Co-constructing controversy: content analysis of collaborative knowledge negotiation in online communities

Knowledge sharing online has flourished within organizations as well as open online communities due to the pervasiveness of Web 2.0 platforms. This paper builds on previous studies of social construction of knowledge online and investigates how contributors in online communities collaboratively share and construct controversial scientific knowledge. As the general public participates in such knowledge collaboration, understanding the processes through which they contribute content and roles that they play is imperative. The authors conducted the content analysis of three online communities that engage in knowledge collaboration on the subject of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccination, which is perceived as contentious knowledge by the public due to the widespread myth among parents that the MMR vaccine is associated with autism. The study's findings include that the content discussed is influenced by the purposes of the communities, nature of the tasks, and demographics of participants, although they discussed the same topic. The authors also found that the framework of knowledge reuse and knowledge co-construction sites is useful for investigating the content and roles that appeared in the three communities. The contribution of the paper includes the analytical framework of knowledge reuse and knowledge co-construction, articulation of the content and roles that appeared in online communities, and unboxing of discourses in three different online communities. Future research directions are also discussed.     

‘We need to get together and make ourselves heard’: everyday online spaces as incubators of political action

This article examines to what extent, and how, people engaging in political talk within ‘non-political’ discussion forums – online lifestyle communities – leads to political (or personal) action or calls-to-action. The analysis is framed in the context of wider questions of citizenship, civic engagement and political mobilization. To capture everyday political talk amongst citizens requires us to move beyond the now widely analysed online spaces of formal politics. Instead, we focus on online third spaces concerning lifestyle issues such as parenting, personal finance and popular culture. Drawing on a content analysis of three popular UK-based discussion forums over the course of five years (2010–2014), we found that (for two of the three cases) such spaces were more than just talking shops. Rather they were spaces where political actions not only emerged, but where they seemed to be cultivated. Discussions embedded in the personal lives of participants often developed – through talk – into political actions aimed at government (or other) authorities. The article sheds light on the contributing factors and processes that (potentially) trigger and foster action emerging from political talk and provides insight into the mobilization potential of third spaces.     

Culture,boundary, and identity: a comparison of practices between two online punk communities in China

This article analyzes how digital technology can shape cultural practice in Chinese online communities. By using the concepts of boundary and identity, it explores the formation of two online punk communities in China, created by those who are interested in punk music originating from Anglo-American countries. Drawing on data from participant observation and 10 in-depth interviews, this article first reviews literature on Internet culture in China, online communities, boundaries, and identity. It then focuses on the differing practices of the two online punk communities. A discussion is subsequently provided concerning how boundaries are constructed in online communities through the exclusion that is enabled by the technological platform. An analysis of how the members identify themselves with online communities and form punk subcultures encouraged by the boundaries of their respective communities is then presented towards the end of the article. It is through this process that the members empower themselves in their relationships with the surrounding society.     

Does Attitudinal Consensus Lead to Neighborhood Collaboration? An Exploratory Analysis of an Urban Community

This article examines whether high levels of attitudinal consensus on community needs and civic responsibilities among a community's residents are associated with effective collaborative efforts among that community's neighborhood associations. Drawing upon both quantitative and qualitative data from an evaluation of an umbrella organization in an urban community, the authors found only a weak connection between attitudinal consensus, which was strong to moderate on most issues, and effective neighborhood association collaboration. The authors conclude that attitudinal consensus may be a necessary first step toward building effective collaboration but is far from sufficient to foster meaningful and stable partnerships. The authors explore the reasons for the lack of effective collaboration, offer suggestions for addressing barriers to collaboration, and discuss the implications of the findings for community building initiatives that aim to build social capital, particularly across “difference,” in distressed and diverse urban communities.     

QUEERLY INTIMATE:

This article examines the rise of the Girls' Love (GL) fan fiction community in contemporary China. More specifically, we focus on the ‘Pink Super Girl Bar’, an online fan fiction community devoted to the pairing of the contestants of the 2006 season of Super Girl, an entertainment program featured on Hunan Satellite TV that enjoys great popularity in the Sinophone world. Through an ethnographic account of the formation, convention and performativity of identities and socialities in this community, we demonstrate how Super Girl GL fans mobilize their emotional capital to create artworks, to have fun and to enrich their everyday lives. We argue that the GL fan fiction community has become a space of female homosociality, intimacy and affect in which a new generation of young Chinese women actively enact friendship and female subjectivity in a way that refuses the normalization of gender, sexuality and social relations. Moreover, by linking fan studies to affect studies and emotional geography, and by paying particular attention to indigenous concepts and cultural practices in mainland China's fan communities, we wish to contribute to fan studies with feminist, queer and transnational perspectives.     

