#6 Option 1: Hierarchy in an online community

When we were studying about Group Dynamics last week in lecture, I thought about the online community I was in for years and tried to find whether characteristics of Group Dynamics and theoretical issues were actually valid in my community. And, I thought it would be great if I can talk about my community on blog.

I want to briefly introduce my community and the website where my community is in. The name of this community is 日本(Japan)TV. As the name implies, members of this community enjoy watching Japanese TV programs, listening to Japanese pop-songs and reading Japanese books. The website this community is in is called “daum.net.” There are hundreds of communities on various topics.

These days, I only go to日本TV to read articles about Japanese singers, but I used to spend lots of time searching for new community to join, participating in discussion and reading posts from the others. As I get exposed to more communities, I realized there is similar norm that people recognize and conform. Among many different standards for each type of communities, I want to talk about hierarchy existed in most of the communities. Let’s say there is one person who just joined a community. He is expected to acknowledge that in terms of hierarchy, he is on the lowest rank. As he becomes more active in the community, based on the standard set by each community, upgrade on his rank is determined. Although the privileges of higher rank would differ by community, they are usually more control on the material that would be on the post or being granted to have an access to more material in the community. At first, when I just joined a community for the first time, I had no idea there would be restriction on me on accessing and displaying posts. When I looked around the community and tried to access the postings on the wall, I received an error message saying I was not eligible to read the information and it said there is an announcement on the top of the wall which I was expected to read thoroughly to adjust to the community. So, I went back to the wall to read the announcement and was informed of the existence of hierarchy, upgrading rank and following privileges. The way this hierarchy worked was as follows: the administrators would form a hierarchical system before they start accepting new members and require members to notify them if they fulfill the commitment required for certain level of the hierarchy.

At first, I did not see the point of enforcing this rule. However, soon I was able to see why administrators had set this kind of rule. As SIDE said, Social Identity encouraged more positive group dynamics. As one spent more time in one community, he became to know how to behave properly and since he also became personally closer to other members to the community over time (SIP), there was less likelihood for him to do something offending or would cause a chaos such as posting spam ads. As Deindividuation Effect of SIDE said, as people acknowledged themselves as a part of the community by labeling them as a certain rank, members became visually anonymous. Most of the time, this factor resulted in greater social influence, more conformity to norms and greater social attractions among community members. Later, I got to know that actually it was the website that recommended each community to have hierarchical structure in order to establish order and balance of the community.