Social Media Locality in a Tribal Network

Abstract

Tribal areas continue to be some of the most under-serviced places in the U.S. with respect to broadband coverage. Despite tribal and FCC interests in addressing this issue, there has never been a network-based characterization on how existing broadband services in these are areas are used. We present one of the first of such characterizations by analyzing traffic from the Tribal Digital Village (TDV) network, a tribal operated network that provides initial Internet services to 576 facilities in rural San Diego county. Our study reveals that the most requested web application in the network is Instagram, which has not yet been characterized in a community setting. Overall, we identify a high locality of interest with respect to content and social connectivity: 27% of the 150,368 unique media objects circulated in TDV Instagram traffic were produced by TDV users; local content creators have 8.2× more engagement with their media on the TDV network than non-local content creators; 26.5% of the 7.9 million media downloads were downloaded by multiple TDV network users; and on average, 42.6% of a user's 1-hop social neighborhood is comprised of users from the same reservation.

Rural HCI Research

“…Use of alternative technologies to provide connectivity, such as radio, was the focus of one article about rural indigenous communities in the US [169]. In a few cases, projects providing Internet access have been described, from technical and usage perspectives [79,168]. One study also focused on the augmentation of train system infrastructure with information technology [159].…”

“…One of the most effective approaches to gaining an in-depth understanding of rural areas is through prolonged engagement in rural areas, as has been pursued in prior HCI research [63,112]. Contextual insight can also be offered by quantitative studies that triangulate digital trace data with analyses of contributed content [168], or by studies that merge researcher- collected data with place-based data collected by federal, state, and local governments (e.g., occupational injury data, economic data), as well as local institutions such as rural hospitals.…”