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Online community and the personal diary: Writing to connect at Open Diary
Abstract
Open Diary was the first online diary service to be created, in existence from 1998 to 2014. An ethnographic case study was performed in 2006–2008 to explore community-creation on the site, using the theory of sense of virtual community (Blanchard & Markus, 2002, 2004) to analyse site practices and the member experience. The study describes a cohesive community based on a culture of support, empathy and open sharing of personal lives enabled by anonymity and privacy protections. The article discusses these results in terms of community-creation online and compares Open Diary to current forms of life writing online, blogging in particular, arguing that it was the members’ and designers’ understanding and experience of the traditional pen-and-paper diary that enabled the building of a unique community on the site, creating an experience that is perhaps no longer possible to replicate due to the social and cultural changes that have occurred on the web since 1998.
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... Over the centuries, from Ancient Greece to our current digital era, there has been surprising consistency in the practice of documenting daily activities and thoughts in a diary. Whether in traditional physical notebooks or on web platforms that offer the possibility of developing an online diary (Firth, 1998;Martinviita 2016), many people have a strong inclination to write about their own lives as they live it. ...
... It should be noted that some of these platforms have been active on the Internet since 1995. Despite the great transformations that the Internet has undergone, many diarists have gone on writing their online diaries on a regular basis, as they started doing more than twenty years ago (Martinviita, 2016). Our qualitative longitudinal data corpus comprised 420 diaries with 11-20 years of writing. ...
Diaries have been generally understood as “windows” on sense-making processes when studying life ruptures. In this article, we draw on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of self-writing as a “technology of the self” and on sociocultural psychology to propose that diaries are not “windows” but technologies that aid in the sense-making. Concretely, we analyzed three non-exhaustive and non-exclusive uses of diary writing in times of vulnerability: (1) imagination of the future and preparation to encounter difficulties; (2) distancing from one’s own experience; and (3) creating personal commitments. Our longitudinal data comprised three public online diaries written over more than twenty years, belonging to three anonymous individuals selected from a database of more than 400 diaries. We analyzed these three diaries by iterating between qualitative and quantitative analysis. We conclude that: (1) beyond their expressive dimension, diaries are technologies that support the sense-making process, but not without difficulties; (2) diaries form a self-generated space for dialogue with oneself in which the diarist also becomes aware of the social nature of her life story; (3) diaries are not only technologies for the Socratic “know thyself” but also technologies to work on oneself, especially in terms of the personal perspective on the past or the future; and (4) the practice of diary writing goes beyond sense-making towards personal development and the desire to transform one’s life trajectory.
... Over the centuries, from Ancient Greece to our current digital era, there has been surprising consistency in the practice of documenting daily activities and thoughts in a diary. Whether in traditional physical notebooks or on web platforms that offer the possibility of developing an online diary (Firth, 1998;Martinviita, 2016), many people have a strong inclination to write about their own lives as they live it. ...
... It should be noted that some of these platforms have been active on the Internet since 1995. Despite the great transformations that the Internet has undergone, many diarists have gone on writing their online diaries on a regular basis, as they started doing more than twenty years ago (Martinviita, 2016). ...
Diaries have been generally understood as “windows” on sense-making processes when studying life ruptures. In this article, we draw on Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of self-writing as a “technology of the self” and on sociocultural psychology to propose that diaries are not “windows,” but technologies that aid in the sense-making. Concretely, we analyzed three non-exhaustive and non-exclusive uses of diary writing in times of vulnerability: 1) imagination of the future and preparation to encounter difficulties; 2) distancing from one's own experience; and 3) creating personal commitments. Our longitudinal data comprised three public online diaries written over more than twenty years, belonging to three anonymous individuals selected from a database of more than 400 diaries. We analyzed these three diaries by iterating between qualitative and quantitative analysis. We conclude that: 1) beyond their expressive dimension, diaries are technologies that support the sense-making process, but not without difficulties; 2) diaries form a self-generated space for dialogue with oneself in which the diarist also becomes aware of the social nature of her life story; 3) diaries are not only technologies for the Socratic “know thyself” but also technologies to work on oneself, especially in terms of the personal perspective on the past or the future; and 4) the practice of diary writing goes beyond sense-making towards personal development and the desire to transform one's life trajectory.
... Furthermore, reading and providing feedback about someone's experiences helps establishing a friendly environment in the learning community. Thus, student writers can practice and learn to be open, honest, and respectful (Martinviita, 2016). ...
