skip to main content
10.1145/2702123.2702403acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Designing Political Deliberation Environments to Support Interactions in the Public Sphere

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Little is known about the challenges and successes people face when piecing together multiple social media to interact in the online public sphere when: seeking information, disseminating information, and engaging in political discussions. We interviewed 29 US citizens and conducted 17 talk-out-loud sessions with people who were using one or more social media technologies, such as Facebook and Twitter, to interact in the online public sphere. We identified a number of challenges and workarounds related to public sphere interactions, and used our findings to formulate requirements for new political environments that support the interactions in the public sphere. Through evolving requirements generation, we developed a new political deliberation technology, dubbed Poli, which is an integrated social media environment with the potential to enable more effective interactions in the public sphere. We discuss several remaining questions and limitations to our tool that will drive future work.

References

[1]
AbouAssi, K., Nabatchi, T., and Antoun, R. 2013. Citizen participation in public administration: Views from Lebanon. Inter. J. of Pub. Admin., 36(14), 1029--1043.
[2]
Adamic, L., and Glance, N. (2005). The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election: Divided they blog. In Proc. of IWLD, 36--43.
[3]
Brabham, D. C. (2008). Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving an introduction and cases. Convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies, 14(1), 75--90.
[4]
Coleman, S., and Moss, G. (2012). Under construction: the field of online deliberation research. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 9(1), 1--15.
[5]
Dahlberg, L. (2001). The Internet and democratic discourse: Exploring the prospects of online deliberative forums extending the public sphere. Information, Communication & Society, 4(4), 615--633.
[6]
Dahlgren, P. (2009). Media and political engagement: Citizens, communication, and democracy. University Press, Cambridge, MA.
[7]
Ellison, N., Steinfield, C., and Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook "friends:" Social capital and college students' use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12 (4), 1143--1168.
[8]
Fung, A., and Wright, E. (2001). Deepening democracy: Institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance. Politics & Society, 29(1), 5--41.
[9]
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday, Carden City, NY
[10]
Gilbert, E., Bergstrom, T., and Karahalios, K. (2009). Blogs are echo chambers: Blogs are echo chambers. In Proc. of HICSS-42.
[11]
Gordon, E., Baldwin-Philippi, J., and Balestra, M. (2013). Why we engage: How theories of human behavior contribute to our understanding of civic engagement in a digital era. Berkman Center Research Publication, 21.
[12]
Gordon, E., Manosevitch, E. (2010). Augmented deliberation: merging physical and virtual interaction to engage communities in urban planning. New Media and Society, 12, 763--778.
[13]
Graham, T., and Wright. S. (2014). Discursive equality and everyday talk online: The Impact of 'superparticipants.' JCMC, 19(3), 625--642.
[14]
Graham, T. (2008). Needles in a haystack: A new approach for identifying and assessing political talk in non-political discussion forums. Javnost, 15(2), 17--36.
[15]
Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action: Reason and the rationalization of society. Heneimann, London.
[16]
Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
[17]
Jensen, J. (2003). Virtual democratic dialogue? Bringing together citizens and politicians. Info. Pol., 8(1-2), 29--47.
[18]
Karlsson, M. (2011). What does it take to make online deliberation happen?: A comparative analysis of 28 online discussion forums. In E-Participation to Online Deliberation: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Online Deliberation, 142--156.
[19]
Kies, R. (2010). Promises and Limits of Web-Deliberation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
[20]
Klein, M. (2012). Enabling large-scale deliberation using attention-mediation metrics. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 21(4-5), 449--473.
[21]
Kriplean, T., Morgan, J., Freelon, D., Borning, A., and Bennett, L. (2012a). Supporting reflective public thought with Considerit. In Proc. of CSCW '12.
[22]
Lampe, C., Ellison, N., and Steinfield, C. (2006). A face (book) in the crowd: Social searching vs. social browsing. In Proc. of CSCW'06.
[23]
Macintosh, A., Robson, E., Smith, E., and Whyte, A. (2003). Electronic democracy and young people. Social Science Computer Review, 21(1), 43--54.
[24]
Maruyama, M., Robertson, S., Douglas, S., Semaan, B., Faucett, H. (2014). Hybrid Media Consumption: How Tweeting During a Televised Political Debate Influences the Vote Decision. In Proc. of CSCW'14.
[25]
Munson, S., and Resnick, P. (2010). Presenting diverse political opinions: how and how much, In Proc. of CHI'10.
[26]
Noveck, B. S. (2009). Wiki government: How technology can make government better, democracy stronger, and citizens more powerful. Harrisonburg, VA: Brookings Institution Press.
[27]
Papacharissi, Z. (2010). A private sphere: Democracy in a digital age. Polity Press, Malden, MA.
[28]
Pennebaker, J.W., Francis, M.E. and Booth, R.J. (2001). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC (2nd Edition). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
[29]
Pennebaker, J.W., Mehl, M.R., and Niederhoffer, K.G. (2003). Psychological aspects of natural language use: Our words, our selves. Ann. Rev. of Psych., 54, 547--577.
[30]
Raine, L., and Smith, A. (2012). Politics on social networking sites. Pew Internet and American Life Project.
[31]
Robertson, S., Wania, C., Abraham, G., and Park, S.J. (2008). Drop-down democracy: Internet portal design influences voters' search strategies. In Proc. of HICSS'08.
[32]
3Semaan, B., Robertson, S., Douglas, S., Maruyama, M. (2014). Social Media Supporting Political Deliberation Across Multiple Public Spheres: Towards Depolarization. In Proc. of CSCW'14.
[33]
Smith, G. (2009). Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
[34]
Strauss, A. L. and Corbin, J. M. (1998). Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Sage, CA.
[35]
Stromer-Galley, J. (2004). Diversity of political conversation on the Internet: Users' perspectives. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 8(3).
[36]
Sunstein, C. (2002). The law of group polarization. Journal of Political Philosophy, 10(2), 175--195.
[37]
Towne, B., and Herbsleb, J. (2012). Design considerations for online deliberation systems. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 9(1), 97--115.
[38]
Wright, S. (2012). Politics as Usual? Revolution, Normalization and a New Agenda for Online Deliberation. New Media & Society, 14(2), 244--261.
[39]
Wright, S., and Street, J. (2007). Democracy, deliberation and design: The case of online discussion forums. New Media & Society, 9(5). 849--869.
[40]
Zuckerman, E. (2014). New media, new civics? Policy and Internet, 6(2), 151--168

