Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2017

Introduction to HICCS-50 Social Networking and Communities Minitrack

Karine Nahon Caroline Haythornthwaite Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya and Syracuse University University of Washington [email protected] [email protected]

The Social Networking & Communities minitrack friends’ engagement in their social space and make focuses on questions of community building and more friends, they are likely to reduce their management as mediated by and social engagement in social media (both externally as well networking platforms. By ‘communities’, we include as internally). communities of practice, epistemic communities, The fourth paper, ‘Portraits of Participation: communities of inquiry, as well as fully virtual Exploring the Relationship between Social communities; and social media use that supports or Motivators and Facets of Participation in a - complements geographically based community. The based Community’ by Sarah Gilbert studies what minitrack has been ongoing since 2003 under various motivates people to follow and contribute to titles. This year, the minitrack comprises 6 papers communities, and why they participate in varying selected from 13 submissions, covering theoretical degrees focusing on Twitter. The study identifies and empirical wide range of studies related to the three important social motivations: tapping into a interrelationship between social media and of people with a common interest, communities in all aspects of our online and offline developing personal and professional relationships, lives. and the community ethos. The first paper ‘Communities on Social The fifth paper ‘Redditors Revealed: Motivational Networking Sites: Testing a Socio-Cognitive Model Factors of the Reddit Community’ by Carrie Moore for Brand Page Usage’ by Christopher Ruehl and and Lisa Chuang examines what motivational factors Diana Ingenhoff focuses on how and why community influence frequency of participation on the social members use corporate pages on SNS. Specifically, news website Reddit.com, which has evolved from a they test a socio-cognitive model of brand page usage news aggregator into a thriving . to investigate users’ incentives to consume and This study takes the uses and gratifications approach interact with corporations on . to examine why people participate in this community. The second paper, ‘Preservation of Indigenous Findings for motivational factors were consistent Culture among Indigenous Migrants through Social with the current literature, with the exception of Media: The Igorot Peoples’ by Khavee Agustus information seeking as a gratification that was sought Botangen, Shahper Vodanovich and Jian Yu or obtained. investigates the use of Facebook groups to promote The final paper ‘Internet Ecologies of New indigenous knowledge among Igorot peoples in the Mothers: Trust, Variety and Strategies for Managing diaspora. The paper contributes to the literature about Diverse Information Sources’ by Louise Barkhuus, the sustainability of human societies through Elizabeth Bales and Lisa Cowan is an exploratory preservation. study of how new first-time mothers navigate online Another paper titled ‘Does Give-and-Take Really resources as they transition into parenthood. Matter? Dynamics of Social Interactions in Social Findings show that parenting tasks are supported by a Network’ by Sunghun Chung, Animesh Animesh, variety of resources, which are often used in Alain Pinsonneault and Kunsoo Han conceptualizes combination to accomplish a task. Also, the authors two types of user engagement (internal and external) found that variety in sources was often valued over and empirically examines the dynamics between general source credibility, and new mothers relied on user’s engagement, friends’ engagement, and their own ability to filter information to assess how network size. The study finds that when people much to trust information. externally engage in their friends’ social space rather than one’s own space, they can make more friends and also receive friends’ engagement in one’s own social space. However, when people receive more

URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/41428 ISBN: 978-0-9981331-0-2 CC-BY-NC-ND 2263