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Abstracts and links to several recent projects are provided below. My complete CV is also available.Exposure to Controversy in an Information Society
(dissertation) New information and communication technologies (ICTs) are rapidly becoming an important mechanism for delivering political news, competing with traditional sources such as newspapers. Scholars are
concerned about what this will mean for individuals' exposure to information about controversial political issues. Networked information processing systems afford unprecedented control over information exposure, and
individuals may use this capacity to avoid information that challenges their position, producing political polarization. This research project examines how people use new ICTs to acquire information about contentious
political issues. Prior research has shown that an individual's opinion influences his or her attitude toward new information, but the expression of this influence is a topic of debate. The central concern is that an
individual will seek consonant (supportive) information and avoid dissonant (challenging) information. There is evidence, however, that the effect may be more complicated. I hypothesize that although individuals seek
consonant information, they do not avoid dissonant information. My dissertation uses a national telephone survey and a Web-administered experiment to test these hypotheses. Dissertation Abstract (PDF)
Complete Dissertation (PDF)The Internet and Democratic Debate (research report published by Pew Internet and American Life, November 2004) Increasing numbers of Americans are getting news and
information about politics online. More than 40% of those who use the Internet have gotten political material during this campaign, according to the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press, more than 50%
higher than the number who had gotten such information in the 2000 campaign. As Internet use has grown, prominent commentators and scholars have expressed concern that this would be harmful to democratic
deliberation. They worried that citizens would use the Internet to seek information that reinforced their political preferences and avoid material that challenged their views. They feared that people would use Internet
tools to customize and insulate their information inputs to a degree that held troubling implications for American society. Democracy functions best when people consider a range of arguments, including those that
challenge their viewpoint. If people screened out information that disputed their beliefs, then the chances for meaningful discourse on great issues would be stunted and civic polarization would grow. The Pew
Internet & American Life Project and the University of Michigan School of Information conducted a survey in June to test those concerns. We focused on the role of the Internet related to four dimensions of
contemporary politics: the arguments anchoring the campaign between George W. Bush and John Kerry; the arguments for and against the war in Iraq; the arguments for and against gay marriage; and the arguments for and
against free trade. And our survey results belie the greatest fears about the impact of the Internet on democracy... Report (PDF)
News media coverage of the reportIt's All News to Me: The Effect of Instruments on Ratings Provision
with Cliff Lampe (Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Forthcoming) In this paper, we address an issue of design in online rating systems: how many items should be elicited from the ratings
provider. Recommender and reputation systems have traditionally relied on single-dimension ratings to reduce user burden, but for some types of information this amount of feedback may be insufficient. We presented users
of an online news rating service with different numbers of items in a news rating exercise. We find that users show the highest satisfaction and greatest rating accuracy with a multi-item reviewing instrument. Pre-press conference paper (PDF)Which Telework? Defining and Testing a Taxonomy of Technology-Mediated Work at a Distance with J. N. Danziger (Social Science Computer Review, Forthcoming)
Telework has been the subject of study for more than a quarter century, yet its causes and consequences are poorly understood. A key reason for this shortcoming is that scholars define and use the concept in many
different ways. This article presents a taxonomy of telework, distinguishing between three distinct forms: fixed-site telework, mobile telework, and flexiwork. It then offers a series of research questions about the
associations between these three types of telework and a variety of other factors. Using data collected in a national telephone survey of more than 1,200 U.S. computer-using workers, we demonstrate empirically that the
three types of teleworkers are unique along key dimensions regarding their individual characteristics, organizational and technological contexts, and the impacts on their work. Pre-press article (PDF)Revolutionary Secrets: Technology's Role in the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement with P. N. Edwards (Social Science Computer Review, Forthcoming v24n4)
In the late 1980s, Operation Vula brought exiled ANC leaders and military capacity into South Africa despite legal and military obstacles. According to participants, a purpose-built encrypted communication system
was critical to this success. The communications network made possible an unprecedented level of information exchange among ANC leaders. How can we understand the role of this system in the operation's
success? Was it simply a catalyst or facilitator for a social process of reorganizing and reinvigorating ANC leadership? If so, would this have happened anyway or by other means? Or did the communication system actively
and crucially change the political situation? Without it, might the apartheid government have hung on for longer, or managed -- as it intended -- to discredit the ANC and retain a privileged political role for whites in
the post-apartheid dispensation? Exploring the Vula case reveals major deficiencies in the existing literature on this topic. We need to move beyond the simple statement that communication technology
influenced political capacity to answer the deeper questions of how, when, and why. In this article, we use the Vula case to identify four key factors affecting the answer to these questions regarding the interaction
between new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social movements. These factors are (1) ongoing technological innovation, (2) user practices, (3) technical competence, and (4) routines. By failing to
consider them, scholars have oversimplified the process of sociotechnical change and hampered their ability to understand the relationship between ICTs and contentious political activity. Pre-press article (PDF)Protest in an Information Society: A Review of Literature on Social Movements and New ICTs (iCS v9n2) New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)
are changing the ways in which activists communicate, collaborate, and demonstrate. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, among them sociology, political science, and communication, are working to understand these
changes. The diversity of perspectives represented enriches the literature, providing an abundant repertoire of tools for examining these phenomena, but it is also an obstacle to understanding. Few works are commonly
cited across the field, and most are known only with the confines of their discipline. The absence of a common set of organizing theoretical principles can make it difficult to find connections between these disparate
works beyond their common subject matter. This paper responds by locating existing scholarship within McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald's framework for explaining the emergence, development, and outcomes of social
movement activity. This provides a logical structure that facilitates conversations across the field around common issues of concern, highlighting connections between scholars and research agendas that might otherwise
be difficult to discern. Pre-press article (PDF) |
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R. Kelly Garrett, Senior Research Fellow, University of California, Irvine, Center for Research on Information Technology
and Organizations (CRITO), 3200 Berkeley Place, Irvine, CA 92697
email: garrettk [at] uci.edu | web site: http://www.umich.edu/~garrettk/ | Last Updated: July 27, 2007 |
