AR: Features of Online Communities and Their Effects on Intent to Participate

Fair enough, the complete title of the article by Wise, Hammand and Thorson is “Moderation, Response Rate, and Message Interactivity: Features of Online Communities and Their Effects on Intent to Participate” (JCMC); which seems to prove that they did not mean this article for online publication.

Anyhow, if the title is too long for the finicky self-proclaimed publisher like myself, it also sums up quite well what the piece is about. The authors measured in controlled experiments how the presence or absence of moderation, the speed of the publication of messages (response rate), and message interactivity affect users’ involvement in an online community.

Interactivity here is a feature of content: it measures the extent to which messages relate to one another; i.e. if messages follow each other in a logical fashion – as in a more or less coherent conversation -, that is interactive, whereas “write-only”, ignorant messages are: not.

First, all three features do have an effect on “intent to participate”.

Second, the most obvious influencing factor seems to be moderation:

The participants who viewed the moderated community reported significantly higher intent to participate than [those] who viewed the unmoderated community. (p24)

AR: Online journalism and the war in cyberspace: a comparison between U.S. and international newspapers

It tells a lot about the overloaded publication schedule of quality journals that today’s article by Daniela Dimitrova and Matt Neznanski only appeared in vol. 12. of the JCMC in 2006, although it analyzes the state of online journalism through the case study of the first 3 months of the 2003 Iraq war.

But even if it is likely that a snapshot taken today would be quite different to that of 2003, the study is still quite interesting, and comes with a model can accommodate further research too.

Building on previous literature, the authors create a three-plus-one-stage conceptual model of online news reporting, classifying online media organs into one of the stages based on the technologies they use in conveying information. Stage 1 is “shovelware” – recycling previously released textual news items. Stage 2 is adding pictures and hyperlinks to the text. Stage 3 is the stage of convergence: news items are enhanced by streaming audio and video, and users are offered various ways to give feedback. (Stage “plus one” incorporates all the future stages.)

Surveying 26 online newspapers from 17 countries, the study found that online journalism at that time (again, 2003) had not yet reached the stage of “convergence”, but clearly surpassed the stage of shovelware. As for the differences between U.S. and international online media organs, the former were more likely to include photos, audio and interactive elements, but no significant differences were found between the two groups as for the use of hyperlinks and digital video.

AR: Online vs face-to-face deliberation: effects on civic engagement

Seong-Jae Min’s article, published in the JCMC (Vol. 12. (2007), pp1369-1387), is quite about what you would expect from the title; it compares online to face-to-face deliberation in an experimental setting. It concludes saying that “online deliberation is not necessarily inferior to face-to-face deliberation,” and that “both online and face-to-face deliberation can increase participants’ issue knowledge, political efficacy and willingness to participate in politics.”

In the experiment, one group of participants (divided into smaller groups) deliberated offline, in face-to-face conversation, while another group (also divided into smaller groups) did the same online, in chatrooms set up especially for the occasion. Both groups discussed the same topic; in fact, all factors affecting the deliberation were the same for them, except that communication in the latter group took place online (but the group members were actually sitting in the same computer lab, albeit without being able to see each other).

I’d like to make two quick points about the experiment and its results.

It’s not over yet (but it is)

In theory, on paper, and officially, the Democratic party still has no presidential nominee – but after winning the Montana primary last night and clinching the endorsement of a score of superdelegates, there hardly remains much doubt about Barack Obama picking up the nomination.

This comes as no surprise to the communities of the social news sites I’m analyzing. Sure, it’s no scientific evidence in itself, but I still thought it would be telling to copy here what the leading news item was on Digg on 11. 5.:

I find his picture – from the Diesel Sweeties Newsblog -, and the fact that it has become a leading news item on Digg (with 2341 votes), iconic in a way. Paraphrasing the LOLcat-meme (the practice of attaching funny, anthropomorphizing captions to pictures of cats and other animals), it tells a lot about the trends of personalization of political issues, the ‘net-mashup-culture, and probably the Digg community in general.

AR: Whose voice is heard in online deliberation?

Some quick notes on Steffen Albrecht’s paper “Whose voice is heard in online deliberation? – A study of participation and representation in political debates on the Internet.” (Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 9. No 1., February 2006)

Albrecht discusses topics such as political activism online (does the net actually spread activism?; not really, though it provides new forms for it), the situational advantage of the digerati, and hypotheses about the lack of social cues (unreliability vs the levelling out effect). The paper then approaches the main problem through a case study carried out in Hamburg in November 2002.

But what’s most important is not really the answer to the question in the title – the point is that the answer is quite vague, and it is most useful if we look at it as an incentive to ask further questions. As the main concluding point, Albrecht proposes a new theoretical model to conduct research into online deliberation; in the model, four sets of factors are considered to determine who participates (participation) and what is communicated (representation) in instances of online deliberation.

“Weak” vs “arranged” publics

This is probably the first time I have to emphasize the blog-like nature of this blog, however excuse-like this may sound.

The thing is, I have been thinking about a problem pretty much all last week, and by now I have only come to the conclusion that I still need to read more in order to be able to give a more or less satisfactory answer. But I thought I could still jot down a few points about it here; if nothing else, this will serve as a reminder for myself. Also, I figured it would be a good idea to create a separate here a separate page for papers that I consider finished and at least trying to respect some academic standards.

This half-baked post is not one of them. Anyhow, the problem is this.

Habermas in Between Facts and Norms talks about “weak” and “arranged” publics. In his understanding, deliberative democracy does not mean that the whole of the society is organized by the discursive mode of sociation. (This is, so far as I understand, a necessity: discourse is something that always includes exclusion; there needs to be a context, something other than the discourse, against which it can be defined.) There is a constitutionally organized political system, which is legitimated (in the ideal case) by its procedurally correct deliberation process. (A number of variables can be drawn up to describe what “procedurally correct” actually is.) But this political system with its decision-oriented, deliberation-run processes is not everything there is; there is also an informal, open and inclusive network of overlapping, subcultural publics. These publics are “weak” in the sense that they are “uncoupled from decisions”, their communication does not necessarily respect the rules of procedurally correct deliberation; they are in fact not really organized at all.