Old Freedoms and New Technologies: The Evolution of Community Networking

Unparalleled in human experience, the Internet, or simply the Net, is the code word for the technosocial accident that gives large numbers of people the means by which they can speak for themselves in public. This is an ironical reversal of the historical social patterning of asymmetrical, centralizing communicating technologies that have molded all of the social relations of modern society. The problematic for this distributed communication capability will be manifest in struggles around the legitimacy of self-expression, assembly, and privacy, in all of their forms. However, unlike the mass mediated discourse where, as the ''audience'' object, we observed these externalized struggles by a narrow other, encounters with distributed media are palpable and subjective, and will be increasingly played out on the common terrain of local community. In initiating unconditional public access to the Net, community networks, or FreeNets, began the long process of blurring the distinction between the public and private terrain, of undoing that dichotomy that mass media technologies in this century have systematically rebuilt and fortified. Nudging along the process of democratic self-representation is the central issue for the Net, and the epochal project for community networks.     

Accessing and Browsing Information and Communication,by Ronald E. Rice,Maureen McCreadie,and Shan-Ju L. Chang. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 2001. xiii + 357 pp., $45.00. ISBN 0-262-18214-9.

Critics have argued that information and communication technologies (ICTs) disconnect people from their social networks and reduce public participation. Research in support of this perspective has been biased by two assumptions. The first is a tendency to privilege the Internet as a social system removed from the other ways people communicate. The second is a tendency to favor broadly supportive strong social ties. Survey and ethnographic observations from Netville, a 2-year community networking experiment, suggest that weak, not strong ties experience growth as a result of ICTs. By examining a unique and underexplored stage in the life cycle of a community networking project, the end of a networking trial, this article demonstrates how ICTs facilitate community participation and collective action (a) by creating large, dense networks of relatively weak social ties and (b) through the use of ICTs as an organizing tool.     

Grieving for a Lost Network: Collective Action in a Wired Suburb

Critics have argued that information and communication technologies (ICTs) disconnect people from their social networks and reduce public participation. Research in support of this perspective has been biased by two assumptions. The first is a tendency to privilege the Internet as a social system removed from the other ways people communicate. The second is a tendency to favor broadly supportive strong social ties. Survey and ethnographic observations from Netville, a 2-year community networking experiment, suggest that weak, not strong ties experience growth as a result of ICTs. By examining a unique and underexplored stage in the life cycle of a community networking project, the end of a networking trial, this article demonstrates how ICTs facilitate community participation and collective action (a) by creating large, dense networks of relatively weak social ties and (b) through the use of ICTs as an organizing tool.     

区块链社交网络信息传播特征及规律研究

【目的/意义】社交网络舆情监管关乎社会稳定,区块链作为当前一种重要的应用技术,关于区块链社交网 络的信息传播特征和规律研究将有利于对区块链社交应用的舆情监管提供一定的理论依据。【方法/过程】基于区 块链和信息传播理论,通过爬虫采集区块链社交网络应用数据,采用社会网络分析法,利用Gephi进行数据可视化 并利用统计分析软件进行数据处理。在此基础上,对整体网络下的社群进行对比分析,重点讨论了声誉分与用户 度的关系情况。【结果/结论】区块链社交网络为无标度网络;社群间的平均聚类基本一致并且较低;用户发帖量服 从幂律分布;声誉分高的用户在区块链网络中的影响力较大,其在舆情网络信息传播过程中起着重要的作用。【创 新/局限】基于区块链社交网络应用,本文分析了区块链整体社交网络及区块链社群网络的舆情信息传播特征及规 律,后续将采用动态网络、超网络方法对区块链网络舆情信息传播特征及规律进行分析研究。     

The Meaning of the Web

Speculation about the meaning of the Net (the Internet and potentially associated networks) and its most rapidly developing dimension, the Web (the World Wide Web), are both symptoms and components of a broader reshaping of world politics, economy, and culture. These changes challenge many of the categories within which we have grown used to thinking about the shape and meaning of society and its future. For individuals and local communities, the promises, hopes, and fears associated with the growth of the Web have particular poignancy as they face the challenge of establishing and asserting their identity in a ever more complicated and interdependent world and, through that, finding a strategy for achieving the sort of future they would like to live. The Net and the Web are technologies that promise us access to the world, but they and their associated social and economic trends challenge many of the premises upon which our identity is forged. The Net facilitates the development of new forms of transnational community organization, opening up the promise of more effective ways of acting as citizens across the broader social terrains in which it must be expressed. This article reconsiders the traditional theoretical tools that we have available to understand these issues. It addresses some of the central difficulties and possibilities available to us in rethinking identity, exploring the new promising cultural potential of the Web and Net in a more integrated and simultaneously fragmenting world.     

