Session 4 - Social Capital and Vampires that Sparkle

The Communities

The Twilight series written by Stephanie Meyer describes the suspenseful, romantic, horrifying, and comedic (as the author once described it) adventures of young Kristen Swan, a bunch of vampires, and Native Americans. Judging by the sales of books and the multiple films they have spawned, it's not difficult to imagine that dedicated fans would create sites devoted to their beloved series. I have chosen two Twilight fan communities to join.


Perhaps because I'm a male, or because my heart has long since become a cold, dead cinder incapable of feeling, I've never really been interested in checking out the Twilight series. Maybe these two communities will teach me not only about social capital mechanisms, but also how to love again.

For the sake of simplicity, I joined two communities under the same name: 691ICS


The communities I joined were: The Bella and Edward Fanclub and Fan Forum (Twilight Saga)
The process to join both communities was simple and painless. A quick five minutes after arriving on each website, I was ready to enter the world of glittering vampires and wolf people.

The Edward and Bella Fan Club is a website devoted to the Twilight series. The community is largely composed (unsurprisingly) of teenage girls. Here is a snapshot of what this OC is all about:

Fan Forum is an interesting OC in that it includes a Twilight fan forum as just one of many options for fans of popular media. One could just as easily hop from the Twilight forum to a forum dedicated to Samuel L. Jackson while on the Fan Forum website. Although there are numerous forums for a user to go to, people in this community seem to stick to their fandom of choice. Their policies (buried deep in a thread with an unclear title) are outlined on the link below:

POLICIES

How do they treat new vampires (members)?

As a new member with limited knowledge on the subject matter, I decided to pose the same question twice in order to discover how they would treat a member with no social capital. To preserve anonymity and encourage responses I posed a 22 year old woman named Ino Chieki Sakai from Japan. Here are screenshots of my question as posted on each site:

Edward and Bella Fanclub

Fan Forum

Fan Forum

Comparing the Mechanisms

It was only on the Bella and Edward Fan Club site that I received an answer to my question. The Fan Forum response, though pleasant enough, did not in fact provide an answer. I checked again after a few days to see if there were any more responses on the Fan Forum, but my thread got lost in the shuffle after it was moved.

The nature of the Twilight Fan Forum means that interactions are primarily limited to forum discussions. Interaction occurs primarily on questions/discussion points posed by members that have established themselves as presences in the Twilight Fan Forum community. My initial post was apparently misplaced, and one of the "experts" as described the in the Gleave article, moved my post to the accepted location for such inquiries. There was a small bit of admonishment that served to maintain the "local norms" also discussed by Gleave.

The E&B Fan Club allowed me to post my question in the forum without any admonishment. There was less micro-managing of posts and all members were able to post new topics for discussion. The Ellison article mentioned that, "...detailed profiles highlight both commonalities and differences among participants." In terms of detailed profiles, the Edward and Bella Fan Site provides a level of customization that closely mimics MySpace and some of the features offered by Facebook. Because of this, and the ability to request people as friends, the E&B Fan Club feels more welcoming than Twilight Fan Forum.

"Bonding social capital" is easier to see on the E&B Fan Club because the level of customization of the personal profile allows members to somewhat passively let people learn more about them through the profile browsing feature. A friend request I received upon joining the E&B Fan Club was motivated by my character's location in Japan, which the user revealed to me via a private message.

First Friend Request

The level of "bonding social capital" apparent in the E&B Fan Club might make exiting the group somewhat difficult. Williams observation that, "When leaving the group represents a true loss of social, psychological, or practical benefits, a group member will exert effort to stay and contribute," is probably true in the case of the longest-lived members of the E&B Fan Club. They interacted more like the members of the Cullen family (the vampire family in the book), rather than a bunch of strangers online.