The personal writing genre can provide valuable space for students to start from what they know best, themselves. In this qualitative study, middle school students’ earliest memories and the kinds of remembered memories were tried to be investigated. Students’ earliest memories were analysed based on their written personal writings. In addition, how well students remembered the names of the objects shown to them in a short time was analysed. Thus the study also aimed to investigate which objects were remembered by students in a quick learning activity. The participants of the study were 21 struggling middle school students participated into a summer project titled as “Let's Discover Our Thoughts: What Do I Know and How Do I Use My Knowledge?” Data was collected from students’ writings reflecting their earliest memories and lists of remembered items’ names. The study's findings yielded that the most remembered feeling was being sad. Other reflected emotions were feeling happy, embarrassed, and tired. Analyses of the data also showed that the most remembered items were oranges, playing cards, and lemons. According to the used memorization test, among struggling middle school students only two students had good memorization skills.
... However, social media as we know it today probably started about 25 years ago, when Bruce and Susan Abelson established "Open Diary," the social networking site for online diary writers in 1997 (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). One of the founders described Open Diary as the first website to bring online diary writers together in a community (Martinviita, 2016). The rapid growth of high-speed Internet over the following years brought social media into extensive use and resulted in the emergence of many social media platforms, such as Myspace (in 2003), Facebook (in 2004), and Twitter (in 2006. ...
The literature highlights social media as an effective communication platform for firms to connect with potential customers. Although scholars have investigated various benefits of social media, limited studies have explored the antecedences of social media adoption for firms. Particularly, we lack an understanding of which firm strategies could affect social media adoption and how. Drawing on the dynamic capabilities perspective, this study utilizes logistic regression to analyze data from 1,392 public firms to investigate how particular strategies could influence social media adoption. The results indicate that a firm’s market diversification strategies are a significant determinant of social media adoption, while product diversification strategies play a relatively less important role. A diversification strategy involving social media may be more favorable when entering new markets as opposed to launching new products. The findings of this study contribute to the existing research on social media and shed light on strategic implementations that lead to social media usage by firms.
... In 1998, Bruce and Susan Abelson founded the "Open Diary" to bring together online diary writers into one community. 2 It was the forerunner for the interactive nature of current cyberspace. The subsequent creation of SNSs such as Myspace (2003) and Facebook (2004) have further extended its horizon. ...
According to information and data research firm Nielsen (2018), adults in the United States spend around 10 hours per day connected to the internet. Kantar’s digital adoption and usage trends report (2018) reveals that there are around 566 million Internet users in India as of December 2018. The Internet is the pivotal technology of the current information age. It guarantees the production, distribution, and use of digitized information in all formats. About 95 percent of all information prevailing around the globe is digitized and is available on the Internet (Hilbert & Lopez, 2011).
Interaction between people has considerably changed with technological advances. The medium of interaction has advanced from direct in-person contact, letter writing, and telephone to internet communication. Humans are social beings, hence they have transformed the internet from being a tool for communicating information to a tool for social interaction. The Internet has created wide avenues for ways of interaction through voice calls, video calls, and social media. A virtual computer world referred to as ‘Cyberspace’ has been formed, which facilitates online communication and information exchange activities. Cyberspace offers a virtual interactive environment for different societies around the globe. Cyberspace offers a sense of near physical contact between people who are far away from each other. It allows people to express themselves and build relationships with a wide variety of people from all over the world. The success of cyberspace in the current society could also be attributed to the concept of hyperreality; cyberspace appears to be more real with enhanced user experience. Social media and virtual games are used as fantasy worlds by many people. They provide the opportunity to do things that are not possible or difficult to do in real life.
This chapter will cover the different forms of cyberspace impacting the social structure, establishment of social relationships in cyberspace, family dynamics in cyberspace, various positive and negative consequences of cyberspace, and finally the perspectives that have to be taken into consideration in the future.
... weblog, blog. [8] Then, the appearance of Web 2.0 applications gave the users many free choices of interaction, collaboration and other kinds of virtual content in social media dialogue. [9] The development of new online social media applications brought a new primary aim to general social purposes. ...
The development of information communication and technology have changed the entertainment activities of Youth. This research elucidated the knowledge base of Youth Entertainment Activities in Social Media (YEASM) by applying the bibliometric methods for 531 Scopus articles from 2000 to 2021. The results showed the annual growth trend of publications over time, leading the United States. Small and emerging research groups, contributed to the YEASM related research community between 2017 and 2021. The sources were interested in four published themes, including Cyber behaviour and Cyberpsychology, Human-Computer interaction, Business studies, and Tourism studies. In addition, nine themes in YEASM were explored, of which the two most important topics were about virtual games and the well-being of young people. Besides that, two other concerned themes were gender & internet usage and adolescent enjoyment in social media. Moreover, ten topical topics were addressed, in which COVID-19 context was a new approach in several studies. Overall, this research could be valuable reference information for scientists in determining future research directions.
