Virtual Community Networks Research Articles

Rethinking labour risk in global production networks: Resilience strategies of cruise ship workers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic

The collapse of the global industry due to the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how precarious the livelihoods of workers embedded in globalised industries are. In the global production network literature, moments of crisis have been addressed in the debate on ‘GPN risk’. While this debate has contributed to our understanding of firms’ risk mitigation strategies, much less attention has been paid to workers’ resilience strategies in the face of risk.To fill this gap, this paper rethinks the concept of ‘labour risk’ by including the perspective of the workers. Drawing on concepts from labour geography, the article sheds light on the resilience strategies of cruise ship workers from Indonesia during the COVID-19 crisis. We interviewed twenty-two cruise ship workers, two non-governmental organisations, and two political authorities to analyse how workers used different resilience strategies (coping, adaptive and transformative) to respond to the risk outsourcing practices of cruise ship companies.Our study shows that workers cope with the crisis by relying on family relations, virtual community networks, and the local labour market. In a few cases, workers followed adaptive strategies of opening their own businesses and leaving the cruise industry. These results emphasise that workers’ resilience strategies play a central role in reproducing exploitative capital accumulation regimes underpinning global production networks.

Addressing Racism, Politics and the Pivotal 2018 Midterm Point: Social Network Analysis of Black Lives Matter Twitter Discourse

This study examines Twitter data collected by Netlytic building up to the 2018 midterm election date as well as one month after. We conducted a social network analysis and a semantic textual analysis of the data. Prior research on network discourse of Black Lives Matter, a social movement organically created from a hashtag on social media following the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's killer George Zimmerman, found Black victims of police brutality and systemic racism were victim blamed. This present study maps tweets, showing communication networks formed around Black Lives Matter and what the networks communicated. Through our analysis, eight distinct virtual community networks emerged.

Role of Social Support in Women facing Domestic Violence during Lockdown of Covid-19 while Cohabiting with the Abusers: Analysis of Cases Registered with the Family Counseling Centre, Alwar, India.

The present study aims to analyze the role of social support in the lives of women survivors of domestic violence who filed a complaint with the Mahila Salah and Suraksha Kendra (MSSK) Alwar, India, while residing with the abusive husband and his family during the lockdown period of COVID-19. The study explores the role of MSSK with extended vulnerability of women during the lockdown period at large. This study adopts an exploratory qualitative method. A total of 36 married women who had filed a complaint with MSSK before and during the lockdown were included. Interviews with the women were held through telephonic conversations on vulnerability, coping mechanism and extent and forms of social support. Thematic content analysis was done in a stepwise manner. Results show that degeneration of social support model is time -bound and the accuracy of applying this model wane under extended condition of vulnerability caused due to COVID-19. MSSK can expand support by creating and integrating virtual community networks to detect and deter violence during the lockdown. The study suggests that the government can ensure and empower bystanders with skills of modern communication. The existing physical institutional delivery mechanism need to evolve strategies that are resilient to emerging threats from the vulnerable ecosystem.

Structural equation modelling for influencing virtual community networks

Structural equation modelling for influencing virtual community networks

Rank Based Virtual Community Detection in Mobile User Network

A virtual community network is a network of individuals who are sharing something in common such as behavior, thoughts, and ideas. The detection of virtual communities in social networks encourages the researchers in the computational and social science to invest more effort and time to explore the different properties of virtual networks. This paper introduces, mobile user network, another application area of virtual community networks with some proven techniques. The work explains the link prediction methods in which the relation between the different parameters in the dataset is explored. The virtual network hence formed could give more insights to the investors in the mobile communication domain to fulfill the customers’ needs and attract more users to their tent.

An efficient protocol for power consumption in wireless enterprise ad hoc virtual community network with Triso framework

Today's global technology has various security treats which made the identity protection essential among user's for establishing communication over internet. Generally these identity protecting network were well known as anonymous communication networks. Mix networks are multistage systems which provide efficient mechanisms for anonymous communication over internet. According to which these networks have various traffic analysis attacks which need to compromise the identities of users. The major objective of this paper is to present a diversity mix techniques against traffic analysis attacks, disclosure attack and spam attack. In this work, we propose traffic re-allocation which involves in varying the size as well as number of messages in the network. By means of enabling this bursting and blending of messages among the network nodes the attacker get confused with the varied message count and sizes. The performance of our proposed work is examined against the three attacks in order to check its security and anonymity. The obtained result proves the effectiveness of our proposed techniques.

