Session 7

Management & Conflict

The Official Rules of PersonalityCafe (which includes INFP Forum and forum for other personality types): http://personalitycafe.com/misc.php?do=showrules

The official rule that governs the forums in PersonalityCafe is quite a concise one. It reminds users tp hold responsibility for any content they had post on the forums, and if there is any objectionable message including “obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, hateful, threatening, or otherwise violative of any laws” information posted, it might be remove or edit by the owner of PersonalityCafe.

Negative Examples (and what I will do)

#1. A member posted a thread asking if anyone know anything about Immigration Laws because a friend of him/her got some visa problems. I tried to read the messages in this thread again and again but still could not find anything related to personality types in the discussions. However, one INFP member and one member with unknown personality replied to the post in very friendly tones, and it was neither closed nor moved to other forums. It does seems strange to me because 99% of the threads in this forum are discussing issues or topics related to INFP personality type, and since there is a “Cafe Lounge” area including “General Chat” forum and “Advice Center” forum in PersonalityCafe, moving this thread to either place will be more appropriate and will help the author get more useful answers. A suggestive report by any other users in this forum should be encouraged, and of course, a warmly message to the author explaining why the thread should be moved to other forums is indispensable as well. Maybe like what is mentioned in How Oversight Improves Member-Maintained Communities, “oversight increased both the quantity and quality of contribution while reducing antisocial behaviour, and peers were as effective at oversight as experts.” Though there are no antisocial behaviour involved in this case, a peer oversight seems to work more effective as well. Besides, my personal opinion will be even the author is an INFP type does not simply mean that all of his/her topics should be putted in this forum.

#2. The second example is one that made me feel insulted somehow. It initially started with a message encouraging the guys in this forum to discuss what is a “woman”. After 53 replies, the thread was closed. Apparently, some members thought that there was a sense of Sexism in some replies, and then quarrel began. Interestingly, a thread alike this one called Ladies, what is a “man” also existed in this forum. And it seems like a coincidence that there are also 53 replies, but it was neither closed, nor there were any aggressive words. I won’t say it is because women users are more moderate, but I will say that the admins did the right thing by closing the thread that contains words that are considered “obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented” by certain group of people. Besides, there was this member named “tuna” who was very active in the debate, almost like a rogue user to me, not because he is actually “violating the community’s rules or spirit”, but because he is acting in a overaggressive way.

#3. For the third example, I’m sure it is not a post violating any of the official rules, neither it is offensive to anyone. The author posted a same poem twice in the forum, and asked the admin to remove one of it to avoid clutter. This seems like a typical technical mistake that anyone could made when posting, and it could be handled more effectively when the author can reported the mistake by him/herself. Unfortunately, the extra post was not removed or closed by the admin, maybe because the author just left that “ask for delete” message in the post and the admin didn’t see it at all. Although this is a simpler case comparing to others, I’m surprised that it wasn’t handled well. However, if the author can directly report to or request from the admin by mail or on-site message, there might be better results. Besides, when I saw a poem posted, it just reminds me of that caricature of an Artiste with a pink flower, who is fond of posting a poem. Although our poem here was not posted “in the midst of battle”, I’m still not sure if it is appropriate for the INFP Forum because it seems to have little relation with the forum, even the author is a INFP. Also, I will consider this a self-aware behavior since the author was trying to get some kind of emotional social support from the forum. Accordingly, the member’s site participation was increased, but the problem is there weren’t many replies. So does it mean other members are not interested at a topic like this? Should they report a post like this if they think it’s not something they expected from a forum? Maybe yes, let’s also have peer oversight here and leave the admins to decide. (To me, the answer is better move it to another forum)

Five “Unwritten Rules”

First of all, I think the most obvious unwritten rule is that any message that is not related to the topic of being an INFP personality will be inappropriate for the INFP forum, and this rule is applicable to the ENTP Forum, ISFJ Forum, or ESFP Forum as well.

Second, the admins will tend to move or close threads discussing technical problems, even if it is about this forum. There was this case when a member was asking if there is a chat room for the INFPs, and after the admin posted his reply, the thread was closed.

Third, if a flame war was started, a big chance the thread would be closed.

