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Slacktivists or Activists?: Identity Work in the Virtual Disability March
Abstract
Protests are important social forms of activism, but can be inaccessible to people with disabilities. Online activism, like the 2017 Disability March, has provided alternative venues for involvement in accessible protesting and social movements. In this study, we use identity theory as a lens to understand why and how disabled activists engaged in an online movement, and its impact on their self-concepts. We interviewed 18 disabled activists about their experiences with online protesting during the Disability March. Respondents' identities (as both disabled individuals and as activists) led them to organize or join the March, evolved alongside the group's actions, and were reprioritized or strained as a result of their involvement. Our findings describe the values and limitations of this activism to our respondents, highlight the tensions they perceived about their activist identities, and present opportunities to support further accessibility and identity changes by integrating technology into their activist experiences.
... While George and Leidner suggest that social media can be used at all levels of engagement [21], a number of HCI researchers have highlighted their ability to coordinate and broadcast messages. By quickly disseminating information to a large number of people, social media can help raise awareness, spark discussion, and organize both online and offline movements around violence [43], corruption [62], accessibility [37], racial inequality [11], economic inequality [22], sexual harassment [13], and more. For marginalized groups in particular, it can play an important role in democratizing their voices and increasing feelings of empowerment around their identities [13,37,38]. ...
... By quickly disseminating information to a large number of people, social media can help raise awareness, spark discussion, and organize both online and offline movements around violence [43], corruption [62], accessibility [37], racial inequality [11], economic inequality [22], sexual harassment [13], and more. For marginalized groups in particular, it can play an important role in democratizing their voices and increasing feelings of empowerment around their identities [13,37,38]. ...
... Others describe its main purpose as lowering the barrier for coordination, with primary activist actions happening in the physical world, such as protests [5,29]. While recent work suggests that even low-level actions can lead to or correlate with real-world impact [36,42], physically "putting your body on the line" is still considered highly meaningful among activists [37]. ...
The rise of consumer augmented reality (AR) technology has opened up new possibilities for interventions intended to disrupt and subvert cultural conventions. From defacing corporate logos to erecting geofenced digital monuments, more and more people are creating AR experiences for social causes. We sought to understand this new form of activism, including why people use AR for these purposes, opportunities and challenges in using it, and how well it can support activist goals. We conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty people involved in projects that used AR for a social cause across six different countries. We found that AR can overcome physical world limitations of activism to convey immersive, multilayered narratives that aim to reveal invisible histories and perspectives. At the same time, people experienced challenges in creating, maintaining, and distributing their AR experiences to audiences. We discuss open questions and opportunities for creating AR tools and experiences for social change.
... Social media has opened a new horizon for social activists to run public campaigns. Studies have examined SMCs on topics such as climate change [22,63], diseases and health [26,34,38,46], social justice [3,7,18,19,24,42,59], and political protests [39,40,43,58]. SMCs share many commonalities. ...
... Because of YouTube's unique culture, wordof-mouth spreading of content differs from Twitter and Facebook. During an SMC, Twitter and Facebook posts depend on users' real-life identities, and the platforms were used as amplifiers of offline activities [18,42]. In contrast, YouTube influencers gain popularity from creating online content [55]; therefore, they may have different manners to participate in an online movement like #TeamTrees. ...
... For example, the roles of the organizer, storyteller, and advocate in a Twitter social justice movement are highly tied to users' identities in real life [18]. The salience of participants' offline identities influenced the engagement in the Twitter disability march [42]. ...
YouTube is not only a platform for content creators to share videos but also a virtual venue for hosting community activities, such as social media campaigns (SMCs). SMCs for public awareness is a growing and reoccurring phenomenon on YouTube, during which content creators make videos to engage their audience and raise awareness of global challenges. However, how the unique celebrity culture on YouTube affects collective actions is an underexplored area. This work examines an SMC on YouTube, #TeamTrees, initiated by a YouTube celebrity and sought to raise people’s awareness of tree-planting and climate change. The authors annotated and analyzed 992 #TeamTrees videos to explore how YouTube celebrities, professionals, and amateurs in different channel topics diagnose problems, present solutions, and motivate actions. This study also looks into whether platform identities and framing activities affect campaign reach and engagement. Results suggest that #TeamTrees reached creators who are generally not active in social issues. The participating YouTubers were likely to motivate the viewers to donate and join celebrities’ and community’s actions, but less involved in examining the environmental problems. Celebrities’ videos dominated the campaign’s influence. Amateurs’ videos had a higher engagement level, although they need more support to frame campaign activities. Based on these findings, we discuss design implications for video-sharing platforms to support future SMCs.
... However, we found no engagement with them in any of these roles in the literature we covered, although they face many unique barriers to fulfill these roles. Some activism barriers for them mentioned in the activism literature in general are: (a) difficulties with physical access, such as access to protests and natural spaces where meetings were often held [123], (b) lack of accessible restrooms, inaccessible parking, no rest areas [95], (c) lack of accessible information, such as websites not being accessible to visually impaired participants, (d) lack of information relating to the accessibility of events, (e) financial and social barriers [123], and (f) barriers to online activism and protesting [95]. Although digital protest avenues, including online petitions and social media, represent new opportunities for persons with disabilities to become involved in activism, they also are not available to many persons with disabilities given that many persons with disabilities live in poverty and may not be able to utilize the technology that facilitates this way of action [95,117]. ...
... However, we found no engagement with them in any of these roles in the literature we covered, although they face many unique barriers to fulfill these roles. Some activism barriers for them mentioned in the activism literature in general are: (a) difficulties with physical access, such as access to protests and natural spaces where meetings were often held [123], (b) lack of accessible restrooms, inaccessible parking, no rest areas [95], (c) lack of accessible information, such as websites not being accessible to visually impaired participants, (d) lack of information relating to the accessibility of events, (e) financial and social barriers [123], and (f) barriers to online activism and protesting [95]. Although digital protest avenues, including online petitions and social media, represent new opportunities for persons with disabilities to become involved in activism, they also are not available to many persons with disabilities given that many persons with disabilities live in poverty and may not be able to utilize the technology that facilitates this way of action [95,117]. ...
... Some activism barriers for them mentioned in the activism literature in general are: (a) difficulties with physical access, such as access to protests and natural spaces where meetings were often held [123], (b) lack of accessible restrooms, inaccessible parking, no rest areas [95], (c) lack of accessible information, such as websites not being accessible to visually impaired participants, (d) lack of information relating to the accessibility of events, (e) financial and social barriers [123], and (f) barriers to online activism and protesting [95]. Although digital protest avenues, including online petitions and social media, represent new opportunities for persons with disabilities to become involved in activism, they also are not available to many persons with disabilities given that many persons with disabilities live in poverty and may not be able to utilize the technology that facilitates this way of action [95,117]. All these barriers should be engaged with in relation to children and youth with disabilities and environmental activism but are not according to our findings. ...
Youth environmental activism is on the rise. Children and youth with disabilities are disproportionally impacted by environmental problems and environmental activism. They also face barriers towards participating in activism, many of which might also apply to their participation in environmental activism. Using a scoping review approach, we investigated the engagement with children and youth with disabilities by (a) academic literature covering youth environmental activism and their groups and (b) youth environmental activism group (Fridays For Future) tweets. We downloaded 5536 abstracts from the 70 databases of EBSCO-HOST and Scopus and 340 Fridays For Future tweets and analyzed the data using directed qualitative content analysis. Of the 5536 abstracts, none covered children and youth with disabilities as environmental activists, the impact of environmental activism or environmental problems such as climate change on children and youth with disabilities. Fourteen indicated that environmental factors ‘caused’ the ‘impairments’ in children and youth with disabilities. One suggested that nature could be beneficial to children and youth with disabilities. The tweets did not mention children and youth with disabilities. Our findings suggest the need for more engagement with children and youth with disabilities in relation to youth environmental activism and environmental challenges.
... Twitter is increasingly used as a medium for advocacy, activism, and social change, but its efcacy is questionable [1,23,24,34]. The disability community, however, has embraced Twitter as a means for political participation, sharing daily encounters of inaccessible spaces [32], fostering discussions on voting [17], calling for a unifed identity [30], participating virtually in protests [31], and engaging people through artistic forms of activism [9]. Despite the value online platforms like Twitter have for the disability community [20], these platforms often have limited accessibility support [22]. ...
