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

[Caroline Haythornthwaite]

I have published a social network informed theoretical position on what 
forms 'crowds' vs 'communities'. The basic proposition is that crowds are tied 
by a coorientation to a subject of common interest, communities are tied by 
this coorientation, but also heavily by attention to others in the community. 
Be interested in what you find from your work. This is one version of the 
idea: 

Haythornthwaite, C. (Jan. 2009). Crowds and communities: Light and 
heavyweight models of peer production. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii 
International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE 
Computer Society. Available via the UIUC institutional repository at: 
https://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/handle/2142/9457.

I'm surprised you'd think Live Journal is not a community in that sense. Try a 
dissertation by Claudia Rebaza that shows the internal recognition of others 
and interaction through reading and commentary on writings. (Re one 
community within LiveJournal).

Rebaza, C. (2009). The Technological Continuum of Coterie Publication: Fan 
Fiction Writing Communities on LiveJournal. Unpublished doctoral 
dissertation, University of Illinois.


/Caroline


---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 12:46:52 +0400
>From: Semenov Alexander <semenoffalex at googlemail.com>  
>Subject: [Air-L] Definition of on-line community through homophily  
>To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
>
>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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--------------------------------------
Caroline Haythornthwaite

I will be using this @illinois email for a few more months for projects started at UIUC. 

However, if your email is in relation to my position as Director, SLAIS, UBC please use haythorn at interchange.ubc.ca