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Much early communication research was inspired by systems theory. This approach emphasizes that individuals and groups use communication to interact with and respond to their larger environment and attempts to outline the ways that different levels interact with each other (e.g., work groups within departments within firms). Many concepts from systems theory - such as emergence and feedback loops - have become integral parts of communication theories. However, until recently, quantitative researchers have struggled to apply a systems approach. Large-scale, multilevel trace data from online platforms combined with computational advances are enabling a turn back toward systems-inspired research. I outline four systems-based approaches that recent research uses to study online communities: community comparisons, individual trajectories, cross-level mechanisms, and simulating emergent behavior. I end with a discussion of the opportunities and challenges of systems-based research for quantitative communication scholars.

'Expect Us' focuses on four online communities - Anonymous (4chan.org), The Pirate Bay, World of Warcraft, and the IGN.com posting boards. In all of these members engaged deeply with political issues in a range of ways. However, only two of the communities mobilised politically. If political behaviour occurred on all four communities, why did only two of these sites foster political mobilisation among their participants? Using ethnographic methods, Beyer argues that key structural features about the birthplaces of the four communities shaped the type of political behaviour that emerged from each.

In Online Communities verbreiten sich digitale Inhalte schnell und weitestgehend ohne Inhaltsprüfungen, wodurch die Gefahr des Missbrauchs für hasserfüllte Kommunikation besteht. Die Zunahme dieser als Hate Speech bezeichneten Inhalte veranlasst Online Communities zum Einsatz von Personal, um derartige Fälle manuell zu erkennen. Aufgrund der Vielzahl an Nachrichten ist dies jedoch arbeits- und kostenintensiv. Das Ziel der Dissertation besteht darin, Verfahren zur automatischen Detektion von Hate Speech in Online Communities zu konzipieren und zu implementieren. Die entwickelten Verfahren basieren auf einem Sequenzmodell zur Strukturierung von Texten und einem Pattern-basierten Ansatz zur Detektion von Bezügen zwischen hasserfüllten Wörtern und referenzierten Opfern. Die Evaluationsresultate zeigen eine Verbesserung der Klassifikationsgüte gegenüber existierenden Verfahren. Zudem ermöglicht das Verfahren die Analyse von zusammenhängender Kommunikation in Rahmen von Cyberbullying.

Using online communities as a market research tool
Using online communities as a market research tool
This article describes the methodological advantages and disadvantages regarding the use of online communities as a market research tool.The advantages include the facilitation of an ethnographic approach due to the use of multiple research methods, the anonymity of a virtual environment, and the effect of unconscious thought processing. This allows for greater insights into the life worlds of consumers. Nonetheless, there are also disadvantages. The lack of body language makes the interpretation process more difficult. In addition, there is also loss of respondent interaction, especially in comparison to traditional focus group discussions.

Sympathy sockpuppets are false online identities used for purposes of extracting care work from others. While online community infiltration for nefarious purposes is a well-documented phenomenon, people may also join online communities using deceptive personas ("sockpuppet" accounts) for non-nefarious reasons, such as to gain sympathy or cultivate a sense of belonging in a group. In comparison with scamming and trolling, this more subtle form of online deception is not well understood, and to date, its impacts on individuals and communities have not been fully articulated. This knowledge gap leaves communities without guidance when managing the impacts of this sympathy sockpuppet deception. We interviewed people who had been members of online communities that discovered sympathy sockpuppets in their midst to explore and characterize the phenomenon of sympathy sockpuppetry and to provide guidance for other individuals and communities that encounter similar forms of online deception.

Purpose– Knowledge capturing and sharing within an organization have been extensively studied in the literature. In this stream of work, an influential focus is on the process of encoding and managing knowledge to enable effective reuse within the organization. With the advancement of internet and web technologies, there is an increased interest in the study of knowledge flows in online communities. The authors highlight in this paper the fact that the boundaries between internal and external organizational knowledge are disappearing, mainly due to the extensive use of online-based platforms to support organizational operations. The authors believe that this will affect the activities of knowledge management in today's businesses. The purpose of this paper is to provide guidelines for organizations on how to bridge their internal and external knowledge using an integrated semantic approach.Design/methodology/approach– In this paper the authors review two classes of approaches, those that target internal organizational knowledge, and those that target online knowledge flow processes. Then the authors identify the challenges involved in today's knowledge environments. To address those challenges, the authors propose a framework to bridge and integrate internal and external organizational knowledge. The authors map the activities handled in the framework to the existing knowledge management activities identified from the literature, and highlight how emerging technologies are used to support such activities along the knowledge management process. The authors apply the approach in the context of an organization's process that heavily depends on the appropriate alignment of internal and external knowledge. The authors focus on the use of emerging technologies that support collaboration and the generation of explicit and reusable semantics.Findings– Interaction points within organizations can be used to define the scope of knowledge exchanged. Following a methodology around the proposed framework, it is feasible to create conceptual connections around internal and external knowledge through explicit semantics. Such connections that are created to support online communities' knowledge exchange can be applied to internal organizational knowledge, and used as a bridge to external knowledge sources.Originality/value– The paper provides a roadmap for organizations on how to manage organizational knowledge processes in a coherent and collaborative semantic platform, with a view to what is available outside the boundaries of an organization.

Die gegenwärtige Diskussion um Inter- und Transnationalisierung der Hochschulen (vgl. dazu u. a. Hartmann 2011, Hahn 2004, Kehm 2003) sowie die Forderung nach Mobilität und internationalem Austausch im Hochschulbereich bilden den Hintergrund des Beitrags. Infolge der tief greifenden Internationalisierungsprozesse wird "strategisches Management internationaler Aktivitäten" (Leszczensky / Barthelmes 2011:6) an den Hochschulen als unentbehrlich erachtet. In diesem Zusammenhang wird u. a. eine gezielte Auswahl von Partnerhochschulen für Kooperations- und Austauschprojekte sowie der "Auf- und Ausbau von Netzwerken auf den verschiedenen Ebenen" (ebd.) seitens der Hochschulen praktiziert. Im Zuge dieser Entwicklung steigt stetig die Anzahl der Online-Communities im Hochschulbereich - allerdings größtenteils auf die Förderung der Partnerschaften zwischen westeuropäischen Hochschulen ausgerichtet. Im Folgenden soll das im Rahmen einer Hochschulkooperation zwischen dem Institut für Interkulturelle Kommunikation an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München und dem Lehrstuhl für Interkulturelle Kommunikation (Institut für Angewandte Linguistik) an der Adam-Mickiewicz-Universität (AMU) Poznań / Polen entwickelte Konzept für ein deutsch-polnisches Hochschulnetzwerk vorgestellt werden.

The role of online community is central to the process of understanding game narratives. Given a tension in game narrative theory, a solution to that tension is the stories that players tell of their own game-play experiences. This analysis of the rhetorical dimension of telling game-play stories as part of a communal experience seeks to illuminate the intersections of game narrative, community, and rhetoric. The rhetorical dimensions of players' personal game narratives and online community building coalesce as a phenomenon unique to how video games influence community construction through the sharing of personal game-play experiences. Using symbolic convergence theory, I examine the personal game-play experiences found on an online community for the game Dark Souls (From Software, 2011), revealing how extraludic narratives function rhetorically to solve the tension between player agency and game narrative.

A curated selection of remix videos that edit pop culture texts and recut them into new works that explore themes of gender and sexual representation, or create new LGBTQ narratives from the original source material.