Author Archives: Anne Chen

Q: What do you think about the difference between the theories of collective action in the context of virtual communities? 

WZ: No words in one definition of conceptualization refer to agency or consciousness – so that what we normally understand about collective action is that it is about achieving some sort of collective end. So Weiyu points to an idea of “collective intelligent design,” and how SNS can have mechanisms that suggest relevant content users. 

Q: For Weiyu: One could argue that all social networks are about relationships. Lam: where did you do your fieldwork and what were your implements? Continue reading →

Michael Delli Carpini responds with some commentary about the papers and their implications.  He applauds the papers in format and substance, reminding us that we’re only getting an excerpt of the papers based on the presentations.

For Jiang’s paper, Michael acknoweldges her “important move” in making a distinction between different types of Internet sites, such as the collocated v. distributed diaspora sites she discusses in the paper.  As with many empirical studies, the difficulties of self-selection are a limit to what kinds of implications we can make with these data sets.  Nonetheless, the conclusion that the real value of building social capital is to connect to a real (physical and virtual) community is important.  To really make that case, though, Michael suggests that we should look to collocated web sites and compare that with those who are in the physical community but do not go online.

Michael considers Sunny’s paper in some ways a “poignant” paper about the role of ICTs in trying to maintain the familial solidarity so integral to Chinese culture.  It’s an almost ethnographic approach that consequently brings a rich flavor to it.  Sunny asks, Michael reminds us, does mobile phones and the Internet bring some kind of solidarity in the face of Chinese society?  The suggestion that new ties may be more virtual is convincing to Michael, but he also wonders what’s driving it and what the normative implications are–can you meaningfully look at ties that might in fact be almost exclusively virtual?  In the first paper, the most valued use of online community is when they are connected to the physical community; here, the question is what is the value of an almost totally virtual community. Michael thinks it’s an open question.

Michael also considers Weiyu Zhang’s paper a valuable contribution because it demonstrates the characteristics of social networking sites in a helpfully multimethod manner, and learning how ties (especially weak ties) emerge in forming social capital.  Issues remain about sampling and direction of causality, but he thinks it’s nonetheless an important contribution about implications of social action. Continue reading →

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? Continue reading →

Sunny Lam thinks that ICTs can be used as a way of strengthening familial solidarity. He brings us this paper based several post-1978 economic reforms, including the “four modernizations” which led to enterprise reform and loose hukou zhidu, education system reform (1977), and China’s one-child policy (since 1979).

He wonders whether ICTs as new channels for communication can help establish what he calls a “translocal familial solidarity” between generations, especially as young family members become more socially and spatially mobile.  He also wants to know whether ICT models can tackle social tensions within this area.  He pulls from theoretical frameworks and literature on media and migration, “network of solidarity” (Castells), and translocality. We can think of “modernity as motivation,” he tells us, and “translocality mobilizes people to take social action.”

The findings, Sunny tells us, show Continue reading →

And now, introducing our final set of panelists for a special session:

• Yong HU, Peking University
• Guobin YANG, Columbia University
• Jack QIU, Working-class network society: Connubication technology and the information have-less in urban China, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Moderator: Monroe PRICE, University of Pennsylvania

As always, you can also watch the webcast live, among other ways of staying connected with the conference’s proceedings. And full biographies of panelists are still available here.

Q: In the network analysis of these communities, how do you collect data, and how do you measure and define the links in the node?

JK: Sometimes we remove sites that do a lot of internal linking, but we do find additional clusters. 

Q: For Zhang Lei – what are some of the challenges that the translation communities are facing, e.g. copyright issues from the West, or other issues from the East?

Continue reading →

Before serving as Associate Dean for International Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Amy Gadsden spent the past few years working closely with civil society groups on the ground, and worked for many years in China on joint cooperation projects with Chinese governmental and non-governmental agencies.  In her experience working with civil societies in China, she was often told of the difficulty of having NGOs work with each other or in different issues.  Those were the limits 8-9 years ago.

Now, she remarks on how the Internet has broken down some of those barriers in China, focusing on communities and clusters–terms each panelist has used in a different way–through a different lens.  The Internet has now allowed NGOs to be able to talk to one another about shared concerns, moving civil societies along faster than they would have otherwise.  And today, it is more likely citizen dissidents will go online instead of in the square.

Even so, the Internet can also bring out some ugly sides, enabling others to speak out and attack each other in a manner reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution.  So how does the Internet develop as a space for addressing problems?

Final note – one of the most powerful stories Isaac Mao raised in the last 20-25 years is the common man in China, and one that has been overlooked by much of media.

Isaac Mao discusses some of his work over the past 7 years since his first blog post in 2002.

The Internet has influenced each level of the traditionally rigid social layering in China.  A big question for the highest leaders now is how can certain parties access new, not just traditional, types of media?  The better informed these leaders are, the more able they are to be able to control content and curb activist work, for example, in lower layers.  They have to be diligent to satisfy their supervisors, but they are not well connected.

IM thus classifies two groups based on whether they are better or less connected.  He suggests that we must examine how people are able to pull others from the unconnected to the connected groups.  This can be the future hope for the Chinese social system, by encouraging the emergence of new communities that can bridge between connected and unconnected groups.

IM is also seeing another change from Western media which has traditionally relied on a few sources to report back to their media formats.  Now, more reporting organizations are relying on reports from more sources and more citizen journalists.  With this change, there is hope that we can provide more of a voice for the average citizen.  

Chinese media is also changing their attitude to social media.  In the 3rd CIRC, he saw more resistance that the blogosphere could be a realistic critical mass to change media; now, attitudes have changed, and more and more journalists in China are switching to bloggers.  They are relying on alternate forms of media to express themselves.  Other professionals – lawyers and businessmen, for example – are also using their blogs for multiple uses.  IM hopes to dig into this aspect, to see how Chinese communities and social relations with each other are changing in the social media sphere.