Suchergebnisse

Was ist unter 'online communities' zu verstehen? Sind 'virtuelle Gemeinschaften' wirklich virtuell, sind sie gemeinschaftlich? Zur Beantwortung dieser Fragen wurde in einer empirischen Studie mit 101 Interviews geprüft, ob und inwiefern es in Kommunikationsdiensten des Internets zur Bildung von neuen Gemeinschaften kommt, bei denen die Teilnehmenden losgelöst von ihrer Körperlichkeit und von einer gemeinsamen lokalen Präsenz ausschließlich 'online' interagieren. Neben den soziostrukturellen Daten der Teilnehmenden an zwei Newsgroups und drei Chats und deren Nutzungsgewohnheiten war für das Forschungsprojekt vor allem von Interesse, wie die Beziehungsnetze aussehen und ob sich die persönlichen Netzwerke 'online' und 'offline' überschneiden. Bei den untersuchten Chats lassen sich im Ergebnis durchaus starke, multiplexe und dauerhafte Beziehungen feststellen, wobei diese aber nicht ausschließlich online aufrechterhalten, sondern durch Begegnungen außerhalb des Internets gestützt werden. Lokalität und 'face-to-face'-Kontakte bleiben also wichtig und Online-Kommunikation ersetzt nicht offline-Beziehungen, sondern ergänzt sie. Chats und Newsgroups ermöglichen den Aufbau von neuen Bekanntschaften und leisten damit einen Beitrag zur Erweiterung des sozialen Netzes. (ICI2)

The spatial dimensions of online communication establish the basic conditions for online social life. The protocol-based constructions make it clear that spatial constructions matter for the sense of community. Parallel to offline life, the spatial dimensions in online communities are important for the individual's navigation, relation, and communication. This article presents a typology of online space, where three different kinds of spatial dimensions are defined. Analyzing the patterns within any online community provides useful information on the basic terms of social life. The interface serves as a visible and ontological space on the screen, a shared common spot in the vast cyberspace. The social space is mainly epistemological, based on the individual's interpretations of social interactions. The metaphorical space is purely epistemological, based on reconstructed reality and geography, and evokes the sense of a place. The typology holds the key to understanding many of the differences within online social life.

Online communities (OCs) are a virtual organizational form in which knowledge collaboration can occur in unparalleled scale and scope, in ways not heretofore theorized. For example, collaboration can occur among people not known to each other, who share different interests and without dialogue. An exploration of this organizational form can fundamentally change how we theorize about knowledge collaboration among members of organizations. We argue that a fundamental characteristic of OCs that affords collaboration is their fluidity. This fluidity engenders a dynamic flow of resources in and out of the community—resources such as passion, time, identity, social disembodiment of ideas, socially ambiguous identities, and temporary convergence. With each resource comes both a negative and positive consequence, creating a tension that fluctuates with changes in the resource. We argue that the fluctuations in tensions can provide an opportunity for knowledge collaboration when the community responds to these tensions in ways that encourage interactions to be generative rather than constrained. After offering numerous examples of such generative responses, we suggest that this form of theorizing—induced by online communities—has implications for theorizing about the more general case of knowledge collaboration in organizations.

Large-scale online communities rely on computer-mediated communication between participants, enabling them to sustain interactions and exchange on a scale hitherto unknown. Yet little research has focused on how these online communities sustain themselves and how their interactions are structured. In this paper, we theorize and empirically measure the network exchange patterns of long-duration sustainable online communities. We propose that participation dynamics follow specific forms of social exchange: direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and preferential attachment. We integrate diverse findings about individual participation motivations by identifying how individual behavior manifests in network-level structures of online communities. We studied five online communities over 27 months and analyzed 38,483 interactions using exponential random graph (p*) models and mixed-effects analysis of covariance. In a test of competing models, we found that network exchange patterns in online community communication networks are characterized by direct reciprocity and indirect reciprocity patterns and, surprisingly, a tendency away from preferential attachment. Our findings undermine previous explanations that online exchange follows a power law distribution based on people wanting to connect to "popular" others in online communities. Our work contributes to theories of new organizational forms by identifying network exchange patterns that regulate participation and sustain online communities.

▪ Abstract  Information and communication technologies based on the Internet have enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices—phenomena worthy of the attention of anthropological researchers. Despite early assessments of the revolutionary nature of the Internet and the enormous transformations it would bring about, the changes have been less dramatic and more embedded in existing practices and power relations of everyday life. This review explores researchers' questions, approaches, and insights within anthropology and some relevant related fields, and it seeks to identify promising new directions for study. The general conclusion is that the technologies comprising the Internet, and all the text and media that exist within it, are in themselves cultural products. Anthropology is thus well suited to the further investigation of these new, and not so new, phenomena.

This editorial introduces the thematic issue of Online Communities and Populism. I begin by laying out the justification for taking up this topic and then articulate why Media and Communication is the ideal location to hold this discussion. Then I introduce the articles in this issue by listing the questions these articles take up, the four major themes these articles take on, and preview each article.

On the Internet, readers of Russian literature create online communities (fandoms), in which users experiment with classical literature and construct their own versions of source texts. Although each separate fandom is dedicated to a particular classical work, authors (ficwriters) compare different classical texts and construct a common artistic space based on those. The article deals with the content and boundaries of the online corpus of amateur works based on Russian classical literature. The research subject is fanfics in which artistic worlds of several classical works are combined (crossovers). There are distinguished two forms of modeling a common artistic space in fandoms dedicated to Russian classical literature: 1) through the character's outlook and transformation of the traditional loci; 2) through the narrator's outlook and creation of an unstable space. The first form involves separating space into 'public' and 'intimate'; the second form is based on the division of space into 'sacred' and 'ordinary'. To describe the connection of fanfics based on classical literature but published in different fandoms, we use the concept 'superfandom', which is a corpus of fanfics based on different classical works where texts are united by the types of transformation of original sources and by common strategies of readers' reception. This binary typology of space reflects the features of perception of Russian classical literature in communities originally created by popular literature fans. On the one hand, ficwriters regard classical literature as an object of honoring; on the other hand, they use the poetics of space from different classical sources to show their own artistic preferences, including acceptance or rejection of Russian classical literature.

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.