Research Methods and Global Online Communities by Alexia Maddox

Author:Alexia Maddox [Maddox, Alexia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367598020
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

7.2.1 Communication Hotspots

When thinking of relationships across this digital architecture, it is important to keep in mind that they consist of multimodal connectedness (Schroeder, 2010) and are rarely confined to any one channel. Schroeder (2010) argues that narrowly focusing on individual technologies of communication (such as a mobile phone in their case) misses the point that the mobile’s usage cannot easily be separated from usage of other information and communication technologies (ICTs). They argue that this misses the social behaviour of distributed maintenance of social ties across devices and refer to this as the concept of multimodal connectedness. Consequently, the media that people use to interact with each other defines the scope of ICT use and the accessibility and reach of social ties across the environment of a community. However it also reveals the nature of sociality within the community, for example whether it is group based or enacted through informal social networks. From the literature, we know that the channels of mediated sociability represent different combinations of factors of use such as cost, familiarity/skill base, who else in a peer network uses it, one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many styles of communication (Bolter & Grusin, 2000; Fuchs, 2005, 2008), mobility and convenience. In terms of understanding the results of the communicative environment of the network, it is helpful to take some time to think about the dynamic of each channel. See Table 7.2 for a brief outline of the dynamics of each channel reported on. This table is a synthesis of how these formats of interaction are described in Internet-based and media-based research on the social impacts of new media (cf. Bargh & McKenna, 2004; Chan, 2011; Comunello, 2012; Fuchs, 2005, 2008; Schroeder, 2010; Shanyang, 2006; Subrahmanyam et al., 2008; Trappeniers et al., 2008).

In light of this permissive spatial logic, the participants were asked about all of their possible channels of communication with other Herpers based on ICTs in use at the time of research. In their survey responses, they indicated how many Herpers they contacted via each channel in the last seven days. When looking at the univariate results in Table 7.11 below, face-to-face social contact, email use and other Internet channels were the most frequently used means to connect with other Herpers. This data is also further reinforced by the fact that much higher numbers of respondents (39.6 per cent, N = 486 and 35.5 per cent, N = 433 respectively) did not use landline phones or mobile phones to contact other Herpers in the last seven days, in comparison to those who did not use face-to-face, email or other Internet channels. From these univariate results, we can say that Herpers that the environment of the community is constituted by physical places where people are co-located, email threads, where Herpers maintain connections and Internet channels, particularly forums, where they maintain and create new connections through extended and diverse socio-technical domains. As these coordinates of sociability are open to engagement with diverse and unknown others in group contexts and informal

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