The Online Student: Lurking, Chatting, Flaming and Joking

This paper looks at the use of online conference interaction as a part of a web-based distance-learning course. There has been much debate surrounding the potential of educational technology, particularly online conference interaction, to support teaching and learning yet little attention has been paid to student experiences and understandings of the online learning environment. Drawing on data from auto-ethnographic fieldwork the paper identifies 5 categories of participation in asynchronous online conferences: lurker participation, member participation, expert/experienced participation, flamer participation and joker participation. Through an exploration of these forms of participation the paper attempts to understand and illustrate the complexities and contradictions of situating conference interaction alongside the demands of study. The analysis highlights the role of online conferencing as a space for \'interaction work\' distinct and separated from existing repertoires of formal study. The paper concludes by suggesting that pedagogically successful use of conferences as part of distance learning needs to understand the challenges and demands of remediating existing practices of interaction and study.Distance Learning, Auto-Ethnography, Online Conferencing

An ethnography of a neighbourhood café: informality, table arrangements and background noise

Café society is something that many of us as customers and/or social theorists take for granted. Cafés are places where we are not simply served hot beverages but are also in some way partaking of a specific form of public life. It is this latter aspect that has attracted the attention of social theorists, especially Jürgen Habermas, and leads them to locate the café as a key place in the development of modernity. Our approach to cafés is to ‘turn the tables’ on theories of the public sphere and return to just what the life of a particular café consists of, and in so doing re-specify a selection of topics related to public spaces. The particular topics we deal with in a ‘worldly manner’ are the socio-material organisation of space, informality and rule following. In as much as we are able we have drawn on an ethnomethodological way of doing and analysing our ethnographic studies

Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities

User contributions in the form of posts, comments, and votes are essential to the success of online communities. However, allowing user participation also invites undesirable behavior such as trolling. In this paper, we characterize antisocial behavior in three large online discussion communities by analyzing users who were banned from these communities. We find that such users tend to concentrate their efforts in a small number of threads, are more likely to post irrelevantly, and are more successful at garnering responses from other users. Studying the evolution of these users from the moment they join a community up to when they get banned, we find that not only do they write worse than other users over time, but they also become increasingly less tolerated by the community. Further, we discover that antisocial behavior is exacerbated when community feedback is overly harsh. Our analysis also reveals distinct groups of users with different levels of antisocial behavior that can change over time. We use these insights to identify antisocial users early on, a task of high practical importance to community maintainers.Comment: ICWSM 201

Democracy and the internet: access, engagement and deliberation

The internet has the capacity to facilitate the creation of new forms of civic engagement, but the realisation of these opportunities requires institutional and cultural reinforcement. The democratic character of e-citizenship and the equal distribution of online resources to the public require the fulfilment of four conditions: access, engagement (incorporating education, motivation and trust), meaningful deliberation and a link between civic input and public policy output. Furthermore, the gap between the main features of cyberspace and the inherent prerequisites of democracy, such as a finite space and a set of rules, create tensions that need to be negotiated politically. Although the empirical evidence available includes some encouraging signs regarding the future use of the internet for civic engagement, the existing limitations and obstacles mean that the new media will complement, rather than replace, the old media as a democratic public sphere

