Supporting the Sense of Locality with Online Communities Tytti Virtanen
Sanna Malinen
Tampere University of Technology Human-Centered Technology P.O.Box 589, FIN-33101 Tampere +358 40 849 0817
Tampere University of Technology Human-Centered Technology P.O.Box 589, FIN-33101 Tampere +358 3 3115 3889
[email protected]
[email protected] [9][10], the use of real-world identities online promotes trust, support and cooperation in the virtual setting. Furthermore, using real names link online identities to the physical world and add context to public face-to-face meetings.
ABSTRACT
Online communities have become popular among geographically distributed users of the Internet. However, there is a growing interest to use online communities to support social interaction also in geography-based communities. In this paper, we study the value of online sociability and the possibilities to support local networking by online communities in two different online communities. We present the results of a survey carried out among Finnish users of Facebook, and complement the with user interviews of a local community service of Helsinki city surroundings. The results show that Facebook is used mainly for nourishing existing friendships online and less for organizing local activities and meeting new people. However, the results can be utilized as implications for designing sociability in locationoriented online communities.
Locality refers to ‘spaces’ and ‘places’ which are closely related concepts. Place has been defined as a space endowed with a meaning. People tend to have a positive emotional bond to familiar places, and this psychological relation between people and their environment is referred to as place attachment [7, 3]. A person’s awareness of the history of a place intensifies attachment to it, and vice versa; people attached to a place expressed more interest in its past [6]. Sense of place is a term used to describe meanings people attribute to the physical setting [11]. In our study, we suggest the term sense of locality for describing people’s relation to their physical environment and its social surroundings. Sense of locality is thus a broader concept including the social context, the geographical area and a person’s emotional relation to these. Sense of locality refers to awareness of local issues, people and places, and a sense of belonging to one’s local environment.
General Terms
Human Factors, Design
Keywords
Online communities, community networks, social networking, locality, sociability
We also suggest that people’s personal ties to the local surroundings can be reinforced by online communities. Online social networking and forming virtual groups with people who share the same interests can promote the sense of community in face-to-face context, and thereby increase well-being.
1. INTRODUCTION
Online communities and online social network services have become popular among geographically distributed users of the Internet. However, there is also a growing interest to use online communities to support and facilitate social interaction of members of particular geography-based communities [9, 5].
Locality and sociality in online communities are studied in two case studies. In the first case study, we used a questionnaire to explore the motivations to participate, and the value of local aspects of a social networking service among the members of Facebook in Finland. In the second case, we focus on how locality and sociability develop and affect content creation in a Finnish location-oriented city service, Oma kaupunki (My City). Our main focus is on how much online communities support local activities and relationships in real life, or does the sense of community remain only virtual.
Online communities provide possibilities for sharing experiences and giving and receiving peer support [12, 10, 8]. The concept sense of virtual community (SOVC) refers to the emotional bond between the members of online groups. Experienced sense of community has many positive outcomes in people’s lives, such as loyalty, willingness to help others, and commitment to community activities [1]. According to Millen and Patterson
The case studies were carried out in June-September 2008, as a part of a joint research project “Product Internationalization with Firm-Hosted Online Communities” (PROFCOM 2008-2011). The research partners are Lappeenranta University of Technology (coordinator) and Tampere University of Technology. In addition, three companies Nokia, SanomaWSOY and Tekla are taking part in the project, and it is funded by Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. MindTrek’08, October 7-9, 2008, Tampere, Finland. Copyright 2008 ACM 978-1-60558-197-2/08/10…$5.00.
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interface during summer 2008, and the Network pages are no longer available. Instead, an invitation to take part in the survey was sent to the members of the “just for fun” group Great Facebook Race Finland (appr. 51,000 members), the group of people who previously lived in Kuopio town (Ex-kuopiolaiset, 1000 members) and Facebook friend networks (appr. 100 persons) of the research team. 240 responses were received.
2. CASE A: LOCALITY IN FACEBOOK
Social networking site Facebook, launched outside US in 2006, quickly became popular in Finland in the autumn 2007. The current amount of registered users in the ‘Finland’ network is over 400,000, and it is the 8th popular internet site in Finland, according to the statics of Alexa.com. Facebook started as a geographically-based campus community, with its members sharing mainly local offline connections [2]. Regardless of its international expansion, Facebook has remained location-based by orientation, since its members have to choose a Network (global, national or specific university) to join in when they register. Nationwide network is a rather extensive context to create a sense of community even in a small country as Finland. Facebook encourages its members to create groups and join them freely, which has led to a vast spectrum of different types of groups, e.g. geographical, political and humorous ones. Therefore, group activities have an essential role when studying locality and sociability in Facebook.
