A Web-Based E-Commerce Learning Community in Brazil

This chapter demonstrates usage of a Web-based participative learning environment, which has enabled graduate students in e-commerce classes on the Executive Master in Business Administration Programme taught by the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration at Getulio Vargas Foundation, based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to share and disseminate their knowledge among themselves. An illustrative single case study is applied in order to achieve this purpose. The structure of this virtual environment on the web is analysed. Findings about the participation level of the students in this group, the impact of regional influences – since classes are given throughout Brazil – and the role of the moderator in the leverage of this environment are also presented in this research, which attempts to establish how Internet technology can be effective in the development of virtual learning communities.

Social Net/work(ing) on Facebook

Reactions to new media vary from utopian pronouncements about their democratizing potential to fear about social deviance. The news media spend a great deal of time discussing new media, especially as they relate to young people. Again, sometimes these media are reported on as democratizing forces as when Time magazine declared “You” to be the person of the year (Grossman, 2006). Other times they are described as a source of social anxiety, for example, when NBC News (2011) reported on flash mobs as “swarms of mostly young people organized through social media, texting, tweeting, using Internet sites, and increasingly turning violent in cities across the country” (para. 4). However, social media are rarely discussed in terms of their capacities to tap into users’ activities as forms of labor. This chapter contributes to the discussion of user generated content as labor (Cohen, 2008; Peterson, 2008; van Dijck, 2009) by examining the process of building and maintaining an audience in the form of a friends list while simultaneously being an audience member in others’ friends lists. This labor is examined in this chapter through looking at the motivations individuals cite for using Facebook and how those users describe their feelings about their friends list qua audience or how users describe themselves as members of an audience.

The Continued Use of a Virtual Community

With the advent of the Internet, so too came several new means by which people share and acquire information. One such method is the use of virtual communities. Virtual communities are steadily becoming a valuable resource for today’s organizations. However, a large number of virtual communities fail because their members withdraw from using them. Motivated by this concern, this study investigates the factors which motivate individuals to continue using a virtual community for information adoption. The proposed model integrates the IS continuance model with the information adoption model and is validated through an online survey of 240 users of a Bulletin Board System established by a local university in China. The results reveal that continuance intention within a virtual community is primarily determined by user satisfaction with prior usage, as well as by perceived information usefulness. The results also suggest that a long-term sustainable virtual community should be provided with high-quality and credible information. The findings of this study contribute to both theory building in virtual community continuance and practice in virtual community management.

A Systemic Approach to Online Sharing Motivations

The purpose of this conceptual chapter is to present and argue for a cross-disciplinary and systemic approach to the examination of motivations for sharing digital media objects via social mediating technologies. The theoretical foundation of this approach is built on two social theories from rhetorical analysis (Burke’s pentad) and gift research (gift systems), respectively. A synthesis of these two theories provides an approach capable of producing more coherent and contextually grounded insights regarding online sharing motivations. The reason these two theories were identified as useful is that they acknowledge and incorporate social and contextual factors. This is important to overcome the assumption that motivations to share are detached from the specifics of actors, situations, and sociotechnical means. As such, this cross-disciplinary combination challenges the limited, but common approach of trying to identify generic motivations for contributing to virtual communities. Instead, this chapter argues for a consideration of situated and contextual motivations for contributing by highlighting the conceptual questions what, to whom, how, where, and finally, why. In conclusion, the chapter fills a gap in the literature on online motivations mainly because current models focus on motivations as self-containing. Instead, this chapter suggests to consider sociotechnical means, types of relationships, values of media objects, identity, or culture in cohort.

