Formation Of Online Communities Research Articles

(Un)scaffolding gender: social media and the evolution of nonbinary identity

This paper presents a diachronic review of nonbinary community formation and self-representation online. Drawing on long-form interviews with nonbinary internet users, it explores how trans and nonbinary people have used the communicative affordances of the internet to co-construct alternative embodiments of gender in the absence of substantial mass media representation. Applying the educational theory of instructional scaffolding to media representation, it argues that mass media is a form of cultural pedagogy perpetuating gender. It further demonstrates the role of social media platforms in enabling peer-to-peer scaffolding of nonbinary gender through the formation of online communities, and of empowering self-scaffolding of gender via customiseable media feeds and tools for self-representation.

Revisiting the Influence of Online Readers in Postcolonial Literature: A Postcolonial Analysis

This paper explores the impact of online platforms, institutions and digital reading communities on reading practice in the digital age. The subjective status of the readers and their activeness in the creation and realization of the meaning of literary texts are emphasized by reception aesthetics. The current research on postcolonial literature focuses broadly on the authors perspective and the texts perspective but lacks the readers perspective. This paper puts the changes in readers subjectivity in the digital era under the post-colonial perspective, discussing what kind of changes have taken place in the subjectivity of network readers. Meanwhile, it analyzes how cyber subalterns and elites will influence postcolonial discourse in the digital realm. Using a theoretical and methodological framework covering post-colonialism and receptive criticism, this article demonstrates how marginal discourses can construct and grow spaces within social and cultural limits. The results show that the online reading practice and the formation of online communities further blur cultural boundaries. The post-colonial visual threshold gives readers the task of expanding marginal discourse. Finally, this article illustrates that readers subjectivity is still limited by digital institutions and algorithms, and they must be wary of network colonization.

Tinjauan Literatur Transformasi Sosial dalam Era Virtual

Social transformation in the virtual era has become an increasingly relevant research subject with the expanding penetration of digital technology in human life. Recent literature studies reveal various aspects related to virtual sociology, including the formation of online communities, the role of technology in identity formation, and the impact of social media on culture and public opinion. This research aims to compile a comprehensive literature review on social transformation in the virtual era, identifying current trends, important findings, and recent developments in virtual sociology studies. Additionally, this study aims to investigate the social impacts arising from changes in social interaction and culture in the digital world. Employing a comprehensive literature review approach, this research gathers and evaluates various relevant literary sources, including journal articles, books, research reports, and other information sources related to social transformation in the virtual era. The findings of this research provide a deeper understanding of social dynamics in the virtual era, including the formation of online communities, digital identity, and the role of social media in shaping public opinion. The information obtained from this literature review can serve as a reference for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in addressing challenges and opportunities arising from social changes driven by digital technology. The social transformation in the virtual era plays a significant role in shaping the dynamics of modern society. Studies on virtual sociology offer valuable insights into how digital technology influences human behavior, interaction, and social structures in the virtual world.

The queers are all right: a content analysis of LGBTQIA + mental health on TikTok

The formation of online communities instils a sense of connectedness which can ameliorate the mental health concerns that result from minority stressors for lesbian, gay, queer, intersex, asexual, and other diverse genders/sexualities (LGBTQIA+). The aim of this study was to explore how LGBTQIA + people communicate social and mental health concerns on TikTok. It was anticipated that factors affecting mental health, such as minority stressors and community connectedness, would be addressed by the videos collected. Engagement statistics, demographics and content analysis were used to describe the 50 most-viewed videos across the top five related hashtags: #genderidentity, #lgbtqawareness, #sexualidentity, #lgbtmentalhealth, and #transmentalhealth. The content analysis indicates that TikTok is used as a way for members of the LGBTQIA + community to connect with each other and enhance feelings of community connectedness, which research shows may buffer the effects of minority stressors. Engagement with social media can be especially beneficial for those who may not be able to connect in the real-world. Further interactions, such as analysis of the comment section, should be investigated to develop a fuller understanding of how LGBTQIA + TikTok users respond to these contents.

A systematic review of hate speech automatic detection using natural language processing

With the multiplication of social media platforms, which offer anonymity, easy access and online community formation and online debate, the issue of hate speech detection and tracking becomes a growing challenge to society, individual, policy-makers and researchers. Despite efforts for leveraging automatic techniques for automatic detection and monitoring, their performances are still far from satisfactory, which constantly calls for future research on the issue. This paper provides a systematic review of literature in this field, with a focus on natural language processing and deep learning technologies, highlighting the terminology, processing pipeline, core methods employed, with a focal point on deep learning architecture. From a methodological perspective, we adopt PRISMA guideline of systematic review of the last 10 years literature from ACM Digital Library and Google Scholar. In the sequel, existing surveys, limitations, and future research directions are extensively discussed.