Disability and democracy in Cambodia: an integrative approach to community building and civic engagement

The political framework through which the various communities of disabled persons in Cambodia advocate for and claim their rights is complex and confusing. Both governmental and non‐governmental actors engage this political framework through the mobilization of persons from the various disabled communities, competing in the civic sphere through issue‐oriented advocacy in ways that seek to influence the process of democratic governance. While the status of disabled rights in Cambodia is still comparatively weak, it is argued here that this civic engagement has allowed disabled communities to find common cause with non‐disabled persons and groups in the project of deepening the roots of democracy in Cambodia. This article discusses the demographic composition of disability, the framework of political action that addresses disability issues and the practice of civic engagement and activism by disabled and non‐disabled communities in Cambodia.     

Social capital online: Collective use of the Internet and reciprocity as lubricants of democracy

This article puts the democratic potential of using the Internet into perspective through an analysis of how collective uses of the Internet promote social capital. Research results reveal that social capital online (i.e. trust and reciprocity) is enhanced by involvement in collective use of the Internet such as participation in online communities and use of the Internet among informal groups in everyday life. This process could counter negative aspects of Internet use. Further, accumulated online social capital can be a powerful predictor of online political participation, i.e. online reciprocity has a positive effect on intention to participate in online civic discussion. Finally, the authors' analyses indicate the possibility of a spillover of online social capital into offline arenas. It is concluded that collective use of the Internet can be a lubricant for democracy.     

Caught on camera,posted online: mediated moralities,visual politics and the case of urban ‘drought-shaming’

The ‘shaming’ of subjects caught on camera, engaging in socially transgressive acts of varying kinds, has become a familiar occurrence and locus of ambivalent possibility in contemporary public culture. In this article, I theorise the socio-moral complexities and visual politics of ostensibly civic forms of online shaming through an in-depth analysis of a single case: urban ‘drought-shaming’ in California (2014–2015). Drawing on interpretive methods of social analysis and anchored by the classical sociological tradition, I highlight the role of images, especially the circulation of still photographs taken and posted by ordinary members, in the emerging problematisation of excessive water use at the centre of this case. Understood as a vital and diminishing resource within an interconnected and interdependent social order, water was made sacred; it was prohibited from being handled in mundane or carelessly reckless ways during the drought. A state-of-emergency came to be constituted (also) as a moral drama. The language and practices constitutive of drought-shaming, I argue, contributed to a popular sociological imagination of water use whose critical dimensions transcend the specificities of this case. To highlight its ritual structure within the context of a viable and organically solidaristic collective order, I compare online civic shaming with the ‘status degradation ceremony’, as theorised by Harold Garfinkel in the 1950s. Comparable in that it constitutes a new form of public denunciation with socially integrative and renewing possibilities, there are also differences that shed light onto some of the new and defining elements of public shaming in a digitally convergent, visually mediated, and (more) participatory media-sphere. Finally, revealing significant overlap and collaboration between social, news, and tabloid media in the social production of mediated shaming today, this study is located at the border of visual sociology and a critical sociology of visual representation in contemporary mediated society.     

Evaluation in the Social Studies

Online role-playing games such as World Of Warcraft represent new participatory cultures in which today's students engage every day. They are appealing to players largely because of the social aspects of game play. Some features of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) can be incorporated into classroom culture to create more dynamic interactions between students and improve both content instruction and civic competence.     

Family Influences on the Social Participation of Youth: The Effects of Parental Social Involvement and Farming

Abstract Parents shape children's social choices through their social and economic actions. Parental social participation connects children to a civic culture and encourages involvement in civic groups. Parents' ties to farming in farm‐dependent communities further enhance children's civic orientations by providing added opportunities and incentives for social participation. Data from the Iowa Youth and Families Project confirm these hypotheses, showing that the children of farmers and of rural leaders are more likely to participate in civic groups. These results establish parental social involvement as a source of social capital and demonstrate the importance of farm influences for understanding the social involvement of youth in rural society.     