... We explores this question through a multifaceted study of the #HandsOfMyADA campaign against HR620, drawing from work on accessibility and activism [15,31,39] and measures of success for activism and advocacy in Twitter [23,49]. This study's goals are to: (a) explore how this paradigm shift in communication compares to historical disability rights movements in the US; (b) characterize the campaign in terms of hashtags, users, and other characteristics that contributed to dissemination of campaign messages; (c) identify major themes in the Twitter conversations and how they difer across the observed user groups; and (d) diferentiate the disability community's mobilization for this campaign versus prior Twitter initiatives. ...
... In the US, work from Bora et al. [4] found accessibility barriers involved with activities like rallies and protests have lead people within the disability community to rely on online platforms for advocacy, where they engage through uploading of photos or sharing of posts (though barriers exist in these online spaces as well). Recent work by Li et al. [31] around the virtual Disability March, which occurred in tandem with the 2017 Women's March in Washington, D.C., found participants used a variety of platforms for the march, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr, with the conversation unifed around the hashtag #DisabilityMarch. These fndings suggest online communities are helpful when activists with disabilities are looking to reach a broad audience and inspire collective action. ...
Twitter continues to be used increasingly for communication related advocacy, activism, and social change. This is also the case for the disability community. In light of the recently proposed ADA Education and Reform in the United States, we investigate factors for effectiveness of sharing or retweeting messages about topics affecting the rights of people
with disabilities. We perform a multifaceted study of the #HandsOfMyADA campaign against the proposed H.R.620 bill to: (1) explore how communication via Twitter compares to previous disability rights movements; (2) characterize the campaign in terms of hashtags, user groups, and content such as accessible multimedia that contribute to dissemination of
campaign messages; (3) identify major themes in tweets and responses, and their variation among user groups; and (4) understand how the disability community mobilized for this campaign compared to previous Twitter initiatives.
... Whether or not users experience awareness of platform algorithms, the algorithms can uphold existing systems of power and oppression and shape users' experiences, including construction and understanding of their own identities. Social media platforms are spaces for identity work for many marginalized people including LGBTQ individuals [20,39], Black individuals [15], and disabled people [48]. For instance, Brock presents Black Twitter and other Black online spaces as places for identity construction and increased understanding about the heterogeneous nature of Black identity [15]. ...
... Participants found community building and empowerment in the various identities presented by those posting photos as part of this movement [49]. Other identity-based social media movements include #SayHerName to create dialogue and bring attention to state-sanctioned violence against cisgender and trans-gender Black women [16], #MeToo to reduce stigma around disclosures of gender-based sexual violence [34], #DisabilityMarch [48], and #BlackLivesMatter in response to police brutality and its formation of a collective identity [65]. These prior works speak to the legacy of identity as part of resistance against bias on social media platforms. ...
Algorithms in online platforms interact with users' identities in different ways. However, little is known about how users understand the interplay between identity and algorithmic processes on these platforms, and if and how such understandings shape their behavior on these platforms in return. Through semi-structured interviews with 15 US-based TikTok users, we detail users' algorithmic folk theories of the For You Page algorithm in relation to two inter-connected identity types: person and social identity. Participants identified potential harms that can accompany algorithms' tailoring content to their person identities. Further, they believed the algorithm actively suppresses content related to marginalized social identities based on race and ethnicity, body size and physical appearance, ability status, class status, LGBTQ identity, and political and social justice group affiliation. We propose a new algorithmic folk theory of social feeds-The Identity Strainer Theory-to describe when users believe an algorithm filters out and suppresses certain social identities. In developing this theory, we introduce the concept of algorithmic privilege as held by users positioned to benefit from algorithms on the basis of their identities. We further propose the concept of algorithmic representational harm to refer to the harm users experience when they lack algorithmic privilege and are subjected to algorithmic symbolic annihilation. Additionally, we describe how participants changed their behaviors to shape their algorithmic identities to align with how they understood themselves, as well as to resist the suppression of marginalized social identities and lack of algorithmic privilege via individual actions, collective actions, and altering their performances. We theorize our findings to detail the ways the platform's algorithm and its users co-produce knowledge of identity on the platform. We argue the relationship between users' algorithmic folk theories and identity are consequential for social media platforms, as it impacts users' experiences, behaviors, sense of belonging, and perceived ability to be seen, heard, and feel valued by others as mediated through algorithmic systems.
... Social media has also hosted large-scale events in substitute of in-person protests to avoid many of their physically, environmentally, or socially inaccessible aspects. Li et al. [50] described how PWD took to online platforms to organize and participate in the 2017 Disability March which energized, empowered, and motivated self-change by attendees. Subsequent research examined Twitter usage by the campaign against legislation which would change the Americans with Disabilities Act [5]. ...
... In the fourth theme, Twitter was used as a platform for public advocacy [12,50]. Some tweeters tagged government ofcials and supermarkets with questions. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced institutions to rapidly alter their behavior, which typically has disproportionate negative effects on people with disabilities as accessibility is overlooked. To investigate these issues, we analyzed Twitter data to examine accessibility problems surfaced by the crisis. We identified three key domains at the intersection of accessibility and technology: (i) the allocation of product delivery services, (ii) the transition to remote education, and (iii) the dissemination of public health information. We found that essential retailers expanded their high-risk customer shopping hours and pick-up and delivery services, but individuals with disabilities still lacked necessary access to goods and services. Long-experienced access barriers to online education were exacerbated by the abrupt transition of in-person to remote instruction. Finally, public health messaging has been inconsistent and inaccessible, which is unacceptable during a rapidly-evolving crisis. We argue that organizations should create flexible, accessible technology and policies in calm times to be adaptable in times of crisis to serve individuals with diverse needs.
... En tant qu'élément de l'activité des participants, l'usage des TIC n'est pas un épiphénomène propre au projet. Il s'inscrit dans les représentations véhiculées dans la société concernant ces outils en tant qu'outil de participation sociale ou de mise en accessibilité des sociétés (Folcher, et Lompré, 2012 ;Li, Bora, Salvi et Brady, 2018 ;Yu, Goggin, Fisher et Li, 2019). Mais il faut noter que ces représentations sont liées à un imaginaire concernant auparavant l'informatique et aujourd'hui le numérique (Ben-Ahmed et al., 2014 ;Robert, 2016). ...
... Considérer le potentiel dynamique et interactif des TIC comme espace de médiation contribuerait à ne pas se centrer sur l'engagement comme cela peut être le cas lorsque la focale est sur la dimension organisationnelle ou de valorisation, mais de les aborder comme étant en eux-mêmes un espace de participation sociale (e.g. Li, Bora, Salvi et Brady, 2018). Il faut noter que cette représentation des TIC passe par des changements de pratiques et de représentations des usagers. ...
Reflexion about the interest of a virtual multilingual collaborative inclusive environment in a mediation-action-research
As part of an international collaborative study, a sense of living together based on respect for everyone developed. This resulted from discussions about diversity -as it appeared in various personal experiences-, thus raising the issue of accessibility. Choosing a digital medium for project dissemination led some participants to investigate the links between digital media and inclusion in terms of access to information, production of co-constructed resources but also dissemination. This contribution explores how a digital network intended for Deaf learners could participate in the implementation of an inclusive approach for other types of public.
... Next, we compared our potential list of questions to prior research studies belonging to the domains of human factors research, accessibility provisions, human-computer interaction, and L@S. We looked at papers in which interviews were the primary source of qualitative data (e.g., [5,13,25,40]). Finally, methodological resources were consulted (refer to [2]). ...
The emergence of the metaverse is being widely viewed as a revolutionary technology owing to a myriad of factors, particularly the potential to increase the accessibility of learning for students with disabilities. However, not much is yet known about the views and expectations of disabled students in this regard. The fact that the metaverse is still in its nascent stage exemplifies the need for such timely discourse. To bridge this important gap, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with 56 university students with disabilities in the United States and Hong Kong to understand their views and expectations concerning the future of metaverse-driven education. We have distilled student expectations into five thematic categories, referred to as the REEPS framework: Recognition, Empowerment, Engagement, Privacy, and Safety. Additionally, we have summarized the main design considerations in eight concise points. This paper is aimed at helping technology developers and policymakers plan ahead of time and improving the experiences of students with disabilities.
