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Wed May 7 22:43:13 PDT 2014


This thesis argues that most examinations of the public online behavior
of Internet users have been in terms of "virtual community", with
researchers using social theory and generally adopting ethnomethodology
or a social network approach.  Furthermore, that these approaches
underplay the fact that builders of online interaction systems impact on
the behavior of users through the architecture of the spaces they
create.  As a result, there is a need for information system researchers
to examine the nature of the relationship between the virtual spaces
typically used for public online behavior, their technological
platforms, and the behaviors such systems contain.  This alternate
focus, which is adopted in this thesis, moves the emphasis away from
notions of community, and its attention to people and their relations,
to the nature of the containership of virtual spaces and the boundaries
such places impose on online behavior.  

In both virtual and physical places, communication technologies can be
seen as enablers of only a limited range of social interactions. 
However, prior to the writing of this thesis, recognition of this fact
has not coincided with a research framework or clear methodology for
exploring the relationship between online space and behavior. As a
result, a new framework is proposed here to systematically investigate
the enabling and constraining nature of virtual publics.  Virtual
publics are defined as symbolically delineated computer mediated spaces
such as email lists, newsgroups, IRC Channels etc., whose existence is
relatively transparent and open, so groups of individuals are able to
attend and contribute to a similar set of computer-mediated
interpersonal interactions. Axiomatic to this new approach is the notion
that limitations to virtual public behavior result not simply from the
nature of the technologies under study, but also from the collective
impact of innate human cognitive processing constraints. These
constraints, when reached by users trying to process overloaded online
discourse, are hypothesized to result in non-linear feedback loops
acting on virtual public interaction dynamics. Such system effects are
not easily identified by normative or experimental studies which have a
tendency to cloud the range of possible behaviors.  For this reason, the
methodology applied here is large-scale field studies of virtual public
mass interaction dynamics.

By a detailed analysis of 2.65 million USENET messages posted to 600
newsgroups over a 6-month period, three effects of the hypothesized
non-linear feedback loops are examined. These are: 1) that until
asymptote, users are more likely to generate simpler responses as the
overloading of mass-interaction increases; 2) that until asymptote,
users are more likely to respond to simpler messages in overloaded mass
interaction; and 3) that until asymptote, users are more likely to end
active participation as the overloading of mass-interaction increases.
The relationship between the hypothesized non-linear feedback loops and
technology type is also examined empirically by comparing the Usenet
data with that of 478,240 email messages sent to 487 email lists managed
by Listserv software over a 5-month period.

Statistical analysis of the Usenet data demonstrated the existence of
the hypothesized effects and supports the assertion that individual
'information overload' coping strategies have an observable impact on
mass interaction discourse dynamics. This thesis is the first empirical
exploration of Usenet discourse for systems effects. The comparative
analysis of the email and Usenet data also demonstrated the relationship
between discourse dynamics and technology type. 

The thesis has a number of important implications for designers and
managers of virtual publics including methods for understanding the
viability of the discourse and user stability associated with various
virtual public types.  It also provides a means for understanding the
usability of various computer mediated communication technologies in
group-level terms.   Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the
theoretical work suggests a new research paradigm for the examination of
online behavior that is progressive in nature and leads to the discovery
of hitherto unknown novel facts.




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