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.
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| Screenshot taken from www.reallifesuperheroes.org |
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| 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
- Senior members of the forum are, as the general theme of the community indicates, incredibly welcoming to new members.
- Nice touches like acknowledgement of member birthdays.
- Spam moderation is in effect.
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| User birthdays are acknowledged by the community. |
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.
- Uniform Colors: 159 replies, 2941 views
- Comic Con: 97 replies, 1468 views
- TV Shows: 46 replies, 556 views
- Recruiting: 41 replies, 1268 views
- 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:
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:
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
Great post! It definitely is interesting to see the items in the articles match our lives well; in your case, the Lord of the Rings On-line and Twitter examples. In your comment about using the Lord of the Rings On-line as an interactive chat room, I am wondering how much of a difference the actual game makes. Is it better for the game to have familiarity and not be too engaging to promote user-to-user interaction? Or, does maximum engagement promote user-to-user interaction? My guess is that it will differ based on the type of interaction that you desire; some engagement to promote socialization and maximum engagement to promote discourse about the game. In this sense, I also wonder if there is a sweet spot between the two, where you switch between the different types of engagement or it is user selectable.
ReplyDeleteI also found your discussion about the real life superhero community to be interesting. I found it interesting that the culture of the community is to be really welcoming to new members, as opposed to “hazing” them. I do wonder how this welcoming culture was developed. Or, was it expected due to the nature of the community. It would seem odd to have a superhero community that did not welcome new members.
As for Schrock’s study of the proportions of females and males in MySpace, I think you point out an important point—how many online community users are giving true information? So far, it is hard to screen the authenticity of the personal information given by the participants. I remember in my response to other students’ blog in session1, I mentioned an interesting comic strip that I saw few years ago. Through computer-mediated communication, a child told his interlocutor that “I am a professor in an established university”. However, he was not the only one who lies. His interlocutor, an old woman, told the child that she was a university student in her 20. The two persons were telling a lie to each other to fulfill their fantasy to a certain extent. In addition, Carol (2007) (we read the author’s article in week 1) warned that we should be cautious about the news we get from web 2.0 because it is hard to tell whether the news is a fact or just fiction made up by someone.
ReplyDeleteI am interested in RLSH, the online community you introduced. Although I haven’t heard of the online community before, I am impressed by how a SNS like this one gathers real-life superhero to do some good. The ways of motivating participation are also interesting. Senior members are very willing to communicate with the junior members, who are new to the online community. Spam moderation is used to make sure the content of messages is not immoral or illegal. The update of news events and commentary is also important, which can enable the members to keep track of site. All these approaches are in line with what Gefen (2007) said in an online community most content is member-generated, and as more members generate more content, the increased content also draw more members. It is a win-win strategy. If the website loses the members who contribute a lot, the result could be like what Tedjiamulia (2005) said lack of content and lack of updated content causes users to become uninterested.
Good online community always supplementary their site with tutorial on how to participate. This is a good example of how OCs try their best on delivering digital literacy to their participants. The Superhero Manual is really super. This is also a good example how to incorporate leisure and entertainment with education. While leisure and entertainment always assume relate with imagination, but in my opinion good idea in our life always come form an imagination too. Integrated imagination on education can be a good inspiration to engage students and make them start by imagination to improve their critical thinking and come up with good idea. When I read your blog I remember that one of the presenter in a conference that I attended several year ago use super hero cartoon and the comic strips from this super hero cartoon to teach sciences. This man creation is really amazing.
ReplyDeleteMBCO - The great thing about the Lord of the Rings MMO was that you had towns and cities to have some "downtime" in. Players could craft stuff or just stand around in an INN chatting and whatnot if they wanted to take a break from going out and fighting monsters.
ReplyDeleteThere were incentives for players to stay in the towns/cities in the form of travelling circuses, town/city specific crafting quests, and auction houses. So in a way, the manner of interaction players want to experience is user selectable in that you can choose to go from combat zones to non-combat safe areas.
The RLSHC surprised me a little in how positive they were able to keep the tone of their interactions. I certainly believe that the nature of their community--inspired by the good guys in comic books--makes users in the community feel obligated to act according to the superhero archetype.
Bug - Great point about being cautious regarding the information we obtain from the internet. Information literacy should be taught to new internet users to help them look at what they find on the internet with a critical eye. The anecdote about the comic strip is great. The fact that the internet allows users to indulge their fantasies to some extent should not be forgotten when using social networking sites as these people could be something other than what they say they are.
HansomeAvatar - Engaging the imagination is definitely a great way to educate. I used to teach English to Japanese elementary school children. By engaging their imagination via games, storytelling, etc., retention of the material we covered was much higher than just using rote repetition. Great points about integrating leisure and education!
Thank you for your comments!
Great post, I really liked how you connected each article to your own online experiences, many of those theoretical ideas make so much more sense when you see real examples like that. Also your point about guys posing as girls is a really good one... sometimes it's not even trolling, but people simply assume you're a certain gender. For example in the F1 community I surveyed, you're assumed to be male unless your username is something like PinkPrincess... while in most fandom communities on LJ on the other hand people will almost always assume you're either a girl or a gay guy. Which can get pretty annoying, even if it's not meant to be malicious or anything. This made me wonder too if there are more girl!superheroes out there, but instead of being a stereotyped majority on a mostly male site, they may just choose to create their own community. With some topics, gender ratio of communities seems pretty even (Lord of the Rings is a good example, like the forum at TheOneRing.net), real life superheroes may be more similar to F1 in that it seems more male-dominated, but in reality most of the girls just went off and had their own little party with no boys invited :)
ReplyDeleteAnother example of a very interesting and well-documented post. As you mentioned, when the rewards of participation give an opportunity for uniqueness, which the superhero culture would seem to especially value, participation can increase.
ReplyDeleteThe real-life superhero community seems to be particularly well-suited (no pun intended) to the online environment. Daydreams of being a superhero are one thing, but a community like this provides some traction for the idea that you can pursue this calling, with some support from others who have done so before you. And I love the practical post about how to use a touch screen with superhero gloves on!
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ReplyDeleteJulia-
ReplyDeleteI've noticed that there were all female groups too. They had their own MySpace and Facebook pages somewhere out there.
Sistars are doing it for themselves!
Your LJ example reminds me of when I was part of this one online game that was a mix of Japanese and American users called Persona Online. Because I would play with Japanese friends we would mostly chat in Japanese, which other users could see. My avatar was fairly androgynous because it was a robot, so I would have people instantly assume that because I was using Japanese, that I was a Japanese girl. It was kind of funny because you could get them to give you money/useful items/stronger monsters, without even speaking much English. :P
Dr. Gazan -
The enthusiasm of this community was quite infectious; it was a blast reading their posts.
I'm glad you mentioned the touch screen post because it was one of the first posts I noticed. I think I just might use that bit of advice for when I have to wear winter gloves again.