Does the site pass the "Tonnies Test"?
When researching your site, orient your observations to answering the following questions.
- Why are people part of the group in the first place? Toward what end?
- Do people just "hang out" or are they there for a purpose and gone once done?
- How is social order maintained? Are there mechanisms for including and excluding people? Are there customs for behavior?
- Do people monitor each other and given evidence of shared norms?
- How are trolls handled?
- Do people in the group think of themselves as a community?
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Do they explicitly talk about it?
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Do they create symbols of their identity?
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- Do people in the group care for each other?
- Are they aware of the deaths of group members?
- Do they memorialize members of the group?
- Is there evidence of their helping each other?
- Does the group share a world view?
- Do people share ideas about the nature of life, justice, history, the universe, God?
- Does the group prefer certain forms of communication and media forms?
- Are there specific ways they communicate?
- What does the space of communication look like?
- What is the structure of communication?
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Is it 1 to 1, many to 1, or many to many?
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Are there conversations or just comments?
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- How are relationships between participants structured?
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Symmetric (Friending)? Asymmetric (Following)?
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- Is anonymity present?
- Is it encouraged or actively discouraged?
- Do people often adopt pseudonyms and personas?
Forms of Evidence
In answering the questions listed above, use the following as forms of evidence to support your claims. For example, to prove that members of a community exert social control, find passages of text where one member admonishes or advises another with respect to proper behavior on the site.
- Language use
- Use Diigo to highlight specific uses of language that provide evidence to the questions
- Site design
- Use Diigo to take notes on how pages are laid out
- News Reports
- Feel free to read news and blog posts on the web about the site