Understanding Online Communities' Social Capital and Trust Mechanism

Introduction

The Massa’s article (2007) is the most disrupting reading this week. Not because the reading is too difficult to understand, but because the reading proposed so many interesting websites which always make me turn away from the paper. I turned away from the paper for taking a look at the website for fulfilling my curiosity before I continue to read. For me, slasdot.org,kuro5hin.org, Epinions.com, dooyoo.com, and hospitalityclub.org were some of the website that I just discovered from the reading. It took me 2 days to finish on reading this article before I can move on to others. While this article did not give me a clue about what means by social capitals/trust mechanisms. The vision of this concept started arising after reading about bridging and bonding from Putnam as well as weak-tie and strong-tie from Granovetter (Williams, 2006). What I can understand is, trust mechanism is also depending on social roles, social structures, and online communities ecology (Gleave, Welser, Lento, & Smith, 2008; Eryilmaz, Cochran, & Kasemvilas, 2009; Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007). The trust mechanism/social capital from offline community can influence the way people have relationship online. Therefore, Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe (2007) add one new type of social capital to the category made by Putnam and Granovetter. They called this social capital as "maintained social capital". With the maintained social capital, I can see clearly how people developing social network to obtained social capital which Allen, Colombo, & Whitaker (2009) called “incentivize cooperation”.

Topic of this week post is social capital/trust mechanism. In sequence, I will describe the two online communities (OCs) which I joined, compare the mechanism of their social capital, suggest some improvement for the sites, and conclude my post with questions proposed for my final project.

Comparing iFanboy with wikiHow

The first OC that I joined is a site for talking and discussion comic books, namely iFanboy.com. This site was developed in 2000 and targeted to people who like to read and share their opinion about comic books they read. In the section “About Us” on iFanboy website, there are general explanation about the site and description about site administrators. When joining to iFanboy, a user has to register for an account, provide login ID (name and password), create user’s name, provide Twitter name (optional), upload profile picture, and introduce self in a short paragraph. The second OC is wikiHow.com. The format of wikiHow is somewhat like Wikipedia. The main purpose of this site is a space for sharing collaborative work on “how-to manual”. wikiHow linked people from around the world and has 56 administrators who spread all over the world. Similar like iFanboy, at the section “About wikiHow”, information about this site can be found. When joining to wikiHow, a user also has to follow the same steps like in register for iFanboy. The difference of these sites is wikiHow asked for location and user’s blog/website instead of Twitter link.

Gleve, Welser, Lento, & Smith (2009) emphasized the important of social roles for improving social capital of OCs like Usenet and Wikipedia. Almost similar, Eryilmaz, Cochran & Kasemvilas (2009) highlighted the important of roles on establishing social trust on an emergence situation. Regarding to these two articles, I understand why it is important for implementing a highly moderating system through participation on either iFanboy or wikiHow. Like mentioned by Massa (2007), “worthiness” and “interestingness” are valuable social capital which come together with “the mass amateurisation” on providing information in the digital era. Therefore, having skilled and trained people to moderating discussion posting on the site will lower the risk of vandalism attack (Gleve, Welser, Lento, & Smith, 2009). The iFanboy has 8 administrator who also active contributors. These administrators are posting regularly to the site, commenting and responding to other participants post, and making sure that postings from participants are not overlap one another. The wikiHow has 56 administrators who spread all over the world. The posting on this site is not only in English, but also in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, Arabic, Italy, and Japanese. Administrators are representative of users in every region. They elected every year based on their reputation and contribution to wikiHow. What really impressed me from the site is a guidance email from region administrator. A new registered user will have an email from region administrator which contains links to manual/tutorial. The function of this manual is to make sure that the new member can participate in the right pattern like the site wants him to be. Because I register with Honolulu, Hawaii as my location, an administrator from Hawaii send an email to my inbox on the site, and guide about how I can participate on the site.

When people decide to participate in the OC, there are options for using the same identity like in the offline, or making a new identity. There is also possible for having more than a single identity on the OCs. Identity becomes a matter and also social capital for OCs (Williams, 2006; Massa, 2007; Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007). Most of OCs allows users to create their own persona online. Using an avatar on profile picture and created a pseudo-name are something usual and accepted in the OC. On the one hand, using pseudo persona online probably could protect the real-life persona from stalking and identity theft. However, pseudo persona is increasing the potentiality of “the dark side of online life” (Williams, 2006). iFanboy and wikiHow users can register using a pseudo persona (posted an avatar as picture profile and used a pseudo-name). This is particularly important for iFanboy users who are comic books lovers. The site gives them open opportunity to express their fantasy and impression to their favorite comic book characters. The large numbers of users are using a screenshot from comic book or a comic book character as their profile pictures. In contrast, on the wikiHow, users are more likely to use human picture as a profile picture, either a self-picture or picture of somebody else. In the same pattern, users used pseudo-names are large in numbers compare to users who use their real-name.

