Coye Cheshire & Andrew Fiore //

Computer-Mediated Communication

Online Communities and the Symbolic Construction of Community

6 February 2013

Mailing List:i216@ischool.berkeley.edu

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https://calmail.berkeley.edu/manage/list/listinfo/i216@ischool.berkeley.edu

Final project schedule We will facilitate in-class group discussion of

project ideas…starting today!

A project description/report will be due halfway through the semester (e.g., mid-March)

Final Projects will be presented and due as the single deliverable for the course.

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More Final Project Examples!

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A few examples of project types:

Design, prototype or build a novel CMC system Experiment using a CMC system Analyze or visualize interaction in a CMC system Research a specific CMC system or domain of systems

and collect empirical data (interviews, small survey, etc).

Importantly, everyone should:

(1) build on a strong theoretical foundation

(2) use this foundation to justify the solution

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Final Project Ideas Shared Doc:

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 http://tinyurl.com/bbtx7xh

It’s a pre-barn dance social!

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Community

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“Mechanical Solidarity”“Organic Solidarity”

“Classic” Conception of Community (The Chicago School)

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The ‘Myths’ of CommunitySimplicity and F2F

“…the anatomy of social life at the micro-level is more intricate, and no less revealing, than among … the macro-level”

Egalitarianism“…community generates multitudinous means of making evaluative distinctions among its members, means of differentiating among them…”

Inevitable Conformity“suggests that the outward spread of cultural influences from the centre will make communities … less like their former selves…[this assumes that] people are somehow passive in relation to culture: they receive it, transmit it, but do not create it.”

http://itawambahistory.blogspot.com/

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Community Boundaries

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other,outgroup

ingroup

other,outgroup

Symbols and Community

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Symbols versus Emblems, Signs

Cohen on symbolic words

Justice, goodness, patriotism, duty, love, peace, life, purity, gender…

“Their range of meanings can be glossed over in a commonly accepted symbol — precisely because it allows its adherents to attach their own meanings to it. They share the symbol, but do not necessarily share its meanings.”

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2/6/13 Cheshire & Fiore — Computer-Mediated Communication 16from 37signals.com

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Symbolic meaning (and variation) within communities

“Patriotism”

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Symbols are effective because they are

imprecise. … They are, therefore, ideal

media through which people can speak a

‘common’ language, behave in apparently

similar ways, participate in the ‘same’

rituals, pray to the ‘same’ gods, wear

similar clothes, and so forth, without

subordinating themselves to a tyranny of

orthodoxy. Individuality and commonality

are thus reconcilable.

“

”

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Community Boundaries and Symbols

“Symbols do not so much express meaning as give us the capacity to make meaning.”

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Community Boundaries and Symbols

Public face(symbolically simple)

Private face(symbolically complex) “ ”

Cohen on subjectivity

“But not all boundaries, and not all the components of any boundary, are so objectively apparent. They may be thought of, rather, as existing in the minds of their beholders. This being so, the boundary may be perceived in rather different terms, not only by people on opposite sides of it, but also by people on the same side.”

— Cohen

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“…what strikes me as even more remarkable is that many of his points and general mentality have relevance today when thinking about online communities and online interaction more generally: in response to dichotomous and reductionist thinking about communities, Cohen encourages us to think more deeply and open-mindedly about the concept of community as well as the interactions, symbols, and meaning that constitute them. This type of thinking seems apt for the contemporary period where once again social dynamics are shifting and where traditional models of thinking about socialization, community, culture, etc., are still being anachronistically and unfairly applied to novel phenomena.” -Emily

“There are… issues that Cohen touches upon which I think deserve further discussion. First, Cohen's article suggested, but did not clarify, one major question about group boundary-making: how do symbolic boundaries serve to integrate members of the group AND to signal the group's existence to outsiders? Symbolic boundaries must do both, but if symbols are meaningful primarily to MEMBERS of the group, then how do they successfully signal outsiders' exclusion?... how do outsiders come to understand in-group meanings and interpret community behavior? In Cohen's terms, if the public face of a group is "symbolically simple" and private face is "symbolically complex," how does the outsider recognize or appreciate the complexity?” -Lindsay

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Some questions to consider

Examples of communities in CMC and the use of symbols?