... which was online from 1998-2014, and was important to many online diarists. In a study of Open Diary users in 2006-8, Annamari Martinviita found that many of their informants felt that the anonymity allowed them to write about very intimate details of their lives, and that the ability to communicate openly about their lives, with no fear of the conversations impacting upon their everyday lives, was very important to them 11 . With Facebook, using real names has become increasingly common in social media, but there are still many platforms where people share diary-like material either using a pseudonym or completely anonymously. ...
This is a book chapter for a comprehensive anthology on The Diary edited by Batsheva Ben-Amos and Dan Ben-Amos, and published by Indiana University Press in 2020. The chapter provides a history of early online diaries and discusses the transitions to recording our lives using technology. My final revised version of the chapter that I sent to the editors before publication is available as a preprint: https://mediarxiv.org/6rb2k/
... Le terme « communauté en ligne » ou « communauté virtuelle » est souvent utilisé comme un synonyme de « groupe en ligne » alors que celui-ci n'a pas les mêmes caractéristiques. Les chercheurs ont tenté de déterminer les facteurs qui distinguent les communautés des autres groupes (Martinviita, 2016). Par exemple, un quartier dans une ville réunit des habitants qui interagissent et qui partagent plusieurs éléments en commun. ...
Au cours des dernières années, les chercheurs ont observé l’émergence de communautés sur des sites Web permettant les interactions sociales, dont le groupe Anonymous. Dans la littérature, les avis sont partagés quant à la vraie nature de ce groupe. Certains mentionnent que ce sont des délinquants anarchistes, d’autres affirment qu’il s’agit d’une simple communauté en ligne partageant les mêmes idéologies, et d’autres encore pensent que le groupe représente un mouvement social émergeant. Considérant qu’il est difficile de donner un portrait précis de ce qu’est le mouvement Anonymous et que très peu de connaissances sont disponibles à ce jour quant à sa dynamique, la présente recherche a pour principal objectif de brosser le portrait des communautés en ligne s’identifiant à Anonymous au Canada, et ce, en tenant compte des éventuelles différences d’une région à l’autre et d’un sous-groupe à l’autre. En analysant les publications Facebook de différentes pages s’identifiant à Anonymous au Canada, les types et les thèmes des publications les plus populaires ont été échantillonnés. L’analyse montre que tous les sous-groupes s’engagent de façon active dans la prise de position dans des débats sociaux et politiques. De plus, certains sous-groupes appellent plus que d’autres à la prise d’action concrète pour défendre leurs opinions, mais en général, la prise d’action est plutôt rare. Il semble que dans le contexte des communautés Facebook, il est difficile de voir que les sous-groupes d’Anonymous se distinguent de toutes les autres communautés destinées à dénoncer des situations conflictuelles dans la société.
... Le terme « communauté en ligne » ou « communauté virtuelle » est souvent utilisé comme un synonyme de « groupe en ligne » alors que celui-ci n'a pas les mêmes caractéristiques. Les chercheurs ont tenté de déterminer les facteurs qui distinguent les communautés des autres groupes (Martinviita, 2016). Par exemple, un quartier dans une ville réunit des habitants qui interagissent et qui partagent plusieurs éléments en commun. ...
« Une publication pour dénoncer, sans plus »
Description des activités des groupes Facebook s’identifiant au mouvement Anonymous au Canada
Au cours des dernières années, les chercheurs ont observé l’émergence de communautés sur des sites Web permettant les interactions sociales, dont le groupe Anonymous. Dans la littérature, les avis sont partagés quant à la vraie nature de ce groupe. Certains mentionnent que ce sont des délinquants anarchistes, d’autres affirment qu’il s’agit d’une simple communauté en ligne partageant les mêmes idéologies, et d’autres encore pensent que le groupe représente un mouvement social émergeant. Considérant qu’il est difficile de donner un portrait précis de ce qu’est le mouvement Anonymous et que très peu de connaissances sont disponibles à ce jour quant à sa dynamique, la présente recherche a pour principal objectif de brosser le portrait des communautés en ligne s’identifiant à Anonymous au Canada, et ce, en tenant compte des éventuelles différences d’une région à l’autre et d’un sous-groupe à l’autre. En analysant les publications Facebook de différentes pages s’identifiant à Anonymous au Canada, les types et les thèmes des publications les plus populaires ont été échantillonnés. L’analyse montre que tous les sous-groupes s’engagent de façon active dans la prise de position dans des débats sociaux et politiques. De plus, certains sous-groupes appellent plus que d’autres à la prise d’action concrète pour défendre leurs opinions, mais en général, la prise d’action est plutôt rare. Il semble que dans le contexte des communautés Facebook, il est difficile de voir que les sous-groupes d’Anonymous se distinguent de toutes les autres communautés destinées à dénoncer des situations conflictuelles dans la société.