Suggested Improvements

The only suggestions I have for the E&B Fan Club to improve their website is a change in the font because I hated reading red on black, and perhaps instituting a badge or promotion system where users can get cool little badges similar to how the Huffington Post does it. Maybe giving the level-up system a vampire theme would put users deeper under the spell this website casts.  Otherwise, their site has a nice blend of "bonding social capital" and "bridging social capital" going on. People ask questions, get responses, birthdays are acknowledged, art is shared. The creators of this site show the same love and care for their community that Edward showed for Bella when he bared his soul to her during that time in the book.

For the Twilight Fan Forum, I suggest they make the community more welcoming to new users. I found it difficult to locate a place to put my introductory post. The way they cluster certain topics according to the senior members wishes seems somewhat arbitrary too. Though the "answer giver" that responded to my post was polite, I still didn't get a response. The community has barriers to entry that can be somewhat intimidating to the new user. They need to create a newbie thread and lock it at the top of the forum; otherwise, the whole thing will just be a conversation between a few 'elite' users that new members have to try and jump into.

The premise offered by Allen and company, that "...every node seeks to interact with another that is at least as cooperative as itself," is true in the case of the Twilight Fan Forum. The only instances of sustained interaction I saw were between the other veteran members of the board, all of which had somewhat similar post counts. Sustained interaction might have allowed me to climb my way up the social ladder on the forum, but I can't say for sure.

As the Twilight Fan Forum is forum-based, there is a lack of personal profile customization which is kind of the norm for this type of OC. A badge-type of system for contributors is already in place, as people get gold crowns for posting a lot. This is a good first step. However, they could open it up to allow more extensive personal pages with more than just a post count and a signature quote. Just like how Bella eventually opened up to Edward in the book, the Twilight Fan Forum needs to give its users a few more ways to open up to each other.

Final Thoughts

Choosing between the two OCs I looked at was much easier than when Bella had to choose between Edward and the wolf guy. Since Bella eventually chose (spoiler alert. Highlight to see.) Edward (according to Wikipedia), I'm going to have to say that the Bella and Edward Fan Club is in fact Edward, while the Twilight Fan Forum is the poor, neglected wolf guy. Thought I have not learned how to love again, I was pleasantly surprised by how well a fan site like the Bella and Edward Fan Club was able to make me feel involved in their community.


Final Project Ideas

I am interested in two forms of social computing not yet covered: Alternative Reality Games and/or Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. I am also open to taking a look at the Facebook games by Zynga.

Social networks formed around online games have had very real impacts on peoples' lives. Some have met online, fallen in love, and gotten married. Others have had marriages ruined because a spouse gets so involved with their online life in the games that their offline interactions suffer. There have even been murders over items that exist only on the servers of the company running the online game!

MMORPG/ARGs I would look at:
 
If I take a look at MMORPGs I might take a look at subscription-based vs. micro-transaction based games.

A look at ARGs would involve commercial and fan-made projects and the different ways they involve the internet to encourage particpation.



Questions I am thinking of investigating:

How do ARGs or MMORPGs form and maintain collaborative relationships between users?


(MMORPG specific)

What are the incentives for participation and how do developers sustain monetized participation by users in an MMORPG environment? How are social networks formed within the game?


(ARG specific)
How do ARGs involve users? What are the types of users that participate in ARGs? Do ARGs successfully leverage the online platform to encourage user participation?


Readings
Gleave, Eric, Howard T. Welser, Thomas M. Lento and Marc A. Smith (2009). A Conceptual and Operational Definition of ÔSocial RoleÕ in Online Community. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, 5-8 January 2009.

Allen, Stuart M., Gualtiero Colombo, Roger M. Whitaker (2009). Forming Social Networks of Trust to Incentivize Cooperation. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, 5-8 January 2009.