The online survey included basic demographic questions (e.g. age, gender, occupation, household size), as well as questions concerning the use of Facebook in general (time spent on site each week, number of friends, privacy settings, activities, participation). Participants were also asked to rate the importance and value of a number of Facebook features and uses, using a 7-point interval scale. The scales were anchored at 1 (not at all important) and 7 (very important). Questions concerning the importance, value, and motivations for use were based on factors used by Joinson [4] in order to able comparisons. Motivations for creating and administrating groups were asked through open questions. The survey was first tested by several Facebook users, and the questions were revised to be more unambiguous based on the feedback from these tests. The survey was open for one month, from the 9th of July.
The focus of our Facebook study was on the significance of groups, the role of locality, as well as the motivations to join and participate in such groups. Furthermore, we were interested to find out if people use Facebook for contacting new people living nearby or only for communicating with people who are physically distant. According to Joinson [4], it is used especially to refresh and maintain long-distance friendships [see also 13].
We used SPSS for the statistical analysis, and initial descriptive results are presented in this paper.
The study was carried out with an online observation of the group activities and an electronic survey among the members of Facebook’s ‘Finland’ Network.
2.3 Participants
The survey was filled by 240 Finnish Facebook users, 153 females (64%) and 87 males (36%). Mean age was 31 years (range 13-65 years). The majority of the sample (67 %) reported employment as their main occupation, 21% were students, and 5% were on parental leave. Rest of the participants (7%) responded being unemployed, on pension or ‘other’.
2.1 Local groups in Facebook Finland
According to our observations, an extensive amount of popular groups are based on location one way or another. Supporting locality occurs in various ways; groups have been created in relation to former and current places of residence from nationwide to certain neighborhood or quarter, geographical areas of work/study and leisure activities, public events and local services, such as restaurants and nightclubs. Some of the groups stand for a real-life group or association and use Facebook for communicating and distributing information, but some are Facebook-originated groups seeking real-life activities, such as local recycling circle (“Vaihtorinki Tampere”). Being a member of these groups indicates a motivation to strengthen one’s sense of locality. In addition, it may also suggest that the members have a need for expanding their social surroundings and networks, that is, the amount of friends.
70% of the respondents had been registered to Facebook for 6-12 months and 21% for over a year. The majority (86%) were active users, visiting the site more than once a week – 61% daily or several times per day. In spite of the large number of visits, 86% reported spending less than 5 hours weekly in Facebook. Most of the respondents had quite many friends linked to their Facebook profile: 70% had 51 or more and 39% had over 100 friends. As in Joinson [4], a clear majority (74%) reported making their profile more private, and only a small minority (2,5%) more open. 21% reported having kept default settings.
2.4 Results
Almost all of the respondents (98%) belonged to at least some Facebook groups. Respondents were asked to choose their personal reasons to join from a list of 15 motivations based on the observations, 41% chose group’s relation to current place of residence as one of the reasons. The high amount of mentions of joining a group for its relation to a former place of residence is partly explained by the recruitment procedure (see 2.2), but also congruent with former studies [4]. The most common locationoriented reasons for joining in groups are presented in Table 1 below.
Available Facebook group operations – posting a wall comment, pictures or videos – enable vivid discussions and chatting. Despite large group sizes, activities seem to be on a quite irregular basis. These observations raised further questions: What is the motivation to join and stay, if the groups are publicly rather inactive? Do the members wish for more activity and local contacts if it were better supported in the service?
2.2 Conducting the survey
Unfortunately, we were not able to search respondents via the Facebook Finland Network, as Facebook renewed its user
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Facebook uses related to sociability and locality and the evaluations of their personal value to the respondents are presented in Table 3. Compared to the attraction evaluations, there was less deviation on the scale, that is, respondents shared opinions more. The first three uses, following the lives of friends, keeping in touch with people far away and using Facebook as the only communication channel with certain people were assessed as important, and meeting new people was quite unanimously evaluated as not at all important. Interestingly, supporting work-related networks was rated as not important by an overwhelming majority. This is especially interesting bearing in mind that 67% of our sample reported employment as their main occupation.
Table 1: The most common location-oriented reasons given for joining a Facebook group Popularity
Reason to join a group
1.
Related to my former place of residence
75 %
4.
Related to my current place of residence
41 %
6.
Inside group of my friends
39 %
8.
Related to an event, e.g. music festivals
34 %
9.
Related to my job
34 %
10.
Related to my studies
29 %
...14.
Getting to know new people
5%
Table 3: Personal value of Facebook uses.