... The study also argues that this early form of sharing online, and the stable, strong community it engendered, may be difficult to replicate in the current social landscape of the web, due to the vastly different experiences and expectations of modern technology users. Similarly, Martinviita's (2016) study of open diary, shows that the online community can surpass the offline community. Open diary is a diary service on the Internet, generally open to target specific readers and has interactive functions. ...
As the world and Chinese society becomes more tolerant and understanding of LGBTQ people, China’s government has become especially strict in censoring content related to homosexual topics on the Internet since 2018 and has removed several same-sex dating apps. As a common communication tool for modern people, the Internet is particularly important for China's LGBTQ people, including sites such as Douban, that allow for communities to gather by interest.
This study investigated the main functions of the lesbian community on the Douban website. Technology is rapidly changing the way the traditional community works. Due to the social stigma surrounding homosexuality, the online community has been popular among the LGBTQ population since its inception. Discourse analysis and digital ethnography were conducted with two biggest lesbian communities on Douban. Findings suggest that lesbian online community offer users a mixed bag of benefits such as construct self-identity, share experience and build relationship. Chinese lesbians can interact with one another while retaining control over the release of identifying information. However, government censorship of LGBTQ topics, the anonymity of the internet and scams targeting lesbian people also bring challenges and barriers to the online community.
Keywords: online community, lesbian, identity
... which was online from 1998-2014, and was important to many online diarists. In a study of Open Diary users in 2006-8, Annamari Martinviita found that many of their informants felt that the anonymity allowed them to write about very intimate details of their lives, and that the ability to communicate openly about their lives, with no fear of the conversations impacting upon their everyday lives, was very important to them 11 . With Facebook, using real names has become increasingly common in social media, but there are still many platforms where people share diary-like material either using a pseudonym or completely anonymously. ...
... Since then, much work has been produced showing that community experiences can indeed take place in a variety of online environments (e.g. Martinviita, 2016a;Obst, Zinkiewicz & Smith, 2002;Rotman, Goldberg & Preece, 2009;Welbourne, Blanchard & Boughton, 2009). This work often centres -quite understandably -on the connections among the participants, and the quality of those connections in terms of producing the feelings of belonging and shared identity associated with community experiences (see Chayko [2014] for a useful overview of the many views into online community in research thus far). ...
This article discusses the meaning and function of “community” as a discourse on the image-sharing website Imgur. The analysis shows that the community term has many meanings and serves as a shorthand for a wide variety of social practices, and these meanings are shaped by the experiences of social action leading to the use of the term. Based on ethnographic data, nexus analysis provides an understanding of how the interactions related to community on the site come to take place the way they do. In conceiving of these interactions as mediated discourse, the article provides a fresh approach to the long-established academic discussion on the definition of community, suggesting a new conception of the community term as a boundary object, which takes on various meanings and functions as it is employed in social action. On Imgur, the community term is associated with an imagined connection to similar others, a shared culture, and the commitment to participation required by the intertextuality of the site content and the challenge of learning to read and create the content that is popular on the site.
... Although there are clearly many similarities between traditional diaries and the way people share stories of their daily lives in social media (Rettberg 2014a), there has been a transition from sites like OpenDiary.com that very explicitly used diary conventions to structure the users' writings, to platforms like Snapchat and Tumblr that don't reference traditional diary conventions at all (Martinviita 2016;Rettberg 2017a;Rettberg 2017b). For the purpose of this chapter, though, what I am interested in is the way that diarists have anthropomorphised their diaries, for instance by writing to their "Dear Diary". ...
Self-tracking apps gather intimate information about our daily lives. One way apps encourage us to entrust them with this knowledge is by taking the role of a confidante, an anthropomorphized companion we can trust. Humans have long confided in non-human companions, from diaries to apps, and the relationship between user and app is structurally similar to the relationship narratologists and literary theorists have identified between diarist and diary. Our agency is always shared with the technologies we use, whether they are simply pen and paper or a complex AI. By comparing apps to diaries, I demonstrate how these technologies, or media, act not simply as objects but also as narratees, as audiences to our human narratives. While diaries are mostly silent listeners, self-tracking apps speak back to us in a feedback loop, and thus enter a role as our companions rather than simply as our audiences.
