Gleave, etc ‘s paper focused on ‘social role’ in online communities. They try to define the ‘social role’ conceptually and operationally. Comparing with their ‘social role’ definition, I like the way they extracting online social role. In their diagram, based on the collective data, extracting social role by watching people with specific action patterns and discovering their relation with the remaining communities. Iteratively refine the ‘social role’ until we get stable conclusion. Then we can predict this new ‘social role’ pattern in other communities. From this paper, in the first time I know how social scientist analysize an online communities.
To extract model from huge collective data which seems unrelated is very difficult. Gleave, etc point out that “Building a catalog of social roles is an important first step towards understanding complex social systems” . It allows us to reduce the huge systems to a relatively small number of roles. There two general ways to do social role analysis: interpretive and structural. Interpretive analyses focus on the collections of e behaviors while Structural analyses mainly deal with metrics of social structure. Both approaches have their own limitations. Gleave, etc combines these two methods together in online community analysis. They obtained very interesting results.
To explore their methods, I joined two online communities. One is http://www.forumshawaii.net/. My user name is yw123. It is Hawaii's Sports Car Club of America's official forum. The homepage attracts me at the first. After I login, all are gone. I got an almost empty forum. I need to give the topic name I am interested. That takes me a while to do it as I don’t even know what kind of topic they have. So I can say it is not well organized and classification. It is very help if it can post the catalog after user login. I do learn a lot about the sport car in this forum. It’s very useful. I give me trust to this forum although I don’t know wither the forum check the information post are correct or not.
Frankly say, I can’t analysize this community like Gleave did on Usenet and Wikipedia. There are so many members and so many posts, I can figure out who plays any role in this net. It has the administrator who I believe play a crucial role in the communities. The members can communicate directly or they can post their questions in the forum. The forum has tree structure. It includes five sub forums , each forum has their own specific topic. Inside each sub forum, there are several interested topic etc. According to member’s contribution, the administrator may assign some member’s priority to members. The members with high priority play important roles than others. Maybe like the administrator of sub-forum. Maybe they have some right to adjust other’s post etc. That all I guess as I just join in and don’t have any priority.
The next step is to analyze the context of participation and the content of behaviors of the actors whose interactions formed those social network structures. Williams, etc investigate the relationship between the Internet and social capital. He points out instead of goods and services, the things being used and created are personal relationships and the benefits that come with them. He focused on the effect of the network although social capital may also have relation with network itself. As the online systems are so different with the traditional society, new concepts “bridging” and “bonding” are introduced. “Bridging” is the connection between social networks. It is broaden and weak. “Bonding” is the connection between strongly tie individuals. It is strong with little diversity. Williams tries to set a measure scale on these two concepts and got some interesting results. Some social actors interact and form a network of individuals, resulting in positive affective bonds. Some interactions are qualitatively different from others, meaning that different types and levels of social capital will result.
According to his opinion, the Hawaii's Sports Car Club of America's official forum I joined is clone to bonding as it has very little diversity. But I feel the connections between members are still too weak for bonding and are too strong for “bridging”. I think it should belong to some area in between. To have some experience on social capital, I joined a very popular net, the Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/. It’s typical ‘bridging’ site. Anyone can join in and anybody can post. The username I use is also yw123. This is a very famous net. It is very well organized and classified. I use it as a science directory quite often. There is one part I feel it need to improve. It does not check the information people post. That is the information you got from Wikipedia may be wrong. As more and more people use this net, it is a great help if the information is checked before it is allowed to post.
Paolo investigate the trust concept and explore how trust is used and modeled in online systems. He point out trust is considered as the judgment expressed by one user about another user, often directly and explicitly, sometimes indirectly through an evaluation of the artifacts produced by that user or his/her activity on the system. “trust” is the term to indicate different types of social relationships between two users, such as friendship, appreciation, and interest. These trust relationships are used by the systems in order to infer some measure of importance about the different users and influence their visibility on the system. Ellen etc complement his opinion by introduces a new generic model to incentivize cooperation between parties that are engaged in the paradox of a social dilemma. Eryilmaz etc explores the design and evaluation of a trust model to establish trust management in an open source collaborative information repository for an emergency response environment. Nicole B. Ellison etc give an example by examining the relationship between use of Facebook, a popular online social network site, and the formation and maintenance of social capital.
As for the two nets I choose, I give my trust to the Hawaii's Sports Car Club of America's official forum as I know very little on sport car. I choose it because I happened to find it and the homepage attracts me. After I joined in, I realized that it’s a sport car club. I accept all the information I got from it. As for Wikipedia, I use it quite often and trust the information I got from it in %90. It’s so weird that the more I know it, the less trust I give it. But this is what I really feel!
I plan to choose two nets, one is belong to “bonding” , the other is belong to “bridging”. It turns out I only choose a correct “bridging” net. The other net I feel it trapped in between “bridging” and “bonding”. So the topic of My final project is in the social capital area. I plan to further explore the concept of social capital and how it can be measured. There are lots of arguments on this topic. William’s paper is a good beginning on this topic as he mentioned so many references.
