Since I am from a rural town in Iowa, Eric Gilbert’s CHI paper/presentation about social media in rural life was of special interest to me. The U.S. census bureau defines rural as towns with a population less than 2500 people and lacking a direct connection to a metropolitan area (i.e people can’t commute to a city for work). Some social indicators of rural populations are that they tend to be older, with less education and lower income. Approximately one-quarter of the U.S. population is rural. However, as Eric pointed out, there is very little research on this segment of the U.S. population with regard to how they use technology.
Eric started out his presentation pointing out that rural people adopted America’s first widespread social technology - the telephone -very enthusiastically. People thought the device would reduce isolation and bridge social distance, which it did. However, rural people adopted the technology differently than their urban counterparts. Eric pointed to the telephone feature of, “party lines”, which proved successful in rural areas while highly unpopular in urban environments and sited the deep social ties as a perhaps the reason why.
Eric used the qualitative work of sociologists like Falk and most specifically the work of K.A Larson, “The Social Construction of the Internet: A Rural Perspective”, who conducted a qualitative study of internet use in the rural US. A particularly interesting finding from Larson’s work was that they found women to be the guardians of the internet in rural US communities.
From these studies, Eric created five hypothesis about how people in rural communities would use social media differently than their urban counterparts. He sampled data of 3,000 public MySpace users to test the following hypothesis:
1. Rural users will have far fewer friends and comments than urban users
2. Females will account for a greater proportion of users than urban users
3. Rural users will set their profiles to private at higher rates than urban users.
4. Rural users’ friends will live much closer than urban users’ friends
5 As compared to urban users, rural users’ distribution of friends will preference strong ties over weak ties.
At this point in the presentation Eric shared a slide of the United States in which he had randomly picked 50 urban and 50 rural users and plotted the distance of their friends. The map looked eerily like a red/blue map of the U.S. His point — rural and urban people don’t tend to mix when using social media. He pointed out that it is distressing that a nation politically divided along rural and urban lines has replicated itself online.
All of Eric’s hypothesis were proven correct using quantitative analysis of the MySpace data.
Eric’s conclusions were that both rural and urban people use social media, but they use it very differently. He found that rural social networks span other rural social networks, creating limited access to social capital for rural people. Borrowing from Larson, people in rural areas say they want to reach beyond their communities, but in practice, they don’t.
Eric’s design implications for the HCI community:
1. Build for incremental trust
2. Introduce urban and rural people to each other through social media. Online has the opportunity to introduce people… something that telephony did not.
He closed the presentation with the assertion that a rural perspective could she new light on technology use. He also wondered out loud if wireless networks are so different than party lines.
Eric’s study made me wonder if his findings were unique to the US population or if they could be extrapolated to rural/urban communities throughout the world. Paul Dourish made the comment that many of the dimensions that define “rural” populations mirror how we define class and that he could potentially substitute the world “rural” with “class” — meaning that rural could actually be a socio-economic class. Danah Boyd has also gleaned some interesting insights around how issues of class have played out in online social networking. Through this lens, Eric’s paper proves that socio-economic behavior patterns in the real world are replicated in the online social media space — classes don’t tend to mix.
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