increasingly important for the administrators of those networks to understand the motivations their users have for joining and staying active in the community. By understanding the motivations non-users have for joining such sites, administrators are able to create more effective and more persuasive appeals to potential users. By understanding the motivation longterm users have for continuing to participate, administrators are better able to retain current users. This paper concerns a small subset of online social networking sites, those created around community safety and neighborhood watch. The unique characteristics of such sites suggest that many users may share common motivations, and that those motivations may differ from those present in other social networking sites. In this paper the primary focus will be on the users’ initial motivations for joining such a site.
The presented experiment investigated the motivations of users in one community safety / neighborhood watch social networking site, Nation of Neighbors. By using a set of potential motivations derived from previous work in the area, the experimenters developed a set of emails which express different reasons for joining the community, and observed what effect the different motives have on the response rates. These effects were compared against data gathered by a colleague which includes the self-reported motivations of current and new users of the site.
Sara Martucci, “’The Most Important Day of Your Life:’ Friendship and support on an online wedding forum”
This project examines relationships of support on an Internet wedding-planning site. The website, LIWeddings.com (LIW), functions as a source of information for couples who are getting married in the New York Downstate area. The site links to various wedding vendors like DJs, florists and catering halls, but the more popular aspect is its message board. The women (there are hardly any regular posters who identify as male) are often planning large weddings that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Many of them come to the site looking for information about vendors and wedding locations, but find an online community of women much like themselves- young, middle class and usually white.
LIW gives these future brides the opportunity to discuss the joyful and stressful experiences they have during the wedding planning process. The women often mention that the other members are the only people they can turn to. The posts have a range of topics, and can focus on benign to very serious issues. Sometimes the women ask for advice about wedding registry items or suggestions on what to wear for their bridal shower. At other times they may log on to vent about money, their jobs or “FH” (Future Husband).
The women on the site are usually most active in their yearly cohort’s chat board. Throughout the day the regular posters (about 30-50 women per cohort) answer questions and offer advice to their fellow brides, often posting new threads themselves about the aforementioned topics or things that are NWR (not wedding related). Frequently there are posts about rather serious matters—trouble with significant others, parental health problems, and issues at work. Over the months they spend on the site these women get to know each other’s occupational and familial circumstances. When one of the posters is experiencing some difficulty in life, the others rally around her with words of encouragement and sympathy; however the nature of the support differs depending on whether the initial post was written by a regular or less involved member. Following Martha Nussbaum’s (2001) analysis of compassion and Jack Barbalet’s (1998) discussion of sympathy , I evaluate the vital role of emotional support in the creation and strengthening of these online friendships.
I have performed content analyses and interviewed site members to understand the networks of support and camaraderie these women create in a virtual space. Analyzing the content of selected forums lends insight into the varieties of issues these women discuss and the means through which they provide and request support to/from their fellow brides. Interviews with regulars from the site complement this material with an explicit account of the significance LIW interactions have for individual women.
Social networking sites, like the forums on LIW, play an increasingly substantial role in the daily lives of Internet users . Sites like these provide new environments for interpersonal interactions, making them an important topic for social research. In the case of LIW, a website initially designed as a platform for advertising serves a second—and arguably more significant— function as an important source of emotional support for young coupled women.
Ishani Mukherjee, “My husband doesn’t know I’m blogging: In Search of Safe Spaces Online”
Narratives of silence have often been a part of the life-stories of women who are the victims of domestic violence. To make matters worse, the tendency to posit “culture” as the sole cause for their physical and psychological abuses not only trivializes their pain, suffering, and resistance, but also suppresses the ethnic, racial, classist, sexual and heteronormative forces that have tried to kept them silent. Although the crime is not solely gender-specific, given quite a few instances of abuse that men face from their partners and that women receive from other women, for the very purpose of my paper I will focus on domestic violence against South Asian women particularly within the context of immigration and transnationalism, where women find their identities doubly displaced: by the politics of race/ethnicity and the constructs of gender.
To combat this painful muting mechanism, many South Asian immigrants are now writing blogs to re-cite testimonies of their own experiences of abuse and those of others, as they fight the domestic, political, economic, legal, cultural and social forces that have tried to keep them voiceless for so long. First, by using the race/gender theory of intersectionality, which argues that acts of violence faced by women of color are frequently the products of intersecting patterns of racism, sexism, cultural myths and legal pitfalls (Crenshaw, 1994), I will study a few South Asian community blogs that discuss the issue of domestic violence (DV). This will likely make clear the role of blogs in creating ethno-cultural discourses around sensitive, human-rights issues within the South Asian (SA) diaspora in the US. Secondly, by framing narrative blog exchanges as desired identity performance and as a system of hypertextual narrative strategies that re-formulate relationships between the writer/creator and reader/user, I argue that blogs have the potential to be alternative “third” communities that give SA women/men the desired identity to openly voice their/others’ struggles as immigrants and as victims of DV.
In fact, the imperative question to be asked is how these women claim alternate safe spaces that help them to come to terms with their split identities of being transnational immigrants on one hand, while on the other being regarded as the so-called repositories of culture/tradition as women from a non-western society? Conversely, do the abused SA women/those affected seem to be more at ease when narrating their testimonies online than in real life, given the current debate that participation in online communities at best neutralizes, or at least, blurs the divide between public and private? Many scholars and feminists have argued that isolation due to immigration is an important factor in domestic abuse among SA families, majorly due to the invisibility immigrant women experience because of their ethnicity and gender status in the U.S. (Abraham, M., 2000). In addition, the proliferation of external forces of racism and internalized sexism and feelings of shame (the notion that DV in some communities is a private issue, not meant to be disclosed in public) disempower victimized women from narrating their dilemmas. (Goel, 2005; Das Gupta, M., 2006; Das Gupta, S., 2007). In summary, most of these studies indicate the need to create a public safe-space and ethno-culturally adapted community interventions that address the discursive intersectionality of racial, sexual, gendered, class-based, cultural, economic and legal causes/forms of abuse that these women endure. Knowing these factors is imperative for understanding the historical and social underpinnings of DV within the SA diaspora in the US, and blog narratives may be one of the few accessible communication channels that create/disseminate multivocal and intersectional narratives about human rights issues through the exchange of personal stories by bloggers. This can not only encourage public participation of DV victims/activists and increase awareness of the issue from within, but also provide advice and information about culturally specific victim services and batterers’ interventions. Moreover, this study has future promise in terms of problematizing the racial-gender dichotomy in the online context, and complicating the potential that blogs have to disrupt the public-private divide, by narrating discursive communities into being that can create agentic counter-publics around issues such as SA DV.