I would agree that perhaps there are some sites that aren't exactly bridging and aren't exactly bonding in terms of social capital. There are certainly more facets than just the two. However the same problem exists in real life. All the people you ever encounter or have dealings with do not neatly fit into one of two categories. In my opinion, social capital needs just two rough divisions and no more. If it continued breaking down into more divisions, comparisons across cultures and groups might not be compatible.
ReplyDeleteYour idea for your paper sounds like a good place to start. There are lots of things to do with social capital and looking at ways it can be measured would be a great paper. Good luck.
Yili,
ReplyDeleteYour comment about trusting information on sites less the more you know about the topic is very enlightening and put a voice to something that I've been thinking about. I've visited Wikipedia often - I was introduced to it by my sons who both liked to use it as a starting place for their reports when they were in middle and high school. I agree with you that when the reader knows very little about a topic, anything that is written on it seems right, but when you have detailed, in depth content knowledge, you can identify the misinformation. I'm glad that there are contributors to Wikipedia who, like you, have the knowledge to improve the information found on the site.
It will be interesting to see where your focus on social capital goes.
Thanks for a thought provoking blog!
I would suggest that you might like to check out Twitter.com. I think its a good example of a social capital site. (like MySpace and facebook,etc) Aside from the obvious indicator of social capital: the numbers of "friends" and "followers" posted next to users' profiles, which indicates just how invested others are in that user, there must be a lot of different ways to measure the quality versus the quantity of the social capital a user possesses.
ReplyDeleteFor your final project you might want to look at different mechanisms that site developers have tried to measure social capital within a site. For example, if you wanted to measure bridging some sites have a mapping feature where you can see a visual chart of users and their friends. Another thing you might check is how to measure bonding social capital on a site. For instance is tracking the number of interactions between two users a good indicator of bonding? What about sites where users can specify the degree of relationships: ie. level 1 friend, level 4 friend etc...
ReplyDeletePutnum himself mentioned that there's not a clear distinction between bridging and bonding. Is there a way to measure the degree of bridging and bonding? I can't help but envision a system where people can go to a social networking site and comment, "It's a 5 on bridging, but only a 3 on bonding."
On forumshawaii there seems to be quite a few motorcycle enthusiasts. I check the general chat and there's also a lot on food, local news stories and the economy. It's like the vehicle section is meant for bonding between car enthusiasts while the general chat is more about random posts and bridging.
Speaking of Twitter and measuring social capital, I found a blog post titled Measure your twitter influence and "social capital". It talks about Twinfluence, a Twitter influence analyzer that "gauges the reach of your tweets and the people who read them." Looking at the top page of Twinfluence, it looks like there are three different rankings: most reach, most velocity, and most social capital. Check it out!
ReplyDeleteI wonder if you were an expert on the idea of sports cars that you would so easily trust the forum. I think this might be the normal tendency of people to trust a group of people who are more experienced in an area. For example, I would trust a group of moms to talk about pregnancy rather than a group of men. Not that men wouldn't have anything worthy to contribute, but their level of expertise is certainly different.
ReplyDeleteYour comment about Wikipedia also reminds me that when I teach my students about finding resources online, they should take the time to get to know "how" information is shared, and "who" is sharing the information. It's something we talk about in various classes concerning information skills literacy, and we continue to flesh out the methods of instruction and assessment. Teens are prone to look for the quick and dirty answers rather than the deep analysis of where their information is from. I think they call it being lazy.
Would conducting interviews among users of different sites be one strategy for you to measure social capital? I like how some of the research tools were phrased, but there's a lot of analysis that needs to be done with how/why people respond in the first place. What age group are you looking at? And, would gender play a role in how we define social capital?
I am glad to see that you joined two very diverse communities, both in regards to social roles and trust mechanisms. I visited the Hawaii Sports Car Club site and it looks like it has the usual trust mechanisms where you can view member profiles and rate posts. It also looks like there are member ranks (i.e. senior member and power user). This site may not have as many trust mechanisms as other sites, because it appears that many of the members know each other in real life. Some even refer to each other by their real name. From the few threads that I read it feels as if you are in a real life club where members get together to chat with each other. The Car Club community is probably an example of an online community used to support real life connections.
ReplyDeleteI thought that it was interesting how while analyzing the Car Club community social roles, you determined that it’s forum has a tree structure. Using this tree structure, administrators are able to rank both members and their posts. This could also be a trust mechanism where it can be implied that members with higher ranks and posts could be trusted more than others.
With the Wikipedia.com community, trust in its content is always a concern. I don’t like to reference the Wikipedia entry, but it is helpful with directing me to more trusted references. I still like to use Wikipedia (even though I don’t reference it) because there is a larger audience to amend and update entries. It appears in some cases that the individuals contributing to Wikipedia are quite knowledgeable regarding specific topics.
Regarding your project, I think that looking at the outcomes of social capital (i.e. emotional support and useful content generation) could be a good way to measure social capital, as mentioned in the social capital definition in the Williams article.