Wind,Water, and Wi-Fi: New Trends in Community Informatics and Disaster Management

In emergencies, information sharing among and between officials, volunteers, and citizens is essential for effective recovery and management. Recently, volunteers and others have been using community technology centers, community wireless networks, and end-user social technologies such as blogs and Wikis to prepare for emergencies and communicate and coordinate response when they happen. This article argues that there is a need for a research agenda that combines our knowledge of community informatics with the principles of disaster management to understand how social networks form and mobilize in disasters and how information and communication technologies should be designed and deployed to engage, inform, and mobilize those volunteer and citizen networks.     

Wind, Water, and Wi-Fi: New Trends in Community Informatics and Disaster Management

In emergencies, information sharing among and between officials, volunteers, and citizens is essential for effective recovery and management. Recently, volunteers and others have been using community technology centers, community wireless networks, and end-user social technologies such as blogs and Wikis to prepare for emergencies and communicate and coordinate response when they happen. This article argues that there is a need for a research agenda that combines our knowledge of community informatics with the principles of disaster management to understand how social networks form and mobilize in disasters and how information and communication technologies should be designed and deployed to engage, inform, and mobilize those volunteer and citizen networks.     

EXAMINING THE IMPLICATIONS OF CHANGING INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION STRUCTURES: THE UK PICT

The convergence of rapidly improving computer and telecommunication technologies is having a profound impact upon almost all social institutions. The characteristics of information gathering, storage, processing and dissemination affect the nature of markets and the structure of industry, as well as the competitiveness of firms and the prosperity of regions. They affect the internal structure of organizations including corporations, government agencies, political parties, and social groups. They affect the formation and distribution of social and cultural networks, the characteristics of work and education, the content of the mass media, and the information environment through which public opinion is formed. This paper discusses some characteristics of information markets and examines the power of the information assumptions. The needed research must be directed toward assessing the long-term implications of institutional change. The UK Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT) is described and its progress reported.     

Perceived critical mass and collective intention in social media-supported small group communication

The increasing popularity of Web 2.0 has dramatically changed the way in which people communicate with others in their daily life or work. However, the use of social media is fundamentally different from that of traditional information technologies. Specifically, it requires collective efforts and interdependence between two or more people, and thus the usage behavior is no longer an individual's own decision or plan. Built on critical mass theory and social influence processes, this study tries to make an attempt to understand the determinants of collective intention (we-intention), which represents one's perception of a group of people acting as a unit. Instant messaging, one of the most popular social media platforms, has been chosen for investigation, and findings from a survey showed that perceived critical mass influenced we-intention both directly and indirectly through group norm and social identity. Recognizing the importance and relevance of collective intention will advance current understanding beyond individual intention-based models which are widely adopted in prior IS research. This study may be limited by having not included other alternative social technologies, but we leave this work for future research.     

Vulnerable community identification using hate speech detection on social media

With the rapid development in mobile computing and Web technologies, online hate speech has been increasingly spread in social network platforms since it's easy to post any opinions. Previous studies confirm that exposure to online hate speech has serious offline consequences to historically deprived communities. Thus, research on automated hate speech detection has attracted much attention. However, the role of social networks in identifying hate-related vulnerable community is not well investigated. Hate speech can affect all population groups, but some are more vulnerable to its impact than others. For example, for ethnic groups whose languages have few computational resources, it is a challenge to automatically collect and process online texts, not to mention automatic hate speech detection on social media. In this paper, we propose a hate speech detection approach to identify hatred against vulnerable minority groups on social media. Firstly, in Spark distributed processing framework, posts are automatically collected and pre-processed, and features are extracted using word n-grams and word embedding techniques such as Word2Vec. Secondly, deep learning algorithms for classification such as Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), a variety of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), are used for hate speech detection. Finally, hate words are clustered with methods such as Word2Vec to predict the potential target ethnic group for hatred. In our experiments, we use Amharic language in Ethiopia as an example. Since there was no publicly available dataset for Amharic texts, we crawled Facebook pages to prepare the corpus. Since data annotation could be biased by culture, we recruit annotators from different cultural backgrounds and achieved better inter-annotator agreement. In our experimental results, feature extraction using word embedding techniques such as Word2Vec performs better in both classical and deep learning-based classification algorithms for hate speech detection, among which GRU achieves the best result. Our proposed approach can successfully identify the Tigre ethnic group as the highly vulnerable community in terms of hatred compared with Amhara and Oromo. As a result, hatred vulnerable group identification is vital to protect them by applying automatic hate speech detection model to remove contents that aggravate psychological harm and physical conflicts. This can also encourage the way towards the development of policies, strategies, and tools to empower and protect vulnerable communities.     

