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

[Semenov Alexander]

Hello, Uwe.
I skimed your article and it seemed very useful to me. I'll read it more
thoroughly later. Now I'll try to clarify my point.
At first, LJ-community "sociolog" doesn't present a "third place" for
sociological debates and conversations. Simply because people post there
mostly announcements and do it quite seldom. I'm not talking about comments.
You can check it yourself: (http://community.livejournal.com/sociolog/)
At second, I think, that people, who decided to join this community should
have at least some common characteristics (may be not related to sociology)
which we can obtain either from their "interests" section in the blog info
page or from their tags, which could be mined too. That's why I expect to
find at least some correlation in this features, so I need to check this
hypothesis. And the only way to do it that came to my mind is the method
from the article I've mentioned in the beginning.
Perhaps I'll add something to my arguement after reading your article.
Best regards,
Alexander.

2010/10/7 Uwe Matzat <umatzat at gmail.com>

> 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
>
>
>
>
> --------->
> --------->
> 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<http://www.scribd.com/doc/353326/The-Social-Semantics-of-LiveJournal-FOAF-%0AStructure-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
>
>
> =======================================
> Uwe Matzat
> Sociology
> School of Innovation Science
> Eindhoven University of Technology
> P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven
> The Netherlands
> ---------------
> phone: + 31 40 247-8392
> email: umatzat /"at"/ gmail.com
> http://umatzat.net
> =======================================
>
>
>
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-- 
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