Kamusal alan olarak Instagram, bireylerin serbest zaman fiziksel aktivite (SZFA) ve spor kimliklerini yeniden formüle ettikleri dijital bir platforma dönüşmüştür. Dijital platformların özgürlük ve kontrol gibi ikilikler ile farklı kimliklerin temsiline zemin sunduğu bilinmektedir. Dijital Serbest Zaman kuramından (Spracklen, 2015) yararlanılan bu çalışmanın amacı “sıradan insanlar” için Instagram’ın SZFA ile ilişkilerindeki rolünü incelemektir. Nitel araştırma yöntemi kapsamında düzenli olarak SZFA’ya katılan ve bu yönde Instagram profili oluşturan 21-44 yaş aralığındaki sekiz kadınla yarı yapılandırılmış bireysel görüşme gerçekleştirilmiş; katılımcıların Instagram profilindeki SZFA ile ilişkili toplam 209 paylaşım doküman toplama tekniğiyle incelenmiştir. Verilerin analizinde düşünümsel tematik analiz yönteminden (Braun ve Clark, 2019) ve Schreiber’in (2017) sosyal medyada görsel iletişim analizi için önerdiği çerçeveden yararlanılmıştır. Analizler sonucunda “Her şey Reel: Değişim”, “Etkileşim ve Döngü” ve “Stratejik Bir Günlük” isimlerinde üç tema geliştirilmiştir. Bulgular, a) katılımcıların kilo vermek ya da sağlıklı olmak gibi değişim isteğiyle başladıkları SZFA’nın Instagram profilleri aracılığıyla toplumsal bir düzleme taşındığını, b) takipçiler ile etkileşimin “gündelik” hayat ile “dijital” hayatı iç içe geçirerek katılımcıların ilham kaynağı olma arzularını güçlendirdiğini ve c) Instagram profillerini toplumsal cinsiyetlendirilmiş güvenlik stratejileri ile yönettiklerini göstermiştir. Sonuç olarak, bu çalışma Instagram’ın SZFA ile ilişkili kendi-kendini temsilin üretilmesinde nasıl bir kamusal alan olarak kurgulandığını göstererek, neoliberal söylem çerçevesinde sağlıklı oluş hali pratiğinin toplumsal gerçeklerden bağımsız düşünülmemesi gerektiğini öne sürmektedir.
Der Beitrag rekonstruiert die Vorgeschichte der gegenwärtigen Selbsttrackingund Selbstoptimierungsverfahren. Dazu erweist es sich als sinnvoll, auf eine Sachlage zurückzugreifen, die das Phänomen der Datenverarbeitung als Problem seiner Materialität und seines Umfangs virulent werden lässt. Für den deutschen Sprachraum spitzt sich diese Konstellation am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts zu – in einem Moment, in dem das Projekt einer Datenverarbeitung sich über etwas scheinbar Selbstverständliches zu verständigen beginnt: die Frage nämlich, was denn überhaupt ein Datum ist. Daran schließt sich die Folgefrage an, welche Rolle medienhistorisch variante Formen einer Datenpolitik für die Genealogie von Selbstverhältnissen haben.
During the last two decades, online environments became rich grounds for ethnographic studies. In the same period, online communities have become popular and broadly studied research topic. Along with online environments, the growth of online communities brought by Computer-Mediated Communications created a solid research field for online ethnography studies. Online ethnography methods, such as virtual ethnography and netnography, are widely adopted for qualitative research. However, it is not clear how the Computer Science field is using online ethnography for empirical studies. Thus, the main goal of this study is to present how online ethnographic studies have been performed in Computer Science. To accomplish this goal, we carried out a systematic mapping study regarding empirical studies on online environments. Through the analysis of 36 resulted pa-pers, this systematic mapping provides a broad overview of existing online ethnography studies in Computer Science and by identifying how these studies have been performed considering adopted methods, collected and analyzed data, community characteristics, and researcher participation throughout these empirical studies.
http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:9789526216430
This thesis studies online community as a discursive phenomenon and as an experience. The ethnographic approach employed in this study allows the open exploration of meanings and experiences associated with community by site members, designers and outside commentators in three online environments. Extensive participant observation is supplemented by interviews, surveys and analysis of the interaction surrounding the topic of community. Nexus analysis provides an understanding of social action as the intermingling of historical bodies, interaction orders and discourses embedded in the scene of action.
The thesis argues that the concept of community functions as a boundary object, taking different meanings in each context it is employed in. Community can be used to describe strong community experiences or lighter varieties of togetherness online; it can be a pragmatic term simply referring to the user base of a site; or it can incorporate many understandings related to the shared identities and shared practices in the social scene being referred to. The work thus provides a theoretical contribution to ongoing academic discussions related to defining online community, as well as a great deal of empirical knowledge on how experiences of togetherness are created online. Such knowledge may be used to inform future technology development and administrative practices that are sensitive to the many elements affecting social interaction in online spaces.
This article is divided into two main parts and aims, on the one hand, at explaining the origins and chronology of the phenomenon called the “diary”, and on the other hand, at the sociological aspects of its use and role in social research. It intends to shed a new light on the historical, methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges facing the social scientist when choosing to use diaries for qualitative knowledge of social life.
