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A Big Data approach to measuring civic engagement, gender differences and usage in social media
among young people
Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, SINTEF, [email protected]
El Congreso Online Comunicación y Sociedad Digital Universidad Internacional de La Rioja
MADRID, 18.04.2013
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The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets—so-
called big data—will become a key basis to understand our society – digital society in the
future
Photo source: http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2013/03/is-big-data-the-next-big-thing-two.html
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Big Data
90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone (Source, IBM: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/)
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The research question
How can we use "big data" to understand gender differences, and cross-country differences among young people and their civic engagement on Facebook?
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Why measuring civic engagement on Facebook?
delTA 6
”We use Facebook to schedule the protests,
Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the
world.”Source: The Cascading Effects of the Arab Spring http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/the-cascading-effects-of-the-arab-spring-28575/
Social media - a new and promising arena for civic engagement
Social media has been increasingly recognized as a rising force that plays a key role in social, democratic, and political issues (Golbeck, 2012).
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Informal types of engagement within social media
Young people to day report to distance themselves from aspects of formal citizenship, such as political parties and involvement in local governmental political issues, and prefer informal types of engagement within social media which often have higher relatedness and, thus, often are associated with causes initiated by young people themselves. (Brandtzæg, Følstad, Mainsah, 2012)
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NGO – Non-Governmental org. or civic org. => increasing presence
on Facebook• Amnesty, WWF, Plan
International, and Save the Children, are all using Facebook actively
• These organizations, their presence on Facebook, and the differentiated patterns of fans (likes) between males and females are discussed in this article.
delTA 11
Why young people?
• Young people are crucial agents with regard to peace processes and political stability on a local and global scale (Tufte & Enghel, 2009)
• Youth is regarded as being at the forefront of new media uptake (e.g. Christensen, 2011; Jenkins et al., 2006).
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All young people are on Facebook
“It’s just that everyone else is on Facebook so you join up yourself" (boy, 17 years)
Brandtzæg et al., (2010)
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Why gender differences?
• UNESCO recognizes that the gender divide is the most significant form of inequality, amplified by the digital revolution (Primo, 2003).
• However, current research points towards a paradigm shift, in the realm of new media technologies (Pavlik, 2013).
• We are entering a new social era as a result of SNSs such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, which may alter the gender divide.
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Why "big data"?
• The biggest technology trend today is big data, due to it's great potential:
– It's more data than ever (e.g. digitalization) on the web and particularly on social network sites like Facebook, due to the increasing possibility for user generated content
– Young people’s self-disclosure (digital foot-prints) in social media to both other users and organizations, has revealed not only new questions about their usage but also new ways to harvest data (“big data”) about their engagement
– Large pools can be brought together and analysed to reveal patterns about young peoples civic engagement online
– We know that presidential campaigns in US relied heavily on huge data sets to identify donors to potential supporters.
3,2 billion "likes" every day
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The "Big Data" in this study
Wisdom – a tool to aggregate data from Facebook. Intelligent tool for data mining supporting demographic pattern assessment of Facebook "likes"
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What, who, when
What: Demographic pattern assessment of civic engagement in Facebook
Who: Facebook users (N = 19,370,443, average= 32 years, min.13 max.71+ years) This number corresponds with those people who have opted-in to contribute their data anonymously to the Wisdom Network as well as their friends
When: March, 2013
Overview of organizations covered in this study and their number of “likes"
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ResultsSome examples
Males are more politically and information oriented than females
Females are more focused on environmental and humanitarian child aid
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Cross-country comparison
• This study used Wisdom to compare young people in different countries on the basis of their country information in Facebook and psychographic profile in relation to two psychographic segments associated with civic engagement: “Social Activist” and “Environmentally Aware.”
• Psychographic segmentations are based on check-ins and page likes (e.g. "Social Activists" = Fans who've liked a significant number of pages related to causes, non-profits, and non-governmental organizations).
Gender differences across countries
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Critiques of Big Data execution
Danah Boyd has raised concerns about the use of big data in science neglecting principles such as choosing a representative sample by being too concerned about actually handling the huge amounts of data. This approach may lead to results bias in one way or another
• Source, Wikipedia, Big Data, 2013: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data
• Photo:http://dialogicalcoffeehouse.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/danah-boyd-new-media-and-discourse/
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Conclusion
• This study has shown that there is a great potential using Big Data to reveal general patterns of gender difference and cross-country differences in regard to civic engagement on Facebook among young people.
– Young males are more supportive than their female counterparts in politically driven
Facebook pages and are more interested in sites that focus on political information and facts, including Wikipedia.
– Young females are somewhat more supportive toward environmental and humanitarian organizations and causes than their male counterparts. These differences might slightly support old gender stereotypes. Cooper (2006).
– In general - young females from Western countries (e.g., Spain, Norway, and the US)
seem to be more active in civic engagement on Facebook than their male counterparts. While young females (as well as females in general) in India and Iran has very low civic presence on Facebook.
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Thanks to
• The VERDIKT-programme in the Norwegian Research Council – for supporting the delTA-project and our partners:– Opinion Perduco– Plan Norway– NRK – Norwegian Broadcasting– Amedia, Glomdalen (newspaper)– Kongsvinger kommune (muncipal)– AHO - Oslo School of Architecture and Design
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Questions ?