Lawrence Peter Ampofo
Engagement with Online Communities
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- Table Five: Bennett’s Patterns of Communication
Engagement with Online CommunitiesThe Web, with its billions of pages and trillions of connections between users, provides a platform for users to engage with boundless numbers of issues and organisations to form communities. This vast collection of information offers online users the opportunity to either form or join communities on any number of topics. The Web reduces the barriers to entry for becoming part of a community, making online communities somewhat more ephemeral than their offline counterparts. There is no one universally accepted definition of an online or virtual community, making accurate descriptions problematic. Online communities are complex entities and, as will be shown during the course of this chapter, have a palpable influence on the behaviour of groups both online and in the real world. A review of the literature on online communities reveals a composite of different attributes; for example, Wenger (1998) characterised them as displaying shared repertoires and resources, while Robert Kozinets (2002) claimed that the dominant characteristic of online communities is social activity and interaction. Rotman & Preece (2010), in a study into the nature of communities on YouTube, defined online communities as ‘a group (or various subgroups) of people, brought together by a shared interest, using a virtual platform, to interact and create user-generated content that is accessible to all community members, while cultivating communal culture and adhering to specific norms’ (Rotman & Preece, 2010: 4, emphasis in original). Rotman & Preece’s definition of online communities is useful for the purpose of this chapter as it is flexible enough to be applied to a wide range of online community structures. For example, the more common expression of a community structure is the formal community in which members have to go through a structured registration process before they are permitted entry into the group and potentially becoming an accepted member. Communities of this kind exist on websites in which prospective members are required to undergo an a priori registration process such as the Financial Times or the New Scientist. Formal online communities exist on other digital platforms such as discussion forums and social networks that require specific user registration, such as the Association of Internet Researchers (Pharmaceutical Discussion Group, 2010). Other communities demand significantly less formal means of attaining membership. If users simply contribute to discussions or demonstrate allegiance to a group then they become part of the community. This occurs when, in a specific posting, a particular user declares their support or opposition for a specific idea, organisation or issue. Online communities of this sort have been in existence since the development of Internet Relay Chat and discussion forum technologies in the 1960s. The most prominent example of this type of online community is the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL), which is considered to be one of the oldest and most influential online communities.86 Established in 1985, and founded by Larry Brilliant and Stewart Brand, the WELL allows its members to participate in a wide range of discussions, many of which do not require a password. One of the results of this type of “push-button” community formation (Bishop 2003) is that online communities can quickly become enormous complex entities with the propensity to coalesce and dissipate quickly. The ephemeral nature of some online communities means it is possible to join and leave at will. It has been argued that many online communities are emotive, knee-jerk entities that form as a result of the immediate whims and desires of its users (Bishop, 2006). However, it can also be argued that large, quick-forming online communities are extremely useful when responding to events that require immediate action, such as the use of crisis mapping in natural disasters.87 The ephemerality of online communities was emphasised by the scholar Lance Bennett who argued that the presence of internet and Web technologies enabled its users to scatter their allegiances to ideologies and causes across a wider spectrum of choice than hitherto, and without the need for a formal institution. He argued that citizens ‘born into these late modern societies display a greater tendency to organize political meaning, identity, and activity around what…I have called lifestyle politics’ (Bennett, 2002: 6). The conception of lifestyle politics is significant when interpreting the nature of online communities because it explains the ease with which online users can affiliate themselves with certain causes or ideologies, or, indeed, part of such causes and ideologies. Bennett argues that the characteristics of ephemeral online communities result in low confidence in government as comments highlight perceptions of the inadequacies in the performance of government. This will be examined in greater detail in the presentation of the empirical evidence in this chapter. To this end, Bennett proposes that online activism can be characterised in certain ways that ‘are hard to separate from organizational capabilities as activists increasingly operate in networks without walls, conventional leadership or membership, geographical or issue boundaries, or other aspects of conventional hierarchical organisations or formal coalitions’ (Bennett, 2002: 7). These characterisations are useful structures within which to explain the nature of the behaviour of online communities when reacting to discussion concerning the 11 March 2004 terrorist attacks. Table Five: Bennett’s Patterns of Communication
