Considerably more experienced

These last months of the year are turning out to be quite busy, even if not much of all the commotion is visible around here.

I made my debut in the world of conferences at the Experience 2008 – which was, indeed, quite an experience. A wide range of topics has been covered – some of them got me lost without the slightest hint of what actually was everything about, but some of them turned out to be quite interesting and – hopefully – useful as well.

Most importantly I’d like to mention the talk of Wim Veen from the Delft University of Technology, titled “Homo Zappiens – learning strategies of a new generation.” I hope to return to this subject – how textual and sequential information processing strategies are replaced by those built on images and non-sequentiality – because it touches upon the problem of interactivity, which has been one of the topics constantly on the agenda in the talks with my supervisor Tarmo Malmberg. (Basically the question is how justified the distinction is between “active” and “passive” media consumption – or in fact just what do these notions actually mean.)

But before that, currently, it is preparation for a methodology workshop that’s keeping me busy. Starting one week from today in Amsterdam, it’s all going to be about methodology – and social network analysis, which might just give me the key to the second phase of my research project.

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)