13,042 research outputs found
On the Role of Social Identity and Cohesion in Characterizing Online Social Communities
Two prevailing theories for explaining social group or community structure
are cohesion and identity. The social cohesion approach posits that social
groups arise out of an aggregation of individuals that have mutual
interpersonal attraction as they share common characteristics. These
characteristics can range from common interests to kinship ties and from social
values to ethnic backgrounds. In contrast, the social identity approach posits
that an individual is likely to join a group based on an intrinsic
self-evaluation at a cognitive or perceptual level. In other words group
members typically share an awareness of a common category membership.
In this work we seek to understand the role of these two contrasting theories
in explaining the behavior and stability of social communities in Twitter. A
specific focal point of our work is to understand the role of these theories in
disparate contexts ranging from disaster response to socio-political activism.
We extract social identity and social cohesion features-of-interest for large
scale datasets of five real-world events and examine the effectiveness of such
features in capturing behavioral characteristics and the stability of groups.
We also propose a novel measure of social group sustainability based on the
divergence in group discussion. Our main findings are: 1) Sharing of social
identities (especially physical location) among group members has a positive
impact on group sustainability, 2) Structural cohesion (represented by high
group density and low average shortest path length) is a strong indicator of
group sustainability, and 3) Event characteristics play a role in shaping group
sustainability, as social groups in transient events behave differently from
groups in events that last longer
âInterruptedâ landscapes: post-earthquake reconstruction in between urban renewal and social identity of local communities
Il presente saggio vuole affrontare il tema della ricostruzione postsismica con un'attenzione alla questione del paesaggio, termine che lega in maniera indissolubile la realtĂ fisica del territorio a quei valori immateriali (storici, culturali, produttivi, enogastronomici, ecc.) che costituiscono l'identitĂ dei luoghi. In questo senso si intendono âpaesaggi interrottiâ i luoghi distrutti dal sisma, perchĂš sono state interrotte le storie che legano gli abitanti al luogo, Ăš stato interrotto quel processo di narrazione continua e di attribuzione di senso e significati che avviene tra una collettivitĂ e il suo territorio. La ricerca parte dall'analisi delle recenti ricostruzioni post-sistmiche, che hanno oscillato tra le due idee opposte di new town, poco distanti dalle cittĂ distrutte e ricostruzione âdov'era, com'eraâ. Il saggio indaga la dimensione sociale e semiologica del paesaggio, riflettendo sul tema dell'identitĂ sociale, sull'attaccamento al luogo da parte degli abitanti, anche con l'obiettivo di definire linee guida e strategie progettuali per la ricostruzione sostenibile dei paesi distrutti dal sisma e da altri eventi disastrosi. In particolare vengono definite azioni di governance, strategie resilienti a partire dal coinvolgimento delle comunitĂ locali e buone pratiche per la ricostruzione secondo un approccio paesaggistico al progetto urbano
"The Paradox of Migration: Reconciling Economic Competition and 'Common Values' in Britain"
[From the introduction] This paper looks at Great Britain as an important case for explaining the inherent paradox of migration policy in Western Europe. Where immigration is an opportunity to jump-start latent industrial or struggling service economies, it is also a dominant political challenge in maintaining national identity and cohesion. This is particularly the case for Britain, where national identity is an inchoate, regularly re-defined concept (see Cesarani 1997; Hampshire 2006). Britain has seen positive economic growth and production in opening up their labor market to over half a million A-8 Accession workers, mainly from Poland and Lithuania. And under the banner of âcontrolled migration,â the Labor government has introduced a five-tiered, point-based entry system to bring highly skilled and need-based non-European migrants to Britain. However, where there is a desire to meet economic needs through migration, immigration has never been more of a contested, salient political issue. The promotion of citizenship requirements emphasizing integration (in English language and UK knowledge assessment) for non-EEA migrants, is an important innovation for defining British national identity, articulating for the first time a set of âcommon valuesâ to underscore the British national community. Britainâs migration calculus, maximizing the economic and social benefits of immigration against the efforts to isolate potential costs of immigration through the first, real definition of âBritishnessâ exemplifies the inherent paradox of migration for Western European states where more formed or consolidation visions of nation-state pre-dated large-scale migration. Following a review of context in which migration and citizenship laws were changed, discussing Britainâs strategic use of European Enlargement as being able to maintain selective admission alongside economic openness, the second part looks at British policy in detail by examining the most recent development of immigration and citizenship policy, beginning with the 2002 White Paper âSecure Borders, Safe Haven,â and manifesting in the 2005 Five-year strategy, âControlling Our Borders.â Finally, I conclude with preliminary comparisons between Britain and other Western European countries, who are only now coming to terms with the realization that they are âcountries of immigration,â taking on all the benefits and responsibilities that come with it