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Reimagining Communities through Transnational Bengali Decolonial Discourse with YouTube Content CreatorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869008:CSCW2(1-36)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Jumping to Conclusions: A Visual Comparative Analysis of Online Debate Platform LayoutsProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685377(1-15)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Embedding Democratic Values into Social Media AIs via Societal Objective FunctionsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36410028:CSCW1(1-36)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Designing Political Deliberation Environments to Support Interactions in the Public Sphere

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2015
    4290 pages
    ISBN:9781450331456
    DOI:10.1145/2702123
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 18 April 2015

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. design
    2. political deliberation
    3. public sphere
    4. social media

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    • NSF

    Conference

    CHI '15
    Sponsor:
    CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 18 - 23, 2015
    Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Acceptance Rates

    CHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 486 of 2,120 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

    Upcoming Conference

    CHI 2025
    ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 26 - May 1, 2025
    Yokohama , Japan

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)75
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
    Reflects downloads up to 20 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Reimagining Communities through Transnational Bengali Decolonial Discourse with YouTube Content CreatorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869008:CSCW2(1-36)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
    • (2024)Jumping to Conclusions: A Visual Comparative Analysis of Online Debate Platform LayoutsProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685377(1-15)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Embedding Democratic Values into Social Media AIs via Societal Objective FunctionsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36410028:CSCW1(1-36)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
    • (2024)Deliberate Exposure to Opposing Views and Its Association with Behavior and Rewards on Political CommunitiesProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645375(2347-2358)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
    • (2023)A tale of struggles: an evaluation framework for transitioning from individually usable to community-useful online deliberation toolsProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Communities and Technologies10.1145/3593743.3593771(144-155)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
    • (2023)Understanding political divisiveness using online participation data from the 2022 French and Brazilian presidential electionsNature Human Behaviour10.1038/s41562-023-01755-x8:1(137-148)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2023
    • (2022)Augmented Democratic DeliberationProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3535850.3536112(1794-1798)Online publication date: 9-May-2022
    • (2022)Reason against the machine? Future directions for mass online deliberationFrontiers in Political Science10.3389/fpos.2022.9465894Online publication date: 5-Oct-2022
    • (2022)Shame on Who? Experimentally Reducing Shame During Political Arguments on TwitterProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35552166:CSCW2(1-18)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
    • (2022)From Environmental Monitoring to Mitigation Action: Considerations, Challenges, and Opportunities for HCIProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35550936:CSCW2(1-31)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media