Jonathan Bishop

Enhancing the understanding of genres of web-based communities: the role of the ecological cognition framework

Web-based communities have been an interest of social science researchers since the dawn of the millennium. To date, much research into them has focused on the methods to enhance community building and understand those who do not participate in community life, known as lurkers. This paper explores web-based communities as a type of media, classifying types of web-based community such as message boards, chat groups and weblogs as genres. A methodology is proposed based on the Ecological Cognition Framework (ECF) for reading these web-based communities in order to determine their genre and subgenre. Utilising both quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the images, text and other artefacts in these web-based communities, two specific subgenres of the weblogs and directories genre emerge as the political blog and the mommy blog and these are compared with the significant differences that are found between them that make them solid subgenres.

The art of trolling law enforcement: a review and model for implementing ‘flame trolling' legislation enacted in Great Britain 1981–2012

The advancement of information and communications technology often results in early adoption, followed by concern over a digital divide, followed by mass adoption and then, inevitably, abuse and misuse of that platform. The most recent of these technologies is social networking services. The early adopters used Friendster and MySpace, and the masses now use Facebook and Twitter. The abuse of people on these platforms was called Cyberbullying in the case of the first two in the 2000s, and Internet trolling in the case of the second two in the 2010s. This paper reviews the legislation enacted in the UK parliament between 1981 and 2012 to deal with these offences, called ‘flame trolling’, for those based on transgress humour, or electronic message faults more generally. The paper presents a framework that includes a ‘Trolling Magnitude Scale’ based on established trolling culture, in order to link the legislative offences to the severities of those faults, as well as to the ability of specific Internet users to tolerate them or otherwise. The paper concludes that by using this framework law enforcement agencies such as the police can apply the laws more fairly and proportionally to protect free speech and at the same time be tough on the causes of electronic message faults in the form of Internet abuse and data misuse.

Digital Teens and the 'Antisocial Network': Prevalence of Troublesome Online Youth Groups and Internet trolling in Great Britain

A concern shared among nearly all generations of adults is that they must do something to tackle the problems in society caused by young people. They often forget that they were once young, and all too often blame young people for all of problems in their community. This paper challenges this view and shows how the blaming of Internet trolling on todays young people — called digital teens — is probably inaccurate. What might otherwise be called Troublesome Online Youth Groups (TOYGs), this paper looks at data collected from subjects in three UK regions (n=150 to 161), which includes young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEETs). Unlike might be typically thought, the data shows that far from these NEETs being the causes of Internet trolling it is in fact the areas with high levels of productivity, higher education and higher intelligence that report lower perceptions of quality of life that these electronic message faults (EMFts) most occur in.

Tough on data misuse, tough on the causes of data misuse: A review of New Labour's approach to information security and regulating the misuse of digital information (1997-2010)

New Labour was a description of a particular approach to government of the British Labour Party, which was in power in the United Kingdom between 1997 and 2010. While this government initially envisaged an end to the social causes of misdemeanours, its actions led to a greater number of laws on the statute books creating thousands of statutory offences. A small number of these had direct effects on the number of computer related offences that were able to be prosecuted. This paper reviews these laws, and the role of legal systems in responding to the increasing number of misdemeanours that are occurring in computer environments for which New Labours approach of creating more statutory offences has not addressed.

Networked: The New Social Operating System

Reviewed by Jonathan Bishop, Centre for Research into Online Communities and E-Learning Systems, European Parliament, Brussels, BelgiumNetworked: The New Social Operating SystemLee Raine and Barry Wellman©2012 by The MIT Press358 pp.

Representations of 'trolls' in mass media communication: a review of media-texts and moral panics relating to 'internet trolling'

29.95ISBN 978-026-2017-19-0This book by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman aims to show how the large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals expand oppor-tunities for learning, problem solving, decision making, and personal interaction. It does this quite successfully, through providing a strong introduction to the authors’ research specialism of networked individualism. The purpose of the book appears to be to consolidate over 30 years’ of research on networked individualism into one volume, which makes it easier for people getting to grips with online social networking to understand this important yet abstract area. Even so, one might still ask whether it is worth buying a whole book dedicated to a concept with a very narrow research base beyond that of the authors. This review might provide the answer.The book is made up of 11 chapters split into three sections. Organisationally it is very well assembled. Each section has a chapter linking it to the next, which although helpful, raises the question whether this should have been an inbuilt feature. The authors discuss in the introduction whether they should have named the book ‘Networked Individualism’, saying that this would confuse readers who might not know what it means. But to anyone who has followed the authors’ extensive works on the subject previously, it would probably have made more sense to have done so, if only to differentiate it from the more technological books on the market implied in the title. The book follows an interesting and well docu-mented biographical account of the lives of online community moderators, Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz, who first appeared in Wellman’s work in the 1990s (Wellman & Gulia, 1999). This provides consistency in terms of making the examples given easy to relate to, yet one can’t help but feel that it is not in keeping with the era of “YOU” conceptualised by Time Magazine. With the very nature of networked individualism being about the joining of differ-ent people across different frontiers, first spoken about by David Kemp in his three-decades long study of electoral behaviour and social mobility in Australia (Kemp, 1978), most would have