The Importance of Focal Awareness to Learning in Virtual Communities

Higher education today calls for transformative rather than transmissive education, and educators need to be particularly concerned with facilitating learners to fully focus on important elements, to make connections and properly process newly learned information. Educational approaches are beginning to place a greater emphasis on participation in community activities such as collaborative learning and team-work as opposed to individual inquiry. With the rise of the global community facilitated by the Internet and advances in communication technology, connected learners are forming virtual learning communities, which facilitate the individual and social aspect of learning through communication and team-based instruction models such as problem-based learning. To achieve this requires an education structure underpinned by pedagogical values that encourage student ownership of their learning and allows exploration of multiple perspectives by social interaction. One such educational structure may involve the use of virtual learning communities. The success of such a virtual learning community depends on developing key behaviours in students, which support them to focus on awareness of their own learning needs, attitudes and processes. This chapter argues therefore that students’ focal awareness is critical to learning in virtual communities.

Virtual Communities as Subaltern Public Spheres

The purpose of this work is to develop a theoretical framework to examine virtual community participation using the concept of subaltern public spheres. The theory of subaltern public spheres directs attention to the internal dynamics and external interaction of virtual communities. Internal dynamics first refers to the inclusiveness of participation by looking at the access to virtual communities and the profiles of their participants. The nature of participation, as another aspect of internal dynamics, is estimated through examining the styles of the discourses and the types of participatory acts. The external interaction becomes another major focus of this theoretical framework and urges researchers to study how virtual communities interact with government apparatuses, commercial entities, the dominant public sphere, and other subaltern public spheres through discursive engagement and other means. The theoretical framework is applied to analyze a case of Chinese online public spheres to illustrate the framework’s utility.

Toward an Infrastructural Approach to Understanding Participation in Virtual Communities

This chapter outlines an infrastructural approach to understanding virtual communities (VCs) and applies it to a novel set of VCs. The infrastructural approach explicitly links logics embodied in technical, social, and information systems to opportunities and motives for participation. This chapter first outlines how the infrastructure approach is synthesised from current approaches to understanding VCs. Second, it uses the infrastructural approach to analyse three related meatspace communities’ progress toward collaborating through specific data-sharing VCs. Third, it highlights merits and shortcomings of the infrastructural approach to understanding participation in virtual communities. Finally, it offers potential avenues of further VC research using the infrastructural approach.

Toward an Understanding of Online Community Participation through Narrative Network Analysis

This chapter proposes the narrative network analysis methodology for application in the examination of online communities. The narrative network analysis provides a basis for systematic examination of online communities that has been missing from the literature. The chapter describes three online communities and their characteristics to demonstrate the possibilities of the methodology. From these descriptions a proposed model of the communities is presented, and then an abbreviated narrative network analysis is developed. The network analysis demonstrates how an ethnographically informed model may be tested in a systematic manner with the narrative network analysis techniques. The chapter then concludes with a number of questions for future research in this area that have been proposed by other authors. These unanswered questions are likely candidates for future research using this promising methodology.

Mixing Metaphors

This chapter explores the theoretical and conceptual assumptions underlying the notion of virtual community. Drawing from relevant literature, the author first examines the fundamental properties of the Internet as both technological and cultural artifact and argues that the Internet can embody different technological, functional, and symbolic meanings that will have direct implications for how communities are formed and experienced. Building on that framework, the second part of the chapter focuses on the sociological and psychological bases of community and explores how such conceptions change with the emergence of the Internet. The author concludes that studies of virtual communities must be contextualized according to historical and existing patterns of social life and offers a discussion on new challenges and questions facing mass communications research in this increasingly interdisciplinary area.

Culture, Disorder, and Death in an Online World

Death strikes everywhere, even online. Death poses problems personally, existentially, and culturally, and is potentially destructive to person and group. Yet many social theories of death posit some kind of social integration as normal, downplaying the potential for disorder. This chapter explores how people on the internet mailing list, Cybermind, dealt with death on two occasions: firstly, just after the group’s founding, and secondly, when the group had been established for eight years, and was in crisis. On both occasions the group was rocked by the deaths, and struggled to make a meaningful and ongoing mailing list culture out of parts of offline culture, while transforming that culture within the constraints and ambiguities of List Life. This was a disorderly exploratory process, which verged on disintegration. Social disorder cannot be seen as simply pathological or an error; it is a vital part of cultural processes and must be taken seriously in itself.