For several years many of us at Peabody College have participated in the evolution of a theory of community, the first conceptualization of which was presented in a working paper (McMillan, 1976) of the Center for Community Studies. To support the proposed definition, McMillan focused on the literature on group cohesiveness, and we build here on that original definition. This article attempts to describe the dynamics of the sense-of-community force — to identify the various elements in the force and to describe the process by which these elements work together to produce the experience of sense of community.
This article revisits the theory of sense of community originally developed in 1976 and subsequently presented by D. McMillan and D. Chavis (see record
1987-03834-001). The same 4 elements remain but are rearranged and renamed as follows: Spirit, Trust, Trade, and Art. In D. Chavis et al (see record
1987-02859-001), the authors demonstrated its empirical strength as a theory and developed the Sense of Community Questionnaire. This was essential work in getting the theory used. The theory has since stimulated considerable empirical research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This research was conducted into people who post their diaries on the Internet (hereinafter referred to as Web diaries) to reveal the psychological implications of writing a diary in cyberspace. A total of 1,529 people were extracted from full-text search engines and collections of Web diary links and surveyed. Invitations to participate were sent to the authors of the extracted home pages by e-mail and the survey itself was conducted with the use of a home page form. There were 377 valid responses, giving a response rate of 24.7%. The Web diaries were broken down into four types: (a) self-conscious records of fact (memoirs); (b) records of fact conscious of a relationship with the reader (journals); (c) self-conscious expressions of sentiment (“(narrowly defined) diaries”); (d) expressions of sentiments conscious of a relationship with the reader (“open diaries”). The four types were described bidimensionally as (a) a record of fact or an expression of sentiment, and (b) the authors' consciousness is either self-oriented or reader-oriented. Moreover, these dimensions are closely intertwined with utility and self-consciousness.
E-commerce strategists advise companies to create virtual communities for their customers, but what is involved in establishing and maintaining virtual communities? This paper addresses two questions: does a sense of community similar to that sometimes observed in physical communities also occur in virtual settings, and how is a sense of virtual community maintained? These questions are examined in an intensive study of an established virtual community called MSN (Microsoft Network). MSN members experienced a sense of community, but the dimensions of the sense of community differed somewhat from those reported for physical communities in ways plausibly related to the differences between electronic and face-to-face communication. The experienced sense of community in MSN was actively maintained through the social processes of exchanging support, creating identities and making identifications, and the production of trust. Again, these processes are similar to those in non-virtual communities, but related to the challenges of electronic communication. The findings suggest a process model of sense of virtual community creation and maintenance that is simpler and more powerful than previous theories.
The concept of Social Media is top of the agenda for many business executives today. Decision makers, as well as consultants, try to identify ways in which firms can make profitable use of applications such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter. Yet despite this interest, there seems to be very limited understanding of what the term “Social Media” exactly means; this article intends to provide some clarification. We begin by describing the concept of Social Media, and discuss how it differs from related concepts such as Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. Based on this definition, we then provide a classification of Social Media which groups applications currently subsumed under the generalized term into more specific categories by characteristic: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds. Finally, we present 10 pieces of advice for companies which decide to utilize Social Media.
YouTube is a video sharing repository, enabling users to post, share and discuss videos. Its stated mission is to create "an online video community"; however, YouTube is not commonly thought of as a community. Our aim in this study is to answer the question whether users have a "sense of community" towards YouTube, and if such feelings exist - are they reflected in the explicit ties among members. To accomplish this, YouTube was examined using two different and complementing methods. Using Grounded Theory, we performed a detailed analysis of more than 30 videos and their corresponding textual comments, which discussed two topics: users' feelings about the YouTube community, and users' accounts of interaction within the community. We then performed a structural analysis on the ties these users display on their YouTube channels. This analysis showed that although users perceive YouTube to be a cohesive community, the explicit relationships in the friendship and subscription network are almost random. We suggest that users' sense of community is not necessarily related to the structure of the YouTube network, and may result from subjective affinity towards other users. This study also points out the importance of triangulating qualitative and quantitative data to get a deeper understanding of the nature of an online community.
E-commerce strategists advise companies to create virtual communities for their customers. But what does this involve? Research on face-to-face communities identifies the concept of "sense of community:" a characteristic of successful communities distinguished by members' helping behaviors and members' emotional attachment to the community and other members. Does a sense of virtual community exist in online settings, and what does it consist of? Answering these questions is key, if we are to provide guidance to businesses attempting to create virtual communities.The paper explores the concept of sense of virtual community in a newsgroup we call Multiple Sports Newsgroup (MSN). We first demonstrate that MSN does indeed have a sense of virtual community, but that the dimensions of the sense of community in MSN differ somewhat from those reported for physical communities. The nature of these differences is plausibly related to the differences between electronic and face-to-face communication. We next describe the behavioral processes that contribute to the sense of virtual community at MSN-exchanging support, creating identities and making identifications, and the production of trust. Again, these processes are similar to those found in non-virtual communities, but they are related to the challenges of electronic communication. Lastly, we consider the question of how sense of community may come about and discuss the implications for electronic business.
