Small-worlds: Beyond social networking

Virtual worlds: An exploratory study of undergraduate behavior

Studies suggested that electronic social sites are popular with undergraduates. Virtual worlds, one of the emergent facets of the Internet, are also seeing tremendous worldwide participation. Of interest to educators is the applicability of this new technology as a learning tool. As a result, this study was untaken to empirically examine undergraduate familiarity and interest in virtual worlds ...

Define Me: A Cognitive and Computational Approach to Critical Digital Identity Representation in Social Networking Applications

Invoking a theoretical framework situated at the intersection of humanistic accounts of social identity construction, cognition linguistics research, and digital media technologies, the Advanced Identity Representation (AIR) Project develops theory and technology for users to represent complex, dynamic social identities in digital media such as virtual worlds and social networking sites. Here, ...

Determinants of Friendship in Social Networking Virtual Worlds

Linking Social Capital to Small-worlds: A look at local and network-level processes and structure

In the past decade, two topics have generated much interest in the idea of social networks and network analysis. These are social capital, popularised by Robert Putnam, and small-worlds, popularised by Duncan Watts and Albert-László Barabási. Social capital highlights local processes and network structures, theorizing the ways in which relations and their patterns link individuals and groups to...

"Whose Second Life Is This?" How Avatar-Based Racial Cues Shape Ethno-Racial Minorities' Perception of Virtual Worlds

Research on social identity contingencies suggests that situational cues, such as a numerical representation of social identities in a given social environment, can trigger identity-associated threat for individuals whose social identity is marginalized. Given that popular virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life [SL]) are often criticized for White-avatar dominance or White bias, we examined the psyc...