Dimensions of Social Groups

In preparation for a webinar that I am presenting on Wednesday, May 20, I have been researching and reading the academic literature on collective intelligence. One resource that I recommend is a set of proceedings from a workshop on “community-based learning” at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS2004) held on June 22, 2004 at the University of California at Los Angeles, especially the paper by Markus Rohde and David Williamson Shaffer entitled “Us, Ourselves, and We: Thoughts about Social (Self-) Categorization.”

The authors note that not all social groups are equal, and that it is useful to distinguish among groups by several salient characteristics. Two suggested dimensions for categorizing groups are the degree that members share a culture, and the degree to which members share interactions.  This allows us to plot the location of several different kinds of groups shown in the graph above.

Separating out different kinds of groups is useful in several ways. For example, it is not enough to simply talk about “social media.” Instead, we need to speak about what a particular form of social media can do (“its affordances”) for a particular kind of group with a specific culture. Rohde and Shaffer support this idea. They say, “…tools to support “collaboration” may need different affordances for different kinds of collectives. The Web is a particularly effective tool for supporting networks of people. Supporting communities, however, will necessarily involve supporting a particular culture, and thus (by definition) particular kinds of interactions. Different communities will, therefore, almost certainly require different kinds of tools—or tools that can be significantly customized for a particular culture.”

I also think that group size makes a big difference in terms of how groups function, and the tools that are necessary to support them. A discussion between two people is different than a small group (3-10 people) discussion, which, in turn, differs from large community interactions. More on this in my webinar on Wednesday. (GW)

Us, Ourselves, and We: Thoughts about Social (Self-) Categorization | Community- Based Learning, pp. 18-23 | Markus Rohde and David Williamson Shaffer | 22 June 2004

Tagged as: Groups, Social Media