Ellison, N.B., C. Steinfield and C. Lampe (2007). The Benefits of Facebook "Friends:" Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html

Williams, D. (2006). On and Off the 'Net: Scales for Social Capital in an Online Era. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 11.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/williams.html

Interesting to Me: Parts 2 and 3 of "The Secret History of Social Networking"

I'm an old man, so going out on the town on a Saturday night is no longer an option for me. Because of this, I listen to a lot of radio programs via the internet. Here are the last two parts of "The Secret History of Social Networking" for your enjoyment:

Part 2

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y2f2s

The growth of Facebook

Part 3

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y5jgf

The future of social networking

Part 1 (If you missed it.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xw14v

Session Three

~Part 1~

The article Examining social media usage: Technology clusters and social network site membership, by Schrock, takes a look at extroversion, self-disclosure, self-efficacy, gender, and computer anxiety; and examines how these factors affect SNS membership. There is a possibility that extroverted people use SNS more than introverted people and just might scare the introverts off of SNS sites. (As an aside, Schrock noted that MySpace was populated by a small majority of females, but I have to wonder how many of those “female” profiles were actually dudes trolling their friends.)

Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online by Gefen and Ridings tackles the question: Why do people join online communities? The primary reasons they offer are: information exchange, social support exchange, friendship, and recreation. In my own experiences, these have all been the exact reasons I've hung out online; especially in the case of friendship/recreation. I used to play Lord of the Rings Online with a friend from Japan, mostly as an interactive chat-room that let us relax together.

These reasons are also discussed in the article Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities, by Akshay Java and company. Observations from the Java article, a 2007 study of micro-blogging, are still relevant when describing the behavior and kinds of users on Twitter. The authors of this article conducted a study of aggregate behavior in micro-blogging communities to understand both types of users and user intentions.

The types of user intentions described by Java are congruent with my own observations of how users behave on Twitter. Like many others, I used Twitter to keep up with the daily lives of friends and co-workers, have conversations and share information. Though I never used Twitter to get news about current events, I knew quite a few people that did follow users classified as an “Information Source,” in order to do so.

In Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities, author Steven Tedjamulia and three other people with less interesting names write an article in which ways to motivate user contributions to OCs are explored. Tedjamulia observes that community managers can bolster their member contributions by training them to use the OC and providing positive feedback mechanisms. There are feedback mechanisms on the Huffington Post, for example that include: post counts, # of followers (fans), badges that reward activity as a moderator/contributor/etc. These mechanisms, especially the badges that users can level up (they get a little number in the corner of the badge they level up), provide the kind of economical performance feedback that Tedjamulia and company wrote about.

Similar to the study by Tedjamulia, the article Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities by Kimberly Ling and her posse also looks at ways to motivate users to contribute. How to motivate “social loafers” was the big question in this study. They found that when individuals were given clear goals and reminded of what unique little snowflakes they were, they contributed to the OC more and that by giving people goals as a group, their participation was higher than those given individual goals. The E-mail manipulators used for their experiments were kind of weak, as they said, and I don’t really find myself motivated when websites try to use the same thing to spark up user participation.

Part 2

Enrique Iglesias, Mariah Carey, David Bowie, The Foo Fighters--all the great bards of our time have sung songs about heroes. I remembered these songs while helping an elderly woman cross the busy intersection near my apartment building and wondered if there were "real life superheroes" out there patrolling the streets. Was there a Spiderman or a Wonder Woman out there protecting the city from top-hat wearing muggers, senior citizen street gangs, and midgets with hammers? A quick search through the interwebs and I was well on my way to finding out.

Just like the old farm couple that found a baby from outer space in their fields, or the lucky nerd that was bitten by a radioactive spider and given amazing abilities, I lucked out and found an online community dedicated to superheroes.

My observation was conducted on The Real Life Superhero Forum,an OC belonging to a "Real Life Superhero Community". The forum is part of the http://www.reallifesuperheroes.org/ project.

Screenshot taken from www.reallifesuperheroes.org

Forum Main Page

Modes of Participation 

The RLSH forum allows superheroes access to these features: Post content, respond to posts, select user groups, send private messages, create polls, create user signatures, and upload their own avatars.

Participation Encouragement

1. Senior members of the forum are, as the general theme of the community indicates, incredibly welcoming to new members. 
2. Nice touches like acknowledgement of member birthdays.



