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#Indigenous: Tracking the Connective Actions of Native American Advocates on Twitter

Authors:

Morgan Vigil-Hayes,

Marisa Duarte,

Nicholet Deschine Parkhurst,

Elizabeth BeldingAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

Pages 1387 - 1399

https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998194

Published: 25 February 2017 Publication History

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Abstract

With fewer than 66% of eligible voters registered and voter turnout rates 5-14 percentage points lower than any other ethnic group, Native Americans comprise the least participatory ethnic group in U.S. political elections [42, 57, 49, 25]. While discourse surrounding Native American issues and interests has increasingly moved to social media [55, 56], there is a lack of data about Native American political discourse on these platforms. Given the heterogeneity of Native American peoples in the U.S., one way to begin approaching a holistic understanding of Native American political discourse on social media is to characterize how Native American advocates utilize social media platforms for connective action. Using a post-structural, interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, we use theories of connective action [5] and media richness [14] to analyze a Twitter data set culled from influential Native American advocates and their followers during the 2016 primary presidential election season. Our study sheds light on how Native American advocates use social media to propagate political information and identifies which issues are central to the political discourse of Native American advocates. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the bandwidth characteristics of content impact its propagation and we discuss this in the context of pernicious digital divide effects present in Indian Country.

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Cited By

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Day MSullivan C(2024)Indigenous peoples, digital leisure, and popular cultureAlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples10.1177/11771801241256115Online publication date: 30-May-2024
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Qin YDuan WWu QLu Z(2024)Dismantling Gender Blindness in Online Discussion of a Crime/Gender DichotomyProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36536868:CSCW1(1-31)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
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Chordia IBaltaxe-Admony LBoone ASheehan ADombrowski LLe Dantec CRingland KSmith A(2024)Social Justice in HCI: A Systematic Literature ReviewProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642704(1-33)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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Index Terms

#Indigenous: Tracking the Connective Actions of Native American Advocates on Twitter
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing

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Reviews

Reviewer: Sharon Tettegah

Today, social movements are more prevalent than ever. Individuals use multiple social media platforms to organize their voices, which turn into political actions. In some ways, these online social movements are more powerful than face-to-face interactions. Where society once primarily judged the sociopolitical movement actions by counting the number of individuals who participate in on-the-ground face-to-face public demonstrations, we have now added and often primarily judge impact through a binomial digital representation of zeros and ones through social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and other web-based platforms. Often omitted in the literature are the voices of indigenous groups, such as Native Americans' political engagement and social movements, whether online or offline. The Internet has afforded an opportunity to hear, document, and understand a much marginalized population of Native American voices through various social media networks. This paper documents the engaging and connective actions of Native American advocates and social movements through Twitter, a social media site. The authors provide a theoretical framework documenting connective action through an interdisciplinary lens, with a focus on Native American political content, network, and bandwidth characteristics of Native American advocates and their sub-communities. Vigil-Hayes et al. provide a brief literature review of prior studies focused on grassroots political and social movement organizations. This brief literature review is important because it delivers background information about the progression or lack of progression involving tribal groups' use of information communication technologies (ICT). This discussion engages and prompts the reader to reflect and recognize various social inequalities that persist specifically among indigenous populations in the US. The use of the metaphor described in the paper-"connective tissue binding multiple political action environments"-is very strong. The reader becomes engaged immediately as she considers the strength of connective tissues that are bound as the principle approaches of the authors' discussion of the affordances of the Internet, which link together individuals with a focus on a social justice action. The authors afford insight into data curation of each group and subgroup of Twitter hashtags using a post-structural mixed method to provide identification of social media content, content and quantitative analysis generated from Native American advocates and their Native American sub-communities. A thorough and very detailed presentation of the methods enables the reader to easily replicate the study. The discussion and conclusion offer readers a very clear picture of the social and technological inequality among Native American populations. At least one area of clarity that I took away from reviewing this paper is the importance of life, death, and family to the Native American community and the need to provide low-bandwidth content, such as photos instead of heavy latent media files, to enhance communication among Native American advocacy groups and their followers over Twitter's social media platform. Online Computing Reviews Service

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CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

February 2017

2556 pages

ISBN:9781450343350

DOI:10.1145/2998181

General Chairs:
Charlotte P. Lee
University of Washington
,
Steve Poltrock
Retired
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Program Chairs:
Louise Barkhuus
Stockholm University and Cornell Tech
,
Marcos Borges
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
,
Wendy Kellogg
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

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]

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Published: 25 February 2017

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Chordia IBaltaxe-Admony LBoone ASheehan ADombrowski LLe Dantec CRingland KSmith A(2024)Social Justice in HCI: A Systematic Literature ReviewProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642704(1-33)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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