As group members, half of the respondents (53%) reported having written on the wall of a group, and 26% had added other content (pictures, videos, links) for the whole group to see. The rather high number of wall writings may indicate activities in closed or hidden groups, since the group type where the activity took place was not asked. However, most respondents (69%) had not taken part in any real-life event or meeting organized by a Facebook group. 23% of the respondents had created a group. According to the categorization of the answers to open questions, the most common reasons for creating a group were communicating and sharing content privately with certain people, a need for an easy information channel, and just for fun Respondents’ evaluations of the attraction of social features of Facebook related to sociability and locality are presented in Table 2. The deviation of answers on the 7-point scale was rather high, and only presenting the means thus hides interesting information – here, they serve as an initial look on the order of importance of the features. The feature “looking at the profiles of people you know” divided opinions least of all, and was clearly the most attractive social feature of Facebook.
Mean
Looking at the profiles of people you know
5.62
Seeing what people have put as their status
4.70
Browsing your friends’ friends
4.48
Updating your own status
4.44
Being a member of a group
3.70
Organizing or joining real-life events
3.63
Following the news feed (to get a general view of what is happening)
3.63
Using advanced search to look for specific types of people
3.33
Looking at the profiles of people you don’t know
3.17
Mean
Following the lives of friends and seeing how they are doing
5.45
Keeping in touch with people living far from you
5.41
Keeping in touch with communicate with otherwise
don’t
5.31
Reconnecting with old friends you’ve lost contact with
5.26
Contacting friends who are near and easy to meet
4.49
Deepening acquaintanceships into friendships
3.55
Meeting new people
2.76
people
you
When asked more specific about meeting new people through Facebook, only 34% of respondents reported having done it. 32% of those had also met their new acquaintances in real life, 41% had not met but would be interested to, and 27% preferred to only meet online. This further indicates that Facebook is used more to support real-life friendships, although only 31% reported having participated in a Facebook group activity outside Facebook.
Table 2: Attraction of social features of Facebook. On scale 1-7, how interesting are the following features of Facebook to you personally?
On scale 1-7, how important are the following uses of Facebook to you personally?
The respondents were also asked to select the topics of information or help they would like to receive from online social networks. Most important topics were cultural events (67%), hobbies and leisure activities (57%), information related to one’s neighborhood (56%), peer support from people in similar life situation (55%) and travelling and resorts (52%). Since the actual amount of Facebook group activities in real life is not known, it is also difficult to say whether it is the users’ unwillingness to participate or the lack of real-life activities that slows down the Facebook groups in developing a stronger sense of locality to their members. However, these results do not indicate that active users of social networking services would not be interested in meeting new people and forming new social neighborhoods. Facebook is profiled as a tool for friends to communicate, not yet a local bulletin board or a friend finder.
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identity and attachment to one’s own city of residence are motivators for participation:
3. CASE B: SENSE OF LOCALITY IN A LOCAL COMMUNITY SERVICE
Oma kaupunki, a local community service provided by the Finland’s leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, was launched in 2007. Oma kaupunki –service is one of the new online communities that are developed further in the PROFCOM project. Oma kaupunki works as a database and a search engine providing information of services and activities in the area of 11 municipalities in Helsinki metropolitan area. Current community features include content creation (favorite places), reviewing and rating attractions of the area, as well as creating and participating in interest groups (e.g. nature conservation, families, dog parks). As Facebook is a tool for communication and self-presentation, Oma kaupunki is profiled more as an advanced online note board with user-created content.
“This city is very important to me, I was born here and I’m interested in everything that is related to Helsinki”. [Male 54] Interviewees preferred anonymity and used nicknames instead of revealing personal information about them. However, the personal information, e.g. age, gender or place of residence, was considered relevant when the reliability of content created by others was evaluated. Although Oma kaupunki is currently used mainly as a local database, the users reported that they are interested in social networking and offline group activities, as well as meeting new people with same interests. The threshold for participation should be low and the interaction rather informal. The users felt that the local service should provide them possibility for general discussions with others and also more in-depth interaction, e.g. private messaging.
Previous research suggests that participation in a local online community can increase the community’s social capital, which is manifested in the expansion of social networks and people’s increased awareness of community resources [10, 15]. Within this ongoing case study, we are focusing on how to motivate and activate users to participate in the local content creation, and how the sense of locality can be enforced with locality-based groups.
I would like to invite people to groups so that I could discuss with them, and especially to find more active users - Those who are there to produce content with more serious attitude. [Male 18]
To gather data for exploring our research questions and contribute to the development of the Oma kaupunki -service, active users are being interviewed. The interviewees are recruited via the administrator of the service, and so far, 3 interviews have been carried out. They had added content to the service, e.g. photos or reviews of their favorite places in the area, and participated in interest groups, which were related to hobbies and pets and were very similar to the ones in Facebook.
