Weiyu Zhang offers some insights about collective action based on social network sites in China. She reminds us that collective action is a difficult term to define. She selects the definition based on Bimber, Flanagin & Sohl (2006) as “a set of communication processes involving the crossing of boundaries between private and public life.” What do they mean as crossing, she asks us? Expressing or acting on an individual interest in ways observable to relevant others. Boundary crossing can incurs transaction costs–so this definition suggests that the softer the boundary, the easier it is to cross.
Weiyu reviews some of the common problems of strong ties in social networks: homogeneity that could discourage tolerance and encourage enclaving of small groups; or impeding members’ ability to adapt to significant changes.
She mentions Usenet as a “Web 1.0″ example of showing us of the effort to establish some weak ties with strangers and doing something together. Putnam’s Bowling Alone documents decreasing social capital in US society, with the exception of “mass mailing list groups.” But these groups have little to no personal interaction. She looks to Web 2.0 examples that can have both massive number of weak ties and direct or personal interaction.
This brings us to Weiyu’s main research question: How an interest-oriented social networking sites (SNS) work differently in enabling collective action as opposed to relationship-oriented SNS? She mentions two prime examples for her study: Douban.com is a SNS that is interest-oriented; Xiaonei.com is “China’s Facebook.” She does a structural analysis of the websites, also using an online survey with a purposive sample and case studies. Weiyu categorized three different characteristics of SNS: network structure, size of network, and strength of ties. The social network graphs of the two SNS sites reflects the different natures of the sites: for xiaonei, it was more difficult to connect to other users; but for Douban, users could connect to other users through subjects. In fact, 66% of Douban users said they found new finds by reading comments, implying that new relationships were formed in fact through subjects rather than people. Network characteristics of Douban users encourage weak ties and, she tells us, internet-based collective action can promote online mobilization.