Caroline Haythornthwaite

The Internet in everyday life

List of Figures. List of Tables. Foreword: The Virtual Community in the Real World. (Howard Rheingold). Series Editora s Preface: The Internet and the Network Society . (Manuel Castells). Introduction: The Internet in Everyday Life. (Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry Wellman). Part I: Moving The Internet Out Of Cyberspace. The internet in Everyday Life: An Introduction. (Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry Wellman). Part II: The Place Of The Internet In Everyday Life. 1. Days and Nights on the Internet. (Philip Howard, Lee Rainie, and Steve Jones). 2 The Global Villagers: Comparing Internet Users and Uses Around the World. (Wenhong Chen, Jeffrey Boase and Barry Wellman). 3 Syntopia: Access, Civic Involvement and Social Interaction on the Net. (James Katz and Ronald Rice). 4 Digital Living: The Impact (or Otherwise) of the Internet in Everyday British Life. (Ben Anderson and Karina Tracey). 5 The Changing Digital Divide in Germany. (Gert Wagner, Rainer Pischner and John Haisken--DeNew). 6 Doing Social Science Research Online . (Alan Neustadtl, John Robinson and Meyer Kestnbaum). Part III: Finding Time For The Internet. 7 Internet Use, Interpersonal Relations and Sociability: A Time Diary Study. (Norman Nie, D. Sunshine Hillygus and Lutz Erbring). 8 The Internet and Other Uses of Time. (John Robinson, Meyer Kestnbaum, Alan Neustadtl and Anthony Alvarez). 9 Everyday Communication Patterns of Heavy and Light Email Users. (Janell Copher, Alaina Kanfer and Mary Bea Walker). Part IV: The Internet In The Community. 10 Capitalizing on the Net: Social Contact, Civic Engagement and Sense of Community. (Anabel Quan--Haase and Barry Wellman). 11 The Impact of Computer Networks on Social Capital and Community Involvement in Blacksburg. (Andrea Kavanaugh and Scott Patterson). 12 The Not So Global Village of Netville. (Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman). 13 Gender and Personal Relationships in HomeNet. (Bonka Boneva and Robert Kraut). 14 Belonging in Geographic, Ethnic and Internet Spaces. (Sorin Matei and Sandra Ball--Rokeach). Part V: The Internet At School, Work And Home. 15 Bringing the Internet Home: Adult distance learners and their Internet, Home and Work worlds. (Caroline Haythornthwaite and Michelle Kazmer). 16 Where Home is the Office: The New Form of Flexible Work. (Janet Salaff). 17 Kerala Connections: Will the Internet Affect Science in Developing Areas?. (Teresa Davidson, R. Sooryamoorthy and Wesley Shrum). 18 Social Support for Japanese Mothers Online and Offline . (Kakuko Miyata). 19 Shopping Behavior Online. (Robert Lunn and Michael Suman). Index

Social networks and internet connectivity effects

This paper explores the impact of communication media and the Internet on connectivity between people. Results from a series of social network studies of media use are used as background for exploration of these impacts. These studies explored the use of all available media among members of an academic research group and among distance learners. Asking about media use as well as about the strength of the tie between communicating pairs revealed that those more strongly tied used more media to communicate than weak ties, and that media use within groups conformed to a unidimensional scale, showing a configuration of different tiers of media use supporting social networks of different ties strengths. These results lead to a number of implications regarding media and Internet connectivity, including: how media use can be added to characteristics of social network ties; how introducing a medium can create latent tie connectivity among group members that provides the technical means for activating weak ties, and also how a change in a medium can disrupt existing weak tie networks; how the tiers of media use also suggest that certain media support different kinds of information flow; and the importance of organization-level decisions about what media to provide and promote. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for Internet effects.

Social network analysis: An approach and technique for the study of information exchange☆

Social network analysis is an approach and set of techniques used to study the exchange of resources among actors (i.e., individuals, groups, or organizations). One such resource is information. Regular patterns of information exchange reveal themselves as social networks, with actors as nodes in the network and information exchange relationships as connectors between nodes. Just as roads structure the flow of resources among cities, information exchange relationships structure the flow of information among actors. Social network analysis assesses information opportunities for individuals or groups of individuals in terms of exposure to and control of information. By gaining awareness of existing information exchange routes, information providers can act on information opportunities and make changes to information routes to improve the delivery of information services.

Strong, Weak, and Latent Ties and the Impact of New Media

This article argues that consideration of the strength of ties between communicators can help reconcile disparate results on the impact of new media on social relations. It is argued from the research literature and studies by the author that where ties are strong, communicators can influence each other to adapt and expand their use of media to support the exchanges important to their tie, but where ties are weak, communicators are dependent on common, organizationally established means of communication and protocols established by others. Due to this differential use of media, a new medium that adds means and opportunities for previously unconnected others to communicate will have positive effects on weak ties and weak-tie networks, in particular by laying an infrastructure of latent ties (ones that exist technically but have not yet been activated), and providing an opportunity for weak ties to develop and strengthen. A new medium may also have positive effects on strongly tied pairs where it adds another means of communicating and supports the communication needs and tasks of the pair. However, where a new medium replaces a former, common means of communication, the dependence of weak ties on a common medium makes weak-tie networks highly susceptible to dissolution. In contrast, strong-tie networks, with their connections via multiple relations and multiple media, can be expected to be more robust under conditions of change.