World Music,nation and postcolonialism

Recent scholarship on representational politics in popular music tends to dwell on the macropolitical entailments of contradictory desires acted out through the consumerization of culture within the globalized circuitry of supranational capitalism. This article takes a micropolitical look at what salsa means for working-class Puerto Ricans in the colonial diaspora, positing salsa as a musical culture that fuels, and is fuelled by, the organic intelligence of its practitioners. Comparatively analysing the performative content and contexts of two albums produced at the symbolic juncture of the Quincentennial (1992) – Willie Colón's Hecho in Puerto Rico and Ruben Blades' Amor y Control – and sharing an auto-ethnographical account of experiences with salsa music in the Puerto Rican colonial diaspora, this article explores the cultural politics obtained between mainstream appropriations of Latin musical cultures and salsa within the working-class communities who created it. Thus shifting the critical lens from above to below, the most salient concerns become the ethical dimensions of subaltern (kin)aesthetics and knowledges, which can be charted alongside the overt rejection of consumerist assimilation, the conscious racialization of cultural agency and other articulations of liberatory desire.     

Tagging Walls and Planting Seeds: Creating Spaces for Youth Civic Action

Youth civic spaces are environments in which youth participation in civic action is fostered—the pathways, structures, and vehicles that provide opportunities for young people to engage in critical discussion, dialogue, and action. The concept of youth civic space includes the formal and informal places in which youth civic engagement can occur and how the lived experience of those places contributes to young people's development as civic actors. It extends discussions regarding the physical locations of youth civic engagement to include the activities, perceptions, and interactions within them. Drawing on archival materials from 2 multiyear projects, this article explores the role of community-based organizations in mediating youth civic action and understanding the characteristics and qualities of the organizations that facilitate youth engagement in community action and social change. We use this analysis of empirical examples to develop a conceptual framework for strengthening practice.     

Bridging and bonding connections beyond the web: youth movements and civic engagement

Young people's participation, supported by the advent and the use of social media, seems to increase and become more definite, especially when it is linked to the local territory and its activities. In this respect, the connections the youths are able to create online go beyond the web, also developing social interactions with local communities. This article, starting from these premises, aims at investigating more deeply the debate about the civic use of the web by young people. The analysis focuses on 20 youth movements (cultural, social-collective, and environmental ones), with national/international relevance, mainly related to the web. Taking into account five main dimensions – internationalization, level of organization, participation, communication, and benefits for the social structure – the paper point outs different dynamics among the movements related to: (1) the use of the net, (2) the transfer from the online communication exchange to the local implementation of the civic actions, and (3) the involvement of the local public opinion. Moreover, the study reveals strong connections among participants, both in terms of bridging and bonding links so that the movements may be considered as a promising opportunity to strengthen civicness and foster social capital.     

Vlogging on YouTube: the online,political engagement of young Canadians advocating for social change

Youth are often perceived as passive and disengaged from civic and political life. However, many researchers have countered such discourses of youth passivity and isolation, highlighting young people's active and interactive political engagement through less traditional outlets, especially online. In this article, we are influenced by a poststructural orientation to agency to identify themes across the social change-oriented YouTube channels of eighteen young Canadians. The themes we have identified counter a dominant focus on youth civic disengagement, political apathy, and isolation, instead highlighting the diverse political issues young Canadian vloggers address, the strategies they use, their multiple subjectivities, the interaction and support of their online community, and the relevance of inequality. We show how YouTube has become an important venue for the production and dissemination of youth perspectives.     

Digital media and cultural institutions in Russia: online magazines as aggregates of cultural services

ABSTRACT

Focusing on online magazines, this article sheds light on Russian cultural institutions from the perspective of digital media. My analysis concentrates on urban lifestyle magazines, a sub-category of consumer magazines and a media genre, which emerged in Russia in the glossy magazine format and is now experiencing a powerful ‘second rising’ on the internet. My article asks how the adaptation to the digital communication environment by lifestyle publications re-defines the very concept of a magazine and reorganizes the institutional ties between media and cultural industries. This focus enables me to analyse lifestyle magazines as a dynamic field of interaction in which cultural meanings are produced and negotiated. Based on new media studies, I see the cultural transcoding (Manovich 2002) of the networked and automatized information transmission into the magazines’ content as being a significant factor in the development of contemporary culture and media. Ultimately, my article introduces an attempt to analyse new media titles combining qualitative media analysis with the developing theory of ‘algorithmic culture’ (Striphas 2015). My argumentation is based on two case publications: Afisha, established in 1999 as a weekly glossy magazine introducing all cultural events in Moscow, and Inde, a digital-born regional lifestyle magazine focusing on urban culture in the Republic of Tatarstan. Urban lifestyle magazines are important for the institutional organization of Russian culture, as they direct their readers’ attention to a broad selection of arts, products and events; strengthen the link between consumers and cultural entrepreneurs and build on a long tradition of print journalism, thereby transmitting the values of reading and literacy to a popular public. Moreover, my analysis shows that, through their multi-platform publication strategy, online magazines (re)organize as aggregates of digital resources helping to manage cultural decision-making in a consumerist setting.     