The next social capital that I want to discuss is linked and shared to social networking sites (SNS). In the article from Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe (2007), Massa (2007), William (2006), Allen, Colombo, & Whitaker (2009), we read how the SNS has created a social capital/trust mechanism that can potentially have a function to maintain social capital. Currently, the number of Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace users are kept improving. To increase popularity and easier for users to get update from the site, users recommended linking and sharing the post on this site to SNS. On the iFanboy, users can share their review, audio podcasts, and video podcasts through the whole bounce of SNS. Those SNS are Twitter, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg, MySpace, Stumbleupon, Technorati, and Google Buzz. Besides that, some administrators also link the post to their own blogs, websites, and other websites. Goodreads and Virb are some of websites which are new for me . Goodreads is an online book club/discussing forum. Virb is a website developing social software. One thing on iFanboy which caught my attention is it linked by some users to the site that not written in English. One that I found is a link to a site written in Thai language. This is an indicator that this site has been participated by international users. On the wikiHow, users can share posting with SNS like Facebook, Twitter, iGoogle, RSS Feeds, Google Buz, My Yahoo!, Email your friends, and an Apple Apps for iPhone. The wikiHow is the combination between wiki and blog. It used wiki format on posting information, and it used WordPress as a blog post platform. In addition, users encourage linking their post with their personal blog post and their SNS.

There are some social capitals that cannot be comparing side by side between these two OCs. I will use this paragraph to mention some of these social capitals. First, for iFanboy posts there are pulled, rating, and percentage pick of the week. Postings on the discussion forum appeared with talk bubbles. Member of the community can choose to pay for membership, give a donation, or just become a free member. The site has weekly TV shows and recordings of TV show are going viral on YouTube. Second, for wikiHow post there are rising start and tab for featured the post. The wikiHow users can also post suggestion about what they want other participants to write. As a writer, you can get a topic or idea to write from these suggestions. When you start to post, you will ask to verify, are your post are new contents which not overlapping former posts. In the site home page, when you log in, you can see the recent change keep dynamically moving updated. To focus on a post, you can click on the pause button on the dynamically moving posts of recent change.

Recommendation for improvement

In choosing the site, I not just randomly pick up one. I decided to choose sites that I will be continued on using and participating. Moreover, my basic knowledge about joining and searching for OCs influenced me on choosing these two sites. I used a blog entitle “50 Social Sites That Every Business Need to Presence On” to start searching on these two sites. I must admit that I have social capital motives on joining these sites. For iFanboy as an OC which sharing information on comic books, I would like to see the improvement in tree aspects. First, the site could have sections for sharing, lending, or donating comic books. I get this idea from Williams (2006) on “providing emotional support, access to scarce, mobilize solidarity, and givingness”. Second, instead of only having a link to Amazon, the site can also raise money by cooperating with stores which sell comic character merchandises. This suggestion operationalized the concept of social marketing of e-marketplaces mentioned on Massa (2007). Third, having an annual meeting, either online or face-to-face, will strengthen the feeling of belong to the community. This idea comes from Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe (2007) which underlined a positive relationship between OC used and “maintenance and creation of social capital”. For wikiHow, I want to see the improvement on how the site giving an incentive to cooperation (Allen, Colombo, Whitaker, 2009). The site already did this by having member to elect administrators who will represent their region. Nominating of the year for its users and giving them an award for their exceptional participation could be used as others incentive to cooperation.

Conclusion and tentative idea for final project

Doing the project for this class always gives me new ideas. I feel that every week posting can be turn into reflection papers and small research papers, because all the posting are based on a mini research project and analytical thinking. To conclude this week posting, I would like to mention ideas for my final project which also influence by this week readings about social capital/trust mechanism and relate with the emerging of the idea on web 3.0. Particularly, in the project, I want to compare between Mendeley and WizFolio. Both Mendeley and WizFolio are well known as a free, web-based tool for organizing research citations. Looking beyond these tools site, they also have members and formed a community. My tentative research questions are: 1) How Mendeley and WizFolio contributed on creating scholarly collaborative OCs for doing research? 2) What are the social capitals/trust mechanisms of these sites? Essentially, I will collect conversation through these sites discussions forum, analyzing contents on these sites blogs, and observe activities of the members on these sites. I would be open and happy to get feedbacks from you folks in this class about the suitable method for researching these sites.