1337 W4YZ of {dollar}p34King: toward a unifying pragmatic theory of virtual speech community building

Building a speech community requires building a shared history of communicative interaction. Within a virtual medium, speech community members employ accommodations for the lack of shared physical space that face-to-face interactions provide. These accommodations, amassing through extended discourse, bring to light the communicative strategies that virtual interlocutors employ in order to build community. Drawing from a corpus of unscripted, naturally occurring discourse of a particular virtual speech community, I engage three frames of linguistic analysis in order to recognize the communicative strategies that constitute speech community building. Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995) accounts for the individual cognitive work involved in asserting membership in a speech community. (Im)politeness Theory (Culpeper 1996) accounts for the negotiation of membership in a speech community via impolite interactions. Stance Theory (Du Bois 2007) accounts for the intersubjectivity of said negotiation, where members situate themselves within the community through their discourse. Each of the three models serve to highlight particular aspects of speech community building but fall short of accounting for the intricate endeavors of entering, maintaining membership in, and negotiating place in a speech community that exists with other speech communities within a larger culture. I propose the ethnopragmatic method, or EPM, which emphasizes the importance of each level of the discourse world (the EP world) – the individual, interlocutors, speech communities, and the larger culture. Each level of the EP world contains histories of interaction, which ultimately inform discourse meaning. While the EPM is too cumbersome for utility as a discourse analytic model, it nonetheless serves to showcase the multi-faceted and interdependent phenomena involved in communicative interaction

Literature Review: Conflict Resolution in Post-Secondary Online Education

This article seeks to provide a review of research literature published between 2008 and 2014 that discusses conflicts arising within the online education process, and their resolution within the online context. The goal of this article is to establish a current overview of related literature that can become the foundation of future studies in this field. An online search produced 48 references that were considered relevant to the purpose of this review. After a brief introduction of the topic, main definitions are provided. A section outlining the method for the development of the review follows including discussions of delimitations, the search, and reference descriptions. More background information is provided through a brief history of online education in the U.S. and an overview of the theories used in current studies in the field. The main body of the article describes common themes and emphases of online education conflict resolution that resulted from the literature analysis. After the uniqueness of online education conflict is established, strategies of virtual conflict resolution are described. Other common themes include foci on the instructor, the learner, and dynamics social interaction. The article closes with a categorized summary of suggested future research found in the literature

Everything You Never Wanted to Know about Trolls:An Interdisplinary Exploration of the Who's, What's, and Why's of Trolling in Online Games

