Assignment 7, Option 1: I'm Nothing Without You!

I am in actor in several Cornell social networks, but in this post I’ve chosen to focus on the Fanclub Collective community because of the synergistic online-offline interaction that occurs regularly among its members. The Fanclub Collective was created by members of the greater Cornell community interested in booking and promoting local concerts featuring smaller, independent acts, those that might not otherwise tour through Ithaca. Within the Fanclub Collective network there is a core group of actors with the strongest interpersonal ties, due to greater proximity, that includes the group’s officers and the regular FtF meeting attendees (together referred to as the “core”). And also a peripheral group that includes some concert attendees (those not designated members) and other weak social ties needed to provide funding or services to the club (and, again, these weak ties are not designated members, by definition).

The dimensions of the relation among core members suggests that Fanclub is a “community of practice”: the mutual engagement of members, the shared endeavor (promoting music), and the shared routines, concepts of music, and manners are considered by Wenger to define this type of community (1998). Core members participate in several modes of interaction, including email, telephony, face-to-face discussion, and text-messaging; engagement via multiple modes of communication suggests stronger ties between core members, a concept summarized in the term media multiplexity (Haythornthwaite and Wellman 1998). The synergy between CMC and offline meetings is vital for the participation of members on various levels: actively, in the booking/promoting process, or passively, in attending the concert (or attending the Facebook event). Both core and peripheral members are united most basically by common ground—the group was born out of and continues to exist because of its members’ appreciation of experimental, alternative, and independent music.

Reciprocity, a necessary glue for healthy interpersonal communities, is exhibited on the personal level and macroscopically on the network level. The officers ask of members to be diligent in responding to emails requesting help during concerts or in the process of booking bands. In return for their investments—time commitment in response to officers’ requests—diligent members enjoy an appreciation for their skills and a satisfaction from their sense of belonging. The sum of personal reactions creates social capital shared by the greater network, “beyond those obtained from pairwise interactions”; this capital (e.g., live music) is shared by all members and weak social ties related to the Fanclub Collective (Haythornwaite 2007). Peripheral members and weak social ties also participate in reciprocity: in return for the services or money, they enjoy exciting music in the Ithaca area.

“Bridging ties between subgroups” is vital to the maintenance of the Fanclub community because of Fanclub's reliance on school funding, and community attendance and participation (Haythornwaite 2007). The network would simply collapse without the weak social ties’ and peripheral members’ drive for reciprocity.

Would you like to reciprocate?

SIC ALPS will play a devilish show this Saturday, Oct 27th, @ NO RADIO RECORDS.