Social Network as mentioned in Haythornewaite (2007), “are built on the foundation of of actors who are connected or ties…” (pg 126). These ties, as Haythornewaite mentions, can be strong or weak depending on the frequency of communication between them. A community can exist in any space, but there are differences and the Social Network Analysis points them out. An SNA view of the community looks at individual relationships, rather than ‘aggregate behavior for a group, community or location’ (pg 128). As Etzioni and Etzioni (1999) defines it, a community depends not only on the crisscrossing interpersonal ties, but it also depends on the culture of the society. A perfect example of this type of community that I am involved in is ESPN Fantasy Football.
Players in my league are the actors of the community which are playing against each other for a common goal of becoming the best by defeating individual opponents every week. The culture of this community is ruled by one thing and one thing only, NFL football. At first, all players get together and draft individual players from the NFL to their team. These NFL players, throughout the season, will give the league members points depending on how well they performed during their games. In the league, two players will go head to head and the winner is the one with the most combined points.
Social capital, which is, “the ability to trust the ability to trust network members, to have a common language and to depend on networkbased mechanisms to manage behaviours’, is definitely seen in this kind of community. Since you invite the people you know to join the league, there is always a sense of trust between the league players. Moreover, the common language that dominates this league is all about sports and trash talk. Lastly, since some people have weak ties to each other in the league, they can capitalize on them and be able to get novel resources from these weak ties. A way that players can manage and interact with each other in Fantasy Football is by making ‘trades’, where one player can ask to swap one of his players with another player on someone else’s team.
ESPN Fantast Football can definitely be classified as a Gemeinschaft community that exists online since the actors truly display the three core characteristics of this kind of community. First, players have strong interpersonal ties due to going head to head every week. Second, they all have a shared focus and common purpose of drafting the best NFL players and scoring the most amounts of points. Finally, they all have a common language and identity which is sports talk and NFL football.
1 comment:
This is a very interesting topic and I think very relevant. There are so many times that I hear my friends talking about Fantasy Football during a meal. I definitely think that this type of community has strong ties even though it is dominantly CMC based. All the actions taken, such as making leagues, trading, etc are done on the site. In this case I feel as if the roles are switch from general CMC communities. What I mean by this is that for Fantasy Football, the majority of the communication and interactions takes place on the Internet. The only times FTF comes into play is to talk about what happened in CMC and perhaps discussion of strategies of what to do next and so on.
Do you think that friendships in FTF gain from Fantasy Football? As a result of being part of a group, do you think that ties become stronger between those members of a league? At the same time, as you were saying, generally speaking people that are already friends join a league together. I wonder if by interacting in Fantasy Football creates a greater sense of cohesiveness or if there is no significant effect.
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