Searching for a Narrative of Loss: Interactional Ordering of Ambiguous Grief

In this article I analyze the collective management of ambiguous emotions in the case of grief arising from perinatal loss/stillbirth. Based on a content analysis of selected Polish discussion lists for bereaved parents and interviews with moderators of these lists, I conceptualize the experience of grief arising from miscarriage/stillbirth as both culturally “disembedded”—not regulated by a coherent set of feeling and display rules, and interactionally “disenfranchised”—framed by the immediate social surrounding of the bereaved as illegitimate. This study then focuses on subsequent social processes surrounding the collective management of such emotions through interactions within online bereavement communities, leading to the creation of local definitions of the situation of loss and formation of subcultural feeling and display rules of grief. I posit that in a wider perspective these community processes can be seen as grassroots mechanisms that agents use to transform the existing emotional culture of grief.     

Young people as global citizens: negotiation of youth civic participation in adult-managed online spaces

With the proliferation of new media technologies, online spaces for civic engagement are being used as new sites by the young people for enacting global citizenship. Some of these online civic spaces are managed by parent organizations and guide the participants towards accomplishing goals that align with the institutional policies. We use Stuart Hall’s theoretical framework to ground the two methods we used for empirical research- textual analysis of the selected online spaces and in-depth interviews with young bloggers. Our analysis shows how negotiated reading of the encoded messages on the online platforms for youth civic engagement marks a political moment of signification in which there lies a possibility of challenging the dominance of the adult centered notions of civic engagement. Shelat’s online civic culture framework [2014. “Citizens, Global Civic Engagement on Online Platforms: Women as Transcultural Citizens.” Dissertation] helped us examine how these managed platforms encode global citizenship with pre-designed participatory practices that reinforce the hegemonic definition of youth political participation. Interviews of young bloggers on two online global spaces foreground the process of negotiation with the dominant definitions and the use of decoding strategies to create scope for subjective, more local definitions, as well as practices of civic engagement and global citizenship. Though literature suggests that adult-management of online youth spaces perpetuate a gap between the adult-centric notions of participation and the youth oriented ideas of civic engagement, our study reveals that the young participants find ways of articulating their ideas and enter these spaces with plans on how to fulfill their civic goals.     

Reflections on diaspora and soft power: community building among female US expats in Southern Europe

ABSTRACT

Illuminated by life stories of American women in Italy and Greece, our work examines a complex relationship between expatriate collectivity and soft power agency. The data were collected from in-depth interviews with 60 US nationals who live in Italy and Greece. Our findings show that these women shape as a strong diasporic collectivity through activities of ecological civic engagement, which, however, do not result in a successful exercise of soft power. The isolationist nature of their collectivity causes a number of diasporic mistakes and turns their chosen community project into a weak resource for soft power, a translation of which remains highly problematic. The basic mistakes that such expats make while exercising soft power are misunderstanding of the notions of community and its main building tool (civic engagement) as well as overall inability to learn the new culture quickly.     

New ethnicities online: reflexive racialisation and the internet

In this article we analyse the emergence of Internet activity addressing the experiences of young people in two British communities: South Asian and Chinese. We focus on two web sites: http://www.barficulture.com and http://www.britishbornchinese.org.uk , drawing on interviews with site editors, content analysis of the discussion forums, and E‐mail exchanges with site users. Our analysis of these two web sites shows how collective identities still matter, being redefined rather than erased by online interaction. We understand the site content through the notion of reflexive racialisation. We use this term to modify the stress given to individualisation in accounts of reflexive modernisation. In addition we question the allocation of racialised meaning from above implied by the concept of racialisation. Internet discussion forums can act as witnesses to social inequalities and through sharing experiences of racism and marginalisation, an oppositional social perspective may develop. The online exchanges have had offline consequences: social gatherings, charitable donations and campaigns against adverse media representations. These web sites have begun to change the terms of engagement between these ethnic groups and the wider society, and they have considerable potential to develop new forms of social action.     

Making projects, making friends: online community as catalyst for interactive media creation

To become full and active participants in today's technologically saturated society, young people need to become creators (and not just consumers) of interactive media. Developing the requisite abilities and capacities is not a wholly individual process; it is important for young people to have access to communities where they can collaborate and share ideas. This article uses the Scratch online community for exploring how different forms of participation and collaboration can support and shape the ways in which young people develop as creators of interactive media. We describe participation in this community in terms of a spectrum ranging from socializing to creating and present examples of three forms of collaboration within the community. We argue that the most exciting interactive media creation and valuable learning experiences are taking place in the middle space, where participants draw on the best of socializing and creating practices.