... According to the prior definition, "art activism" has shown the ability of art to function as the medium for social activism [100]. Despite the legal right to activism and protection against discrimination under the Rehabilitation Act (Section 504) [94], in-person activism poses additional barriers for people with disabilities as found by Li et al. [81]. In addition to the institutional barriers against activism, people with disabilities have to navigate additional physical and environmental accessibility challenges to effectively collectivize and protest against (disability) injustice. ...
Visual arts play an important role in cultural life and provide access to social heritage and self-enrichment, but most visual arts are inaccessible to blind people. Researchers have explored different ways to enhance blind people's access to visual arts (e.g., audio descriptions, tactile graphics). However, how blind people adopt these methods remains unknown. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 blind visual arts patrons to understand how they engage with visual artwork and the factors that influence their adoption of visual arts access methods. We further examined interview insights in a follow-up survey (N=220). We present: 1) current practices and challenges of accessing visual artwork in-person and online (e.g., Zoom tour), 2) motivation and cognition of perceiving visual arts (e.g., imagination), and 3) implications for designing visual arts access methods. Overall, our findings provide a roadmap for technology-based support for blind people's visual arts experiences.
... Although the interviewees acknowledged the general significance of physical presence in demonstrations, the extract above highlights their inaccessibility. Despite being critical around notions of normative embodiment, and explicitly taking such norms as the target of activism, the rhetoric of 'putting your body on the line' as a proper marker of an activist sometimes circulates around disability activism (Li et al. 2018). In Suvi's narration, being able to question this rhetoric did not call into question their role as activist. ...
By combining ideas from social movement theory with disability studies, this article unpacks how young disabled people navigate the cultural ideals of the activist and activism as they narrate their past and present experiences of disability activism. Five life history interviews of young disabled people are analysed in detail by deploying the idea of the ‘perfect standard of activist’. This allows taking into account the complexity of identifying as a disability activist. The findings indicate how the cultural ideals of activism and the figure of the activist are out of reach for young disabled people; as a result, they do not necessarily consider themselves as activists while still engaging in activism. The embodied standards of activism, and ways in which ableism frames these, provide a framework to think about young disabled people’s fluctuating activism and the different forms it might take.
... In the United States, Peng et al. analyze the online activism movement for Black Live Matters and show that online user behaviour is closely related to offline events: They find that discussions started shortly after instances of police violence persist longer than communications during normal times [33]. And for virtual marches, Li et al. show that identification with the rest of the protesters is a significant factor to join such protests [26]. However, social media's capacity to help mobilize or sustain a movement is not unlimited: A study [20] on a group of people with age ranging between 22 to 29 shows that social media merely provide a communication platform for already politically motivated users, but does not draw less motivated people into such discussions. ...
In this paper, we highlight the use of Instagram for social activism, taking 2019 Hong Kong protests as a case study. Instagram focuses on image content and provides users with few features to share or repost, limiting information propagation. Nevertheless, users who are politically active offline also share their activism on Instagram. We first evaluate the effect of protests on social media activity for protesters and non-protesters over two significant protests. Protesters' exposure to protest-related posts is much higher than non-protesters, and their network activity follows the protest schedule. They are also much more active on posts related to the protest that they participate in than the other protest. We then analyze the images posted by the users. Users predominantly use symbols related to protests and share personal thoughts on its primary actors. Users primarily share content to raise their network's awareness, and the content choice is directly affected by Instagram's intrinsic interaction modalities.
... This research has examined what motivates individuals to join, contribute to, and stay in online communities [35,44]. Scholars have noted the role of social identity in fostering participation in virtual spaces for social groups or interests core to users' identities [1,42,45,70]; interpersonal interactions in making participants feel welcome and heard [5]; and personal and/or social bonds in drawing individuals to communities [55]. Other motivations include information-seeking and information-sharing [31, 47], entertainment, and self-discovery [37]. ...
Many benefits of online communities---such as obtaining new information, opportunities, and social connections---increase with size. Thus, a "successful'' online community often evokes an image of hundreds of thousands of users, and practitioners and researchers alike have sought to devise methods to achieve growth and thereby, success. On the other hand, small online communities exist in droves and many persist in their smallness over time. Turning to the highly popular discussion website Reddit, which is made up of hundreds of thousands of communities, we conducted a qualitative interview study examining how and why people participate in these persistently small communities, in order to understand why these communities exist when popular approaches would assume them to be failures. Drawing from twenty interviews, this paper makes several contributions: we describe how small communities provide unique informational and interactional spaces for participants, who are drawn by the hyperspecific aspects of the community; we find that small communities do not promote strong dyadic interpersonal relationships but rather promote group-based identity; and we highlight how participation in small communities is part of a broader, ongoing strategy to curate participants' online experience. We argue that online communities can be seen as nested niches: parts of an embedded, complex, symbiotic socio-informational ecosystem. We suggest ways that social computing research could benefit from more deliberate considerations of interdependence between diverse scales of online community sizes.
... The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities [79] and the United Nations 2018 Flagship Report on Disability and Development: Realization of the Sustainable Development Goals by, for, and with Persons with Disabilities [80] are just two documents that outline the systemic societal disablism disabled people face, all of which could be targets of engagement for disabled artists and their work. Although it is recognized that disabled people have had a long history as activists within society [81][82][83], it is also recognized that disabled people face many unique barriers to their role as activists [84][85][86][87][88][89]. One of the unique barriers for disabled people of being activists is that the perception of disabled people follows a medical imagery, meaning that they are engaged within the context of medical narratives and medical problems, and therefore are often not seen as being im-pacted or as having a vested interest in a given societal topic or social problem [88,90]. ...
Artists and the arts have many different roles in society. Artists also have various roles in relation to science and technology, ranging from being users of science and technology products to being educators for science and technologies, such as in museums. Artists are also involved in science and technology governance and ethics discussions. Disabled people are also artists and produce art, and disabled people in general and disabled artists are impacted by science and technology advancements. As such, disabled artists should also engage with science and technology, as well as contribute and influence science and technology governance, ethics discussions, and science and technology education with their work. We performed a scoping study of academic literature using the 70 databases of EBSCO-HOST and the database SCOPUS (includes Medline) to investigate the social role narrative of disabled artists and both their work in general and in relation to science and technology. Our findings suggest that disabled artists are mostly engaged in the context of becoming and being a disabled artist. Beyond the work itself, the identity issue of ‘being disabled’ was a focus of the coverage of being a disabled artist. The literature covered did not provide in-depth engagement with the social role of disabled artists, their work, and the barriers encountered, and best practices needed to fulfil the social roles found in the literature for non-disabled artists and the arts. Finally, the literature covered contained little content on the relationship of disabled artists and advancements of science and technology, such as in their role of using advancements of science and technologies for making art. No content at all was found that would link disabled artists and their work to the science and technology governance and ethics discussions, and no content linking disabled artists to being educators on science and technology issues, for example, in museums was found.
... This research has examined what motivates individuals to join, contribute to, and stay in online communities [35,44]. Scholars have noted the role of social identity in fostering participation in virtual spaces for social groups or interests core to users' identities [1,42,45,70]; interpersonal interactions in making participants feel welcome and heard [5]; and personal and/or social bonds in drawing individuals to communities [55]. Other motivations include information-seeking and information-sharing [31,47], entertainment, and self-discovery [37]. ...
Many benefits of online communities---such as obtaining new information, opportunities, and social connections---increase with size. Thus, a ``successful'' online community often evokes an image of hundreds of thousands of users, and practitioners and researchers alike have sought to devise methods to achieve growth and thereby, success. On the other hand, small online communities exist in droves and many persist in their smallness over time. Turning to the highly popular discussion website Reddit, which is made up of hundreds of thousands of communities, we conducted a qualitative interview study examining how and why people participate in these persistently small communities, in order to understand why these communities exist when popular approaches would assume them to be failures. Drawing from twenty interviews, this paper makes several contributions: we describe how small communities provide unique informational and interactional spaces for participants, who are drawn by the hyperspecific aspects of the community; we find that small communities do not promote strong dyadic interpersonal relationships but rather promote group-based identity; and we highlight how participation in small communities is part of a broader, ongoing strategy to curate participants' online experience. We argue that online communities can be seen as nested niches: parts of an embedded, complex, symbiotic socio-informational ecosystem. We suggest ways that social computing research could benefit from more deliberate considerations of interdependence between diverse scales of online community sizes.
