Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, and Interaction
Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, and Interaction
Characterizing E-Participation in Policy-Making
HICSS '04 Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'04) - Track 5 - Volume 5
What Drives Global E-Governance? An Exploratory Study at a Macro Level
HICSS '05 Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'05) - Track 5 - Volume 05
Digital Government: Technology and Public Sector Performance
Digital Government: Technology and Public Sector Performance
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
This research explores how federal agencies interact with their audiences via Facebook, their most popular social media channel, by analyzing the comments posted by agencies and how users respond to the initial threads. This study seeks to determine whether the additional communication channels that Facebook offers within formal accounts facilitate conversation among individuals in the form of ad hoc social groups, contributing to higher levels of participation. This inquiry is based on prior research that established that three conditions influence stocks of social capital in networks -- horizontality of network, network density and the number of messages interchanged between networks' members. To test this tri-partite relationship, 4,280 threads initiated by federal agencies were analyzed. Results show that (1) horizontality of network impacts positively participation and it is also associated with higher numbers of users; (2) threads that invite users to participate generate fewer comments than informative messages, which suggest that in Web 2.0-based environments the opinions posted by users are more important than the messages broadcasted by organizations; and (3) when there is a higher number of threads initiated by federal agencies it negatively affects the number of comments posted by users.