User birthdays are acknowledged by the community.

3. Spam moderation is in effect.

   4. Posters can make friend lists.

  5. Questions are answered in a timely manner and the moderators help keep a positive vibe on the boards.

  6. Statistics are kept for each individual user and are open to the public. 

  7. Website keeps track of news events and posts recent forum commentary from users on the main page.

  8. There is a superhero manual available for newcomers to peruse. 

Content that drew the most responses: 

As the superhero community is still a growing one, new heroes ask appear to ask fairly common questions. The topic most important to heroes was uniform colors, with Comic Con being a close second. Increased media interest in real life superheroes most likely inspired recruiting as well. Citizens arrest was popular because a real life superhero is still a citizen, so one might as well be as informed as possible on what they can do to prevent crime. 

1. Uniform Colors: 159 replies, 2941 views
2. Comic Con: 97 replies, 1468 views
3. TV Shows: 46 replies, 556 views
4. Recruiting: 41 replies, 1268 views
5. Citizens Arrest:  22 replies, 624 views

Final Thoughts:

The superhero community, though not what most of us are used to, is still a community. They have leveraged online resources to create a group that appears to be fairly tight-knit. There's a familial vibe to the interactions between users of the RLSH forums. Some more prominent members have created personal blogs that attract commentary from other super heroes that are also members of the forum. The community has grown large enough that a movie has been made about some of its more prominent members:

http://current.com/entertainment/movies/blog/92969198_real-life-superheroes-get-their-own-film.htm

I actually noticed, as said in the Tedjamulia article, that the more "visible" members of the community, with names recognized outside of the forums by newspapers and the like, were quite prolific contributors to the forums. Much of their advice also seemed geared to nurture new heroes and help build group identity.

The Ling article made the point that participation can be encouraged by giving individuals an idea of how unique their contribution is. I kind of doubted just a little at first, but I noticed that in the real life superhero community, they really do respond to having their uniqueness noticed. Thanatos, one of the more prominent members of the community, contributed to a film project about real life superheroes. Superhero (yes that's his name. :P) was at first reluctant to participate in the project, but after finding out Thanatos had his unique contributions recognized, seemed eager to join in at the prospect of having his own uniqueness recognized. The addition of the film project having a sort of group goal might also have had an impact as the guest from the post above Superhero's said he participated to help Thanatos and the film crew out. 

It's interesting to see the effect that discussions in OCs can have on offline projects like the aforementioned film.

If Schrock had done an analysis of the real life superhero community, he might have noticed there are more male members than female members. In regards to the RLSC, gender certainly does appear to play a role in membership. There are women in the community, just very very few.

In the end, I was surprised to see that there are actually people out there (aside from police, firefighters, EMTs, military, etc.) who will go out into their communities to try and do some good. Though I lack the necessary motivation and costume sewing skills needed to join them, I respect the mission of real life superheroes. They genuinely look like they care about helping out their communities. Excelsior!


Readings:

Ridings, Catherine and David Gefen (2004).  Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue1/ridings_gefen.html

Ling, K., G. Beenen, P. Ludford, X. Wang, K. Chang, X. Li, D. Cosley, D. Frankowski, L. Terveen, A.M. Rashid, P. 

Resnick and R. Kraut (2005). Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(4), article 10. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/ling.html

Tedjamulia, Steven J.J., David R. Olsen, Douglas L. Dean, Conan C. Albrecht (2005).  Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities: Toward a More Comprehensive Theory. Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Schrock, Andrew (2009).  Examining Social Media Usage: Technology Clusters and Social Network Site Membership. First Monday 14(1).http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2242/2066

Java, Akshay, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin and Belle Tseng (2007). Why We Twitter: Understanding the Microblogging Effect in User Intentions and Communities. Joint 9th WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop, 12 August 2007, San Jose, California.  http://workshops.socialnetworkanalysis.info/websnakdd2007/papers/submission_21.pdf