Then, I guess members should mentioned it if anything they post is is transferred from another forum or anything that has been published elsewhere.

At last, even not written, this rule will be important in both offline and online environments: one should always act polite, and show respect to others when in a community.

In general, I have to say there aren’t many post REALLY violating the official rules by posting any information that is “obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, hateful, threatening, or otherwise violative of any laws” in the INFP Forum. Can we attribute this to the fact that INFPs are peaceful people and the atmosphere of this forum is warm and supportive? Maybe. Anyhow, the majority of the posts that should be removed or moved is just because they are inappropriate for this forum but will suit another forum in PersonalityCafe by far.

Reference:

Cosley, Dan, Dan Frankowski, Sara Kiesler, Loren Terveen, John Riedl (2005). How Oversight Improves Member-Maintained Communities. CHI 2005, April 2-7 2005, Portland, Oregon.

Kollock, Peter and Marc Smith (1994). Managing the Virtual Commons: Cooperation and Conflict in Computer Communities. In: Susan Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 109-128. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/csoc/papers/virtcomm/Virtcomm.htm

Gazan, Rich (2009). When Online Communities Become Self-Aware. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, 5-8 January 2009.

Gazan, Rich (2007). Understanding the Rogue User. In: Diane Nahl and Dania Bilal, eds. Information & Emotion: The Emergent Affective Paradigm in Information Behavior Research and Theory. Medford, New Jersey: Information Today, 177-185.

Reed, Mike (no date). Flame Warriors. http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/index.htm

Session 6

Online Identity in INFP Forum

Introverts, as we might think, are a group of people that would like the style of online communication more than offline communication because of the features the former one has, like not-face-to-face, anonymity, and easy-to-log-off. However, it is hard to know among those highly active online members, how many are introverts and how many are extroverts. But in an OC (or maybe should call it an online sub community) that is called INFP Forum, it is easier for us to believe that the majority of members here are composed of introverts, or people with INFP personality. Therefore, talking about online identity, the one that works for here could be concluded as a sense of self-identity combined by community belongingness and of being an individual with INFP personality seeking for emotional and informational supports in the meantime, it might also overlap with the members’ offline social identity (which is also introverts) in a great chance.

And a comparable condition would be what Ploderer had said in his article about the BodySpace, an online community for bodybuilders. Although INFP Forum is not a passion-centric social network site comparing to BodySpace, they do have similar features and functions, like providing support, information, and make the members have a definite feel of their online identity, or in other words, with a strong sense of community belongingness and self orientation. I think there is some kind of networked individualism included as well here since there are different members with different personalized profiles and preference posting different threads, and forming a variety of networks for themselves. But the difference between an user’s online identity and networked individualism is also obvious: the latter one focuses on the users’ ability or potential of forming one or several networks while the former one emphasizes on the characteristic, and self-cognition on oneself when he or she is in an online environment.

On a normal day in INFP Forum…

Sunny day #1

A new guy named “a.happy.tree” come into the INFP Forum.

He has some kind of social anxiety and depression, and had tried to suicide for more than once before. He typed a lot of words talking about his problems, and seemed to be really eager of knowing how a person like him could live happy.

I noticed that he said he had post a thread on “What Is My Type?” Forum but because of the atmosphere there made him feel uncomfortable, he deleted that thread and came here.

The thread was posted on 03-30-2011 10:18 PM, and until the last post on 04-01-2011 07:53 AM, there were 22 posts including 5 from himself. Among the 17 posts from other members, 7 are just showing friendliness while 10 are giving advices and other information. The host, at the same time, was trying to response to each post, either showing gratitude or having discussions with other members, and I think we can say he is getting what he expected from this forum: supports and information. There was also a member named “Mei” who drew my attention because of the quality and quantity of her posts. And by checking into Mei’s profile, we can know that she is always generous in giving advices to people, and had received so many appreciates from others.

Sunny day #2

From another thread called “INFP and ENFP differences” first posted by a member who is an ENFP (we can found this label under one’s user name) in the INFP Forum, there were 57 posts replying to the question regarding the key differences between these two types (INFP&ENFP) of personalities. Among the replies, 27 were coming from ENFP’s, 20 from INFP’s, 7from an ESFJ, one from an INFJ, and one from a member of uncertain personality type.