... The remaining communities of focus each accounted for under 10% of papers, including people with cognitive impairments (9.1%, N=46), older adults (8.9%, N=45), autism (6.1%, N=31), and IDD (2.8%, N=14). Additionally, 9.1% (N=46) of papers aimed to address the disability community in general, including investigations of assistive technology [135], interviews with disability activists [91], and accessibility adherence/knowledge across professions [106,123]. The code "other" was also applied to 9.1% (N=46) of papers, of which 20 had no additional code; further analysis revealed that these 20 focused primarily on color vision accessibility (N=7), such as work by Flatla et al. [41,96], in addition to mental health [127,163], special education [89], and learning disability topics more generally [25,126]. ...
Accessibility research has grown substantially in the past few decades, yet there has been no literature review of the field. To understand current and historical trends, we created and analyzed a dataset of accessibility papers appearing at CHI and ASSETS since ASSETS' founding in 1994. We qualitatively coded areas of focus and methodological decisions for the past 10 years (2010-2019, N=506 papers), and analyzed paper counts and keywords over the full 26 years (N=836 papers). Our findings highlight areas that have received disproportionate attention and those that are underserved--for example, over 43% of papers in the past 10 years are on accessibility for blind and low vision people. We also capture common study characteristics, such as the roles of disabled and nondisabled participants as well as sample sizes (e.g., a median of 13 for participant groups with disabilities and older adults). We close by critically reflecting on gaps in the literature and offering guidance for future work in the field.
... On Twitter, groups of disability advocates have convened around hashtags like #CripTheVote [6] and #HandsOfMyADA [1] to organize political support of disability legislation. Online activism also can be a more accessible outlet for political advocacy than physical marches or protests, so people with a disability may turn to virtual activism more often [15]. Social media platforms are also a place to seek social support online about accessibility barriers and solutions [16]. ...
Social media platforms are deeply ingrained in society, and they offer many different spaces for people to engage with others. Unfortunately, accessibility barriers prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in these spaces. Social media users commonly post inaccessible media, including videos without captions (which are important for people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing) and images without alternative text (descriptions read aloud by screen readers for people who are blind). Users with motor impairments must find workarounds to deal with the complex user interfaces of these platforms, and users with cognitive disabilities may face barriers to composing and sharing information.
We invited accessibility researchers, industry practitioners, and end-users with disabilities to come together at the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work conference (CSCW 2019) to discuss challenges and solutions for improving social media accessibility. Over the course of a day that included two panels and breakout sessions, the workshop attendees outlined four critical future research directions to progress on the path to accessible social media: tooling to support disabled people authoring content, developing more accessible formats/tools for new forms of interaction (e.g, Augmented and Mixed Reality), using communities to distribute accessibility labor, and ensuring machine learning systems are built on representative datasets for disability use-cases.
... On Twiter, groups of disability advocates have convened around hashtags like #CripTheVote [5] and #HandsOfMyADA [1] to organize political support of disability legislation. Online activism also can be a more accessible outlet for political advocacy than physical marches or protests, so people with a disability may turn to virtual activism more ofen [12]. These platforms are also a place to seek social support online about accessibility barriers and solutions [13]. ...
Social media platforms are deeply ingrained in society, and they ofer many diferent spaces for people to engage with others. Unfortunately, accessibility barriers prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in these spaces. Social media users commonly post inaccessible media, including videos without captions (which are important for people who are deaf or hard of hearing) and images without alternative text (descriptions read aloud by screen readers for people who are blind). Users with motor
... This process can be collaborative as people work together to make sense of identity for themselves or reconstruct collective identity in an effort to change public perceptions. Studies of identity work have explored the uses of social media by a number of groups, including those undergoing gender transitions [30], first-time fathers [1], underprivileged college students [64], transnational migrants [54], and disability rights activists [53]. Beyond scholarship focusing on individual identity work, Schwalbe examined subcultural identity work as a group process, suggesting how identity work can be understood as part of a process of cultural struggle [79]. ...
We examine how and why Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) moderators on Reddit shape the norms of their online communities through the analytic lens of emotional labor. We conduct interviews with 21 moderators who facilitate identity work discourse in AAPI subreddits and present a thematic analysis of their moderation practices. We report on their challenges to sustaining moderation, which include burning out from volunteer work, navigating hierarchical structures, and balancing unfulfilled expectations. We then describe strategies that moderators employ to manage emotional labor, which involve distancing away from drama, building solidarity from shared struggles, and integrating an ecology of tools for self-organized moderation. We provide recommendations for improving moderation in online communities centered around identity work and discuss implications of emotional labor in the design of Reddit and similar platforms.
... First, prior HCI research highlights that participation in and outcomes based on online and digital efforts for social change take on substantially different forms. For example, Li and Brady tackle the trope of online participation as only "slacktivism" to examine how online spaces allow for different types of participation that may challenge traditional definitions of activism [51]. Similarly, Asad et al. 's work demonstrates how housing justice activists use social media and mobile communication technologies to draw broader attention to housing inequality, to recruit would-be allies, and to garner social support for the movement [2]. ...
Drawing from fieldwork of 14 small food farms in the Midwest, we describe the on-the-ground, practical challenges of doing and communicating sustainability when local food production is not well-supported. We illustrate how farmers enact learned and honed tactics of sustainability at key sites such as farmers' markets and the Internet with consumers. These tactics reveal tensions with dominant discourse from government, Big Ag, and popular culture. The success of these tactics depends on farmers having fortitude--control, resilience, and the wherewithal to be exemplars of sustainability. In our discussion, we highlight how the local farmers' social movement work constitutes loosely organized small groups connecting others to an amorphous idea of a sustainable society--one that sustains an environmental, economic, local, cultural, and physical way of life. Using Fine's concept of tiny publics, we identify design opportunities for supporting this less directed kind of social movement.
... The Disability March was a blog and social media platform where disabled women and their allies could asynchronously share stories of resistance against misogynist and ableist structures in society. Building on prior work [26], we present the Disability March as an example of collective action that embodies the major concepts of interdependence. ...
In this paper, we describe interdependence for assistive technology design, a frame developed to complement the traditional focus on independence in the Assistive Technology field. Interdependence emphasizes collaborative access and people with disabilities' important and often understated contribution in these efforts. We lay the foundation of this frame with literature from the academic discipline of Disability Studies and popular media contributed by contemporary disability justice activists. Then, drawing on cases from our own work, we show how the interdependence frame (1) synthesizes findings from a growing body of research in the Assistive Technology field and (2) helps us orient to additional technology design opportunities. We position interdependence as one possible orientation to, not a prescription for, research and design practice--one that opens new design possibilities and affirms our commitment to equal access for people with disabilities.
Research in accessibility and assistive technology often assumes that technology is within easy reach, that is, people with disabilities are able to obtain technologies so long as they are accessible. As a result, less is understood about the challenges that people with disabilities face in obtaining technology in the first place and how they work around these challenges. We reduce this gap by examining the technology access challenges of people with visual impairments in India in the context of digital banking. Through a qualitative study consisting of 30 interviews, we find that participants routinely encountered social and technical challenges that made it difficult to access and use digital banking. To address these challenges, people with visual impairments engaged in advocacy work which consisted of five dimensions: 1) creating awareness, 2) demonstrating competence, 3) escalation, 4) gathering support, and 5) seeking sighted help. We expand on the idea of advocacy as a form of access work performed by people with visual impairments to secure and maintain access to digital banking.
Calling out, a phenomenon where people publicly broadcast their critiques of someone to a larger audience using, has become increasingly common on social media. However, there has been concerns that it could develop into harassment, deteriorating the quality of public discourse by over-punishing individuals for minor transgressions. To investigate this phenomenon, we interviewed 32 Twitter users who had been called out, had called out, or had witnessed a calling out on Twitter. We found that a key determining factor that distinguishes criticism from harassment was the callee's ability to respond to or engage with the criticism, and that different stakeholders hold different perspectives toward how online harassment is defined. We also discovered that the distinction between callers and callees was not absolute, and that there was high interchangeability of roles both within and across events. Through these findings, we discuss design implications for the platform in promoting healthy discourse while preventing toxic behavior on social media.
This study focuses on the experiences of disabled individuals in online activism in the context of China. Adopting the social model of disability, this study found an iceberg structure consisting of two levels and three layers. The explicit level included observed labels, attitudes and legislation. The implicit level involved both social and internalized stereotypes. These three layers of social structures interacted with each other and together brought about social exclusion into being. Adopting the social model as an organizing principle represents a starting point to alter social patterns and possibly change social isolation.
