Critonian Michael Jensen will be spending the next six
months in Barcelona at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
working at their Internet
Interdisciplinary Institute. He will be working directly
with a group of researchers engaged in a Spanish Ministry
of Education and Science funded project studying online participatory
initiatives between community groups and local governments
in Spain This research group has also scheduled a nationwide
survey of political participation and the Internet in Spain
for Spring 2008. Mike is coordinating a similar survey effort
in the U.S. by CRITO's Project POINT (People, Organizations,
and Information Technology), an NSF funded project under the
direction of James Danziger and Alladi Venkatesh. The surveys
conducted in Spain and the U.S. will enable him to investigate
the interplay between cultural and social factors and ICTs
in the political process. He will be focusing primarily on
how use of the Internet and other ICTs are changing political
participation and the relationship between government actors
and citizens in the United States and Spain.
This research opportunity emerged when Mike met a graduate
student visiting UCI who was from the Universitat Autònoma
de Barcelona. She was working on a dissertation very similar
to his own. He learned she was submitting a proposal to the
Spanish government to do a nation-wide survey of Spain on
this subject. Last spring he gave a talk at a local research
center in Barcelona, and after a series of events he was invited
to come as a visiting research professor at the Universitat
Oberta de Catalunya.
Mike, whose research interests are in political informatics,
has been a part of CRITO since 2002 when he started as a graduate
research student with Project POINT and assisted the researchers
in the analysis of how information technology transforms people's
lives in such areas as the home, work, and civil life. Involvement
in Project POINT really sparked his interest in the topic
that eventually became his dissertation in 2007, “Electronic
Democracy in America: The Internet and Participation in American
Local Politics.” The dissertation, which used Project
POINT data, is an inquiry into how residents use the Internet
to interact with their communities and local governments.
Mike is very excited about his project and before he left
he recounted George Orwell’s quote from his Homage to
Catalonia, "I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than
in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!"
(CRITO Research Spotlight, January 2008)
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