Shocker! The net isn’t egalitarian, popular forum posters have it easy

Athens, Ga. – The net is usually considered a forum that permits egalitarian communication among people from diverse backgrounds and political persuasions, but a school of Georgia study reveals that online chat groups display the identical hierarchical structure as other large social groups.

“About 2 percent of these who start discussion threads attract about 50 percent of the replies,” said study author Itai Himelboim, assistant professor within the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. “So although we’ve this big selection and variety of sources, just some of them are now attracting attention.”

Himelboim, whose latest findings appear within the early online edition of the journal Communication Research, examined discussions among greater than 200,000 participants in 35 newsgroups over a six-year period. He focused his analysis on political and philosophical newsgroups on Usenet, the oldest Internet discussion platform, and is currently exploring patterns of communication in newer social networking services, inclusive of Twitter.

To spot the diversities, if any, that exist within the content posted by popular participants and their less popular counterparts, Himelboim and associates Eric Gleave and Marc A. Smith of Connected Action Consulting Group examined the content of a subset of the messages. Only 12 percent of messages from the well-liked posters presented their very own comments and opinions; generally, they only imported content from other news sources. Of the imported content, 60 percent came from traditional media, akin to The brand new York Times, CNN and other national and native outlets, while 8 percent came from blogs and private websites. Fifteen percent of posts used content from online-only news sites, and six percent of posts used content from government and nonprofit organizations.

“For the inside track media, these findings are pretty encouraging,” Himelboim said. “We still need someone to head out and look for information to bring it to us, and that is a standard journalistic role.”

For those that fancy the web as a very good equalizer that brings equality to the voices of the hundreds, however, the findings suggest that it is able to never meet that lofty ideal. Himelboim said he wasn’t surprised to locate that online chat groups are likely to become hierarchical. Even in grade school, he brought up, everybody desires to be friends with the hottest kid.

What did surprise Himelboim was that the bigger the gang gets, the more skewed the network of interactions becomes. People exhibit what’s called a preferential attachment toward people with many connections, which implies that having many connections makes it easier to make more connections. Himelboim said that because people can only spend most time communicating with others, the expansion of those so-called hubs comes on the expense in their less-connected counterparts.

In a related study that randomly assigned nearly 200 participants to 1 of several simulated forums, Himelboim and his colleagues found that posting high-quality content is necessary for attracting attention-but not sufficient. That is, fine quality posts with few replies drew few additional replies and not became hubs.

So what does one should do to draw attention on the net?
“That is the million dollar question,” Himelboim said. ‘But just posting plenty is not going to make you a hub for attracting attention.”