 |
‹ | The Case Against Dualism | < | Weekly Archives | > | Novice Teachers | › |  |
 |
 |
Analyzing Communities
internet, society & sociology
September 01, 2003, 12:57 AM
The fall semester has begun here at CMU, and I'm taking a class in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) from Bob Kraut. This semester, the class is focusing on Designing Online Communities and Bob is co-teaching it with Paul Resnick, a recommender systems (think Amazon.com ratings) expert who is visiting from the University of Michigan.
In the first class, which was last Friday, we discussed several types of social structures that exist both in the real world and online:
- Groups are a small number of people who come together to accomplish well-defined goals and have a specific, agreed-upon purpose. Most of the teams you may have worked with for projects in a class or at a workplace fall into this category.
- Voluntary associations are generally larger collections of people who all share common goals or interests and have agreed to congregate around those interests. Unlike groups, the goals of a voluntary association may not be very well-defined. Voluntary associations tend to last longer than groups, however; many may even have indefinite lifespans. An example is your local chapter of the YMCA.
- Communities are like voluntary associations but might be more loosely organized. I don't believe we talked much about this category, so I don't recall a whole lot of distinguishing features. I'd imagine communities involve people coming together to socialize and share in each other's lives, and are potentially even longer-running than voluntary organizations (you may belong to some communities for your entire life).
- Third places are locations people go to socialize that are separate from the home and the workplace (which are the first and second places). Third places are characterized by people coming together to revel in the uniqueness of each others' personalities; the patrons of the third place go for each other and not as much because the place is enjoyable per se. An example would be a neighborhood bar. Cheers is kind of the prototypical third place.
- Social networks are collections of people who are associated with one another through social interactions such as friendships, working relationships, etc. Your social network defines who you talk to, who you can ask favors of, who you can get information out of, etc. Bob went into an interesting digression where he showed a drawing of a social network some sociologists had observed; he pointed out how the network formed certain "clusters" that were only connected to other clusters through a single link between one node in each. Bob remarked that the two people who formed that link were frequently (de facto) powerful individuals since they controlled the communication between those two social clusters. This is especially true if the groups must frequently exchange important information, since they get to play gatekeeper for that information.
- Social capital describes the sense of trustworthiness and shared identity that people feel towards one another. Your social capital is a measure of this sense that people experience towards you; if you have high social capital among a certain group of people they will tend to value what you say and listen to you; if you have a low social capital, they're more likely to ignore you. This is a different way of looking at social relationships than the more structural ones I mentioned before.
Bob also made an interesting point about how physical architectures (as in, the structures of buildings) define the environment in which a community operates and thus has a large influence on the community itself. The readings drew a metaphor between building architectures and city planning (the kinds of things Alexander discusses) that physical communities live in and the design of the software systems that virtual communities live in. The suggestion, of course, is that the software system design influences these virtual communities in a similar fashion. This was really interesting to me; I had originally thought of going to grad school to study online communities in general and specifically how the design of social software systems influenced the way their communities operated. I hope we'll talk more about this issue in later classes.
Neema is also in the class and has posted his thoughts on his weblog. Chad is taking the course as well; hopefully he'll put up a few reflections as the semester wears on. If you, dear reader, happen to be a member of the class and have a weblog of your own, please post it in a comment below or send me a trackback ping. I'd like to keep tabs on what other people think of the course.