As information technologies become unremarkable elements of everyday life, opportunities arise to employ them to help introduce and reinforce lifestyle and behavioral changes in which people are invested, in areas such as health and wellness, or environmental sustainability. Most previous research in this area has taken the individual user as its primary focus, asking, first, how interactive technology might make people more aware of their own behavioral patterns, and, second, how interactive technology might provide people with incentives and rewards for changing those behaviors. The challenge - especially for topics such as environmental sustainability - is how to scale up from individual actions to the sorts of large-scale, societal change that makes for long-term impact.
This research examines an alternative approach to technologically-based behavior change with a focus on questions of scale. We draw on two main sources. The first comprises sociological investigations of social movements and the processes through which they are formed. The second is the contemporary interest in social networking and social media. Our goal is to be able to link people together into larger socio-computational systems that align with and motivate civic engagement and social responsibility. We will develop, deploy, and evaluate online tools on both traditional and mobile platforms that foster the creation of social movements through the alignment of individual actions to collectivities. These systems will be built around our fundamental principle that social groups are a more intelligible and more compelling way to understand environmental actions than arbitrary scales or abstract scientific measures such as CO2 tonnage.
This research will provide new understandings of the processes of social movement formation, with an emphasis on the role of online tools and the potential for social networking technologies. We will operationalize these understandings through a focus on design practice. Our research provides insight into the potential for information technologies to help people connect with local communities, increase civic engagement, and achieve personally desirable behavior change.
How do people come to think of themselves as participants in a social movement? Where do "grass roots" movements come from and how do people begin to realize that they have a connection to them? Studies of social movements in sociology have identified that one of the critical elements in people's connection to social movements is what is called "frame alignment" -- the process of coming to understand one's own situation in the terms that the social movement offers. So, for example, when one can see problems of everyday life or of your own town as aspects of environmentalism, then one is a step closer to thinking of oneself as having a stake in the environmental movement. We have been studying one particular aspect of this process in contemporary society, which is the extent to which social networking online can play a role here. Social networking is a way that we connect with people, friends and friends of friends, with interests that spread beyond our immediate experience out into the network. It seems like an appropriate way, then, for people to be able to find and adopt new ways of thinking about their lives and local conditions. In order to explore these questions, we built an application for the Facebook platform that allowed people to share their environmental actions and, in doing so, to spread particular conceptual models and vocabularies for thinking about environmentalism in everyday life. We then looked at how this application was adopted -- nor, as it turned out, was not. When the application failed to gain much traction, we began a study of why, starting off with the question of how people thinking about environmental action in their everyday lives. The primary conclusion that we drew from our interview data was that people do not just not think of themselves in terms of these global labels, but in fact, they reject them. Terms like "green," "environmental," "conservation" and so on all have significant negatives associated with them. What engages people are not these global rhetorics, but rather local concerns and considerations and questions much closer to home. Someone might be concerned about organic food and pesticide-free eating, but not because of their environmental concerns, but rather because they want to be good parent to their young children; someone might want to grow their own food, but not because of concerns about transportation and pollution, but rather because they enjoy being out in their garden; someone might be engaged in a river clean-up, but not because they are concerned about dumping and pollution but rather because it was a place they played as a child. Local events, connections close to home, and specific items from people's life stories had a much bigger impact on their actions and their ways of thinking than large-scale political engagements. This tells us something about how people might be engaged in civic or political action, and how we might want to design software applications that allow people to connect together around these topics. It also helps us understand something about the balance between global and local concerns when they are mediated by large-scale social networking technologies. The web might be world-wide but the concerns that people bring to it arise much closer to home.
