Communicative Informatics: A Social Media Perspective for Online Communities

Individuals are active audience members that use Internet-based social media technologies to create and negotiate social action in online spaces. Communicative informatics is the key to constructing, describing or critiquing social media. Communicative informatics is the discovery of the audience, text/image, technology, negotiated place relationships that create symbolic meaning. Four propositions focus on the communication of the audience: 1) the audience is active; 2) the audience is creative; 3) the audience interacts with technology and 4) place is negotiated in online communication. Communicative Informatics The Internet is the “ultimate connecting tool” (Coget, Yamauchi, & Suman, 2002) and communication has been identified as the primary purpose of the Internet (Lo, Fang, & Wang, 2005). In the transformation of message, place, and time for social interaction, online communication changes the notion of a passive media audience. Individuals are active audience members that use Internetbased social media technologies to create and negotiate social action in online spaces. Online communication has reconfigured how businesses, the media, politicians, and everyday people interact with audiences. The audience, as constructed on the Internet, is more active and creative than ever before in history. The term, audience, is humanizing and provides a sense of agency to the user. Audience also emphasizes the communication function of the Internet, that when acted upon by people with communicative intent, the situation is more than mere data transfer. However, communicative action in online social settings must be meaning based for individuals (users/senders/producers) and audiences (receivers) to build social links establishing common understandings that can form and sustain online communities. Communicative informatics is the key to constructing, describing or critiquing social media. Communicative informatics is the discovery of the audience, text/image, technology, negotiated place relationships that create symbolic meaning. We investigate online communities from this communication perspective to reveal what ingredients of Copyright © 2008, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. communication and sociability an online system needs to facilitate online communities. Central to any formation of community, online or offline, is communication. Communication facilitates all the other components of community formation, which includes people and their common desires and motivating factors such as goals, interests, and fears (Parrish, 2002). Four Propositions about the Internet