TY - JOUR
T1 - Imagined Online Communities
T2 - Communionship, Sovereignty, and Inclusiveness in Facebook Groups
AU - Sultana, Sharifa
AU - Saha, Pratyasha
AU - Hasan, Shaid
AU - Raihanul Alam, S. M.
AU - Akter, Rokeya
AU - Islam, Md Mirajul
AU - Arnob, Raihan Islam
AU - Najmul Islam, A. K.M.
AU - Al-Ameen, Mahdi Nasrullah
AU - Ahmed, Syed Ishtiaque
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was made possible by the generous grants from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (#RGPIN-2018-0), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (#892191082), Canada Foundation for Innovation (#37608), Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (#37608), International Fulbright Centennial Fellowship of Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, and Facebook Fellowship of Sharifa Sultana.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 ACM.
PY - 2022/11/11
Y1 - 2022/11/11
N2 - Through Facebook "Group"feature, users often sensitize communionships, join different Facebook groups, and establish imagined communities with known people and strangers. In our interview study with 32 admins and users of Facebook groups, we explored the influential factors of such communionships, the challenges the Facebook group admins face while managing these communities, and how they resolve those. Our findings show that admins set rules for the entry and maintenance of the groups, monitor members' activities, and often limit their actions or mute them during conflicts. Thus, the members and admins of the groups together grow a sensibility of sovereignty within the community on Facebook. While the imagined sovereignty in Facebook groups is empowering, this empowerment may not be perceived and experienced evenly by everyone in such online communities. To explain this, we build on the concept of "Imagined Communities' by Benedict Anderson [16 ] and argue that there is a tension between Facebook admins' perceived sovereignty and other users' empowerment in practice. Our work joins the body of CSCW literature that aims at designing more sustainable and collaborative tools for specific communities on Facebook groups and other similar platforms.
AB - Through Facebook "Group"feature, users often sensitize communionships, join different Facebook groups, and establish imagined communities with known people and strangers. In our interview study with 32 admins and users of Facebook groups, we explored the influential factors of such communionships, the challenges the Facebook group admins face while managing these communities, and how they resolve those. Our findings show that admins set rules for the entry and maintenance of the groups, monitor members' activities, and often limit their actions or mute them during conflicts. Thus, the members and admins of the groups together grow a sensibility of sovereignty within the community on Facebook. While the imagined sovereignty in Facebook groups is empowering, this empowerment may not be perceived and experienced evenly by everyone in such online communities. To explain this, we build on the concept of "Imagined Communities' by Benedict Anderson [16 ] and argue that there is a tension between Facebook admins' perceived sovereignty and other users' empowerment in practice. Our work joins the body of CSCW literature that aims at designing more sustainable and collaborative tools for specific communities on Facebook groups and other similar platforms.
KW - connectionism
KW - Facebook
KW - imagined community
KW - social media
KW - solidarity
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U2 - 10.1145/3555132
DO - 10.1145/3555132
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85146367248
SN - 2573-0142
VL - 6
JO - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
IS - CSCW2
M1 - 407
ER -