Hello,
I decided to look for info on user-created online social communities. I got the idea from Davidson and Goldberg’s chapter on the future of learning. While I don’t feel the university system—which they refer to as “antiquated” multiple times—is desperately out of date, I do think we need to pay attention to how digital communities operate and how they facilitate learning and information diffusion. These digital communities represent a novel form of community, one unique to our era, and we can draw lessons about digital scholarship from the social uses of digital technology.
One article I found is “Interfaces as Rhetorical Constructions: reddit and 4chan During the Boston Marathon Bombings.” It’s a pretty fascinating look at the basic workings of reddit and 4chan and their interfaces, and then a case study in the two sites’ reactions to the Boston marathon bombings in 2013. The article tracks how the two communities reacted and what their self-generated goals quickly became, and how the websites took the tools at hand and pursued those goals. (The article is 8 pages.)
Another interesting article is “Socialization Tactics in Wikipedia and Their Effects” (10 pages). It’s a bit stats-heavy, but the overall gist is that researchers tracked socializing tactics in WikiProjects—sending greeting messages, offering assistance, etc.—and analyzed how this changed new users’ likelihood of remaining committed to the project. No surprise—the more socializing and welcoming, the longer the newcomers remained active. It’s a little more complicated than that, there are more categories, but overall it’s a good look at effective strategies for growing and maintaining socially networked projects from like an administrative or leadership perspective.
Andrew
