Online Collective Action: Dynamics of the Crowd in Social Media PDF
Preview Online Collective Action: Dynamics of the Crowd in Social Media
Lecture Notes in Social Networks Nitin Agarwal Merlyna Lim Rolf T. Wigand Editors Online Collective Action Dynamics of the Crowd in Social Media Lecture Notes in Social Networks (LNSN) Series Editors Reda Alhajj UniversityofCalgary Calgary,AB,Canada Uwe Gla¨sser SimonFraserUniversity Burnaby,BC,Canada Advisory Board CharuAggarwal,IBMT.J.WatsonResearchCenter,Hawthorne,NY,USA PatriciaL.Brantingham,SimonFraserUniversity,Burnaby,BC,Canada ThiloGross,UniversityofBristol,UnitedKingdom JiaweiHan,UniversityofIllinoisatUrbana-Champaign,IL,USA HuanLiu,ArizonaStateUniversity,Tempe,AZ,USA Rau´lMana´sevich,UniversityofChile,Santiago,Chile AnthonyJ.Masys,CentreforSecurityScience,Ottawa,ON,Canada CarloMorselli,UniversityofMontreal,QC,Canada RafaelWittek,UniversityofGroningen,TheNetherlands DanielZeng,TheUniversityofArizona,Tucson,AZ,USA For furthervolumes: http://www.springer.com/series/8768 . Nitin Agarwal (cid:129) Merlyna Lim (cid:129) Rolf T. Wigand Editors Online Collective Action Dynamics of the Crowd in Social Media Editors NitinAgarwal MerlynaLim DepartmentofInformationScience SchoolofJournalismandCommunication UniversityofArkansasatLittleRock CarletonUniversity LittleRock Ottawa,Ontario,Canada Arkansas,USA RolfT.Wigand DepartmentsofInformationScience andBusinessInformationSystems UniversityofArkansasatLittleRock LittleRock USA ISSN2190-5428 ISSN2190-5436(electronic) ISBN978-3-7091-1339-4 ISBN978-3-7091-1340-0(eBook) DOI10.1007/978-3-7091-1340-0 SpringerWienHeidelbergNewYorkDordrechtLondon LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2014946576 ©Springer-VerlagWien2014 Thisworkissubjecttocopyright.AllrightsarereservedbythePublisher,whetherthewholeorpart of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,broadcasting,reproductiononmicrofilmsorinanyotherphysicalway,andtransmissionor informationstorageandretrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware,orbysimilarordissimilar methodologynowknownorhereafterdeveloped.Exemptedfromthislegalreservationarebriefexcerpts inconnectionwithreviewsorscholarlyanalysisormaterialsuppliedspecificallyforthepurposeofbeing enteredandexecutedonacomputersystem,forexclusiveusebythepurchaserofthework.Duplication ofthispublicationorpartsthereofispermittedonlyundertheprovisionsoftheCopyrightLawofthe Publisher’s location, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer.PermissionsforusemaybeobtainedthroughRightsLinkattheCopyrightClearanceCenter. 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Printedonacid-freepaper SpringerispartofSpringerScience+BusinessMedia(www.springer.com) Preface Contemporary collective actions, from the 2011 Egyptian Tahrir uprising to the 2013 Turkish protest in Gezi Park, cannot be separated from the uses of social media.Invariousrecentprotests,socialmediaaredescribedasimportanttoolsfor thedisparatecrowdtocommunicate,coordinate,organize,andmobilizeitself.How do social media influence, change, or shape (or not) the ways in which people collectivelymobilizethemselves? The new phenomenon called “online collective action,” a collective action that emerges in a networked online environment, has led to the emergence of a new scholarship. In the last few years, there has been a surge in research devoted to deepening our understanding of online collective action, including our own National Science Foundation-sponsored study entitled “Cyber-collective Movements” (website: http://onlinecollectiveaction.lab.asu.edu/), a project that led to the origin of this book. Analysis of online collective action is a relatively newandfast-movingfieldduetotherapiddevelopmentofthetechnologiesinuse ontheground.Largegapsinourunderstandinginevitablyremain. The contemporary use of social media, in particular, has unavoidably linked collectivebehaviorwithsocialnetworks.Asindividualsandgroupsbecomemore networked through social media, real-time communication can take place in the vast social network instantaneously. How does this new way of communication influence and shape the formation ofcollective action? Is there a need toreassess