How to Win a World Election : Emergent leadership in int'l online comm...

[SmileMaker]

I am really happy I went to this lecture (at Princeton University) and even more convinced that there is hope for humanity through technology collaborations like the one I learned about today.

The best way for me to share the info with you is to provide links to
similar presentations/writings that Justine has on her web site.
The lecture was full of really interesting facts and stories about the
project. During the reception afterward, I asked her if she'd heard
about a 'write-in' project orgainized by PeaceNotPoverty.org -- She
had not - so, I hunted it down and sent it to her with the hope that
we can do more with these technologies and take our world back!

Here is the web page for the write-in --
http://www.peacenotpoverty.org/writein.php (the declaration was read
on 4/4/05 at Riverside Church by the leader that emerged). Neat stuff!!

Here is a link to all of the interesting stuff that Justine is
researching and writing about. Below that are links that will take you
to presentations/papers that are similar to what she presented today.

http://www.soc.northwestern.edu/justine/jc_papers.htm

Cassell, Justine, Huffaker, David & Tversky, Dona (2005) "How to Win a
World Election: Emergent leadership in an international online
community" Proceedings of Communities and Technologies 2005. June 13-16,
Milan, Italy. The Hague: Kluwer Academic Press

http://www.soc.northwestern.edu/justine/publications/Cassell.C&T2005.pdf

Abstract

This article examines how linguistic interaction patterns changed over
time among a geographically and ethnically diverse group of young people
in an online virtual community, the Junior Summit '98 online youth
forum. The tools of word frequency and content analyses are paired with
evidence from post-hoc interviews. Results demonstrate the ways in which
these young people from different cultural, linguistic, and
socio-economic backgrounds increasingly constituted themselves as a
community, speaking in the collective voice, converging on a linguistic
style, and concurring on the topics of conversation, the goals of the
group, and strategies for achieving them.

Cassell, J., Tversky, D. (2005) "The Language of Online Intercultural
Community Formation in Junior Summit '98" Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication 10 (2) .

Introduction

Almost paradoxically, technologies that allow people to communicate
across great distances have allowed social scientists to make advances
in understanding the construction and maintenance of community. In
particular, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have
provided a seemingly-miraculous window into the processes of community
formation, including when the community members differ from one another
along the axes of age, culture, economic benefits, language, and other
dimensions that would hinder if not prohibit communication in the
physical world. But how do online groups exhibit the hallmarks of
community? How does their online language index patterns of assimilation
to other community members, identification with group goals, growing
engagement in joint activity? When a group of people from different
countries comes together online at the same time in a new community
grouping, are sub-groups distinguishable by their language use? Can one
group be identified as the leader of linguistic trends? Are patterns of
dominance among sub-groups in line with dominance in the physical world?
How do such behaviors change over time as the members of the community
come to know one another?

We approach these questions through an investigation of the "Junior
Summit '98," an international virtual forum that brought 3062 children
from 139 countries online to discuss global issues. The participants,
speaking many different languages and representing a wide variety of
economic and cultural backgrounds, discussed and planned ways to make
the world better using technology. In order to analyze the tens of
thousands of messages posted to the forum, we employ a set of research
tools adapted from psychology and sociolinguistics, including word
frequency counts, content analysis, and in-depth interviewing, and apply
them to this online context. In this article we discuss some of our
results concerning language as an index of integration vs. the
maintenance of separate cultural, age, and gender identities, by looking
at how children from different backgrounds presented themselves online.

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/cassell.html

[Skip Intro]

1. A World Election, now there's an idea.

[SmileMaker]

2. kick for the kids