Browsing by Subject "Online communities"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

A multi-modal approach to understanding Asian American political participation
(2023-04-20) Lawrence, Cornelia Elizabeth; Shaw, Daron R., 1966-; Philpot, Tasha; Jessee, Stephen; Wong, Janelle
This project aims to enhance our understanding of political participation within the United States by more carefully and systematically examining political participation within the Asian American community. Previously, prominent theories of political participation have been created with Anglo-Americans in mind, resulting in incomplete or unsatisfactory applications to racial and ethnic minority groups. By updating our understanding of what participation looks like and by formulating a racially aware theory, I seek to improve upon these previous explanations of the participatory habits of voters. I first expand upon the Resource model offered by Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995), both by updating the conceptualization of the dependent variable, political participation, to reflect recent technological advances, and including key variables I believe that are missing from the original. My first empirical chapter compares the original Resource model to the updated model, I name the Unified Resource Model, via an Asian American survey sample. There I find strong support for my suggested changes, before speaking with members of the Asian American community via focus groups in my second empirical chapter. Finally, in my third empirical chapter, I retest the Unified Resource Model in a hybrid quantitative-qualitative online community. Throughout this study, generational status and nativity status are significant predictors of the numbers of acts one is likely to participate in politically, and while organizational involvement behaved similarly in 2016, qualitative research suggests that this may no longer be true. All three empirical chapters support the expanded conceptualization of political participation to include social media usage.
Encouraging expert participation in online communities
(2011-08) DeAngelis, David; Barber, K. Suzanne; Perry, Dewayne E.; Arapostathis, Aristotle; Julien, Christine; Francisco-Revilla, Luis
In concept, online communities allow people to access the wide range of knowledge and abilities of a heterogeneous group of users. In reality, current implementations of various online communities suffer from a lack of participation by the most qualified users. The participation of qualified users, or experts, is crucial to the social welfare and widespread adoption of such systems. This research proposes techniques for identifying the most valuable contributors to several classes of online communities, including question and answer (QA) forums and other content-oriented social networks. Once these target users are identified, content recommendation and novel quantitative incentives can be used to encourage their participation. This research represents an in-depth investigation into QA systems, while the major findings are widely applicable to online communities in general. An algorithm for recommending content in a QA forum is introduced which can route questions to the most appropriate responders. This increases the efficiency of the system and reduces the time investment of an expert responder by eliminating the need to search for potential questions to answer. This recommender is analyzed using real data captured from Yahoo! Answers. Additionally, an incentive mechanism for QA systems based on a novel class of incentives is developed. This mechanism relies on systemic rewards, or rewards that have tangible value within the framework of the online community. This research shows that human users have a strong preference for reciprocal systemic rewards over traditional rewards, and a simulation of a QA system based on an incentive that utilizes these reciprocal rewards outperforms a leading incentive mechanism according to expert participation. An architecture is developed for a QA system built upon content recommendation and this novel incentive mechanism. This research shows that it is possible to identify the most valuable contributors to an online community and motivate their participation through a novel incentive mechanism based on meaningful rewards.
"I am not your friend... or am I?" : how Twitch community relationships and interactions affect belongingness
(2022-05-10) Schoos, Julia; Eastin, Matthew S.
Live-streaming platforms have enjoyed a significant rise in popularity in recent years, particularly after the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. Twitch, the leading video game livestreaming platform, allows users to form relationships with other chatters through its live content and simultaneous chat, as well as experience parasocial interactions and parasocial relationships with livestreamers. In an online survey, the current study explored what factors drive belongingness for Twitch users (N = 154) in live-streaming communities. Findings show that connectedness, community identity, behavioral involvement, and parasocial relationships are significant predictors of community belongingness. Of these, parasocial relationships and behavioral involvement are the most significant drivers of community belongingness, indicating that audiences seek out and participate in live-streaming communities to satisfy social needs. Parasocial interactions themselves, although necessary to forming parasocial relationships, do not predict belongingness. Finally, the study points to further research about the nature of parasocial relationships on Twitch, the transformation of parasocial interaction to parasocial relationship, as well as how these relationships drive consumer behavior like donations
T0WARD CY83RGN0S1S
(2016-05) Stuckey, Rachel Meredith; Williams, Jeff, M.F.A.; Henderson, Linda
Can we experience enchantment with cyberspace as we can with outer space? Can late-night web browsing provide unexpected encounters equivalent to those had in the space between radio frequencies? These questions drive my art and research. What I am pursuing is cybergnosis, or intuitive experiences of mysterious spiritual realities on the cyberplane. My goal is to question traditionally held divisions between technology and the human, and to explore marginal views of technologies. My research involves embedding myself in outlier online communities, some composed of people who feel afflicted by computers, and others who are collaborating with them in unusually empowered ways, be they spiritual, psychological, political or otherwise. I use video based performance, net-based projects, and multimedia installations to evoke empathetic yet critical renderings of these experiences. In this report, I write about five of my artworks: Estrin Tide is Fresh, Everyone Else is Tired (2016), Hello Nebula? It’s me, Margaret. (2015), Innernet Addict (2015), T0WARD CY83RGN0S1S(2015), and Welcome to my Homepage! (2014).