4. CONCLUSIONS
The results of the survey of 240 Finnish Facebook users promote earlier studies [4] and show that the main purpose for using Facebook is to maintain existing relationships. A minority of respondents reported explicitly being interested in meeting new through Facebook. When moving to another place people use Facebook stay in touch with old friends, but also connect with the ones living nearby. The Facebook groups that gather people are related to places of residence, supporting causes and sharing information e.g. on hobbies, and locality seems to be of value for the group members. Groups were formed also in order to communicate confidentially with restricted group of people.
3.1 Initial results of user interviews
Oma kaupunki was considered primarily as a databank and a useful source of local information. The interviewees were using the service mostly to take a look at the weather or local news, or to search for a particular place or service.
In Oma kaupunki, users communicate through creating locationbased content, such as photos or reviews of their favorite places in Helsinki area, for everyone to see and utilize. The interviews show that the most important reasons for participating in local online community are willingness to help other people, share one’s expertise of local issues, and networking with other people with same interests.
For the interviewees, the motive for registering to the service was the desire to produce content and share it openly. Instead of expecting external rewards for their contributions, they emphasized that sharing itself is motivating enough. In the study of Wikipedians, that is persons who actively create content to Wikipedia.org, Nov [14] found out that the purpose of Wikipedia and its free and collaborative nature was an important motivation in contribution. Our interviewees also felt similar commitment to Oma kaupunki -service and wanted to promote its goals by taking part in the development.
Facebook provides an easy and popular way to communicate and share personal content between friends. Our survey results can be modified into implications for designing location-based online communities, such as Oma kaupunki –service. To support the sense of location by online communities, people need to know with whom they are sharing the neighborhood. User profiles that can be browsed, light content to share and statements to make through e.g. group membership or status information could make it easier to get acquainted. Participating in online discussions with other residents of the area may create context to real-world meetings, and later, face-to-face-meetings help to build trust in the online environment.
”I’m motivated by the feeling that I’m part of the community, and I can give people the information they need.” [Male 56] “Incentives and competitions may encourage to product more content to the service, but they can also make it obligatory.”[Male 18] The will to learn more about one’s place of residence was reported as an important motive for using the service. The service enables users to present their own expertise of local information they considered as useful. Experienced strong local
The term community social capital refers to the extent to which members of a community can work and learn together, and
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community cultural capital stands for the various forms of knowledge, skills, abilities, and interests that have particular relevance or value within community [15]. We assume that the geographical context can be facilitating the integration between online and physical worlds. Local online service can be used as a tool to strengthen the empowerment of residents, organizations, and businesses of neighborhood. It can also be used to activate community members in producing information and content. Increased social and cultural capital of a community increases people’s awareness of local issues, and therefore people’s capacity to improve the conditions of its neighborhood.
[5] King, S. and, Brown, P. 2007. Fix my street or else: Using the Internet to voice local public service concerns. ICEGOV2007, December 10-13, 2007, Macao.
Online communities provide many possibilities for supporting locality and encouraging people to participate in the activities of their life-surroundings. Online communities allow users to generate their own groups and communities, and share their own content with in others. We propose that these user-generated services and contents have positive outcomes as they can promote the experienced sense of locality, and enable networking with people in the neighborhood.
[8] Maloney-Krichmar, D., and Preece, J. 2002. The meaning of an online health community in the lives of its members: Roles, relationships and group dynamics. International Symposium on Technology and Society, 2002, (ISTAS'02), 20-27
[6] Lewicka, M. 2008. Place attachment, place identity, and place memory: Restoring the forgotten city past. Journal of Environmental Psychology (2008), doi:10,1016/j.jenvp.2008.02.001. [7] Low, S.M., and Altman, I. 1992. Place attachment: A conceptual inquiry. In Place Attachment, eds. Altman, I. and Low S.M., 1-12. New York: Plenum Press.
[9] Millen, D.R., and Patterson, J.F. 2002. Stimulating social engagement in a community network. CSCW’02, November 16-20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. [10] Millen, D.R , and Patterson, J.F. 2003. Identity disclosure and the creation of social capital. CHI’03, April 5-10, 2003, FT. Lauderdale, Florida, USA.
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Jarno Ojala for assisting in this study and to Lassi Kurkijärvi from SanomaWSOY for fruitful co-operation. Also thanks to professor Sari Kujala for her valuable comments and support while conducting the study and finalizing the article.
[11] Steadman, R.C. 2003. Is it really just a social construction?: The contribution of the physical environment to sense of place? Society and Natural resources, 16:671-685, 2003. [12] Wellman, B. and Gulia, M. The network basis of social support: A network is more than the sum of its ties, in Wellman B (Ed): ‘Networks in the Global Village’, Boulder, CO, Westview Press (1999).
6. REFERENCES
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