“F*cking politeness” and “staying sexy” while doing it: intimacy, interactivity and the feminist politics of true crime podcasts

ABSTRACT Podcasts possess the unique affordance of “hyper-intimacy” that allows listeners to tap into personal experiences and emotional connections. Intersecting with social media spaces, these connections provide for the formation of online communities that encourage listeners to engage in discursive politics and to view their own experiences as part of a feminist politics. Piggybacking on the “Serial Effect”, the true crime podcast, My Favorite Murder, became a cult sensation while connecting individual listeners to an online community of Facebook groups, twitter accounts and subreddits. In this paper I examine how, through a series of memes, jokes, stories and mantras, these MFM-focused online spaces have transformed an online podcast community into a subcultural space that advances discourses about challenging women’s fear of violence and victimization. Examining how the issue of violent crime against women is being understood and developed. I draw on the concept of discursive politics as well as the emerging literature on the potential of podcasting.

Social Media as It Interfaces with Psychosocial Development and Mental Illness in Transitional-Age Youth.

Social media (SM) can be defined as "a group of Internet-based applications that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." This includes formation of online communities and sharing of information, ideas, opinions, messages, images, and videos. Therefore, although all online video games would not necessarily count as SM, video games that allow for substantial sharing of information and development of online communities do fit this definition. SM has become an integral component of how people worldwide connect with friends and family, share personal content, and obtain news and entertainment. Use of SM is particularly prevalent among transitional-age youth, usually defined as individuals aged 16 to 24 years, who are at critical junctures around developmental tasks such as identity development and establishment of social norms.

Where Online Friends Meet: Social Communities in Location-Based Networks

Recent research suggests that, as in offline scenarios, spatial proximity increases the likelihood that two individuals establish an online social connection, and geographic closeness could therefore influence the formation of online communities. In this work we present a study of communities in two online social networks with location-sharing features and analyze their social and spatial properties. We study the places users visit to understand whether communities revolve around places or whether they exist independently. Our results suggest that community structure in social networks may arise from both social and spatial factors, so that exploiting information about the places where people go could benefit the definition of new community detection methods and community evolution models.

In Tune with the Listener: How Local Radio in Ireland has Maintained Audience Attention and Loyalty

Local radio has remained relevant and ever-present in Ireland owing to the relationship stations have built with their audiences over time. These strong connections combined with adherence to public service duties and supplying locally relevant content – which the national stations cannot offer – helped local stations repel the double threat of a global recession and the influx of new media. This paper argues that by building on its core strengths while embracing change and adopting the potential offered by digital and social media, local Irish commercial radio stations have managed to survive and remain relevant. Using case studies of two prominent stations Radio Kerry and Beat, and one public service station RTÉ 2fm, this paper will illustrate that by being in tune with the audience’s unique social, cultural and political interests, radio stations have been able to endear their audiences to the brand and compete for their attention in an increasingly competitive mediascape. These stations were able to achieve this partly through the formation of online communities on Facebook, by having a presence in the local community and by actively engaging with the audience. This paper posits that local radio holds an important place in the lives of the people it serves and therefore must be preserved as not only an invaluable public service but as a beacon of culture and heritage.

The Impact of Community Happenings in OpenStreetMap—Establishing a Framework for Online Community Member Activity Analyses

The collaborative nature of activities in Web 2.0 projects leads to the formation of online communities. To reinforce this community, these projects often rely on happenings centred around data creation and curation activities. We suggest an integrated framework to directly assess online community member performance in a quantitative manner and applied it to the case study of OpenStreetMap. A set of mappers who participated in both field and remote mapping-related happenings was identified. To measure the effects of happenings, we computed attributes characterising the mappers’ contribution behaviour before and after the happenings and tested for significant impacts in relation to a control group. Results showed that newcomers to OpenStreetMap adopted a contribution behaviour similar to the contribution behaviour typical for the respective happening they attended: When contributing after the happening, newcomers who attended a remote mapping event tended to concentrate on creating new data with lower quality but high quantity in places foreign to their home region; newcomers who attended a field mapping event updated and enhanced existing local data with high accuracy. The behaviour of advanced mappers stayed largely unaffected by happenings. Unfortunately, our results did not reveal a positive effect on the community integration of newcomers through happenings.