In this mixed methods study of a grassroots racial justice movement, Justice for Antwon Rose II (J4A), we analyze framing processes which we contextualize within the movement’s communication ecosystem. We find J4A framing processes to be hybrid, evolving through a combination of online and offline interactions and strategic and discursive processes. J4A engaged in three types of hybrid framing processes: strategic, discursive, and frame transmission. Due largely to concerns about safety and surveillance, J4A made limited use of Twitter, instead using secure messenger applications and pre-established networks of trust. Using social network analysis, we analyzed the growth of the J4A network and diffusion of movement frames on Twitter. We find a paucity of interaction between activists on Twitter, and instead find a core network of local journalists, suggesting the shifting role of Twitter in grassroots movements.
Negative attitudes shape experiences with stigmatized conditions such as dementia, from affecting social relationships to influencing willingness to adopt technology. Consequently, attitudinal change has been identified as one lever to improve life for people with stigmatized conditions. Though recognized as a scaleable approach, social media has not been studied in terms of how it should best be designed or deployed to target attitudes and understanding of dementia. Through a mixed methods design with 123 undergraduate college students, we study the effect of being exposed to dementia-related media, including content produced by people with dementia. We selected undergraduate college students as the target of our intervention, as they represent the next generation that will work and interact with individuals with dementia. Our analysis describes changes over the period of two weeks in attitudes and understanding of the condition. The shifts in understanding of dementia that we found in our qualitative analysis were not captured by the instrument we selected to assess understanding of dementia. While small improvements in positive and overall attitudes were seen across all interventions and the control, we observe a different pattern with negative attitudes, where transcriptions of content produced by people with dementia significantly reduced negative attitudes. The discussion presents implications for supporting people with dementia as content producers, doing so in ways that best affect attitudes and understanding by drawing on research on cues and interactive media, and supporting students in changing their perspectives towards people with dementia.
Social media provides marginalized activists multiple options for constructing alternative narratives that challenge mainstream discourse. However, despite these platforms’ increasing accessibility, disabled activists may struggle in creating their counter-narrative. Their inability to conform to able-bodied notions of activism leaves their individual experiences out of the discussion of social media activism. This paper addresses this gap by presenting the individual decision-making process of disabled social media users regarding activists’ performances in social media as gleaned from the qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews. This process includes three phases that demonstrate the experiences of social media users with communicative concealable disabilities – autistics, hard-of-hearing (HoH), and people who stutter. First, these interviewees present a spectrum of perceptions of disability activism in social media. Second, these perceptions lead to a spectrum of motivations, which mirror the interviewees’ various risk-benefit calculations regarding public self-disclosure as disabled. Third, these perceptions and motivations are manifested through interviewees’ strategic design of their activist performances in private and public spheres. By rethinking key concepts in social media activism – risk-benefit calculation, slacktivism, and digital storytelling – this process illustrates taken-for-granted assumptions of personalization, visibility and representation, that challenge current discussions on social media activism.
Social Networking Sites (SNS) provide a platform for engaging youth in activism (e.g., by helping mobilize civic action). While youth typically employ casual approaches to online activism (i.e., quick actions, such as broadcast posts to advertise social justice events), more strategic practices (i.e., those that are more creative and informed) can increase the likelihood of successful online campaigns. However, little work has examined how youth activists can be supported to use SNS more strategically. To address this research gap, we conducted interviews with youth activists, exploring how youth made sense of social network visualizations and their perspectives on how such tools could support their activism efforts. Our findings characterize how participants made inferences about followers? identities based on their hashtag use, and how they used those inferences in outreach decisions. We conclude with design implications for future research in this area.
Both hashtag activists and news organizations assume that trending political hashtags effectively capture the nowness of social issues that people care about [20]. In fact, news organizations with growing social media presence increasingly capitalize the use of political hashtags in article headlines and social media news post-a practice aimed to generate new readership through lightweight news consumption of content by linking a particular story to a broader topic [28]. However, response to political hashtags can be complicated as demonstrated with the events surrounding #MeToo and #BlackLivesMa"er. In fact, the semantic simplicity of political hashtags o#en belies the complexities around the question of who gets to participate [71], what intersectional identities are included or excluded from the hashtag [45], as well as how the meaning of the hashtag expands and dri#s [10] depending on the context through which it is expressed. Overtime, reports show increasing backlash [70, 73, 74] and polarization [21, 52, 66, 67, 70] against key issues embodied by political hashtags. In this vein, we assume that political hashtags affect how people make sense of and engage with media content. However, we do not know how the presence of political hashtags-signaling that a news story is related to a current social issue-influences the assumptions potential readers make about the social content of an article. In this work we conducted a randomized control experiment to examine how the presence of political hashtags (particularly the most prevalently used #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter) in social media news posts shape reactions across a general audience (n=1979). Our findings show that compared to the control group, people shown news posts with political hashtags perceive the news topic as less socially important and are less motivated to know more about social issues related to the post. People also find the news more partisan and controversial when hashtags are included. In fact, negative perception associated with political hashtags (partisan bias & topic controversy) mediates people's motivation to further engage with the news content). High-intensity Facebook users and politically moderate participants perceive news with political hashtags as more partisan compared to posts excluding hashtags. There are also significant differences in discourse patterns between the hashtag and control groups around how politically moderate respondents engage with the news content in their comments.
From the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement, social media has been instrumental in driving and supporting socio-political movements throughout the world. In this paper, we present one of the first social media investigations of an activist movement around racial discrimination and police violence, known as "Black Lives Matter". Considering Twitter as a sensor for the broader community's perception of the events related to the movement, we study participation over time, the geographical differences in this participation, and its relationship to protests that unfolded on the ground. We find evidence for continued participation across four temporally separated events related to the movement, with notable changes in engagement and language over time. We also find that participants from regions of historically high rates of black victimization due to police violence tend to express greater negativity and make more references to loss of life. Finally, we observe that social media attributes of affect, behavior and language can predict future protest participation on the ground. We discuss the role of social media in enabling collective action around this unique movement and how social media platforms may help understand perceptions on a socially contested and sensitive issue like race.
Live streaming platforms bring events from all around the world to people's computing devices. We conducted a mixed methods study including interviews (N = 42) and a survey (N = 223) to understand how people currently experience events using Facebook Live, Periscope, and Snapchat Live Stories. We identified four dimensions that make remote event viewing engaging: immersion, immediacy, interaction, and sociality. We find that both live streams and the more curated event content found on Snapchat are immersive and immediate, yet Snapchat Live Stories enable quickly switching among different views of the event. Live streams, on the other hand, offer real time interaction and sociality in a way that Snapchat Live Stories do not. However, the interaction's impact depends on comment volume, comment content, and relationship between viewer and broadcaster. We describe how people experience events remotely using these social media, and identify design opportunities around detecting exciting content, leveraging multiple viewpoints, and enabling interactivity to create engaging user experiences for remotely participating in events.
Ageism is a pervasive, and often invisible, form of discrimination. Though it can affect people of all ages, older adults in particular face age-related stereotypes and bias in their everyday lives. In this paper, we describe the ways in which older bloggers articulate a collective narrative on ageism as it appears in their lives, develop a community with anti-ageist interests, and discuss strategies to navigate and change societal views and institutions. Bloggers criticize stereotypical notions that focus exclusively on losses that occur with age and advocate a view that takes into account the complexity and positive aspects of older adulthood. This paper contributes a unique case of online collective action among older adults while drawing on their online discourse as a way of understanding what ageism means for CSCW.
Despite the participatory and democratic promises of Web 2.0, many marginalized individuals with fluid or non-normative identities continue to struggle to represent themselves online. Facebook users, in particular, are told to use "authentic identities," an idea reinforced throughout the site's documentation, "real name" and other policies, and in public statements by company representatives. Facebook's conception of authenticity and real names, however, has created problems for certain users, as demonstrated by the systematic deactivation of many accounts belonging to transgender and gender variant users, drag queens, Native Americans, abuse survivors, and others. In view of the struggles of marginalized users, Facebook policy appears paradoxical: the site simultaneously demands authenticity yet proscribes certain people from authentic self-presentation. In this work, we examine Facebook's construction of "authenticity" and show how it excludes multifaceted, fluid, or non-normative identities. Using content analysis and close reading, we analyze site documentation and data from The Zuckerberg Files (an online archive of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's public remarks) to understand the platform's mechanisms for enforcing authenticity. We find that Facebook positions itself as a type of administrative identity registrar, raising vital questions regarding the ethics and consequences of identity enforcement online today.