collective action theory to provide deeper insights for successful contemporary collectiveactioneffortsleveragingthenewwayofcommunication?Arethereany fundamentalaspectsofcontemporarycollectiveactioneffortsthatcanbeidentified and explained using existing collective action theory or do we need innovative approaches and methodologies to reframe and reconceive collective action theory inonlineenvironments? The book aims to contribute to our understanding of contemporary collective action in the age of the Internet and social media by approaching it from various perspectives rooted in diverse disciplines. By carefully selecting a number of qualitativeandquantitative studies fromcomputationalandsocial sciencesfocus- ing on online collective actions, through this edited volume we aim to promote a v vi Preface symbioticandsynergisticadvancementofthemultiple,interconnecteddisciplines. More specifically, we intend to illuminate several fundamental and powerful yet theoretically undeveloped and largely unexplored aspects of collective action in socialmedia. The book consists of three distinctive parts: (1) concepts, theories, and methodologies; (2) applications; and (3) case studies. The first part consists of high-level discussions on concepts, theories, and methodologies. Five chapters have been grouped under this category. The authors of these chapters have proposed, developed, and evaluated the models to advance our understanding of onlinecollectiveactionsbeyondanecdotalevidences.Themodelspresentedinthe chaptershaveconceptualandtheoreticalunderpinnings frommultipledisciplines, including computational sciences, social sciences, mathematics, and statistics to understand,evaluate,andmeasureonlinecollectiveactions. In the chapter entitled “Sentiment Analysis in Social Media,” Georgios Paltogloudiscussesmethodologies,theories,andtechniquesfromadiversesetof scientific domains, ranging from psychology and sociology to natural language processing and machine learning for sentiment analysis and its contributions to understanding the online collective action phenomenon. The author argues that such actions are motivated by intense emotional states, and sentiment analysis couldofferinsightstounderstandtheentirelifecycleofonlinecollectiveactions. Leveraging the notions of natural language processing, Dipankar Das and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay, in their chapter entitled “Emotion Analysis on Social Media:NaturalLanguageProcessingApproachesandApplications,”consider collective actions as events, and the emotional change with respect to events is represented using the graphical notion of sentiment-event tracking. The authors mainlyfocusonblogusersandtheirtopicsofdiscussionforidentifyingemotional changes with respect to time. They have considered the social interactions of the bloggers as collective actions, and their emotional changes based on such actions have been measured from the perspectives of topic and time. Goldina Ghosh, SoumyaBanerjee,andVasilePalade,intheirchapterentitled“DiscoveringFlow of Sentiment and Transient Behavior of Online Social Crowd: An Analysis ThroughSocialInsects,”however,havestudiedthesentimentflowinacrowdas expressedonsocialmediasitesduringacrisiseventusinganagent-basedparadigm knownasswarmintelligence. Further, Anna Chmiel, Julian Sienkiewicz, Georgios Paltoglou, Kevan Buckley, Marcin Skowron, Mike Thelwall, Arvid Kappas, and Janusz A. Holyst, in their chapter entitled “Collective Emotions Online,” demonstrate therelevanceofnegativeemotionsinsustainingtheonlinediscussionsinavariety of web platforms, including blogs, discussion forums, IRC channels, and Digg communities.Moreover, the findingssuggestindividual and collectivepatternsof emotionalactivitiesamongwebforumusers. ThelastchapterinthiscategorybyAlanKellerGomesandMariadaGrac¸a Campos Pimentel, entitled “Evaluation of Media-Based Social Interactions: LinkingCollectiveActionstoMediaTypes,Applications,andDevicesinSocial Networks,” presents a technique for capturing, representing, and measuring Preface vii collectiveactionsinsocialnetworks.Itusesusedataminingprocedurestomeasure behavioral contingencies in the form of if-then rules and identify