An efficient protocol for power consumption in wireless enterprise ad hoc virtual community network with Triso framework

Today's global technology has various security treats which made the identity protection essential among user's for establishing communication over internet. Generally these identity protecting network were well known as anonymous communication networks. Mix networks are multistage systems which provide efficient mechanisms for anonymous communication over internet. According to which these networks have various traffic analysis attacks which need to compromise the identities of users. The major objective of this paper is to present a diversity mix techniques against traffic analysis attacks, disclosure attack and spam attack. In this work, we propose traffic re-allocation which involves in varying the size as well as number of messages in the network. By means of enabling this bursting and blending of messages among the network nodes the attacker get confused with the varied message count and sizes. The performance of our proposed work is examined against the three attacks in order to check its security and anonymity. The obtained result proves the effectiveness of our proposed techniques.

Empirical analysis of interpersonal interacting behavior in virtual community

Internet forum is the place where online mass incidents usually happen, and is very important in information diffusion and opinion spreading. We empirically analyze the interacting behavior of internet forum users, construct the virtual community network based on implicit interaction behavior. Through inspecting the statistical properties, we find that this virtual community network is directional, asymmetric and disassortative scale free network, and it has hierarchy and community structure.Moreover, user page view is positively correlated with his in-degree, so both can describe the influence power and popularity. From quantitative view, the results show that the effects of influential user with 'contribute-driven' property on information spreading can not be ignored; the success of internet forum needs to increase the activity of the most inert users; if user wants to be authoritative in virtual community networks, he needs to propose interesting message or has a personal brand.

Research on the evolution process of virtual community networks

We investigate and simulate the evolution process and topological features of the virtual community networks.We founded that the joint of nodes, joint of edges, networks’ degree distribution, average degree and the correlation between the node’s degree and its time in the network are different from the scale-free network model.With statistics and analysis of some of the characteristics of an actual Internet forum, we propose a new network evolution algorithm, namely the virtual community network construction algorithm.The simulation results show that the networks generated from our algorithm has the same characteristics as the real virtual community networks.

Using Actor-Network Theory to Understanding Virtual Community Networks of Older People Using the Internet

Older people around the world are adopting the Internet at an increasing rate, and in the process are forming virtual community networks in a way that would not otherwise have been possible. Internet interactions by this group include e-mail, chat groups, community forums and discussion groups as well as the individual use of the Web for information purposes. Some of these virtual networks relate older people to other older people, while other networks span age groups as when, for instance, a grandmother communicates by e-mail with her grandchildren. But linking to the Internet is not always straightforward as family members, friends and the technology, along with other non-human actors, often intrude. This highlights the socio-technical nature of these networks and the need to investigate them in a way that allows this to be seen. To attempt an understanding of the formation and operation of virtual networks of older people, and the interactions involved, a socio-technical approach is required and this paper will attempt such an analysis based on research, in an Australian context, undertaken by the authors.

Developing a virtual interdisciplinary research community in higher education

As multidisciplinary collaboration in both clinical and research settings is becoming a key aspect of contemporary health care, strategies to enhance interprofessional interaction in postgraduate research programmes can offer important experiences to facilitate on-going interprofessional relationships. This paper provides a retrospective appraisal of a strategy which used computermediated communication to develop a virtual community network, known as health_voice, accessed through a web page. The rationale for developing the network is presented, and the process of designing and establishing the web-site through an action research approach is described. The outcome of the strategy is reviewed with regard to the relationships between the real and virtual community. Reflections on the developmental process contextualise the initiative within a concept of a communityof-practice. It is acknowledged that the use of a virtual arena for communication within a research community involves a cultural change in the dynamics of higher degree teaching and learning. Future plans to further embed the virtual environment within a postgraduate research culture are given.