Hi Everyone, I am Sharifa Sultana, from Cornell University.
Today I will present our paper, “Imagined Online Communities: Communionship, Sovereignty,
and Inclusiveness in Facebook Groups”
This project was done in collaboration with University of Dhaka, Bangladesh
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Khulna University, Utah State University,
LUT University, and University of Toronto.
So this paper is about imagined online communities.
Online social media ‘groups’ connect people with similar interests.
Little research has been conducted on in-depth understanding of what happens in the social
media groups.
How do people form virtual communities and maintain those?
How do they sustain their broader agenda of communionship?
All of these motivates us to set our problem statement as What happens when people in Global
South access online social space and form groups?
Our study sought answers to 3 research questions: RQ1: Which factors influence the creators
and admins to form and run the Facebook groups?
What kind of strategies do they follow for recruiting members and growing a
comunnionship?
RQ2: What challenges and difficulties do the admins face while managing the groups?
How do the existing Facebook-group tools support and fall short in this process?
RQ3: How do the admins and the users negotiate between the groups’ boundary and
sovereignty and members’ freedom and privacy?
To address the research questions, we interviewed 32 participants, among whom 29 participants
were male and three were female participants.
The criteria to be eligible to participant our study was that the participants had to
be admin of at least one Facebook group and member of other groups.
We interviewed admins of four public groups, 22 private groups, and six hidden groups.
Now let’s have a look at our findings.
The first findings about Administrating Facebook Groups was group formation.
Our participants told us that they set up the groups by creating the groups.
Some participants also purchased their groups. We got one participant who
explained,
“The sellers at first open a Facebook account, add people as their friends and add them to
a group.
Thus with many Facebook accounts, you can gather a lot of people...The buying rate of
closed groups is low, as the contents are not public, they get fewer views/likes/shares."(P4)
Then comes member enrollment.
They invited their known people to join the group.
Following the invitations, the known people accepted the join request and thus they became
a part of the community.
However, our participants were challenged by the locked profiles, as they explained,
“It’s normal to have a locked profile, in that case we inbox him and if he replies
properly and unlock his profile for couple of minutes
or if he gives us his timeline post screenshot
for proving that he is a (the football club)
fan we approve
his join
request.
Then comes the maintenance.
Part of the maintenance was about selecting the administrators.
Some groups used voting polls to select their admins.
The adminship was periodic for 3-6 months.
However, women were reluctant to join the adminship because of women harassment behavior from many group members,
as our participants explained, “We have three women actively help us run the groups, we have also added them on our
admin chat since they are good with ideas and judgment.
However, they never agreed to be admins because many times people take women’s posts and
comments lightly, sometimes as a joke.
Those may even turn to trolls and harassment."
(P21)
The participants mentioned to us that to handle the group properly, the admins imposed rules and regulations on the groups.
For example, Copied posts and screenshots from other posts
are prohibited.
Mixing up multiple languages are discouraged In cases, admins help members edit posts.
In a discussion where we talked about the people who might have limited skills with
their keyboard languages and might mix up languages, the participants told us,
“Of course we are sympathetic to them.
If we understand that is the case, then we help them learn and rewrite.
Our group is giving them an opportunity to learn and match the standard and helping to
blend in, isn’t it great?"(P16)
Our participants also told us about troubleshooting in groups. For example, the admins deleted controversial offensive posts,
They also shadow-banned problematic members from group activities, sometimes temporarily banned for
a certain amount of time for severe offenses, and also permanently banned for extreme offenses.
Our participants also told us about the tools and techniques they used to maintain the groups.
For Example, some participants created secondary assisting groups.
Some participants also said that they created chat groups for admins.
Often they also used mute options for problematic group members.
And they also used “turn of comment” for controversial posts.
Our participants also informed us that Google forms, Google surveys, and Google Spreadsheet were used to
keep track of member enrollment, banned members' list, who added whom, when, and why they were banned.
Our study found that the practices of Facebook group-based communionship could be explained using Anderson’s concept
of imagined communities, since they follow Anderson’s three criteria:
Imagined as Limited Imagined as Sovereign
Imagined as Community
First, imagined as limited.
The online groups were limited by the certain special interests that accumulated the members.
Membership or subscription to the group was considered the boundary and was maintained
through rules and regulations.
Second, imagined as sovereign,
We found that Facebook groups were set up based on specific and focused interests, and
the members subscribed to the groups for these reasons.
We also found that Facebook groups with desirable sizes could be bought and sold.
Both of the ways of founding a Facebook group actually went against the theme of hierarchical
dynastic realm and notion of state emerging from that.
Here rather members could join and leave the communities based on their own will.
Finally, Imagined as community,
While setting up the group, the admins came to the users as community, in which the fraternity
experienced a horizontal comradeship.
The admins were the members of the groups, one of them, accessible, connectable, and
communicable.
In many groups, such a sensibility of community brought more inclusion of diverse group of
people with similar interest.
This research was made possible by the generous grants from Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council (#RGPIN-2018-0), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (#892191082),
Canada Foundation for Innovation (#37608), Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation
(#37608), International Fulbright Centennial Fellowship of Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, and Facebook
Fellowship of Sharifa Sultana.
We also thank our audience for watching the presentation.
Here we accept question.
If you want to catch up in the future and ask more question, you can also email us.