In “Exploring the Relationship between Information and Communication Technology Collective Behaviors and Sense of Community: An Urban Refugee Analysis” Canevez et al. argues that technology have a a strong impact on belonging to your community.
Canevez et al. studied the relationship between collective behaviors and sense of community, as well as considered self-efficacy and gender. They used a “quantitative, survey study methodology” and fed the information into a regression model to analyze their data. From their analysis, they found that self-efficacy is a positive predictor of sense of community and that gender had little effect on the sense of community because women weren’t looked at as having strong technological skills, with the p-value being .981. The team also proposed ways to expand their research, which includes considering community characteristics intersected with sense of community, as well as using more sophisticated models to provide more insight into which features have a greater weight.
This was a long paper, so following it became a little difficult, but the results make a lot of sense. If people are confident in their technological abilities and help each other out, then I can definitely see how that would make a strong sense of community. So, based off of this paper, there is an argument that could be made that technology brings people closer, not because of their telecommunication features, but because of the opportunity it provides for people to help each other out.
I agree that the length of the paper, especially the portions where they described all of the statistical manipulation, made it a but difficult to follow at times. I think this detail is important, however, because using qualitative data requires some additional steps to try and quantify it, and I appreciate where the authors used statistics to fill in some of these quantitative/qualitative gaps (even if I don’t exactly know what each individual manipulation means).
Although I read a different article, I find these ideas interesting as sometimes I see technology as dividing (as it causes fewer face-to-face interactions) but at the same time, I definitely see how it can create communities as well. I am more on the side of thinking it brings people together, as people who have shared similar experiences and would not necessarily meet if our interactions were limited to in-person experiences can now meet and keep in touch over the internet.
I feel like while technology offers a way to build strong communities through helping one another, I think another part of its creation of communities has to do with how much time we spend on it. With the abundance of technology and social media, people are creating online friends and relationships just based on our great access to it. We spend so much time online, we forget about real life and the connections we’ve made there. In a way, people don’t see their real life communities they’ve built due to the online communities they’ve become a part of. While there are positives to online communities, this in itself can bring issues of division.