From the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement, social media has been instrumental in driving and supporting socio-political movements throughout the world. In this paper, we present one of the first social media investigations of an activist movement around racial discrimination and police violence , known as " Black Lives Matter ". Considering Twit-ter as a sensor for the broader community's perception of the events related to the movement, we study participation over time, the geographical differences in this participation, and its relationship to protests that unfolded on the ground. We find evidence for continued participation across four temporally separated events related to the movement, with notable changes in engagement and language over time. We also find that participants from regions of historically high rates of black victimization due to police violence tend to express greater negativity and make more references to loss of life. Finally, we observe that social media attributes of affect, behavior and language can predict future protest participation on the ground. We discuss the role of social media in enabling collective action around this unique movement and how social media platforms may help understand perceptions on a socially contested and sensitive issue like race.
Digital artifacts on social media can challenge individuals during identity transitions, particularly those who prefer to delete, separate from, or hide data that are representative of a past identity. This work investigates concerns and practices reported by transgender people who transitioned while active on Facebook. We analyze open-ended survey responses from 283 participants, highlighting types of data considered problematic when separating oneself from a past identity, and challenges and strategies people engage in when managing personal data in a networked environment. We find that people shape their digital footprints in two ways: by editing the self-presentational data that is representative of a prior identity, and by managing the configuration of people who have access to that self-presentation. We outline the challenging interplay between shifting identities, social networks, and the data that suture them together. We apply these results to a discussion of the complexities of managing and forgetting the digital past.
In social psychology, we need to establish a general theory of the self, which can attend to both macro and micro processes, and which avoids the redundancies of separate theories on different aspects of the self. For this purpose, we present core components of identity theory and social identity theory and argue that although differences exist between the two theories, they are more differences in emphasis than in kind, and that linking the two theories can establish a more fully integrated view of the self. The core components we examine include the different bases of identity (category/group or role) in each of the theories, identity salience and the activation of identities as discussed in the theories, and the cognitive and motivational processes that emerge from identities based on category/group and on role. By examining the self through the lens of both identity theory and social identity theory, we see how, in combination, they can move us toward a general theory of the self.
Prior research offers competing predictions regarding whether an initial token display of support for a cause (such as wearing a ribbon, signing a petition, or joining a Facebook group) subsequently leads to increased and otherwise more meaningful contributions to the cause. The present research proposes a conceptual framework elucidating two primary motivations that underlie subsequent helping behavior: a desire to present a positive image to others and a desire to be consistent with one’s own values. Importantly, the socially observable nature (public vs. private) of initial token support is identified as a key moderator that influences when and why token support does or does not lead to meaningful support for the cause. Consumers exhibit greater helping on a subsequent, more meaningful task after providing an initial private (vs. public) display of token support for a cause. Finally, the authors demonstrate how value alignment and connection to the cause moderate the observed effects.
CSCW systems are playing an increasing role in activism. How can new communications technologies support social movements? The possibilities are intriguing, but as yet not fully understood. One key technique traditionally leveraged by social movements is storytelling. In this paper, we examine the use of collective storytelling online in the context of a social movement organization called Hollaback, an organization working to stop street harassment. Can sharing a story of experienced harassment really make a difference to an individual or a community? Using Emancipatory Action Research and qualitative methods, we interviewed people who contributed stories of harassment online. We found that sharing stories shifted participants' cognitive and emotional orientation towards their experience. The theory of "framing" from social movement research explains the surprising power of this experience for Hollaback participants. We contribute a way of looking at activism online using social movement theory. Our work illustrates that technology can help crowd-sourced framing processes that have traditionally been done by social movement organizations.
In this paper we explore how the decision of partaking in low-cost, low-risk online activism - slacktivism - \'14may affect subsequent civic action. Based on moral balancing and consistency effects, we designed an online experiment to test if signing or not signing an online petition increased or decreased subsequent contribution to a charity. We found that participants who signed the online petition were significantly more likely to donate money to a related charity, demonstrating a consistency effect. We also found that participants who did not sign the petition donated significantly more money to an unrelated charity, demonstrating a moral balancing effect. The results suggest that exposure to an online activism influences individual decision on subsequent civic actions.
We analyze practices of political activists in a Palestinian village located in the West Bank. Activists organize weekly demonstrations against Israel’s settlement policy and the separation wall. Over a period of 28 months, we conducted a field study consisting of eight days ‘on the ground’ observation and interviewing, and extensive monitoring of Internet communication. We describe the activists’ background and their efforts to organize these demonstrations under conditions of military occupation. Over time, we observe the role both digital and material factors play in the organization of protest. Specifically, we analyze how Email and Facebook were appropriated to facilitate interaction ‘on the ground’.
This paper provides a documentation and discussion of the diverse experiences that different disabled people have with regards to access in the built environment. It begins by outlining the various ways in which disabled people's access needs and requirements are articulated in public policies and practices towards the development and regulation of the built environment. As the material indicates, disabled people's needs are poorly articulated and/or represented in the design and development of the built environment while the regulatory controls which oversee disabled people's access are weak. In the second part of the paper, disabled people's values, attitudes and practices towards access in the built environment are discussed by referring to the findings of focus group research. The material shows that many disabled people feel estranged and oppressed by facets of the built environment and generally feel powerless to do anything about it. We conclude by suggesting a number of ways of interconnecting the design and implementation of public policy towards the built environment with the daily lived experiences of disabled people.
Social psychologists currently conceptualize self as composed of many parts; often they visualize the parts as organized hierarchically by differences in salience or psychological centrality. We ask whether these concepts are equivalent, overlapping, or independent, and whether one concept ''works'' better in an identity theory context. Models relating commitment to role relations to salience and centrality, and salience and centrality to time spent in role, are estimated for four roles and identities related to university students. Results show that identity salience and centrality are independent for some roles, but overlap for others. When they are independent, both are predicted by commitment and both predict time in role, although salience ''works'' somewhat better in these terms. When they overlap, considerable commonality is present in the variance of time in role they explain. Salience again links somewhat better to commitment and time in role, but centrality again contributes to explaining time in role. This study considers when salience and centrality overlap in impact and when they do not, but no clear answer is at hand. Until an answer is available, researchers would be well advised to incorporate both salience and centrality into their designs.
Many observers doubt the capacity of digital media to change the political game. The rise of a transnational activism that is aimed beyond states and directly at corporations, trade and development regimes offers a fruitful area for understanding how communication practices can help create a new politics. The Internet is implicated in the new global activism far beyond merely reducing the costs of communication, or transcending the geographical and temporal barriers associated with other communication media. Various uses of the Internet and digital media facilitate the loosely structured networks, the weak identity ties, and the patterns of issue and demonstration organizing that define a new global protest politics. Analysis of various cases shows how digital network configurations can facilitate: permanent campaigns; the growth of broad networks despite relatively weak social identity and ideology ties; transformation of individual member organizations and whole networks; and the capacity to communicate messages from desktops to television screens. The same qualities that make these communication-based politics durable also make them vulnerable to problems of control, decision-making and collective identity.
Human behaviour is thought to spread through face-to-face social networks, but it is difficult to identify social influence effects in observational studies, and it is unknown whether online social networks operate in the same way. Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people. Furthermore, the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users' friends, and friends of friends. The effect of social transmission on real-world voting was greater than the direct effect of the messages themselves, and nearly all the transmission occurred between 'close friends' who were more likely to have a face-to-face relationship. These results suggest that strong ties are instrumental for spreading both online and real-world behaviour in human social networks.
The impact of the Internet on political participation has been a debated issue in recent decades. Internet activities have been criticized for being slacktivism, where the real life impact of the activities is limited; the main effect is to enhance the feel-good factor for participants. This article examines whether this accusation is valid. It does so by examining two aspects of Internet campaigns: Whether they are effective in affecting real-life political decisions, and whether Internet activism substitutes traditional forms of off-line participation. Although it is not possible to determine a consistent impact of Internet campaigns on real-life decisions, there is no evidence of the substitution thesis. If anything, the Internet has a positive impact on off-line mobilization. Accordingly, there is little evidence to support the accusation of Internet campaigns being slacktivism. It is at worst harmless fun and can at best help invigorate citizens.