Nonpublic participation within an online community, often called lurking, occurs when an individual joins a community, but
does not post. This study examines the nature of lurking, why people lurk and the differences in attitudes between lurkers
and posters. The results indicate significant differences between people who lurk and those who post in an online community.
We conclude that when people lurk they are observing, which in no way is a negative behavior. This introverted or passive
behavior affects lurkers' attitudes about the benefits of the community, their expectations, and opinions of themselves and
others who lurk. In general lurkers are less optimistic and less positive than those who post.
Purpose
– Aims to describe systematically the characteristics of weblogs (blogs) – frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence and which are the latest genre of internet communication to attain widespread popularity.
Design/methodology/approach
– This paper presents the results of a quantitative content analysis of 203 randomly selected blogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of blogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects.
Findings
– Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and underestimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self‐expression.
Originality/value
– Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, considers the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situates it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the internet today, and suggests possible developments of the use of blogs over time in response to changes in user behavior, technology, and the broader ecology of internet genres.
The notion of “community” has often been caught between concrete social relationships and imagined sets of people perceived to be similar. The rise of the Internet has refocused our attention on this ongoing tension. The Internet has enabled people who know each other to use social media, from e-mail to Facebook, to interact without meeting physically. Into this mix came Twitter, an asymmetric microblogging service: If you follow me, I do not have to follow you. This means that connections on Twitter depend less on in-person contact, as many users have more followers than they know. Yet there is a possibility that Twitter can form the basis of interlinked personal communities—and even of a sense of community. This analysis of one person’s Twitter network shows that it is the basis for a real community, even though Twitter was not designed to support the development of online communities. Studying Twitter is useful for understanding how people use new communication technologies to form new social connections and maintain existing ones.
this paper has been provided by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (General and Strategic grants), Bell Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Information Technology Research Centre. We dedicate this chapter to science-fiction personage Judith Merril who net surfed for fifty years until her death in Sept., 1997.
This article presents a textual analysis of Chinese personal blogs to understand how social interactions and performances are enacted in this evolving genre. On account of the complexity of genre composition, the present analysis focuses on examining the organizational aspect of personal blogs. Data were collected from three Chinese A-list personal blogs and were analyzed through identifying major generic components of the blogs. The findings reveal that these blogs are organized in a complex composition of macro-units and micro-units to engender performances. Factors such as socio-
cultural and institutional conditions, individual bloggers’
literacy level, and personal preferences are at play. The personal blog entails temporal stability as it changes and remixes with other genres constantly in response to institutionalizing and acculturating dynamics.
This essay reflects on my now ten year old investigation of the impact of web cams on the nature of life writing and the self. Despite the many changes that have occurred since that time, the trajectories of these older technologies and practices continue to have relevance today and provide us with a reasonable ground from which to continue our explorations into current and emerging technological practices.
Looking back to Biography’s 2003 “Online Lives,” the coeditors reflect on continuities and analyze new developments in Internet-based auto/biographical production since the advent of Web 2.0. They outline recurring themes in the essays in Online Lives 2.0, which include the merging of public and private life, online self-curation, the socioeconomic dimensions of online self-presentation, and the filtering and falsification of lives in social media, and they explore the implications of these issues for auto/biography studies.
The connections between anonymity and self-disclosure online have received research attention, but the results have been inconclusive with regard to self-disclosure in blogs. This quantitative content analysis of 154 personal journal blogs tested some assumptions of the online disinhibition effect in order to examine the effect of types of anonymity on the amount, breadth, and depth of self-disclosure in blog entries. Results showed that participants disclosed more information in their blog entries when they were more visually identified (sharing a picture of themselves), contrary to the assumptions of the online disinhibition effect. Overall, a trend emerged where visual anonymity led to less disclosiveness, and discursive anonymity (sharing one's real name) led to less disclosiveness for particular types of bloggers.
This naturalistic study of a blogging community examines the norms and activities that govern the establishment of a community of practice. Activity theory and communities of practice are used as frameworks to guide the analysis of this study. Six brief cases are used to illustrate the paths of blogging newcomers, as they shift from peripheral to inbound paths, and in some cases to insider positions within the community. Findings show that the community values newcomer practices such as engaging in legitimate peripheral participation via observation of norms. Further, although the community is welcoming of newcomers, the burden is on the newcomer to learn about and interact appropriately within the community.
This study explores the relationships between motivations for joining virtual health communities, online behaviors, and psycho-social outcomes. A sample of 144 women from two virtual health communities focusing on infertility completed survey measures assessing motivations, posting and receiving support, connectedness, community, and stress. Our results indicate that socio-emotional support motivations for joining the community were associated with posting support within the virtual community, while informational motivations were related to receiving support. Further, receiving support was associated with greater sense of virtual community as well as more general feelings of connectedness, which was related to less stress. Implications for virtual health community research are discussed.