References

Allen, S.M., Colombo, G., &Whitaker, R.M. (2009). Forming social networks of trust to incentivize cooperation. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI.

Ellison, N.B., Steinfield, C., and Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook "friends:" Social capital and college students' use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4). Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html

Eryilmaz, E., Cochran, M., & Kasemvilas, S. (2009). Establishing trust management in an open source collaborative information repository: An emergency response information system case study. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa.

Gleave, E., Welser,H.T., Lento, T.M., & Smith, M.A. (2009). A conceptual and operational definition of social role in online community. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI.

Massa, P. (2006). A survey of trust use and modeling in current real sSystems. Trust in e-services: technologies, practices and challenges. Retrieved from http://www.gnuband.org

Williams, D. (2006). On and off the 'Net: Scales for social capital in an online era. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 11. Retrieved from Wiley online library.

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Reflection on Joined Online Communities

"In a relationship and it's complicated," most of you must be familiar with this post. You will be in this situation if you joined online community (OC) without well known how to maintain your participation on it. You feel engage with the communication, friendship, sharing-exchanging information, and convenient on purchasing products. By the same time, you experience receiving tons of waste email, overwhelming with the keep changing on navigation of the site features, and your information were shared to public without having a consent from you. The entire articles for this week, with an explicit or implicit tone, pointed the double blade of OC. LaRose, Eastin, & Gregg (2001) used the term "paradox". Galston (2000) questioned "Does the internet [OC] strengthen community?". Tedjamulia, Dean, Olsen, Albercht (2005) mentioned about valuable and invaluable contribution of OC's participants. Weeks (2009) and Albrechtslund (2008) mentioned about there are positive and negative effects of OC to personal and social system. Furthermore, a classic article from Licker and Taylor (1968) had made an excellent prediction about the paradox of OC.

I will start the discussion about paradox of OC by reflecting to my personal experiences. I will then end up the post with summary about the similarity and nonparallel pieces from the referred articles.

My Experience with Online Community

A not user-friendly navigational, informational, and transactional aspect on the OC (Java, Finin, Song, & Tseng, 2007) will be burning head, not only for novice users but also for veteran users. How do not your head get burn because normally you want to become more productive by joined the community, but you are wasting too much time to resolve the problem on these technical aspects (LaRose, Eastin, Gregg, 2001). However, for veteran users with more advanced computer skills and high self-efficacy, overcome the difficulty on technical problem on the Internet will be easier compare to the beginners who have the lower self-efficacy (LaRose et al, 2001). A good example for this is setting up account and privacy on Facebook (FB), as well as keeps up date with the innovation on this site. In my pilot project on looking at the adolescent awareness on security and etiquette of FB (The, H.Y., Kong, K., Masaki, E., Ackerman, L., Ayala, P., & Borengasser, C. (2010), I found that the majority of adolescents did not know how to use the setting of account and privacy on FB. As a reflection, if you are a FB user, did you notice that something has change in FB recently? Do you follow the innovation update of FB through its blog or other technology's blogs, or from news? Have you notice that now FB users have their personal email address tight with FB messages that named with user's_name@facebook.com? Do you also have disabled the sharing of your personal information by FB through the apps that you joined on FB?

Now I will move to the consequence of getting unwanted email because of you joined a OC. Unwanted email or I prefer to called it wasted email has caused some people become stressful (Gregg, 2001; Galtson, 2000; La Rose et al, 2001). Usually, when you joined an OC and registered to their site, you will automatically subscribe to the OC site mailing list. You must get to know this earlier and realized about this. While a little bit tricky, you can set up your OC site account for only sending you the email that you are willing to read. Every site has the unique way on doing this setting. It will be useful to look at their online manual, help section, or get assistance from their customer services for performing the setting. Another important strategy is maintaining your email account management. All email services, currently, has email management system. You are allowed to create a folder for your incoming email. You are allowed to make a rule to short the incoming email to exact folder. You are allowed to block and identify incoming email as spam. Moreover, you are allowed to receive email forwarded from another email account that you have. Performing email management system will help you safe your time on shorting the email that has a priority to be responded.

