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Reviving community networks: hyperlocality and suprathresholding in Web 2.0 designs

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Abstract

Social scientists have identified a crisis of community in modern society, for example, Putnam’s (Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community. Simon and Schuster, New York, 2000) study of a 40-year decline of community in American society. We argue that the design palette of Web 2.0 offers critical affordances for community information and interaction that enable hyperlocality and suprathresholding. We describe a community-based participatory design research project through which we investigated the design characteristics of hyperlocality and suprathresholding. We speculate on the possibility of a new design model for community networks.

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Acknowledgments

We thank our collaborators Craig Ganoe, Michael Horning, and Harold Robinson. This research was supported by the US National Science Foundation (IIS 0342547 and IIS 1218544), Intel Corporation (34251), and the Edward M. Frymoyer Chair Endowment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Human–Computer Interaction and College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    John M. Carroll, Blaine Hoffman, Kyungsik Han & Mary Beth Rosson

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  1. John M. Carroll
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  2. Blaine Hoffman
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Correspondence to John M. Carroll.

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Carroll, J.M., Hoffman, B., Han, K. et al. Reviving community networks: hyperlocality and suprathresholding in Web 2.0 designs. Pers Ubiquit Comput 19, 477–491 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-014-0831-y

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