I guess this can be counted as a successful thread as well since it raised enough attentions from a number of members and had a reasonable quantity of replies. But it is interesting that even this thread is posted in the INFP Forum, the repliers are composed of more ENFPs than INFPs. Could this be due to the fact that INFPs are more introverted when there are some outsiders involved? Maybe we’ll find out.

What interested me more was that an ESFJ was involved in this thread too. First, there was only this one ESFJ replying to the thread; second, this member had posted 7 messages by himself. By checking his profile, we can see that he/she is an elite member who is very active, has lots of friends (145) in this OC, and had both been received (7954) and given (8131) many “Thanks”.

Rainy day #1

For a thread that is uncommon and with little echoes, I think the one that post by “AllorNuthin” asking for members to post their blogs on the thread could be used as an example. Unexpectedly, this thread hadn’t caught that much attention from members of this forum and had only 4 replies including 2 from the host himself. The host, who invited members to post their blogs in the thread got just one response. Since the INFP Forum is quite an active community, I would say this is not a very successful thread and my presumption is that the INFPs might prefer not to expose themselves.

Q: how is online identity shaped and expressed through interactions in this community?

A: The online identity in INFP Forum, like what is mentioned above, is a sense of identity of being an INFP personality type, discussing feelings of being an INFP, and trying to either offer or get supports or information from the INFP Forum. The interactions in this community are mostly around the topic of INFP personality.

To explain it in detail, firstly, the members are warm and friendly to newbies because they seem to have strong sense of similar-identity with each other. For INFPs, online communication might be easier than offline communication, and since social grooming is such an indispensable need for human beings, the members of INFP Forum intend to rely on the interactions here to maintain enough social ties. In general, it is like what Donath said in Signals in Social Supernets, online communication is “social grooming for the information age”, especially for introverts.

Secondly, I would propose that the INFPs prefer not to debate too much with outsiders (comparing to insiders with the label “INFP”) from the expression I got from the Sunny day #2 scene. With the label INFP showing in profile, members can get a sense of familiarity with others with the same label, and tend to communicate more with them. It reminds me of what Liu had said in Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances where users’ profile “speak to their identity” and differentiate them from others.

Thirdly, although INFPs don’t like to expose themselves, they tend to trust prestigious members. In fact, this may be applied to all type of members with different personalities. We can see this from the screen snap above and from the case when an active ESFJ named “Paranoid Android” had left many posts in a thread in the INFP Forum. In Paranoid Android profile, there are 1427 visitor’s messages not only showing gratitude to Paranoid Android, but also discussing issues, leaving questions, and even sending poems to him on his profile page.

Reference:

Wellman, Barry, Anabel Quan-Haase, Jeffrey Boase, Wenhong Chen, Keith Hampton, Isabel Isla de Diaz and Kakuko Miyata (2003). The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 8(3). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue3/wellman.html

Hodkinson, Paul (2006). Subcultural Blogging? Online Journals and Group Involvement Among UK Goths. In: A. Bruns and J. Jacobs, Uses of Blogs. New York: Peter Lang, 187-199.
http://www.paulhodkinson.co.uk/publications/hodkinsonsubculturalblogging.pdf

Donath, Judith. (2007). Signals in Social Supernets. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/donath.html

Ploderer, B., S. Howard & P. Thomas (2008). Being Online, Living Offline: The Influence of Social Ties Over the Appropriation of Social Network Sites. Proceedings of CSCW 2008.
http://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/student/rhd/berndp/research/CSCW2008Ploderer.pdf

Liu, H. (2007). Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 13. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/liu.html

Session 5

Social tagging

vs.

Professional cataloging and classification

First, I want to thank Philip who commented on my post last week and brought up the term “controlled vocabulary”. It made me start thinking about the connection between tags on bookmarking sites and CV, and luckily, the readings in this session help me a lot in understanding my concern.

In Tagging Video: Conventions and Strategies of the YouTube Community, the authors took YouTube’s tagging system as an example to show us the two main reasons why social tagging system is a necessity: fast growing speed of the items and the difficulties in cataloging or classifying them with a established professional cataloging or classification system. Although the authors only referred to resources like digital videos or moving images, I think the two reasons they concluded can also be applied to resources like websites or web pages, as those in De.li.cious.

