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Raising and Rising Voices in Social Media

A Novel Methodological Approach in Studying Cyber-Collective Movements

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Abstract

Emerging cyber-collective social movements (CSMs) have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite their popularity, there is a lack of systematic methodologies to empirically study such movements in complex online environments. Using the Al-Huwaider online campaign as a case to illustrate our methodology, this contribution attempts to establish a rigorous and fundamental analysis that explains CSMs. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns capturing multi-cultural aspects for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling CSMs by utilizing existing collective action theories and computational social network analysis. This article contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. The proposed methodology provides a rigorous tool to understand the complexity and dynamics of CSMs. Such methodology also assists us in observing the transcending nature of CSMs with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Our study addresses the lack of fundamental research on the formation of CSMs. This research contributes novel methodologies that can be applied to many settings including business, marketing and many others, beyond the exemplary setting chosen here for illustrative purposes.

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Notes

  1. http://globalvoicesonline.org/ – An open project supported by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Reuters, the MacArthur Foundation, Hivos, and other funding sources.

  2. http://www.ushahidi.com/ – An open project supported by the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Google, Cisco, Mozilla, Hivos, and other funding sources.

  3. Such as unemployment, unemployment under 25 years, population below poverty, GDP per capita, Internet literacy and access, mobile phone/smart device market penetration, U.S. economic aid, U.S. military aid, population and male/female breakup, political leadership and tenure collected through open sources such as Gallup, C.I.A. World Factbook, U.S. A.I.D. 2009 Economic and Military Aid, U.S. Census International Data Base.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) Program within the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering’s Division of Information & Intelligent Systems (Award numbers: IIS-1110868 and IIS-1110649) and by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (Grant number: N000141010091). We gratefully acknowledge this support.

An earlier version of this article was presented to the European Conference on Information Systems, held in Helsinki, June 9–11, 2011. We would like to thank the conference track chairs for their invitation to submit the paper to this journal. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their suggestions and comments and, especially, for Dr. Dorothy E. Leidner’s valuable advice and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Science, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 S. University Ave., Little Rock, AR, 72204, USA

    Nitin Agarwal

  2. Consortium of Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) and School of Social Transformation – Justice and Social Inquiry, Arizona State University, 1120 S. Cady Mall, Tempe, AR, 85287, USA

    Merlyna Lim

  3. Departments of Information Science and Management, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 S. University Ave, Little Rock, AR, 72204, USA

    Rolf Wigand

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  1. Nitin Agarwal
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  2. Merlyna Lim
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Correspondence to Nitin Agarwal.

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Accepted after one revision by Prof. Leidner.

This article is also available in German in print and via http://www.wirtschaftsinformatik.de: Agarwal N, Lim M, Wigand R (2012) Meinungsäußerung und -bildung in sozialen Medien. Ein neuer methodischer Ansatz zur Untersuchung cybersozialer Bewegungen. WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK. doi: 10.1007/s11576-012-0317-3.

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Agarwal, N., Lim, M. & Wigand, R. Raising and Rising Voices in Social Media. Bus Inf Syst Eng 4, 113–126 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-012-0210-z

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