links among a variety of platforms for social interactions, such as actions (e.g., like), media objects (e.g., photo), application type (web or mobile), and device type (e.g., Android). The second part of the book comprises discussions of three applications, each extractinganddistillinguniqueanglesandperspectivesofcollectiveaction.These rangefromasociologicalperspectiveofinformationsharingresultingincollective knowledge and action to computer-mediated communication in virtual citizen science and to crowdsourcing methods of pro-environmental collective action. All of these application chapters demonstrate how unique outcomes can be achievedusingnewerinformationandcommunicationtechnologies(ICT)coupled withsocialmediatoachievepreviouslyunachievablelevelsandformsofcollective action. The chapter “The Studies of Blogs and Online Communities: From Information to Knowledge and Action” by Emanuela Todeva and Donka Keskinovaisthefirstamongthreeinthisapplicationcategory.Thiscontribution, whiletakingasociologicalperspective,addresseswhethertheriseofblogsasarich informationmediummaygeneratenewopinionleaderswhointurntransformand challengetraditionallyheldEuropeanpublicviewsonpharmaceuticalsandhealth care.Todeva’sfindingsrevealthatinspiteoftherelativelyhighvolumeofblogsfor theinvestigatedperiod,surprisinglyonlyasmallnumberareinterlinkedbymutual referrals.Theresultingnetworkconfigurationdemonstratesasmallcorecomponent withmanydyads,orshorttails,representingaratherfragmentedcommunityspace. TheauthorconcludesthatinspiteofhightechnicalInternetconnectivity,commu- nity interaction is relatively limited, and there is no evidence of online crowd or collectiveaction. The next chapter by Jason T. Reed, Arfon Smith, Michael Parish, and Angelique Rickhoff, entitled “Using Contemporary Collective Action to UnderstandtheUseofComputer-MediatedCommunicationinVirtualCitizen Science,” looks at how virtual citizen science creates Internet-based projects involving volunteers collaborating with scientists in authentic scientific research. This chapter describes how virtual citizen science can be understood asa form of onlinecollectiveaction.Computer-mediatedcommunicationplatformssupportall aspectsofprojectactivityandinteraction.Usingcollectiveactiontheoryallowsfor thecreationofacollectiveactionspacebasedonacombinationofvariousformsof interactionandprojectresponsibilitiesavailabletovolunteers. The third and last chapter in this category of applications authored by Janis L. Dickinson and Rhiannon L. Crain is entitled “Socially Networked Citizen Science and the Crowd-Sourcing of Pro-Environmental Collective Actions.” Theauthorspositthatthesocialwebhaschangedthenatureofhumancollaboration with new possibilities for massive-scale cooperative endeavors such as scientific research and environmentally important collective action. “Next generation” citi- zensciencepracticenetworkscombinecrowdsourcing,ajointsenseofpurpose,and softinstitutionalgovernancewiththedistributedintelligenceandefficacyofonline viii Preface socialnetworks.Theauthorstapintoevolutionarytheoryandsocialpsychologyto generate hypotheses for how such “next generation” citizen projects can best support pro-environmental behaviors such as habitat restoration and energy con- servation. Finally, the authors explore how properties of social networks them- selvesenhancethespreadofbehaviorsthroughthethreedegreesrule,homophily, socialcontagion,andthestrengthofweakties. The third part of the book, the case studies, provides rich and well-studied illustrations of the ways in which activists and citizen groups in various contexts use online media to collectively organize themselves into political actions. The four chapters included in this category represent four case studies from Spain, Egypt, Morocco, and the United States. The four case studies examine exemplarymovementorganizationsandnetworkswhereonlinetoolsandpractices arewovenintothefabricofsocialmovements. Thechapterentitled“TheSpanish‘Indignados’Movement:TimeDynamics, GeographicalDistribution,andRecruitmentMechanisms”presentsthefirstof the four case studies included in this book. Analyzing Twitter data from the Indignados, Javier Borge-Holthoefer, Sandra