How does a community define its boundaries? If there have been times when those boundaries were violated, how did members respond?

http://xkcd.com/802/

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Community Boundaries Online: Facebook Newsfeed Fiasco of ‘06

“The point is, you're always presenting the identity you want to present - you never have to worry about the identity you used to present … This morning, millions of students were shown that they can't actually rewrite history. Everything they do, all of the groups they join and interests they state or friends they make - it is all being recorded.”

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Coye Cheshire & Andrew Fiore //

Brief History and What Makes an Online Community Anyway?

The Beginnings of Online Community…

The first large-scale online communities were Usenet discussion groups and forums

- Developed around 1979- No official structure

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http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~atf/images/treemap_all.gif

What aspects define a community?

Symbols?

Poster to post ratio?

Network ties?

Affect-ladenrelationships?

Common practices?

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Social networks and online community

“Community emerges where the cumulative impact of interactions among individuals adds value above the level of pairwise interactions.”

— Caroline Haythornthwaite

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The network perspective

People(nodes)

Ties (edges)

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Ties in a social network(as modeled in SN analysis)

Directed or undirected

Simplex or multiplex

Valued or unvalued7

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Network approach to community

Examines interconnections to discover where groups exist rather than determining a priori that a group exists based on external criteria.

But is this a community? Or “an alliance, a collaborative work group, a collective, a cohort”?

Social networks and Social Capital

Accumulate capital Social capital Knowledge capital Communion

… all achieved through network ties?

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The power of social capital and the structure of social networks

1 + 1 > 2?

1 + 1 = 2

2 + 2 > 4?

6 + 6 > 12?

Fully connected network: N people, N(N-1)/2 ties

Connections grow at a much faster rate (quadratic vs. linear)

Bridge

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“…The chapter was published in 2007, and perhaps the initial framing of the question whether or not communities can exist without physical colocation contributed to my skepticism. I believe the author's perspective was using a network view to understand communities, whereas I was reading the article thinking about how it could be used to grow a community. I was left with many unanswered questions that the author didn't intend to answer” -Dave

“…There are upsides and downsides to social networks of course, however I believe it is wrong to say that online communication is a threat to the ideals of community. Society moves at the speed of technology today and being a part of a community is the norm of todays youth and even older generations. Online communication helps the idea of community more than it hurts it in my opinion.” -Maurice

Anonymity and Behavior in Online Groups and Communities

Photo Attribution: http://mimanifesto.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/anonymous1.jpg

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Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and Identity

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Shyness and Anonymity

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Aggressiveness and Anonymity

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Group Dynamics and Anonymity

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“I was most interested in the discussion of support groups, because it's a huge part of internet life that I know nothing about. The discussion of signaling legitimate group membership with each communication was especially fascinating. … However, after I finished the article I was pretty underwhelmed with it as a whole. ” -Kate

“it struck me that there could be a danger in asserting that "socially anxious" people feel more comfortable and are therefore more confident engaging with group members online as opposed to face-to-face interactions offline. Though not stated, there seemed to me an implicit assumption that these individuals can and should find solace and community exclusively online, and thereby forgo any need to take part in social activities offline. ” -Jennifer

Finding Community

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Online communities are neither built nor do they just emerge, they evolve organically and change over time. Developers cannot control online community development but they can influence it.

Jenny Preece

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For next Wednesday…Privacy and information control

Mayer-Schonberger, V. (2009) "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age". Princeton University Press. (In reader.)

Boyd, D., and Hargittai, E. Facebook Privacy Settings: Who Cares?. In First Monday 15(8).

Cheshire, C., Antin, J. and Churchill, E. (2010) Behaviors, Adverse Events and Dispositions: An Empirical Study of Online Discretion and Information Control. In Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61(7).

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