Source: Lance Bennett, 2002 While Bennett’s model above was created in order to analyse global activism, it is possible to conceive the utility of such a model for examining the general formation and maintenance of communities when analysing responses to the 11 March 2004 terrorist attacks, as numerous people engaged either individually or in groups to express their feelings with like-minded people. Another characteristic of online communities is the relative lack of geographical limitation to membership of a particular group. This notion demonstrates how the Web lowers barriers to entry in forming and participating in groups; online communities are, to a large extent, dependent on linguistic and ideological congruence, not geographic proximity. One of the central tenets of online communities is the potential they have to influence both online and real-world events. Although the link between the behaviour of online communities finding expression offline and vice versa is unproven, recent events in international politics provide evidence to the contrary. The example of the disputed elections in Iran in 2009 is particularly apt as protestors for the disputed candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi used tools such as microblogs, blogs and discussion forums as a means of expressing their support and communicating with like-minded people (Bray, 2009). While online communities can be grand in scale and influential in shaping the course of real-world events, it is prescient at this juncture to discuss what online influence actually is. In a similar vein to deriving a neat definition for online communities, online influence is equally difficult to define because of its intangibility. A review of the literature concerning online influence defines the concept in terms of users able to impact the behaviour and opinions of other users (Bertola 2010), or as ‘conduits for human based filtering and content discovery within their communities, as members of the community look to the person of influence to connect them to people and content they should trust, and fuel positive community growth’ (Baldwin, 2009: 1). Influential online users are, therefore, able to disseminate information to their network, which is then assimilated and subsequently passed to others within their respective networks; thereby creating a network effect (Katona et al., 2010). Online influence can, as a result, be defined and measured in a number of different ways. One way of measuring online influence measurement is quantitatively, generally by counting the number of links or citations a user has aggregated, or the number of designated followers a user or organisation has. The amount of links accumulated, or professed followers a person has, is thought to be a strong indicator of the level of influence wielded online (Huberman et al., 2009, Skala 2010). This argument fits with the definition of online influence by Baldwin (2009); that an influential person within a community is perceived to be a conduit for human-based filtering and content discovery, and will be cited more often online and accumulate more followers. In addition, the level of influence for a particular user can be either augmented or degraded by the level of support or admonishment from other users (Kozinets 2002). However, influence in online communities does not always reside in the networks of individual users. Influential users still rely on their networks to send recommended content to other members of their extended network. This means that the collective number of online users who are less active can collectively wield a significant degree of influence, as they are responsible for disseminating content from the influential users. In his analysis on the linkages between micro and macro-level sociological interactions, Granovetter (1973) commented that the less active members of communities or groups were “weak ties”. Granovetter claimed that an analysis of the behaviour of “weak ties” reveals much about the ‘interactions between groups and…analysis of segments of social structure not easily defined in terms of primary groups’ (Granovetter, 1973: 1360, emphasis in original) “Weak ties” therefore diffuse content from influential users to other groups of “weak ties” ensuring that the content is at once endorsed and dispersed widely online. This phenomenon of “weak ties” demonstrates the symbiosis between users with irregular activity in online communities collectively, and those more visible influential users. The following section incorporates an analysis of ways in which public diplomacy strategies can be incorporated into counter-terrorism strategies as techniques to better engage with communities of people online and offline. Directory: portal -> files -> 4733003 files -> Impact case study (ref3b) files -> Ethics and Factual Television: a short history files -> P. O. Box 27, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland tel. 358-9-191 58080 / 22216; fax 358-9-191 58096 / 23008 files -> The impact of a pledge campaign and the promise of publicity: a randomized controlled trial of charitable donations files -> Diversity and Voice: the Political Participation of Young People in the European Union files -> Chapter 15 a voice in Decision Making: young children in Denmark Stig Broström Introduction Download 1.29 Mb. 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