Detecting online recruitment of terrorists: towards smarter solutions to counter terrorism

Increased usage of social media led to formation of online communities of terrorist groups for discussing many violent plans. These online communities present big data to researchers to identify hidden patterns and behaviors to generate actionable intelligence which can be useful for security agencies. Recruiting new people over online social media is on emerging trend which presents how internet is exploited by terrorist groups. In this paper, we present automatic model to detect online cyber recruitment over social media. Online discussions regarding recruitment of terrorists or building new connections for recruitment of violent extremist have been labelled. Two experts labelled 730 messages from five dark web discussion forums named ‘Ansar1’, ‘Gawaher’, ‘Islamic Awakening’, ‘Islamic Network’ and ‘Mywic’ as YES (recruitment) and NO (non-recruitment). Statistical analysis has been done on two independent labelled messages to find mutual agreement between two judges. Kohen’s Kappa coefficient computed is 0.87 at p = 0.01 which signifies higher mutual agreement. Five machine learning classifiers namely support vector machine, logic boosting, random forest, generalized linear model and maximum entropy based model are developed to further classify recruitment labels. To the best of our knowledge no such work has been done by collaborating data from multiple dark web discussion forums to automatic identify online recruitment of terrorists. Our proposed model presents smart solution with usage of computational techniques to quantify terrorist behavior analysis and detect online recruitment of violent extremists over online social media and dark web forums.

Remaking the Commons: How Digital Tools Facilitate and Subvert the Common Good

This scoping paper considers how digital tools, such as ICTs and AI, have failed to contribute to the “common good” in any sustained or scalable way. This is attributed to a problem that is at once political-economic and technical. Many digital tools’ business models are predicated on advertising: framing the user as an individual consumer-to-be-targeted, not as an organization, movement, or any sort of commons. At the level of infrastructure and hardware, the increased privatization and centralization of transmission and production leads to a dangerous bottlenecking of communication power, and to labor and production practices that are undemocratic and damaging to common resources. These practices escalate collective action problems, pose a threat to democratic decision making, aggravate issues of economic and labor inequality, and harm the environment and health. At the same time, the growth of both AI and online community formation raise questions around the very definition of human subjectivity and modes of relationality. Based on an operational definition of the common good grounded in ethics of care, sustainability, and redistributive justice, suggestions are made for solutions and further research in the areas of participatory design, digital democracy, digital labor, and environmental sustainability.

WEB ARCHIVING AS CULTURE: TUMBLR AND THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE ARCHIVED WEB

Web archives - broadly conceived as any attempt to capture and preserve the Web for future use - are evermore central to discussions of digital access in the public sphere, as they provide tools for accessing parts of the Web that have been subject to neglect, removal or state and platform-based forms of content moderation and censorship. In this paper I discuss the cultural significance of web archiving through the example of Tumblr’s 2018 efforts to remove so-called ‘Not Safe for Work’ (NSFW) posts from the platform. The paper examines the archiving of Tumblr NSFW by Archive Team, a self-described ‘loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage’. Findings are presented through the concept of culture which provides a dual lens through which to understand web archiving practices as contingent upon the cultural worlds which they create and operate within. Here, web archiving as culture reveals the ways that practices shape (and are shaped by) online community membership, the nature of how and why the Web is archived and the reflexive significance participants place on their own web archival activities. The paper contributes to broader discussions of online community formation and raises further questions about the ethics and role of power in the production of web archives, as well as their positioning as historical representations of online cultures.

An Empirical Study on Response to Online Customer Reviews and E-Commerce Sales: From the Mobile Information System Perspective

Response to online customer reviews helps increase sales. Extensive research has been carried out on this topic discussing tactics of response, while few scholars looked at it from the social network perspective. The problem is not how to respond but to whom to respond. Essentially, it is an effective online social network, not a response itself that generates trust and sales. In this paper, our main work is to use basic theoretical tools of social network theory to reveal the nature of the relationship between online response and performance. We use a web crawler to scrape data and get a sample of 3379 sellers from a B2B website. The regression results are consistent with the theoretical derivation and provide strong evidence for our assumptions and hypothesis. Sellers’ response to online customer reviews, especially to negative reviews, has a significant positive effect on its sales. Seller’s product price and product heterogeneity play moderating roles in the relationship above. Therefore, sellers should actively participate in online social conversations and get embedded in online social networks. Sellers should see pricing and product diversification strategies as important factors in the networking process. E-commerce platform companies should provide the necessary technical support to accelerate the formation of online communities. Producers should cooperate more with sellers and make full use of the customer review information for product improvement and innovation.

Perspectives on the evolution of online communities

ABSTRACTThe rapid growth of social networks opens interesting research opportunities to make use of the massive information exchanged in day-to-day communication. One of the active research issues related to this aspect is the study of online community formation and evolution in dynamic social networks. As community structure is usually ambiguous, then defining how it evolves over time becomes a challenge in terms of tracking mechanism and evaluation method. In this study, we review the online communities and their evolution tracking mechanisms and discuss the main categories of approaches for tracking community evolution and how they work. We analyse the different solutions proposed under each community evolution tracking category and provide an assessment of their projected performance. Finally, a discussion of analysis insights concerning community evolution and its influence is introduced.