Understanding citizen perception of European Union Cohesion Policy: the role of the local context
The way in which Cohesion Policy is perceived by citizens is a crucial issue for the process of European identity-building. Based on the idea that citizens' perceptions depend on the local socioeconomic context in which Cohesion Policy is implemented, the paper seeks to define alternative combinations of the economic, social and institutional features of different local policy implementation settings, and to identify them empirically in European NUTS-2 regions. The results highlight a broad variety of policy settings, whose characteristics are relevant to the outcome of Cohesion Policy implementation. Read the transcript Watch the video on Vime
Introduction to the Special Section. Character and Citizenship: Towards an Emerging \u2018Strong Program\u2019?
The principal questions addressed in this special issue concern a crucial dimension of the educational agenda for 21st century Western societies: in the complex, uncertain, rapidly changing world we live in, which character traits matter most? How are they related with the development of a
cohesive society with better rates of employability and innovation, especially among young generations? And how are they best developed?
Within this context, special attention must be devoted to citizenship: what are the skills and virtues required for young people to play their role as
fully integrated citizens in the emergent European economic, political, social and cultural space? And how can character education improve their
social and political participation? Therefore, the scholarly challenge to be met consists of developing the theory of character education and its relation with citizenship education within a sound conceptual frame. This involves integrating approaches, models, data and research methods concerning character traits and citizenship education in Europe
Proc ACM Hum Comput Interact
Participation in communities is essential to individual mental and physical health and can yield further benefits for members. With a growing amount of time spent participating in virtual communities, it's increasingly important that we understand how the community experience manifests in and varies across these online spaces. In this paper, we investigate Sense of Virtual Community (SOVC) in the context of live-streaming communities. Through a survey of 1,944 Twitch viewers, we identify that community experiences on Twitch vary along two primary dimensions: |, a feeling of membership and support within the group, and |, a feeling that the group is a well-run collective with standards for behavior. Leveraging the Social-Ecological Model, we map behavioral trace data from usage logs to various levels of the social ecology surrounding an individual user's participation within a community, in order to identify which of these can be associated with lower or higher SOVC. We find that features describing activity at the individual and community levels, but not features describing the community member's dyadic relationships, aid in predicting the SOVC that community members feel within channels. We consider implications for the design of live-streaming communities and for fostering the well-being of their members, and we consider theoretical implications for the study of SOVC in modern, interactive online contexts, particularly those fostering large-scale or pseudonymized interactions. We also explore how the Social-Ecological Model can be leveraged in other contexts relevant to Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), with implications for future work.CC999999/ImCDC/Intramural CDC HHSUnited States
Language, Media and Community in the Information Age
This article argues that the electronically mediated communication contributes to the construction of new,
mediated forms of communities which are based on the synthesis of virtual and physical communities. The
appearance of these new forms of communities leads to a new conceptualization of the relation between self
and community. The aim of this article, on the one hand, is to show that with the mediatization of communities,
our concept of community becomes more complex. On the other hand, in this essay I consider the assump
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tion that the medium of the mediatization and new conceptualization of community is a specific, pictorial
language of electronically mediated communication
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