This article examines the diary's transformation from print culture practice
to online phenomenon, considering the implications of this change for the
diary as a literary genre and as life writing. This discussion explores the challenges
the online diary represents to traditional concepts of the genre as private
and monologic, investigating the ways in which online diarists attract
readers, build communities, and create identities in cyberspace.
Trust among members is an important outcome of virtual communities. Based on identity and social exchange theories, this article proposes a model of trust in which norms and sense of virtual community (SOVC) mediate the relationship between the antecedents of exchanging support, learning identity, creating identity, and sanctioning with the outcome of group trust. The authors surveyed 277 members of 11 active virtual communities. Results generally support our model indicating that the development and adherence to norms as well as members' SOVC play significant roles in the development of group members' trust of each other. This article discusses the theoretical and practical implications of the study.
Contends that community psychology has failed in its efforts at social reform. The adverse consequences of segregating the mentally ill, aged, and others in residential institutions are discussed. A new community psychology is proposed which emphasizes a sense of belonging and responsibility among community members. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Sense of virtual community (SOVC) reflects the feeling that individual members have of belonging to an online social group. Yet there is a lack of investigation focusing on its individual-level antecedents. We argue that in order to enhance understanding of how SOVC develops we first need to distinguish between the individual expectations, actions, and the resulting community-related feelings. Drawing upon the uses and gratifications approach, we explore the community members’ expected benefits, their linkages with different types of community participation and consequently with the experienced SOVC. We tested the hypotheses on a sample of 395 members of a virtual community hosted by a Finnish business newspaper. The findings suggest that both forms of participation – reading and posting messages – have a positive impact on SOVC, but the expected benefits differ. Participation by reading messages is mainly driven by the expectation of cognitive benefits, while posting messages seems to be largely driven by the anticipation of both social and personal integrative benefits. Our study contributes by providing a refined SOVC conceptualization and operationalization for virtual-community research, and by opening up the individual-level actions that build up a sense of virtual community.
If useful explanations are to be provided about the relationship between computer mediated communication (CMC) technologies and online behavior, then a longer-term perspective needs to be taken than the current focus of CMC researchers. This paper provides such a perspective by outlining in theoretical terms how a cyber-archaeology of virtual communities can be conducted. In archaeology, researchers focus on cultural artifacts. A similar focus on the cultural artifacts of virtual communities should be a focus for CMC researchers as these artifacts can provide an integrative framework for a community's life, be it virtual or real. It is proposed that CMC researchers pursue cyber-archaeology by systematically examining and modeling the framework for virtual community life provided by their cultural artifacts.The systematic exploration of cyber-space via cyber-archaeology cannot proceed without adequate linguistic tools that allow for taxonomy. The first step in the creation of such a taxonomy is to distinguish between virtual communities and their cyber-place, the virtual settlement. The second, is to define and operationalize the term virtual settlement so that they can be systematically characterized and modeled. With this new terminology, it is possible to detail a cyber-archaeology where technological determinism is replaced with the notion of bounded hierarchies and material behavior. The theoretical outline will show how cultural artifacts can play a role in constraining the forms virtual settlements can sustain. The modeling of the boundaries of virtual settlements via cyber-archaeology should dramatically increase our understanding of communication in general.
Since the late 1990s, blogs have become a popular platform to communicate various facets of Internet users' personal lives such as thoughts, opinions, interests, and ideas. However, what remains open is the question of how much intercultural differences determine the specific motives of bloggers to write a virtual diary, as well as their attitudes and reactions towards comments. A cross-cultural online survey with 79 German, 68 American, and 68 Russian bloggers investigates whether the bloggers' cultural backgrounds impacted these individual usage patterns. Analysis indicates that Russian bloggers tend to be more reserved towards documentation and are more insecure towards received comments than American and German bloggers who, on the contrary, blog more frequently. Results are discussed in the light of Hofstede's cultural dimensions.
Features include the selection and sampling of cases, the problems of access, observation and interviewing, recording and filing data, and the process of data analysis.
Can lifelogs and blogging be considered the digital counterpart of what used to be paper diaries and diary writing? This article examines three dimensions of this phenomenon in conjunction: the diary/lifelog as a cultural form or genre, as a material and technological object, and as cultural practice. Tracing the transformation of personal logs in the face of new digital technologies, it is argued that lifelogs and blogging are not outcomes but rather signifiers of cultural change, as they both reflect and construct new epistemologies. The current emergence of weblogs indicates a transformation of important cultural notions such as individual and collective, privacy and publicness, and memory and experience.
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