Social Roles in Online Community-building and development!
Despite the increasing importance of social networks, community development needs to take place both on and offline.
In both online and offline communities, users tend to show various behaviors depending on their skills, privileges, and responsibilities, which ultimately establishes their roles within a social situation/circumstance. Such social roles organize people’s behavior/conduct and give structure to social positions within communities. Understanding that people embrace distinctive social roles allows others (e.g. analysts, researchers) to contextualize their behavior in the communities. In addition, examining the social roles of different users is also a good way to comprehend both the social setting of the group and user data. As more and more people spend an increasing amount of their time (personal and professional) online, the idea of social roles turns out to be progressively important as a tool for understanding patterns of action, recognizing distinct user types, and cultivating and managing communities. Yet, research in this field has remained very limited.
“Social roles have been foundational concepts in social analysis. They describe the intersection of behavioral, meaningful, and structural attributes that emerge regularly in particular settings and institutions” (Parsons, 1951; Merton, 1968; Callero, 1994).
1. Theoretical Foundations of Social Roles
Social Roles were earlier defined as “…a patterned sequence of learned actions or deeds performed by a person in an interaction situation”. The idea of social jobs is significant as a result of its utility. All the more as of late, with the development of community-oriented applications, like Reddit, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Facebook, the interest to examine social roles in these online networks has expanded. Jahnke (2009) used design-based research to study the change of social structures by social roles within the socio-technical community. In addition, (Yang et al. 2019) studied the social roles that people undertake in the American Cancer Society’s (CSN) and identified eleven key roles in this online community.
2. Online Communities As Social Systems
Online communities are seen as data repositories where individuals seek or contribute information. However, online networks are also social systems where individuals opt for social roles, associate, and structure associations with one another over time.
2. 1 Trajectory of Social Roles
The movements between social roles are non-linear but dynamic. Let’s take a case study of how leaders have been seen to emerge within the different communities to understand the trajectory process of social roles.
Contributors, Collaborators, and Leaders roles are all members of the community doing different activities. Contributors’ activities include posting, labeling, inspecting, and remarking, while collaborators’ activities comprise of creating connections and cooperating towards shared objectives. Leaders are viewed as the dominants or the vital participants who emerge from the members of the communities. As the leaders are the core participants or central players of the communities, the manner in which they emerge and how they connect with others will profoundly affect the networks all in all and ultimately on the social dynamics and the trajectories of social roles within each community. The first model presents the trajectories of social roles that leaders emerge from the participation and interaction within the online community, while the second model represents the online communities where leaders already exist in the community. Leaders can be the organizers of the community who create the community and build the site since day 1 or overseers/ moderators who have the responsibility and ability to set and maintain strategies. These leaders can partake in the community and their participation may go from effectively engaging to playing a silent part and intervening just in the event that somebody is disrupting the norms.
3 Conclusion
From the case study, it very well may be seen that social roles do exist in online networks and can be recognized. However, the presence of these jobs shows up in various degrees and significance to what the model suggests; further not every community follows the same path. One applies to communities where leaders emerge from community members while the other has existing leaders. In the two models, various roles can be recognized relying upon variables like the nature of the site/discussion, duration of participation, recurrence of posts, and quality and type of commitments. These social roles are interlinked and are interchangeable.
Online communities unite people who share the same interests and exchange data, allowing information to shape and stream all through networks. The models not only show the relationship between roles but also the information and knowledge flows within the different communities. We can’t guarantee that the models represent social roles in all types of communities but together they do provide a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics and interactions of social roles in different types of online communities. Researchers may want to examine other types of communities such as social versus professional communities, or communities for different age groups. There are also several other factors that relate to social roles, could facilitate highly successful online communities, such as types of community, quantity, and quality of contributions, member motivation, trust, and reputation.