The third important piece from the reading is about cyberspace. According to Albrechtslund (2008), the cyberspace is related with the physical space. This is contradicted with Licklider and Taylor (1968) that stated for OC the concept or proximity become less important. In some certain, Licklider and Taylor correct. With the improvement of computer and Internet technology, OC can help on mediated the relationship across the border of the country and region. There is no boundary for people to meet and interact online 24/7. I experience with what Licklider and Taylor predicted about 50 years ago when I utilized Elluminate, Skype, Google apps, WiZiQ, and Social Networking Website. Other amazing experiences are watch my local TV program live through mivo.tv and read my hometown newspaper, Pontianak post on their site. I also keep in touch with colleagues, in my field of study, through join professional education OC, such as aace.org, 12manage.com, aect.org, asanet.org, and ascd.org. With a friend in Indonesia, I administrated freewriting.ning.com as our personal blog. However, on the other hand, I also agree with Albrechtslund (2008). Through conferences OC, I can have communication online and also meet in person with people while we have our annual meeting. Through Second Life (SL) and IMVU, I can send my avatar to attend a meeting, a class, or a presentation. Furthermore, I want to show you one excellent online virtual conference that held by campus technology 2010. In this conference, the whole representation of physical space was represented in a good setting for the campus technology virtual conference sim.

Microblogging such as Twitter is also a unique OC. I am not an active Tweeter. Regarding to Tedjamulia et al (2005), my participation on Twitter can be labeled as a lucker. As mentioned by Java et al (2007), Twitter has been used particularly for daily chat, conversations, sharing information, and reporting news. I used Twitter in order to gain information and update from several technology blogs. Several names of those blogs are mashable, education week, the young and the digital, and Google blogs. The updates from these blogs are running quickly, and I could not read every single update of them. I feel the benefit of joining this running information, particularly for mining new resources and getting ideas for writing my research paper.

There are so many things to tell about my relationship with the OC. I still want to continue on telling a story about getting discount from online book store, benefit of free book for book club, and a free magazine send to me every month by an OC that I joined. It is also interesting for discussing apps on FB or Google by reflecting to the paper from Bernstein, Michael, Tan, Smith, Czerwinski, & Horvitz (2010) that focused on Collabio, a tagging game. More specific, it will be awesome to discuss IMVU and SL by making the connection with the concept of online identity and affective emotional such as mentioned by Bigge (2006). If I keep continuing those things, this blog will be too long for a session post. I will keep that for the next posting.

The similarities and differences from the referred articles

The common things that appear on all these referred paper are:

1. Analyzing characteristics of OC in general or in specific (Twitter, Collabio, and Internet Paradox).
2. Starting the discussion with the usability and functionality of OC and then narrow down to identify the impact of OC to its members and the society.
3. Authors try to be neutral by provided in balance the discussion and evidence for positive and negative impact of OC to its members.
4. The main purpose for doing the study is the author want to contribute on determine how the members of OC develop and benefit from join the community.

The uniqueness of each paper are:

1. Using a different concepts or terms for starting the discussion about OC. For example, Java et al (2007) specified on understanding the usability of OC and Tedjamulia et al (2005) focused on motivating contribution of participants on OC.
2. Convincing audiences by implementing different methods. For example, Biggie (2006), Albrechtslund (2008), and Galston (2000) wrote opinion papers; while Java et al (2007)and LaRose et al (2001) are using statistical data.
3. Variables that become focus are specifically different and in my opinion will be adding exclusive contribution for developing the hypothetical and theoretical framework on analyzing OC.

References

Albrechtslund, A(2008). Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance. First Monday 13(3). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2142/1949

Bernstein, Michael, Tan, D., Smith, G., Czerwinski, M., & Horvitz, E. (2010). Personalization via Friendsourcing. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 17(2), Article 6.

Bigge, Ryan (2006). The Cost of (Anti-) Social Networks: Identity, Agency and Neo-Luddites" First Monday 11(12). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1421/1339

Galston, W. A. (2000). Does the Internet Strengthen Community? National Civic Review 89(3), 193-202.

LaRose, R., Eastin, M.S., & Gregg J. (2001). Reformulating the Internet Paradox: Social Cognitive Explanations of Internet Use and Depression. Journal of Online Behavior 1(2). http://www.behavior.net/JOB/v1n2/paradox.html

Licklider, J.C.R., and Taylor, R. (1968). The computer as a communication device. http://www.ais.org/~jrh/licklider/computer-as-communications-device.html

The, H.Y., Kong, K., Masaki, E., Ackerman, L., Ayala, P., & Borengasser, C. (2010). Adolescent awareness of security and etiquette on Facebook. 33^rd AECT 2010 Annual Conference Proceeding Volume 1. http://www.aect.org/publications/proceedings/2010.asp?id=1

Weeks, L. (2009). Social Responsibility and the Web: A Drama Unfolds. 8 January 2009. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99094257

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