Few research studies focus on how the use of assistive technologies is affected by social interaction among people. We present an interview study of 20 individuals to determine how assistive technology use is affected by social and professional contexts and interactions. We found that specific assistive devices sometimes marked their users as having disabilities; that functional access took priority over feeling self-conscious when using assistive technologies; and that two misperceptions pervaded assistive technology use: (1) that assistive devices could functionally eliminate a disability, and (2) that people with disabilities would be helpless without their devices. Our findings provide further evidence that accessibility should be built into mainstream technologies. When this is not feasible, assistive devices should incorporate cutting edge technologies and strive to be designed for social acceptability, a new design approach we propose here.
Disability legislation acknowledges the right of people with disabilities to participate in political and public life on an equal basis with others, but there continue to be significant barriers in accessing all aspects of the policymaking process. Advocacy and technology are two core strategies used by the disability community to advance the rights of people with disabilities. Further understanding of how these strategies and tools empower people with disabilities to connect with government is needed. This research seeks to develop and enhance civic knowledge and practices of people with disabilities by conducting civic engagement training and evaluation and examining the role of four disability advocacy organizations. Using qualitative and quantitative data, the research explores the inclusion and participation of people with disabilities in civic society, with a focus on advocacy and technology.
In the digital age, social media has become a popular venue for nonprofit organizations to advocate for causes and promote social change. The 2016 United States Presidential Election occurred amidst divisive public opinions and political uncertainties for immigrants and immigration policies were a frequently-contested debate focus. Thus, this election provided an opportunity to examine nonprofit organizations' social media usage during political conflicts. We analyzed social media posts by immigrant-focused nonprofit organizations and conducted interviews probing into how they managed their online presence and social relations. This study finds that these nonprofit organizations adopted three key strategies to support their target community: 1) disseminating content about immigration-related issues and policies; 2) calling for participation in collective endeavors to influence the political climate; 3) engaging in conversations with outside stakeholders including political actors, media, and other organizations. We use empowerment theory, which has been used widely to study marginalized populations, as a theoretical lens to discuss how NPOs' social media usage on Twitter reflects their endeavors to bring information and calls to action to immigrant communities. We, then, present design opportunities to amplify the advantages of social media to help nonprofit organizations better serve their communities in times of political upheavals.
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.
Citizens can be active in their community through a diverse set of actions in real life or on online platforms. Since the emergence of the Internet, there has been continual debate about the impact of online activism on real-life activism: whilst some claim that “clictivism” creates the false sense of making a difference, and undermines real life activities, others say it actually fosters it. We therefore explored the relationship between online and offline activism, covering a range of engagement levels in eight different domains. Every offline activity had its online counterpart. The results draw from a probability sample of 1023 participants from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H), Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo aged between 13 and 18 years. A unidimensional model fit the data better than a two dimensional model, suggesting that one factor underlies both online and offline forms of civic action. Our data demonstrate that online and offline activisms are not independent constructs, and that offline activism does not constrain online activism and vice versa. The two combine in a new, so called “hybrid activism”, comprised of very different forms of offline and online actions.
Social media platforms are existing online spaces where users share their daily encounters, providing a large dataset of photographs of inaccessible environments. We analyzed 100 posts from Twitter and Instagram that describe accessibility problems. Our findings suggest these posts are helpful to locate, identify and communicate accessibility problems, and provide design ideas for potential assistive technologies. We suggest design implications using social media posts to improve physical accessibility.
Social media are now inextricably intertwined with the political behaviour of ordinary citizens. As people go about their daily lives on an ever-changing cast of web-based platforms, they are invited to make 'micro-donations' of time and effort to political causes: liking, sharing, tweeting, retweeting, following, uploading, downloading, signing petitions and so on, which extend the ladder of participation at the lower end and draw new people into politics, particularly in younger age groups. These 'tiny acts' of political participation can scale up to large mobilizations. The overwhelming majority fail, but some succeed rapidly and dramatically through a series of chain reactions and tipping points.
Social media is an increasingly important part of modern life. We investigate the use of and usability of Twitter by blind users, via a combination of surveys of blind Twitter users, large-scale analysis of tweets from and Twitter profiles of blind and sighted users, and analysis of tweets containing embedded imagery. While Twitter has traditionally been thought of as the most accessible social media platform for blind users, Twitter's increasing integration of image content and users' diverse uses for images have presented emergent accessibility challenges. Our findings illuminate the importance of the ability to use social media for people who are blind, while also highlighting the many challenges such media currently present this user base, including difficulty in creating profiles, in awareness of available features and settings, in controlling revelations of one's disability status, and in dealing with the increasing pervasiveness of image-based content. We propose changes that Twitter and other social platforms should make to promote fuller access to users with visual impairments.
Bosnia-Herzegovina and its administrative unit or "entity", Republika Srpska are divided, transitional post-war societies. The aim of this paper is to present a preliminary analysis of regional activists' use of information and communication technology (ICT) and to identify improvement potential. Empirical investigations of social media use and qualitative interviews with the country's activists indicate strong interest in ICT. Benefits for the use of ICT by activists include more efficient access to their target group, easier information sharing with the general population, and quicker reaction to spontaneous "offline" activities. Simultaneously, data points to problems such as limited budgets and know-how, intensive outsourcing practices, and a significant lack of awareness regarding data security. Activists see improvement potential in areas of training on content optimization, campaign management, ICT use and maintenance, security, and privacy. Additionally, there is potential to improve upon the sustainability of activist's work and patterns related to their ICT outsourcing.
In recent decades, great technological strides have been made toward enabling people who are blind to live independent, successful lives. However, there has been relatively little progress towards understanding the social, collaborative needs of this population, particularly in the domestic setting. We conducted semi-structured interviews in the homes of 10 pairs of close companions in which one partner was blind and one was not. We found that partners engaged in collaborative accessibility by taking active roles in co-creating an accessible environment. Due to their different visual abilities, however, partners sometimes encountered difficulties managing divergent needs and engaging in shared experiences. We describe outstanding challenges to creating accessible shared home spaces and outline new research and technology opportunities for supporting collaborative accessibility in the home.
E-petitioning has become one of the most important and popular forms of online activism. Although e-petition success is driven by user behavior, users have received relatively little study by HCI and social computing researchers. Drawing from theoretical and empirical work in analogous social computing systems, we identify two potentially competing theories about the trajectories of users in e-petition platforms: (1) "power" users in social computing systems are born, not made; and (2) users mature into "power" users. In a quantitative analysis of data from Change.org, one of the largest online e-petition platforms, we test and find support for both theories. A follow-up qualitative analysis shows that not only do users learn from their experience, systems also "learn" from users to make better recommendations. In this sense, we find that although power users are "born," they are also "made" through both processes of personal growth and improved support from the system.
p>Universal Design (UD) is a movement to produce built environments that are accessible to a broad range of human variation. Though UD is often taken for granted as synonymous with the best, most inclusive, forms of disability access, the values, methodologies, and epistemologies that underlie UD require closer scrutiny. This paper uses feminist and disability theories of architecture and geography in order to complicate the concepts of "universal" and "design" and to develop a feminist disability theory of UD wherein design is a material-discursive phenomenon that produces both physical environments and symbolic meaning. Furthermore, the paper examines ways in which to conceive UD as a project of collective access and social sustainability , rather than as a strategy targeted toward individual consumers and marketability. A conception of UD that is informed by a politics of interdependence and collective access would address the multiple intersectional forms of exclusion that inaccessible design produces.
Keywords: universal design; collective access; interdependence; built environment; feminist theory
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In this paper, we explore blind people's motivations, challenges, interactions, and experiences with visual content on Social Networking Services (SNSs). We present findings from an interview study of 11 individuals and a survey study of 60 individuals, all with little to no functional vision. Compared to sighted SNS users, our blind participants faced profound accessibility challenges, including the prevalence of photos without sufficient text descriptions. To overcome the challenges, they developed creative strategies, including using a variety of methods to access SNS features (e.g., opening the mobile site on a desktop browser), and inferring photo content from textual cues and social interactions. When strategies failed, participants reached out for help from trusted friends, or avoided certain features. We discuss our findings in the context of CSCW research and SNS accessibility as a design value. We highlight the social significance of photo interactions for blind people and suggest design practices.
