Building Community Online: Opportunities, Challenges, and the Role of Schools

• In Event: New Media as a Resource for Transforming Civic Learning Contexts

Abstract

Introduction

With the rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, scholars have begun to explore ways that youths’ participation in online communities might support their civic and political engagement (e.g. Jenkins et al., 2006; Kahne, Lee, & Feezell, under review; Shirky, 2010; Watkins, 2009). While several promising examples exist, most youth do not use social media for civic or political ends. Rather, the online communities in which they participate are largely friendship-driven, meaning these communities center around youths’ desire to socialize with their friends (Ito et al., 2009).

An important, as yet unanswered, empirical question is whether and how friendship-driven participation can be leveraged to support youths’ civic and political participation. To answer this question, it is necessary first to understand youths’ social experiences in friendship-driven online communities. Moreover, since friendship-driven participation is rooted in offline social contexts (boyd, 2007), understanding the relationship between youths’ online and offline experiences of community is also important.

This presentation addresses these areas of inquiry through the following research questions:
1. Do youths’ online communications with friends support positive or negative social experiences?
2. Do offline experiences of community affect youths’ experiences of community online?

Method
Participants included 2,079 adolescents (1180 females, 895 males ), between the ages of 11 and 19 (M = 15.4 years), attending secondary school in Bermuda (a British Dependent Territory located 700 miles off the coast of South Carolina). Participants completed an anonymous online questionnaire that included questions about their online activities, experiences with cyberbullying, school satisfaction, close friends, and demographic characteristics.

Findings

Multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the associations between the predictor variables—online peer communication and school satisfaction—and outcome variables—friendship quality and experiences with cyberbullying. Models A and B (Table 1) show that online peer communication is positively associated with both friendship quality and cyberbullying experiences, controlling for the effects of age, gender, and socioeconomic status. Adolescents who go online to communicate with their friends tend to report higher quality friendships. They are also more likely to report experiencing various forms of cyberbullying, such as having someone send them a threatening or aggressive online message.

Models C and D (Table 1) show that school satisfaction is positively associated with friendship quality and negatively associated with cyberbullying experiences, after controlling for the effects of online peer communication and demographic characteristics. Adolescents who experience school as a positive environment where they feel satisfied with their friends and respected and understood by their teachers tend to report higher quality friendships. They are also less likely to report experiencing various forms of cyberbullying.

Implications

These findings hold important implications for educational efforts to leverage friendship-driven participation for civic and political ends. They suggest that these efforts must identify ways to enhance the positive and mitigate the negative aspects of youths’ online peer communication. They also suggest that one way to achieve this goal is by working to enhance youths’ experience of community offline, at school.

Author

• Katie Davis, University of Washington