The Network in the Garden: Designing Social Media for Rural Life

Abstract

History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet little is known about how rural communities use modern technologies, which therefore results in a collective lack knowledge about how to design for rural life. To address this gap, the present empirical article investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. With a data set collected from a broadly popular social network site, the current work analyzes users’ profiles, 340,000 online friendships, and 200,000 interpersonal messages. Based on social capital theory, differences are predicted between rural and urban users, and strong evidence supports the present hypotheses—namely, rural people articulate far fewer friends online, and those friends live much closer to home. Results indicate that the groups have substantially different gender distributions and use privacy features differently. The article concludes with a discussion of the design implications drawn from these findings; most important, designers should reconsider the binary friend-or-not model to allow for incremental trust building.