How likely are the millions of Americans with disabilities to participate in politics? What insights do their experiences provide into overall participation levels and determinants? This article reports the results of a nationally representative household telephone survey of 1,240 peoplestratified to include 700 people with disabilities-following the November 1998 elections. Voter turnout is found to be 20 percentage points lower among people with disabilities than among people without disabilities who have otherwise-similar demographic characteristics. Other standard predictors of turnout such as political efficacy and mobilization explain only a small portion of this gap. There is great variation within the disability sample: the lower turnout is concentrated among people with disabilities who are not employed or who are age 65 or older, who have had recent onset of a disabling condition, and who have difficulty going outside alone (despite the availability of absentee ballots). The findings suggest that disability, apart from imposing resource constraints, often has social and psychological effects that decrease voter turnout through decreased social capital and identification with mainstream society, particularly among senior citizens. The findings also support the idea that general mobility and major life transitions can be important influences on voter turnout in general, and raise questions on the causal relations among age, employment, efficacy, and voter turnout that should be a focus of future research.
Much of the debate about young people with disabilities focuses on the difficulties these young people experience and their needs in terms of service provision. Rarely is there a focus on the positive contribution that disabled young people themselves make to society. The paper describes research which aimed to highlight the contribution that young people with disabilities make to their communities, by focusing on their participation in volunteering and campaigning. A national survey of disabled young people's participation was undertaken, as well as two case studies of particular projects. The paper describes the range of voluntary and campaigning activities being undertaken by young people with disabilities, highlights the effects of participation on the young people and those around them, and identifies issues for organisations wishing to enable more young people with disabilities to participate in this way.
The activity of volunteering is readily available to, and undertaken by, able‐bodied people in Australia and is recognized as a valuable social pursuit, particularly among citizens of retirement age. Despite the known benefits of volunteering, however, there are few reports of disabled people participating as volunteers and little is understood of their experiences or perceptions of volunteering. The aim of this study was to explore how older workers within supported employment settings perceived the opportunities for and barriers to volunteering. Fourteen people with long‐standing impairments participated in this small qualitative study. Overall the participants were positive about volunteering, but noted they might require support to volunteer successfully. Drawing upon the participants’ views, recommendations are made for developing training. Disabled workers facing retirement need to be supported to have opportunities for active participation in the community as volunteers if so desired.
This article critiques the assumptions about the nature and meaning of disability advanced in social-psychological writing, suggests the origins of these assumptions, and proposes a return to a Lewinian/minority-group analysis of the situation of people with disabilities. It concludes by placing the articles in this issue of the Journal of Social Issues in context and by presenting questions in need of further exploration.
Background This participatory action research (PAR) project involved a collaboration with a self-advocacy group of people with intellectual disabilities that sought to build group capacity for advocacy.
Materials and Methods This study used a focus group, sustained participatory engagement and a reflexive process to gather qualitative and quantitative data over 15 months. All methods were adapted to ensure accessibility and to support active participation.
Results The collaboration generated action products, including tools to support advocacy and an accessible action and reflection process. Research findings suggest that active participation is essential for group control, but alone does not automatically lead to control. The manner in which supports are provided, including member supports, advisor supports, strategy supports and systems supports, influences the extent to which members have a sense of control over decision making and participation and thus, improved capacity for advocacy.
Conclusions A PAR approach can be used to increase a group’s capacity for advocacy and meaningfully involve self-advocacy groups in participatory research that leads to change.
The same technologies that groups of ordinary citizens are using to write operating systems and encyclopedias are fostering a quiet revolution in another area - social activism. On websites such as Avaaz.org and Wikipedia, citizens are forming groups to report on human rights violations and organize email writing campaigns, activities formerly the prerogative of professionals. This article considers whether the participatory potential of technology can be used to mobilize ordinary citizens in the work of human rights advocacy. Existing online advocacy efforts reveal a de facto inverse relationship between broad mobilization and deep participation. Large groups mobilize many individuals, but each of those individuals has only a limited ability to participate in decisions about the group’s goals or methods. Thus, although we currently have the tools necessary for individuals to engage in advocacy without the need for professional organizations, we are still far from realizing an ideal of fully decentralized, user-generated activism. Drawing on the insights of network theory, the article proposes a model of “networked activism” that would help ensure both deep participation and broad mobilization by encouraging the formation of highly participatory small groups while providing opportunities for those small groups to connect with one another. Drawing on a series of interviews with human rights and other civil society organizations, the article recommends specific design elements that might foster a model of networked activism. The article concludes that although online activism is unlikely to replace some of the functions served by human rights organizations, efforts to create synergies between traditional and online efforts have the potential to provide avenues for real, meaningful, and effective citizen participation in human rights advocacy.
Do activists lead happier and more fulfilled lives than the average person? Two online surveys using a sample of college students (N = 341) and a national sample of activists matched with a control group (N = 718) demonstrated that several indicators of activism were positively associated with measures of hedonic, eudaimonic, and social well-being. Furthermore, in both studies, activists were more likely to be “flourishing” (Keyes, 2002) than were nonactivists. A third study of college students (N = 296) explored the possible causal role of activism by measuring well-being after subjects either engaged in a brief activist behavior, a brief nonactivist behavior, or no behavior. Although well-being did not differ substantially between these three groups, the subjects who did the brief activist behavior reported significantly higher levels of subjective vitality than did the subjects who engaged in the nonactivist behavior. Potential mediators of the relationship between activism and well-being and the usefulness of these findings are discussed.
Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral. We review research on this moral self-licensing effect in the domains of political correctness, prosocial behavior, and consumer choice. We also discuss remaining theoretical tensions in the literature: Do good deeds reframe bad deeds (moral credentials) or merely balance them out (moral credits)? When does past behavior liberate and when does it constrain? Is self-licensing primarily for others’ benefit (self-presentational) or is it also a way for people to reassure themselves that they are moral people? Finally, we propose avenues for future research that could begin to address these unanswered questions.
The series of protests against the Church of Scientology known as "Project Chanology" marks the emergence of an important form of contemporary protest movement defined by networked internal structures and pervasive memetic culture. Such a protest movement is highly dynamic- rapidly adapting to changing challenges and contextual settings. This cultural innovation is made possible by the increasing digital mediation of social life. In the following analysis, we trace the unique structural contours of Chanology, investigate how participants leveraged a unique internal structure and the memetic environment of the internet to grow, and conclude with an explanation of why the novel modes of protest used in Chanology contributed to its success and why these forms of protest are likely to proliferate in an increasingly digitally mediated environment. From a theoretical standpoint, Project Chanology both affirms and challenges conventional conceptions of social movements. The utility of Chwe's network analytical approach to the problems of coordination in social movements is also demonstrated.
Consumer choices reflect not only price and quality preferences but also social and moral values, as witnessed in the remarkable growth of the global market for organic and environmentally friendly products. Building on recent research on behavioral priming and moral regulation, we found that mere exposure to green products and the purchase of such products lead to markedly different behavioral consequences. In line with the halo associated with green consumerism, results showed that people act more altruistically after mere exposure to green products than after mere exposure to conventional products. However, people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products than after purchasing conventional products. Together, our studies show that consumption is connected to social and ethical behaviors more broadly across domains than previously thought.
Part and parcel to the civil rights movements of the past thirty years has been a sustained, coordinated effort among disabled Americans to secure equal rights and equal access to that of non-disabled people. Beyond merely providing a history of this movement, Sharon Barnartt and Richard Scotchââ¬â¢s Disability Protests: Contentious Politics, 1970ââ¬â1999 offers an incisive, sociological analysis of thirty years of protests, organization, and legislative victories within the deaf and disabled populations. The authors begin with a thoughtful consideration of what constitutes ââ¬Åcontentiousââ¬? politics and what distinguishes a sustained social movement from isolated acts of protest. The numbers of disability rights protests are meticulously catalogued over the course of thirty years, revealing significant increases in both cross-disability actions as well as disability-specific actions. Political rancor within disability communities is addressed as well. Chapter four, ââ¬ÅA Profile of Contentious Actionsââ¬? confronts the thorny question of who is ââ¬Ådeaf enoughââ¬? or ââ¬Ådisabled enoughââ¬? to adequately represent their constituencies. Barnartt and Scotch conclude by giving special attention to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the 1988 Deaf President Now protest, focusing on how these landmark events affected their proponents. Disability Protests offers an entirely original sociological perspective on the emerging movement for deaf and disability rights. Sharon Barnartt is Professor of Sociology at Gallaudet University. Richard Scotch is Associate Professor of Sociology and Political Economy at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Civic Activism Online
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Identity work processes in the context of social movements: clarifying the identity/movement nexus
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