Gonza´lez-Bailo´n, Alejandro Rivero, and Yamir Moreno investigate the mechanisms involved in the emer- gence,development,andstabilizationofthemovement.Trackingcentralissuesin thesocialnetworkliterature,suchasrecruitmentpatternsandinformationcascades, this study offers an empirical test to help us answer some sociological questions about collective action and better understand the connection between online net- worksandsocialmovements. The second case study continues to deepen our understanding of the usage of Twitterincollectiveactions.Inthechapterentitled“TheStrengthofTweetTies,” Rob Schroeder, Sean F. Everton, and Russell Shepherd explore how Egyptian activists utilized Twitter to frame grievances in ways that resonate with their targetedaudience.UsingTwitterdatacollectedduringthe2011Egyptianprotests, the authors examine whether the Twitter usage helped to diffuse the Arab Spring frame across Egypt and generate greater social cohesion around their messages. Analyzing counts of complete triads, which are regarded as an indicator of cohe- sion, the authors conclude that activists occupy the position of brokerage in the Twitternetwork,andthisnetworkpositionhasenabledthemtoframegrievancesin waysthatbroughtpeopletogetherandhelpedmobilizethemforaction. In “The Arab Spring in North Africa: Still Winter in Morocco?” Rebecca S.RobinsonandMaryJaneC.Parmentierpresentarichlynuancedcasestudyof the use of blogs for political activism in Morocco. Focusing on the Blogoma, the Moroccan Blogosphere, the authors utilize collective action literature to examine thenatureofonlinepublicnarrativesinlightofseveral“ArabSpring”proteststhat occurred in Morocco. They argue that online collective actions through the Blogoma fail to reflect social and political divisions within the society and, thus, are disconnected from the majority of Moroccan citizens. However, this online activism does contribute to a larger and freer civic sphere in the country by providing a space for Moroccan bloggers to exercise their freedom of expression Preface ix and converse,socially and politically, with each other without an overt control of thegovernment. The last case study of the book discusses how two groups of American Muslims,theCouncilofAmerican-IslamicRelations(CAIR)andtheHijabifashion community,addresstheissueofhijabanddiscriminationintheworkplacethrough online collective actions. In “Online and Offline Advocacy for American Hijabis: Organizational and Organic Tactical Configurations,” Rebecca S. Robinson analyzes the divergent tactics of these two groups by utilizing the conceptsoforganizationalandorganic,wherethelatterisemployedtodelineatethe non- or less hierarchical, self-organized nature of collective action. While neither one can be said to be superior, the author argues that the organic tactics are more grounded in a shared sense of identity and context and are embedded in the experiencesofhijabis“ontheground”asopposedtotheorganizationaltactics. These12chaptersofthebooktogetherprovideaninterdisciplinaryplatformfor researchers,practitioners,andgraduatestudentsfromdifferentdisciplinestoshare, exchange, learn, and develop preliminary results, new concepts, ideas, principles, andmethodologies,aimingtoadvanceanddeepenourunderstandingofcollective action in social media to help criticaldecision and policy making. The developed methodologies will be a valuable companion and comprehensive reference for anyone interested in newer ICT, examining their role in decision and policy making; understanding the dynamics of interaction, communication, information propagation,andopiniondiffusion;andresearchinginsocialnetworksforyearsto come.Thebookalsoservesasanextensiverepositoryofdatasetsandtoolsthatcan be used by researchers leading to a perpetual and synergistic advancement of the discipline. RecentadvancementsinWeb2.0haveprovidedvastopportunitiestoinvestigate thedynamicsandstructureofweb-basedsocialnetworks.Throughthepublication ofthiseditedvolume,wehopetofacilitatedisseminationofthesenewlydeveloped methodsaswellastheinvestigationsandtheiroutcomes. LittleRock,AR NitinAgarwal Ottawa,ON MerlynaLim LittleRock,AR RolfT.Wigand
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