Lydia Laurenson Polarisation and Peacebuilding Strategy on Digital Media Platforms: Current Research 11 world? Research about wellness is mostly out of scope for this brief, but one concept from that sphere could be useful here: “Maladaptive” vs. “adaptive” usage, or “non-connectionpromoting” vs. “connection-promoting.” In a 2016 pilot study by Tran et al., researchers took a look at when and how social media improves people’s mental state, and when it makes people feel worse. This was a preliminary study, so it is not conclusive, but its findings suggest eleven ways social media can be a positive coping mechanism, like when people use it to actively communicate with friends or change their perspective on negative experiences. On the other hand, it can make people feel worse, too, like when people use social media to facilitate obsessing over their problems. Positive usage is called “adaptive,” and negative usage is “maladaptive.” This research dovetails with a later study, published in 2018 by Clark, Algoe, and Green, which notes that a key distinction in social media use seems to be “connection-promoting” vs. “non-connectionpromoting” use. It is hard to find spatial community metaphors that work well for describing digital media — is Facebook a cocktail party? A public square? — but these findings could fit with experiences of social space. A person who is saddened by the death of a parent may be comforted if they go to a party and have close conversations with friends, but they may just feel more isolated if they go to the same party and do not talk to anyone. Researchers like Helena Puig Larrauri, who has been designing depolarisation interventions for Facebook and Twitter, note that these social platforms are not inherently “good containers” for dialogue, but human facilitators can get involved to depolarise a given conversation. Human facilitators are likely irreplaceable, but it may be possible to design a better container. Perhaps, when designing humane technology, it would help to build digital platforms that actively model respectful conversation and healthy connection with their affordances — or whose container is labeled clearly to users in advance, in the same way that people know whether they are going to a dinner party or a public square. With luck (and accountability), such models could be informed by transparent research and built with transparent processes. Recommendations for Further Research Although research alone cannot solve digital media problems, there is still a lot we do not know about how platforms operate and how people are using them. The second brief on polarisation details different intervention strategies. Recommendations for further research include the following: 1. Research the different types and genres of social media (or just different platforms) to see if they have significantly different impacts on society, and/or require different interventions 2. Identify whether some impacts can be traced to affordances rather than platforms. (An “affordance” is an interactive aspect of design. For example, the “retweet” button is an affordance on Twitter, the “Like” button is an affordance on Facebook, and the handle on a tea mug is an affordance on the tea mug.)