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

[Uwe Matzat]

Dear Alexander, Caroline, and others,

I have a paper that runs through these definitions and argues that (some type of) 
online communities should be defined by common interest. You, Alexander, may 
want to shoot at it for your purpose:

Matzat, U. (2004). "Cooperation and Community on the Internet: Past Issues and 
Present Perspectives for theoretical-empirical Internet Research" in: Analyse & 
Kritik, 26, 1: 63-90.  (pre-print at my website)

To be honest, I can't follow your argument. Maybe this is just a misunderstanding? 
But why does this type of definition imply a high degree of homophily? If you look at 
a "classical" online community, for instance a discussion fora about cancer, then 
there is a common interest (discussion about cancer). But there does not have to be 
a high degree of homophily. Members can have different educational, ethnic, and 
social backgrounds. Could you clarify?

-------->
So, my arguement is that community should be defined by interaction, not by
some declarative features like interests, profiles, communities, etc.
-------->

I agree that for some other types of online communities ("social online 
communities") other criteria should be taken into account as well. See the article. 

Uwe




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Semenov Alexander semenoffalex at googlemail.com 
Wed Oct 6 01:46:52 PDT 2010 

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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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Uwe Matzat
Sociology
School of Innovation Science
Eindhoven University of Technology
P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven
The Netherlands
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phone: + 31 40 247-8392
email: umatzat /"at"/ gmail.com
http://umatzat.net
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