[Air-L] Definition of on-line community through homophily

[MacDougall, Robert]

hello Alex,
I consider homophily on blogs in the article described below.  If you want a "review copy" just send me a note offlist and I'll push you a pdf.

thanks,
-r

http://abs.sagepub.com/content/49/4/575.short

Identity, Electronic Ethos, and Blogs:
A Technologic Analysis of Symbolic Exchange on the New News Medium

Abstract
News blogs (Web logs dedicated to the dissemination of news) are becoming the default political news source for a growing number of well-educated and apparently well-informed segments of the population. Bloggers and blog advocates suggest that blogs, online lists, and their various analogs offer something different and potentially unique to the 21st-century citizen. At their best, blogs represent a new form of open-sourced/open-access partisan press that promises to bring McLuhan’s tribal context one step closer to fulfillment. At their worst, blogs represent the latest form of mass-mediated triviality and celebrity spectacle, with the potential to create and sustain insulated enclaves of intolerance predicated on little more than personal illusion, rumor, and politically motivated innuendo. Employing first a medium theoretic and then a symbolic interactionist lens, the present study considers some of the key structural features of news blogs and discusses some of the personal, social, and political significances of blogs and blogging.

________________________________________
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Semenov Alexander [semenoffalex at googlemail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 4:46 AM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: [Air-L] Definition of on-line community through homophily

Hello, everybody.
I'm looking for papers, that define on-line communities through common
itnerests.
My idea is to prove, that many so-called communities in LiveJournals are not
such, because there is too few discussions and other kind of interaction. So
that joining such a community is mostly a demonstration of taste and part of
self-presentation in their profiles.
In order to prove that I want to run a PCA on the data from one of such
communities like in Paolilo, Wright and Mercure's article (
http://www.scribd.com/doc/353326/The-Social-Semantics-of-LiveJournal-FOAF-Structure-and-Change-from-2004-to-2005).
Their data show that there is no correlation between interests and friends
and I understand it as lack of homophily. (Am I right?) So, that is my
working hypothesis I want to prove. That's why I need some sources.
I looked through Barry Wellman's works but he uses another approach.
--
Alexander Semenov.
MA student
Faculty of Sociology
Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES)
http://www.msses.ru/English/index.html

Graduate Student in Sociology at
State University - Higher School of Economics
http://www.hse.ru/eng
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