Digital Discourse and Ideation in Community Empowerment: A Mixed Methods Study

Community members utilize social media to directly converse with community development and planning stakeholders. However, it is unclear how community members adapt frames to share, develop, and spread ideas to empower their communities of place. We adapt the theoretical lenses of collective action and social ideation to investigate how digital exchanges can empower members to engage (or disengage) in further discourse with their communities. We collected messages from a community outreach platform, messages from X, and conducted interviews with community members. An abductive iterative data analysis approach was used to examine how community members interact and develop ideas to empower others. We identified community discourse and community ideation as the main antecedents that can lead to either empowerment or dissolution in communities. This study contributes to the understanding of how digital interactions advance the community members from discourse framing to idea articulation and, subsequently, enable idea elaboration to solutions.