Building Social Capital in Online Communities: a Perspective of Information and System Quality

An Online Community (OC) is an IT-based social space where people are connected and access various resources during virtual social interaction. Previous IS research reveals that social capital can be a salient determinant of user participation and contribution to OCs. However, most such research assumes that social capital is given and has been built; limited attention has been paid on how social capital is developed within an OC. To bridge the gap, grounded on the Social Capital Theory (SCT) and IS quality literature, we argue that information quality and system quality influence social capital building in an OC from a multi-dimensional perspective in terms of cognitive, relational and structural capital. The potential results of this study will shed light on the design and management of OCs

We want drama! The effect of online conflict on social capital in online communities of consumption

Online communities (OC) are an expanding social phenomenon gaining increasing interest from marketing practitioners. Community managers thus aim to increase OCs’ social capital. Diversity of individuals interacting in OCs provokes a lot of conflict. However, the influence of online conflict on OCs’ social capital is not clear as research indicates both positive and negative effects. The research aims to explain these contradictory effects by conceptualizing conflict as drama and developing a typology of online conflict. Based on netnographic investigations of a forum, four types of conflicts are thus distinguished depending on valence of emotions and the type of members involved. The research contributes to literature on OC dynamics and is of particular interest for community managers working in any company or organization

Online social capital : mood, topical and psycholinguistic analysis

Social media provides rich sources of personal information and community interaction which can be linked to aspect of mental health. In this paper we investigate manifest properties of textual messages, including latent topics, psycholinguistic features, and authors\u27 mood, of a large corpus of blog posts, to analyze the aspect of social capital in social media communities. Using data collected from Live Journal, we find that bloggers with lower social capital have fewer positive moods and more negative moods than those with higher social capital. It is also found that people with low social capital have more random mood swings over time than the people with high social capital. Significant differences are found between low and high social capital groups when characterized by a set of latent topics and psycholinguistic features derived from blogposts, suggesting discriminative features, proved to be useful for classification tasks. Good prediction is achieved when classifying among social capital groups using topic and linguistic features, with linguistic features are found to have greater predictive power than latent topics. The significance of our work lies in the importance of online social capital to potential construction of automatic healthcare monitoring systems. We further establish the link between mood and social capital in online communities, suggesting the foundation of new systems to monitor online mental well-being

Fostering Knowledge Exchange in Online Communities: A Social Capital Building Approach

Prior studies on knowledge contribution started with the motivating role of social capital to predict knowledge contribution but did not specifically examine how they can be built in the first place. Our research addresses this gap by highlighting the role technology plays in supporting the development of social capital and eventual knowledge sharing intention. Herein, we propose four technology-based social capital builders – identity profiling, sub-community building, feedback mechanism, and regulatory practice – and theorize that individuals’ use of these IT artifacts determine the formation of social capital, which in turn, motivate knowledge contribution in online communities. Data collected from 253 online community users provide support for the proposed structural model. The results show that use of IT artifacts facilitates the formation of social capital (network ties, shared language, identification, trust in online community, and norms of cooperation) and their effects on knowledge contribution operate indirectly through social capital

Otwartość na dialog międzyreligijny ‒ psychologiczne uwarunkowania i procesy

The aim of this article is to examine psychological antecedents and processes that play a crucial role in building and developing openness to interreligious dialogue. Two factors turn out to determine the ways in which interreligious dialogue is led: personality traits (agreeableness and openness to experience) and religious attitudes (intrinsic religiosity). They create an atmosphere of tolerance, which is especially important in dialogue as it promotes the religious freedom that is a necessary condition for interreligious dialogue. The effectiveness of interreligious dialogue depends on the presence of personal and group factors which all contribute to the final outcome, e.g. genuine autonomy of religious motivation, the ability to differentiate between essential and peripheral elements in religion, or authenticity of religious beliefs connected with commitment. They frequently interact with each other in influencing the final forms of interreligious dialogue.Celem niniejszego artykułu jest określenie psychologicznych uwarunkowań i procesów, które odgrywają kluczową rolę w budowaniu i rozwijaniu otwartości na dialog międzyreligijny. Dwa czynniki decydują o stylu prowadzenia dialogu międzyreligijnego: cechy osobowości (ugodowość i otwartość na doświadczenie) oraz postawy religijne (dojrzała religijność). Formują one atmosferę tolerancji, która jest szczególnie ważna w dialogu, gdyż tworzy wolność religijną, która jest niezbędnym warunkiem dialogu międzyreligijnego. Skuteczność dialogu międzyreligijnego zależy od obecności czynników osobistych i grupowych, które określają jego ostateczny charakter, np. prawdziwa autonomia motywacji religijnej, umiejętność różnicowania zasadniczych i peryferyjnych elementów religii lub autentyczność przekonań religijnych związana z zaangażowaniem. W wielu sytuacjach wymienione czynniki wchodzą we wzajemne interakcje, które wpływają na finalne formy dialogu międzyreligijnego

Creation and recreation: motivating collaboration to generate knowledge capital in online communities.

