Social interaction online

Abstract

While, online conferencing has grown in popularity, many conference attendees still prefer face-to-face conferences because the social networking opportunities are seen as superior. Hence enabling social interactions in online conferences is seen as important. This paper provides a case study of how social interactions are promoted in an online cross-disciplinary research conference. The online conference website provided archival artefacts posted by participants during the online conference discussions. These artefacts were firstly analysed to identify the levels of social interaction present in the online conference, and secondly to identify social interaction enablers and inhibitors. Effective enablers were found to be the facilitation and the use of prescribed topics of discussion. Some major inhibitors of social interaction were found to be the lack of community amongst members, poor conference timing and notice period, lack of immediacy and unclear or not relevant topics. Although the study focused predominantly on a cross-disciplinary research conference, the findings reported in this study could have useful applications on online social interaction in general. The study found that while an online conference arguably has merits over a face-to-face conference, these benefits can only be optimised when social interaction is deliberately fostered through convergence of the online conference tool, facilitation, and topic design.