Work, friendship, and media use for information exchange in a networked organization

We use a social network approach to examine how work and friendship ties in a university research group were associated with the kinds of media used for different kinds of information exchange. The use of electronic mail, unscheduled face-to-face encounters, and scheduled face-to-face meetings predominated for the exchange of six kinds of information: Receiving Work, Giving Work, Collaborative Writing, Computer Programming, Sociability, and Major Emotional Support. Few pairs used synchronous desktop videoconferencing or the telephone. E-mail was used in similar ways as face-to-face communication. The more frequent the contact, the more “multiplex” the tie: A larger number of media was used to exchange a greater variety of information. The closeness of work ties and of friendship ties were each independently associated with more interaction: A greater frequency of communication, the exchange of more kinds of information, and the use of more media.

Exploring multiplexity : Social network structures in a computer-supported distance learning class

A computer-mediated group is a complex entity whose members exchange many types of information via multiple means of communication in pursuit of goals specific to their environment. Over time, they coordinate technical features of media with locally enacted use to achieve a viable working arrangement. To explore this complex interaction, a case study is presented of the social networks of interactions and media use among members of a class of computer-supported distance learners. Results show how group structures associated with project teams dominated who communicated with whom, about what, and via which media over the term, and how media came to occupy their own communication niches: Webboard for diffuse class-wide communication; Internet Relay Chat more to named others but still for general communication across the class; and e-mail primarily for intrateam communication. Face-to-face interaction, occurring only during a short on-campus session, appears to have had a catalytic effect on social and emotional exchanges. Results suggest the need to structure exchanges to balance class-wide sharing of ideas with subgroup interactions that facilitate project completion, and to provide media that support these two modes of interaction.

The SAGE Handbook of E-learning Research

The new edition of The SAGE Handbook of E-Learning Researchretains the original effort of the first edition by focusing on research while capturing the leading edge of e-learning development and practice. Chapters focus on areas of development in e-learning technology, theory, practice, pedagogy and method of analysis. Covering the full extent of e-learning can be a challenge as developments and new features appear daily. The editors of this book meet this challenge by including contributions from leading researchers in areas that have gained a sufficient critical mass to provide reliable results and practices. The 25 chapters are organised into six key areas: 1. THEORY 2. LITERACY & LEARNING 3. METHODS & PERSPECTIVES 4. PEDAGOGY & PRACTICE 5. BEYOND THE CLASSROOM 6. FUTURES

Motivation for open collaboration: Crowd and community models and the case of OpenStreetMap.

This article presents an examination of motivational factors relating to contribution to the wiki OpenStreetMap, a site for voluntary geographic information. Based on a wide literature review of motivation, open source, volunteerism, and serious leisure, a questionnaire was created and completed by 444 OpenStreetMap contributors. Results of judgments of the motivational importance of 39 reasons for contribution are presented and considered in relation to models of contributory behavior for crowd- and community-based online collaborations. Positive and important motivators were found that accorded with ideas of the “personal but shared need” associated with contribution to open-source projects, co-orientation to open-source and geographic knowledge, and attention to participation in and by the community. Differences in motivation between serious and casual mappers showed that serious mappers were more oriented to community, learning, local knowledge, and career motivations (although the latter motivation is low in general), and casual mappers were more oriented to general principles of free availability of mapping data.

Crowds and Communities: Light and Heavyweight Models of Peer Production

Two collaborative forms of organizing dominate discussion of open participation and production on the Internet: a crowdsourcing model based on microparticipation from many, unconnected individuals, and a virtual community model, based on strong connections among a committed set of connected members. This paper argues that dimensions such as task interdependence, authority control, and group focus underpin behaviors associated with participation in such open systems, resulting in contributory behaviors that can be described at one end as ‘lightweight’, functioning by weak-tie attachment to a common purpose, enacted through authority-determined, rule-based contribution, and at the other end as ‘heavyweight’, operating through strong-tie affiliation with community members and community purpose, enacted through internallynegotiated, peer-reviewed contribution. Examination and articulation of these dimensions, and the resulting patterns of contributory behavior they engender, help reconcile peer production and virtual community approaches to online collaboration, explain motivational and structural aspects of new forms of collaborative production, and inform design for building and sustaining collective contributory systems.

Learning and knowledge networks in interdisciplinary collaborations

Interdisciplinary collaboration has become of particular interest as science and social science research increasingly crosses traditional boundaries, raising issues about what kinds of information and knowledge exchange occurs, and thus what to support. Research on interdisciplinarity, learning, and knowledge management suggest the benefits of collaboration are achieved when individuals pool knowledge toward a common goal. Yet, it is not sufficient to say that knowledge exchange must take place; instead, we need to ask what kinds of exchanges form the basis of collaboration in these groups. To explore this, members of three distributed, interdisciplinary teams (one science and two social science teams) were asked what they learned from the five to eight others with whom they worked most closely, and what they thought those others learned from them. Results show the exchange of factual knowledge to be only one of a number of learning exchanges that support the team. Important exchanges also include learning the process of doing something, learning about methods, engaging jointly in research, learning about technology, generating new ideas, socialization into the profession, accessing a network of contacts, and administration work. Distributions of these relations show that there is more sharing of similar than different kinds knowledge, suggesting that knowledge may flow across disciplinary boundaries along lines of practice.