基于技术创新的企业社会责任对绩效影响研究

以公共事件为切入点,从绿色创新角度出发,将从基于技术创新的企业社会责任对企业财务绩效影响这条意识的路径来研究,而不是基于社会责任的创新对企业财务绩效的影响。从大量文献研究发现,创新的绿色也就是基于技术创新的社会责任,我们将剖析基于技术创新尤其是产品和工艺创新的企业社会责任对于企业社会绩效和财务绩效的影响机制和媒体曝光度在这种影响机制中所起到的调节作用。研究认为,基于技术创新的企业社会责任会积极影响企业社会绩效,社会绩效会积极影响企业财务绩效,而媒体曝光度则会正向调节基于技术创新的企业社会责任对社会绩效影响机制。     

国外社交媒体影响力研究述评——进展与启示

大数据环境下信息与通讯技术的发展, 使越来越多的用户进入了社交媒介建构的虚拟网络空间之中, 社交媒体的影响力也在不断增强。本文从信息内容和网络结构两个层面综述了国外计算机科学等相关领域的社交媒体研究, 指出了基于内容的主题提取, 信息传播的流行度分析, 社交媒体中的网络结构分析以及社区发掘等重要的研究领域;具体阐释了一部分具有基础性或典型性的模型、算法、以及相应的研究成果比较, 同时也提出了未来的研究领域和研究方法的可能发展方向。最后, 本文讨论了国外社交媒体影响力研究对基于国内语境之研究的启示。     

Co-citation and cluster analyses of extant literature on social networks

Over one billion people are currently using social media such as social websites (Facebook Newsroom, 2015); consequently, numerous academic scholars have developed interest in studying the use of social media and social networks. However, few studies have focused on examining the core factors of social networks. In this study, we collected studies on social-network-related topics that were published between January 1996 and December 2014, assembling a total of 2565 articles and 81,316 citations. Co-citation analysis and cluster analysis were applied to verify seven main factors regarding social networks: (a) the measure of complex social networks; (b) community structure; (c) strong and weak ties; (d) the evolution of social networks; (e) network structure and relationship; (f) value concept and measurement strategies; and (g) social capital. Finally, the results of this study were further discussed to elucidate the core topics relevant to social networks.     

Online news comments: Social network and emergent public

Abstract

The research on online news comments has been dominated by a normative approach and has centered on media engagement. Normativity and media dominance have also featured big in the theoretical discussions on the public sphere. This article presents a case study of online news comments, combining a novel methodological testing of social network hypotheses to examine user–user interactions in online comments with a conceptual discussion of the potential connections between social network research and theories of the public. The social network analysis in this study indicated that users (online commentators) do not constitute highly dense networks, although their relations can be studied as social networks. However, this analysis can only explore limited features of this online phenomenon and requires complementary methods. From a conceptual perspective, this article confirms the role of shared issue for a potential public and also emphasizes the importance of context, actors, and meanings for understanding the public.     

Focused Activities and the Development of Social Capital in a Distributed Learning “Community”

This study examined the development of individual social capital in a distributed learning community. Feld's theory of focused choice predicts that the formation of network ties is constrained by contextual factors that function as foci of activities. In our research, we examined how group assignment and location could function as such foci to influence the development of individual social capital in a distributed learning community. Given that networks with different content flows may possess different properties, we examined two different types of networks—task-related instrumental networks and non-task-related expressive networks. A longitudinal research design was used to evaluate the evolution of networks over time. Hypotheses were tested using a sample of 32 students enrolled in a distributed learning class. The results show strong support for Feld's theory. While serving as foci of activities to organize social interactions, both group assignment and geographic separation can also function to fragment a learning community.     

