Sorin Adam Matei

Storytelling Neighborhood: Paths to Belonging in Diverse Urban Environments

This article develops and tests a communication infrastructure model of belonging among dwellers of urban residential environments. The concept of a communication infrastructure—a storytelling system set in its communication action context—is discussed. Storytelling neighborhood, the communication process through which neighborhood discussion transforms people from occupants of a house to members of a neighborhood, is proposed as an essential component of peoples paths to belonging, an attachment to a residential area that is evidenced in everyday exchange behaviors. A multimethod research design is employed to study seven residential areas in Los Angeles through the use of multilingual data collection to discover the relevant factors that determine belonging in new and old immigrant communities. A communication infrastructure model that posits storytelling as an intervening process between structural location and belonging is proposed and tested. Overall, the most important factor in creating belonging was found to be an active and integrated storytelling system that involves residents, community organizations, and local media. The diagnostic potentials of the communication infrastructure approach and the policy implications of the findings are discussed.

Fear and Misperception of Los Angeles Urban Space: A Spatial-Statistical Study of Communication-Shaped Mental Maps

Imagining urban space as being comfortable or fearful is studied as an effect of peoples connections to their residential area communication infrastructure. Geographic Information System (GIS) modeling and spatial-statistical methods are used to process 215 mental maps obtained from respondents to a multilingual survey of seven ethnically marked residential communities of Los Angeles. Spatial-statistical analyses reveal that fear perceptions of Los Angeles urban space are not associated with commonly expected causes of fear, such as high crime victimization likelihood. The main source of discomfort seems to be presence of non-White and non-Asian populations. Respondents more strongly connected to television and interpersonal communication channels are relatively more fearful of these populations than those less strongly connected. Theoretical, methodological, and community-building policy implications are discussed.

Cultural Cognitive Style and Web Design: Beyond a Behavioral Inquiry into Computer‐Mediated Communication

Numerous studies have identified links among culture, user preferences, and Web site usability. Most of these studies were reports of findings from a behavioral perspective in explaining how cultural factors affect processes of Web-related content design and use. Based on the research of Vygotsky and Nisbett, the authors propose a broader model, referred to as ‘‘cultural cognition theory,’’ by which Web design, like other types of information production, is seen as being shaped by cultural cognitive processes that impact the designers’ cognitive style. This study explores issues related to Web designers’ cultural cognitive styles and their impact on user responses. The results of an online experiment that exposed American 1 and Chinese users to sites created by both Chinese and American designers indicate that users perform information-seeking tasks faster when using Web content created by designers from their own cultures.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Virtual Community Discourse and the Dilemma of Modernity

Virtual communities are discussed as expressions of the modern tension between individuality and community, emphasizing the role that counterculture and its values played in shaping the virtual community project. This article analyzes postings to the WELL conferences and the online groups that served as incubators and testing ground for the term “virtual community,” revealing how this concept was culturally shaped by the countercultural ideals of WELL users and how the tension between individualism and communitarian ideals was dealt with. The overarching conclusion is that virtual communities act both as solvent and glue in modern society, being similar to the “small group” movement.

Watts, the 1965 Los Angeles Riots, and the Communicative Construction of the Fear Epicenter of Los Angeles A previous version of this paper was presented at the American Sociological Annual Conference, Chicago, 2001

215 mental maps collected in 1998 indicate that Watts is Los Angeles’ epicenter of fear. Spatial cluster analysis provides evidence that this fear is most closely associated with the 1965 “Watts” riots. The role played by television in constructing spatial fear is proposed as a possible explanation for the persistence of this collective memory. Analysis of phone survey data and of a set of mental maps indicates that the greatest fear of Watts is found among respondents with stronger dependency relations with television.

Wikipedia's “Neutral Point of View”: Settling Conflict through Ambiguity

This article discusses how one of the most important Wikipedia policies, the “neutral point of view” (NPOV), is appropriated and interpreted by the participants in the Wikipedia project. By analyzing a set of constitutive documents for the Wikipedian universe, including discussion about NPOV, the authors conclude that ambiguity is at the heart of the policy process on Wikipedia. The overarching conclusion is that ambiguity on Wikipedia is not extraneous, but a central ingredient of this wiki projects policymaking. Ambiguity naturally develops from the pluralist and nonhierarchic values of the culture that brought Wikipedia to life, and this conclusion requires that we reconsider the nature of “neutrality” practiced on Wikipedia.

Globalization and heterogenization: Cultural and civilizational clustering in telecommunicative space (1989–1999)

Abstract The globalization of telecommunicative ties between nations is studied from a heterogenization perspective. A theoretical model inspired by Appadurai’s “disjuncture hypothesis,” which stipulates that global flows of communication are multidimensional and reinforce regional/local identities, is tested empirically on an international voice traffic dataset. Spatial-statistical measures (global and local versions of Moran’s I) indicate that countries that share the same linguistic (English, Spanish, or French) or civilizational (Catholic, Protestant, and Buddhist–Hindu) background are more likely to be each other’s “telecommunicative neighbors” and that this tendency has increased over time (1989–1999).

The Role of Physical Affordances in Multifunctional Mobile Device Design

As designers of mobile/media-rich devices continue to incorporate more features/functionality, the evolution of interfaces will become more complex. Meanwhile, users cognitive models must be aligned with new device capabilities and corresponding physical affordances. In this paper, the authors argue that based on HCI design theory, users approach objects by building mental models starting with physical appearance. Findings suggest that users who embrace a devices multifunctionality are prevented from taking full advantage of an array of features due to an apparent cognitive constraint caused by a lack of physical controls. The authors submit that this problem stems from established mental models and past associated behaviors of both mobile and non-mobile interactive devices. In conclusion, users expressed a preference for immediate access and use of certain physical device controls within a multi-tasking environment, suggesting that as mobile computing becomes more prevalent, physical affordances in multifunctional devices may remain or increase in importance.

Editing Behavior to Recognize Authors of Crowdsourced Content

During this era of internet, crowd-sourcing is a very popular way of accommodating a large group of people contributing together to accomplish a goal. One of the most remarkable examples of such crowd sourced content is the Wikipedia, where millions of articles have been produced by volunteers from all over the world. Wikipedia allows anyone to edit articles without being authorized. Although creation of this huge repository of information is being possible because of the freedom of editing, it also attracts sock puppets and malicious users to cause ruthless destruction in Wikipedia contents. One way of dealing with such malevolent users is to predict the identity of ambiguous authors. However, authorship recognition in collaborative environment like Wikipedia is very challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel way of mapping ambiguous users identity to previously known users based on their editing profile. The proposed editing behavior based authorship recognition can be applied to decide on trusty and offensive authors, identity theft, shock puppetry, human behavior analysis, and so on. Our experimentation on a large database of Wikipedia demonstrate promising results of using editing behavior to recognize authors of collaborative writing.

A Research Agenda for the Study of Entropic Social Structural Evolution, Functional Roles, Adhocratic Leadership Styles, and Credibility in Online Organizations and Knowledge Markets

The new social media enabled by the Internet and the Web have deeply changed the ways in which individuals interact and how knowledge is created and exchanged, which is opening up interesting new research questions for social science. A key question is how the notions of expertise and reputation will evolve as a consequence of the emergence and broad use of social media. Addressing such questions is crucial for many different domains, from traditional academic settings and processes (e.g., promotion procedures), to research funding (e.g., assessing the impact of research results), homeland security and intelligence (e.g., detecting campaigns aiming at spreading deceiving information), and healthcare (determining the source and credibility of health information on the Net).