31,473 research outputs found
Negative emotions boost users activity at BBC Forum
We present an empirical study of user activity in online BBC discussion
forums, measured by the number of posts written by individual debaters and the
average sentiment of these posts. Nearly 2.5 million posts from over 18
thousand users were investigated. Scale free distributions were observed for
activity in individual discussion threads as well as for overall activity. The
number of unique users in a thread normalized by the thread length decays with
thread length, suggesting that thread life is sustained by mutual discussions
rather than by independent comments. Automatic sentiment analysis shows that
most posts contain negative emotions and the most active users in individual
threads express predominantly negative sentiments. It follows that the average
emotion of longer threads is more negative and that threads can be sustained by
negative comments. An agent based computer simulation model has been used to
reproduce several essential characteristics of the analyzed system. The model
stresses the role of discussions between users, especially emotionally laden
quarrels between supporters of opposite opinions, and represents many observed
statistics of the forum.Comment: 29 pages, 6 figure
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Community and Social Media Use among Early PEV Drivers
Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are now being offered for sale to consumers. Contemporaneously, multi-way social interactions among individuals, groups, businesses, governments, and other actors are increasingly facilitated by communication technologies: we take this to be “social media.” Can this confluence facilitate the formation of new interest-based communities among plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) buyers? How might this be important to promoting PEVs? This paper presents the results of 28 in-depth interviews with household PEV drivers in San Diego, California. These PEV drivers show wide variation in their descriptions of who they believe PEV drivers to be, conceptualizations of a PEV, uses of social media to engage other members of the community, and socially mediated and face-to-face interactions with other PEV drivers. Better understanding of the relationship between emerging PEV markets, social media and consumer-based communities will affect the ongoing management of transitions to electric-mobility
Collective emotions online and their influence on community life
E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an
object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet
exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional
information - how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group
members. Emotions are known to be important in affecting interaction partners
in offline communication in many ways. Could emotions in Internet exchanges
affect others and systematically influence quantitative and qualitative aspects
of the trajectory of e-communities? The development of automatic sentiment
analysis has made large scale emotion detection and analysis possible using
text messages collected from the web. It is not clear if emotions in
e-communities primarily derive from individual group members' personalities or
if they result from intra-group interactions, and whether they influence group
activities. We show the collective character of affective phenomena on a large
scale as observed in 4 million posts downloaded from Blogs, Digg and BBC
forums. To test whether the emotions of a community member may influence the
emotions of others, posts were grouped into clusters of messages with similar
emotional valences. The frequency of long clusters was much higher than it
would be if emotions occurred at random. Distributions for cluster lengths can
be explained by preferential processes because conditional probabilities for
consecutive messages grow as a power law with cluster length. For BBC forum
threads, average discussion lengths were higher for larger values of absolute
average emotional valence in the first ten comments and the average amount of
emotion in messages fell during discussions. Our results prove that collective
emotional states can be created and modulated via Internet communication and
that emotional expressiveness is the fuel that sustains some e-communities.Comment: 23 pages including Supporting Information, accepted to PLoS ON
Creating UGC Areas of Official Destination Websites: Is there a Recipe for Success? An Insight through Netnographic Research
An analysis of the existing literature has demonstrated the importance of word of mouth as a source of information for potential tourists and service consumers. The growth of the Internet and interactive websites has lead to the creation of online communities that serve as points of reference for word of mouth and in particular for independent, personal and experiential information. Recent articles have noted the growing interest of tourism companies and destinations to include UGC areas in their official websites to provide their users with these types of information and interactivity among each others. However, so far little research has been performed on the success factors of online communities. This paper wants to create a platform for further research on the topic. If destinations want to boost visits to their websites through UGS areas and create a “buzz” through positive word of mouth, it is necessary to know the correct ingredients for success. Some of these ingredients have been discovered through a netnographic analysis of an Italian virtual mountaineering community. The analysis has shown that some of the most important issues when creating online communities are the reliability of information, the ease of finding information and creating threads and posts, the constant appearance of interesting threads and discussions, the respect for other members, the passion of all of the active users for the same topics and a certain homogeneity within the users.virtual communities, netnography, electronic word of mouth, forums, information search
Interactivity: A review of the concept and a framework for analysis
The terms `interactivity' and `interactive media' became significant buzz-words during the late 1980s and early 1990s when the multi-media euphoria fascinated politicians, economists, and researchers alike. However, right from the beginning of the scientific debate, the inconsistent usage of the term `interactivity' massively complicated the comparability of numerous empirical studies. This is where this article joins the discussion. First, the article sheds light on the terminological origins of `interactivity' and distinguishes the term from cognate expressions. Further, it restructures and extends existing findings on the basis of a new analysis framework which considers three levels of interactive communication (action level, level of subjective situation evaluation, and level of meaning exchange). Finally, it delivers a systematic overview of specific criteria of interactive communication
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