Designing social media for rural life

Reference: Gilbert, E., Karahalios, K., Sandvig, C. (2010). The network in the garden: Designing social media for rural life. The American Behavioral Scientist, 53:9, 1367-1388.

Based on cultural differences between people living in rural and urban areas of the United States, it is reasonable to suppose that rural and urban Americans might differ in the way they use online social media.  Indeed, the authors of this paper found that compared to urban users, rural users have far fewer friends, that a larger percentage of users are female, that rural users will set higher levels of privacy for their online profiles, and that their friends will live much closer to them than the friends of urban users.  The implications of these findings for business, in my opinion, is that it is probably harder to draw rural US users into the types of communities that many companies want to create to support brand loyalty, test new ideas, etc.  The authors put the blame for this difference on the binary friend-or-not model of most social networks.  Rural people, they argue, would like to reach beyond their geographic isolation using social media, but they have trouble establishing trust with distant people. They propose that a model based on incremental trust would increase the likelihood of rural users expanding their social networks.  They liken such a model to the social model of dating, where initially each party knows very little about the other, but over a period of time, trust is built and deep friendships develop.  Allowing for gradations of friendship in social networks should allow more online friendships to actually originate online.  This would be beneficial as well for non-rural users.