Engagement, imagination, and alignment

Ren et al's common bond/common identity framework is basically an imagination form of belonging (in Wenger's terms). To imagine the set of people all having a certain set of characteristics with things in common.

Alignment means you take actions with others to advance the interests of the collective. You are aligned with a particular agenda (a task force?) but may not think of having common characteristics.

"The work of..." sections starting on p. 184 as a good place to clear up the confusion of the chapter. How does the work of creating identity through belonging (through identity and alignment) appear in Cool Running?

Mutually constitutable argument
You have to be able to reference the idea of community if you wish to talk about identity issues for individuals.

Likewise, if you're going to talk about community identity, you need to talk about the individual identities that compose those communities.

Identity does not exist just through individual declaration -- there must be a community that recognizes that identity (see Yong-Mi's diagram). In interactions with communities, only parts of your identity is revealed to each community

Following the format of my chapter 6 entry...

Reading notes

- Are there different degrees of non-participation? On p. 165 Wenger claims that realizing that I'm not a member of the claims processors CoP is "inconsequential." But I'm not a member of the SI PhD students' CoP, a realization that seems much less inconsequential to me, given the opportunities to participate in it. My non-participation in that group is a much larger part of my identity than my non-participation as a claims processor, is it not?

- Ah, he seems to be getting at this question with his definitions of peripheriality and marginality (165-6)

I'm going to switch things up a bit since I'm late to the party and there are already several excellent summaries of Wenger that should get us started. I'll include some notes here for my own selfish paper-writing purposes, and then try to give back to the blog by adding notes from our in-class discussion.

Notes
- Identity and practice as parallel
- Identity as a social process of lived experiences of participation in specific communities
- Identities form trajectories in and across communities as we participate (154)
- The "temporal notion of trajectory characterizes identity as:" (158)

Meta-contrast is the ratio of between group differences and within group differences.

Prototype of a social category is determined with this ratio, and helps explain why the average of the group beliefs is not the prototype.

Some implications of meta-contrast in group identity formation:
- Groups pick a prototype that maximizes this ratio; polarization happens b/c people move towards the prototype
- Decisions about who is in and who is out are based on this prototype
- Leader of group tends to be close to this prototype

Summary
Race and physical body features have been defined in relation to one another for centuries. In an online environment in which cues about physical features are absent, the question is quite literally: how is race read?

Burkhalter proposes that race is read online in several ways: through establishing or assigning a racial identity; use of racial frames (using a phrase like "sisters"); by using an identity (anonymity as disqualifier); through disputes about identity (self-revelation and identity cues); through community collaboration and characterizations; and through exposure to different audiences when items are cross-posted.

Summary
Apologies for the length. This paper will likely factor heavily into my final papers about Cool Running, so I wanted to document it well.

Ren, Kraut, and Kiesler examine the design implcations for online communities given certain social psychological theories of common identity and common bond. They also make the larger point that theory matters and can provide a "more principled approach" to the design of online communities.

Common identity: a feeling of attachment to the group as a whole rather than to fellow group members. The authors assert that common identity online implies a commitment to the purpose of the online community.

Summary
The hypothesis is that close relationships are more likely to form online between people who reveal their "true self" to others, and these online relationships are more likely to result in face-to-face relationships. After performing three studies, the authors claim that 1) meaningful relationships form online; 2) these relationships are stable over time, and; 3) people like one another more when they meet face-to-face after starting their relationship online. They posit that gating feaetures (barriers to relationship formation such as ugliness, shyness, etc.) that are absent online help explain why online relations hit it off so well when they meet face-to-face.

Summary
The authors assert that the relationships formed online are "less valuable" than relationships formed offline. They arrive at this conclusion by examining two things: 1) how the quality of social interactions are affected when they are created over a digital medium and 2) whether online relationships supplant or suplement offline relationships.

The authors replicated a comparative study of communication media and found that email was less preferred by participants who wished to sustain personal relationships. Communication in person and over the phone were much better predictors of relationship strength. They examined listserv interactions to try and determine relationship strength in non-dyadic environments. Here, too, they found the quality of conversation low compared to face-to-face mediums.