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Introducing Hierarchy in the Networked Audience: A Case Study of Online Communities of Musical Theater Audiences

  • Informatization Policy
  • Abbr : 정보화정책
  • 2009, 16(3), pp.74-98
  • Publisher : NIA
  • Research Area : Social Science > Public Policy

Ho-Yeong LEE 1,  U-Seok Seo 2

1정보통신정책연구원
2서울시립대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The Internet may be offered as a technology of equality, challenging established monopolies of knowledge and power. However, contrary to our expectations, we have come across some phenomena that demonstrate that it may also become a technology of exclusion. For example, the online communities of musical theatre audience that we deal with in this paper have an exclusive and hierarchic membership policy. The current study aims to understand this phenomenon from a sociological perspective by empirically examining the activities and attitudes of the members toward the communities, as well as the communities’membership policies. Here we understand a online community of musical theater audiences to be a space that allows the networked spectator to maximize utility through rational choice in information-seeking and performance-selecting on the one hand, and to interact with peer groups on the other. Our work is based on an online survey instrument administered to a sample of subscribers to the online communities of musical theater audiences. By investigating the dynamics and structuration processes of online communities, we found that a hierarchy that assumes the form of a grading system is widely introduced for the purpose of reducing free-riders. Contrary to the utopian vision for the information society, which emphasizes that contemporary society is moving away from the era of the vertical hierarchy to one of“ dispersed networks,”online communities now organize themselves using a graded system. The results prove that transforming collective goods into club goods is not without its cost and that if the market model is applied, online communities can be transformed into environments in which exclusive and constrained circulation of information dominates, rather than into a space where horizontal communication is promoted.

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