Summary Within the world of online gaming, trolling has become a regular menace. While gamers try to connect and socialize with one another, or even simply play the game, there are other gamers – trolls – on the prowl for an entirely different kind of good time, one in which they are enjoying themselves at the expense of everyone else (Chapters 2 and 3). Although trolling is common, and mass-media has latched onto it as a hot topic, it is only recently that the academic community has begun to take a serious look at how trolling occurs in and affects the gaming community at large. However, a lot of this literature is either descriptive in nature (see Thacker & Griffiths, 2012), or jumps ahead to prevention (see Cheng et al., 2017) without taking a deeper look at more than a single underlying motivation at a time. In short, there is a complex and prolific phenomenon happening online, but the research on it is only emerging. This dissertation’s goal is to take a deeper look at trolling as a phenomenon, beyond what has been done so far. More specifically, I aim to figure out a) what trolling is, b) why people do it, and c) who helps and who hinders trolling in online games. To do this, I took four different perspectives: the troll’s (Chapter 2), the researcher’s (Chapter 3), the victim’s (Chapter 4), and the bystander’s (Chapter 5). The purpose of Chapter 2 is to give the troll’s perspective on trolling, something that researchers had yet to do at the time. To do this, I interviewed 22 people who said that they had a history of trolling in online games. More specifically, I asked them about times they witnessed, were victims of, or perpetrated trolling, as well as what they thought about how the gaming community dealt with and felt about trolls and trolling. My goal with these interviews was threefold: I wanted to figure out a) what trolls consider trolling, b) what motivates them to do it, and c) the role of everyone else in game when it comes to encouraging or discouraging more trolling. What I found was that although trolling was almost universally considered a negative part of online gaming culture, and all the trolls in our group of participants started as victims of trolls before becoming trolls themselves, the online community neither encourages nor discourages it, making it an asocial activity. The next chapter allowed me to look at an archive of trolling incidents to find patterns in the way that different people involved in real-life trolling incidents communicate with one another. This public online archive consisted of 10,000 reported incidents of trolling in the popular online game League of Legends, and it included game data like player statistics, as well as everything all the players involved said during the game. Once the data was properly cleaned and prepared, myself and my co-author, Dr. Rianne Conijn, analysed the chat logs in two different ways: structural topic modelling (STM), and a traditional dictionary-based content analysis. In this way, we were able to see what characterized all the different actors – the troll, their victim(s), and the bystanders – and what was similar when it came to their messages. All this information was then compared to what existed already in literature used to describe trolls and trolling and complement what I had learned about trolls from Chapter 2. The key finding was that trolls and their teammates actually share a lot of the negative speech patterns (e.g., profanity, negative emotional content) normally associated with only trolls. Practically, this means that we have to be extremely careful as researchers when labelling trolls for the purpose of study, as we could very easily be falsely labelling victims. After speaking to trolls and looking at trolling interactions broadly, Chapter 4 focuses intently on the victim and their personal experience in a trolling simulation, taking into account their cultural background and values. It is also the first study to directly compare and contrast two different types of trolling: verbal (flaming) and behavioural (ostracism). They are both really common online occurrences, so the participants could easily relate, but they are extremely different in how they are executed, with flaming being vicious insults and ostracism being totally ignoring a person. Our participants were either Dutch, Pakistani, or Taiwanese, so that we could also look at how people from vastly different cultural backgrounds would react to – behaviourally and emotionally – the different kinds of trolling in the study. We simulated a trolling experience by putting our participants in a virtual game of catch with two computerized co-players, who they were led to believe were real people of either the same nationality or a minority member (e.g., a Moroccan immigrant in the Netherlands), who I had programmed to either troll them or silently watch the trolling happen. We found that there are indeed cultural differences when it comes to reactions, as well as differences between reactions to the two trolling types, but the core take-away is that future trolling interventions have to take into account the cultures of the target population as well as the specific type of trolling they are trying to fix or prevent in order to be effective. In the penultimate chapter, I shift the focus one last time to bystanders by putting participants in a game of League of Legends with two confederates who would troll one another throughout the game. This study’s goal was to see what motivated gamers to report trolls to an authority figure (the game developer) using the game’s built-in reporting functions, as the results of Chapter 2’s study suggested that this was an effective trolling deterrent. It is also, according to the results of the same study, the least-used recourse by bystanders faced with trolls in the proverbial wild. We found that how warm and friendly the troll was perceived to be and how competent the victim was perceived to be were what determined whether the participant reported our fake troll or not. A more competent victim and a less warm troll lead to more reports. To conclude, there is still a lot more to learn about trolls and trolling, but the field is farther along now than when this project started in 2015. There is a broad definition developed that encompasses most of the descriptive literature on trolling in games thus far. We also now know that there is the indication of a trolling cycle that requires further exploration. This is particularly important to know when it comes to the world of game development, as knowing the cycle exists allows for multiple points of intervention in order to protect their customers. Finally, this dissertation has shown the complexity of not just trolls – who are often portrayed in the media as one-dimensional antagonists – but also of everyone else involved in trolling interactions. Trolls, victims, and bystanders are all multi-faceted humans, and trolling, like all interactions, is an intricate social dance that deserves to be studied in even further depth in the future than what I have done here

Credibility and authority on internet message-boards

This research aimed to provide some proof or refutation of the hypothesis that online communities develop specialized vocabularies, often technical jargon, and use elements of those vocabularies, here labeled “tokens,” to ascribe credibility and/or authority to other posters. The literature from a variety of communications fields relating to this topic was summarized as a progression from an early “limitations” model of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to a later “opportunities” model. The drawbacks of current research were outlined and some new paths were sketched, including the methodology employed here. Several discussions from different Web sites, each containing hundreds of posts, were tabulated and analyzed for the effects of inclusion of anecdotally-chosen “token” posts. Gauging authority and credibility as attention paid token posts and positive reaction to token posts, respectively, no correlation was found between token posts and attention paid them. One of three discussions showed a strong correlation between token posts and positive reaction, while two other discussions analyzed yielded results short of statistical significance. Suggestions were made regarding further work in this expanding field