Impact of Digital Technologies on Communities

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue explores the impact that digital technologies have on communities, including how they are established, how they function, and how they are maintained.

The communities we participate in are increasingly shaped by—and shape—the digital technologies upon which they depend. Whether a community exists primarily in-person, entirely online, or somewhere in between, a wide range of technologies are often required to establish and maintain the relationships and human systems that are necessary for it to function. Indeed, as we currently experience a world impacted by physical distancing measures, the positive and negative impacts that digital technologies have on our communities, including how we conceptualize what counts as a community in the first place, are even more acutely felt.

Recognising the cross-disciplinarily and diverse perspectives on digital technologies and communities, this Special Issue seeks to bring together studies that help us to understand how community technology interventions are developed, deployed, studied or sustained; share detailed accounts of the evolving ecologies that shape those communities and technologies; and point the way forward for future community technology design.

We are interested in a wide range of submissions, including, among others: lessons learned in the field; descriptions of technology intervention deployments; case studies of communities, technologies, or ad hoc assemblages of either; methods and methodologies for understanding the impact of digital technologies on communities; stories of failures (both crimes against communities as well as crimes against technologies); and critiques of any of the above.

We hope to include representations of many kinds of communities, considering various population demographics, sizes, topologies, media, geographies, and purposes. Topics can include but are not limited to:

• Community activism and/or digital civics, including investigations of the sustainability of interventions and deployments;
• Moderation requirements, techniques, and implications;
• The felt experience of participating in technology-mediated communities;
• Explorations of communities that serve as replacements for infrastructure that should exist elsewhere (such as support groups that should be organized through government sponsored projects but are not);
• Definitions and interpretations of the concept of “community”, including how the tools we use shape our understanding of “community”, how the data we are able to access can come to represent communities, as well as how some technologies can be used to question the boundaries of the concept of community);
• Discussions of the roles that technologies can play in creating or mitigating “echo chambers” and misinformation;
• Case studies of how technologies have been transferred or translated from one community context to another;
• Reflections on the impacts of technology on relationship building strategies.

Dr. Austin Toombs
Dr. Kyle Montague
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.