Examination of how social aspects moderate the relationship between task characteristics and usage of social communication technologies (SCTs) in organizations

Because of the increasing significance of social communication technologies within an organization, they have become a new form of information processing, resulting in business process transitions and increased benefits. By applying media richness theory and social theories, this study investigated how social communication technologies (SCTs) can be used by an employee to fit his/her task characteristics. Additionally, it also examined how the employee's social relationships moderated media usage in the current job environment and how this usage influenced the task performance. Five media were selected in this study (telephone, video conferencing, email, instant messaging, and blog). Using a hierarchical regression approach, we found that task characteristics were related to media usage, whereas social factors (social influence and social affinity) moderated the degree of the relationships. A few particular media and technologies seemed to perform well, however these are influenced by the social aspects. Moreover, the usage of social technologies results in positive task performance. The performance of a few specific technologies demonstrated binding effects (email performance was associated with instant messenger performance). In summary, we found that the usage of SCTs is instrumentally determined by the interaction between the task and social relationships.     

微博社区网民情绪引导与舆情控制的SIR演化博弈分析

【目的/意义】通过研究微博社区网民的情感交互与舆情观点,有助于在复杂的网络中掌握网民情绪演化从而良性引导网络舆情态势。【方法/过程】基于传播动力学、社会安全阀等理论,结合微博社区中的实际案例,定义事件利益主体并抽象出事件演化的全生命周期,同时,构建SIR演化博弈模型刻画网民情绪的动态演化规律及主体决策博弈演化过程,并通过仿真模拟分析得到系统演化至稳定状态的均衡条件。【结果/结论】结果表明:微博社区中意见领袖与官方媒体感知收益与风险的敏感度对决策行为产生显著影响;官方媒体及时设置有效议程构建安全阀能够防止网民情绪恶化;意见领袖与官方媒体的协同引导能够最大效度地帮助政府管控网络舆情。     

从“专家导向”到“集体磋商”——论维基百科时代科学知识的社会建构

人们一直秉承这样一个传统：科学知识由专家创造,并且经由专家的把关之后传递给大众。维基百科的出现,使得公众得以规模化地进入科学知识的生产领域,由此开始刷新以往专家驱动的知识生产史。本文从社会建构主义的视角对传统科学知识传播的认知进行反思,指出在颠覆专家授予知识的传统上,媒介变革所推动的知识民主意识和世俗化的科学形象均起到了重要作用,且维基百科的社交媒体属性对知识社会建构提供了保障,使异质共同体参与科学知识生产得以可能。同时,也有助于科学反思自身,调和科学与公众在知识传播中的矛盾。     

Knowledge mobilisation in communities through socio-technical systems

Enterprises in both the public and private sector undertake knowledge management (KM) initiatives through which they hope to engender a new, more adaptive and flexible culture of learning and innovation in their organisations. Creative activities involving social learning and innovation are, however, more common in less formal entities such as communities of practice at work and community service organisations in civil society. This paper presents the results and implications of collaborative research into the understanding, development and evaluation of socio-technical systems (STS) designed to mobilise collective knowledge in diverse community settings. The research concerns information and communication technologies (ICT)-mediated activities of communities in the broader civil society and also those in formal organisations. The paper describes and critically evaluates a set of three STS that have the potential to support the collective knowledge of innovative groups, teams and networks, which can all be considered forms of community. The findings could be of strategic value to business, government and community service organisations initiating KM programmes aimed at using collective learning to support innovation.     

Social media crowdsourcing for rapid damage assessment following a sudden-onset natural hazard event

Rapid appraisal of damages related to hazard events is of importance to first responders, government agencies, insurance industries, and other private and public organizations. While satellite monitoring, ground-based sensor systems, inspections and other technologies provide data to inform post-disaster response, crowdsourcing through social media is an additional and novel data source. In this study, the use of social media data, principally Twitter postings, is investigated to make approximate but rapid early assessments of damages following a disaster. The goal is to explore the potential utility of using social media data for rapid damage assessment after sudden-onset hazard events and to identify insights related to potential challenges. This study defines a text-based damage assessment scale for earthquake damages, and then develops a text classification model for rapid damage assessment. Although the accuracy remains a challenge compared to ground-based instrumental readings and inspections, the proposed damage assessment model features rapidity with large amounts of data at spatial densities that exceed those of conventional sensor networks. The 2019 Ridgecrest, California earthquake sequence is investigated as a case study.