The Effects of Group Size and Time on the Formation of Online Communities: Evidence From Reddit

These studies examine the influence of group size and the passage of time on two characteristics of online communities: dispersion of participation in group discussions and active member turnover from month to month. We used multilevel analysis to examine the dynamics of user contributions to discussions on Reddit, a popular website that hosts large-group discussions, across 30 groups over 6 years. As groups grow in size, participation becomes more highly concentrated among fewer members while turnover decreases. As time passes, participation becomes more widely dispersed while group member turnover increases. An increase in group member turnover appears to be the result of both a maturation effect (as each group ages, turnover increases) as well as a cohort effect (groups formed at a later date have higher turnover than groups formed earlier). We can conclude from these results that as time progresses and groups become larger, they become less community-like, but in different ways.

Influence of Learning Design of the Formation of Online Communities of Learning

This paper presents the findings of a study on a fully online Bachelor’s level course in Health Sciences at a European University conducted to explore the influence of learning design on the formation and evolution of different types of communities of learning. The impetus for the study came from the well-established effectiveness of community-based learning, a need for understanding learning design and analytics within networked structures and, the lack of theoretical grounding for social network analysis (SNA) in previous literature. Our study uses the Integrated Methodological Framework (IMF) which employs SNA as the key methodology for exploring community-based learning in light of the Communities of Practice (CoP) and Community of Inquiry (CoI) frameworks. The course comprised of three differently designed successive discussion forums spanning three weeks each. Network diagrams and SNA measures clearly showed the impact of the different learning designs on student engagement in the discussion forums. Based on CoP and CoI structural components within the IMF, a comparative analysis of whole-network properties of the three networks indicated the formation of a CoP, initiated and mediated by the tutor in discussion 1, sustained by the students in discussion 2, and disintegrated due to lack of guidance and facilitation in discussion 3. Qualitative analysis on the content of discussion posts revealed the importance of group oriented messages in the formation of the CoP. The paper discusses findings in terms of implications for learning design and analytics in online learning and the role of the tutor in community formation.

User-Generated Social Media Events in Tourism

Social media and mobile technologies have revolutionised communication and particular attention has been given to user-generated content (UGC) and the formation of online communities; however, little attention has been given to tourist events entirely generated by users through social media. This paper aims to define and characterise the phenomenon of tourism user-generated events (UGEs) through social media around the user’s new empowered role and to assess user-generated social media events’ online socialness. It is also our aim to provide a useful mixed-methodology analysis framework for UGEs in relation to social media and to highlight their interest for organisations. The methodological approach includes a quantitative model to store, analyse and compare events’ online socialness, which is combined with qualitative, participant observation at the events. This approach is applied to the analysis of three Instagram meetups organised by a specific online community at Catalan ski resorts. The paper’s results show the differential characteristic of tourism UGEs: user initiative and empowerment, full organisation and structure, great social media use and UGC production, brand dissemination, attraction capacity, strong online community bond and faithfulness. With UGEs, an event management paradigm shift occurs as organisations are no longer the main initiators and controllers of the event.

Technology, fandom and community in the second media age

The virtual or online community was considered by Mark Poster (1995) to be central to what he called the second media age, marked as distinct from the first media age by new modes interactivity and subjectivity afforded by internet technologies. Community is also central to participatory culture, the study of which began at the cusp of the second media age. This paper critically examines the technocultural formation of online community in the context of fandom and its relationship to specific platforms from Usenet to Tumblr. Based on the analysis of interview data collected from participatory fans (n = 33), I argue that not all platforms enable community formation. While the participants had a sense of community as members of listservs, Yahoo groups and LiveJournal, the same was not true of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, even though they afforded a number of fannish pleasures. These findings raise questions as to the ongoing centrality of online community in the late second media age.

Wikipedia and e-Collaboration Research

Wikipedia's precursor started in the year 2000 as a traditional online encyclopedia with content controlled by a small group of experts. In 2013 Wikipedia's current user-controlled incarnation was such a successful enterprise that an asteroid was named after it. The authors briefly discuss key opportunities and challenges in e-collaboration research on Wikipedia. The opportunities refer to studies on the impact of Wikipedia on individuals and organizations, as well as on the spontaneous formation of online communities. The main challenges discussed refer to the consensus-building nature of content creation in Wikipedia, making practical applications of findings somewhat limited, as well as data compilation difficulties.