The results of a research project that examined the factors that motivated individuals competing to win an award of £10,000 to interact collectively in a Yahoo e-group are presented. The project’s focus was to examine the apparent willingness of competitors to help their rivals when only one prize was available. The findings revealed that the initial impetus for members to join the group was to discover information for personal benefit. Over time, however, individual desire to reciprocate the help received from the group developed out of the online interactions. Other results from the study: challenge the findings of previous research on the value of strong social capital in online communities;confirm that in order to motivate active participation in online environments incentives offered should match the values of the group in question; advocate that a balance needs to be achieved in determining the degree of focus in a discussion group’s activities: a narrow focus leads to action amongst members and diminishes the requirement for social support and community control;reveal that decisions on a community’s size may determine its power to support genuine collaboration and new knowledge creation: all-inclusive membership provides opportunities for individual learning, but true knowledge capital is generated in smaller, less public groups. These findings highlight issues that businesses may wish to consider when there are plans to create virtual communities of practice to meet corporate goals. This is particularly important with reference to furnishing environments where employees are willing to work collaboratively in the creation of new knowledge

Social Capital and the Equalizing Potential of the Internet

Social capital is predominantly seen as a public good. Internet communication tends to complement real-world interaction. Therefore, concerns that it might contribute to a decline of social capital seem unfounded. Internet communication can support and enhance communities that to some extent depend on face-to-face interaction. Taking the online communication of computer professionals as a model, the paper seeks to demonstrate the power of virtual communities. Examples are the development of Linux and users reactions to a bug in the Pentium processor. Online communication, facilitated by personal home pages and search engines, offers isolated workers opportunities for increasing their private good social capital as well. On the level of infrastructure, key characteristics of the Internet match those of social capital: the network aspect itself, cooperation, voluntary work, giving, standards of social behavior and the fact it is not designed. Downsides of the Internet also correspond to downsides of social capital: exclusion, a trade-off between openness and trust and support for destructive forces. Realizing the equalizing potential of the Internet in terms of social capital requires action; there is also a possible scenario in which social capital is undermined

There’s No “Me” in “Imgur”: Applying SIDE Theory and Content Analysis to Viral Posts on Imgur.com

The Social Identity model of Deindividuation Effects (SIDE) asserts that social (i.e., collective) identities are more salient under conditions of anonymity, prompting “deindividuation” as group members place more focus on community standards and downplay individual differences. As a result of deindividuation, social standards become the driving force of group interaction, and the successful practice of group norms identify individuals’ in-group status while reinforcing the social identity of the community. The current study applies the SIDE model to the anonymous image-sharing platform Imgur.com to ascertain whether self-referential posts are assessed more negatively than other-referential and non-directed content, and to examine whether posts of varying referential-type occur more frequently across post-type subcategories. A content analysis of 42 posts to Imgur’s “front page” revealed that self-referential posts receive significantly more “downvotes” (i.e., negative assessments) than non-directed content and substantially more downvotes compared to other-referential posts. Further, self-referential content was most common within the subcategories of “capitalizing” and “social support,” as compared to “community identification” and “information / mobilization” for other-referential, and “visually appealing” and “humor” for non-directed posts. The findings suggest that the Imgur community engages in voting habits that favor the maintenance of social identity over the sharing of individuating information, providing sustained support for the applicability of SIDE in anonymous online contexts such as Imgur

Facilitating Social Inclusion of Migrant Workers through Digital Game Play

With the accelerated and large-scale im/migration around the world, many countries face issues of integration of migrants into the host societies. Anxiety created by the continuing economic crisis and declining state welfare contribute to antipathy towards foreign population. Social exclusion is particularly a struggle for those who migrate with unstable statuses as transient workers, refugees, and asylum seekers. To promote social inclusion, this paper first introduces the concept of cultural citizenship grounded in the ethics of care and empathy to approach social inclusion. It further argues that social inclusion can be facilitated through technology use, particularly digital game play. A Facebook game is subsequently designed based on the theoretical lenses to foster cultural citizenship and integration between migrant workers and local Singaporean society