According to the instruction from De.li.cious, tags here are “one-word descriptors” that can be used to organize bookmarks. They “do not form a hierarchy” and can be applied as many as one can to a particular bookmark. Basically, they’re keywords that users created or modified by themselves, like what Geisler and Burns called as “assigned free-form terms”. And the advantages of these tags, cited from De.li.cious, are “driven by personal interests” and “more flexible than fitting information into preconceived categories or folders”.

Speaking of preconceived categories, or professional cataloging and classification terms, the first one that popped up in my mind is the Library of Congress Subject Headings. As an authentic and commonly used system, these authorized headings play an important role in bibliographic control in libraries, and help librarians to “collect, organize and disseminate documents” in an effective way. However, it seems that there are few social network sites or online communities are consulting LCSH when intitling their tags. The situation could be due to a number of reasons, but it is also an interesting phenomenon when some of these self-generated tags are also terms in LCSH.

Therefore, in order to compare between the “LCSH-tags” and “non-LCSH-tags” to see if there are any kinds of relationship, I chose the top 38 tags from the Popular Tag Cloud in De.li.cious.

Among these tags, there are 23 that can be found as Subject Headings in the Library of Congress Online Catalog, and 15 that can’t. There are several conditions that can be confusing. For example, the tag “web” is not a Subject Heading because “web” is too board as a term in LCSH, instead, there are Subject Headings like “web archiving”, “web browsing”, or “WEB (Computer program language)”. “Reference” is not found either but there is a corresponding Subject Heading of “reference and research services”. Also, “development” is not a Subject Heading because there are Subject Headings like “development and education”, “development associates” and etc. At the same time, although some tags can also be found in LCSHs, the meaning of the same term could be different. Like “mac”, as a tag in De.li.cious, it is mostly related to the operating system of Apple’s Macintosh, but as a Subject Heading, it is the pseudonym of mario medina correa.

Also LCSH	Not LCSH	Also LCSH	Not LCSH	Also LCSH
design	blog	web2.0	development	technology
tools	video	google	news	travel
music	software	inspiration	flash	shopping
programming	web design	photography	blogs	books
art	reference	food	tips	mac
how to	tutorial	css	politics	science
javascript	web	education	opensources	games
linux	free	business

However, it is Interesting that the result of overlapping is more than I expected. Given the fact that these 38 tags are the most popular ones in De.li.cious, the relatively high rate could be due to conformity. Users tend to pick normal or formal terms when they form a tag because it will be easier for them to identify and classify both the groups and individual items. So, there is a big chance these tags can be found in LCSHs, because LCSHs are also conventionally generated from common terms. Therefore, it is hard to deduce or imagine the number of tags that are also LCSHs among the rest of the tags in De.li.cious, we can even suppose that there would be fewer among the less popular ones, and little among the least popular one, for the fact that the less popular tags might be either individualized or indicate newly emerging information that few people know.

And the factor of some newly emerging information is existing, especially when it comes to websites, is quite a big reason why free-form tags should be existing. If there are terms that none of those professional cataloging and classification system had come out with, these tags could be great complement to De.li.cious or any other sites. In addition, another advantage of free-form tags is that professional cataloging and classification could be hard for general users. It might takes a long time for the users to memorize, or even to learn all the standard terms, and probably will frustrate them. Moreover, free-form tags gives personalization to tags and can form characteristic of the community. According to Geisler and Burns, since it “enable all members of the community to see the tags that have been previously used to describe content”, this sharing feature can enhance a sense of belonging of the community among the users.

The disadvantages of free-form tags, however, is that they might be non-standard and reduplicated sometimes. Like in the case above where there are both the tag of “blog” and “blogs” in the top 38 popular tags. It is the users personal choice to use which tag but somehow will cause confusion when searching for information or doing researches. So in general, I think the social tagging system and professional cataloging and classification systems can work as complementary supplements to each other, to create a most effective, easy-to-use, and “fancier” tagging system.

Reference:

http://www.delicious.com/help/faq#tags

http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/v4n1/geisler/geisler.html

http://authorities.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First

http://www.slate.com/id/2179393/fr/rss/