Session 6: Online Identity and Interaction

For this assignment, I chose caloriesperhour.com, which provides weight loss tips (food calories calculator, weight loss calculator, etc.) and has a diet and weight loss forum where many people discuss weight loss (posting users’ own diet success and failure stories, sharing body images to get self-esteem, asking about medical issues, such as eating disorders, surgery, diet pills, and supplements).

Sunny Day, Scenario 1

·         A user is on a diet. She has lost a tremendous amount of weight. However, she hasn’t lost weight during past two weeks but has even gained a few pounds. Struggling, she is becoming exhausted and giving up the diet.

·         She posts her before and after body images to ask for suggestions.

·         Many users share their experiences dealing with struggles (changing types of exercise, food, etc.) and applaud her efforts.

·         Her self-esteem grows and, after a while, her diet is successful.

Sunny Day, Scenario 2

·         A user who has never tried a diet wants to lose weight.

·         Because he doesn’t have any knowledge of diet plans, he joins the forum to seek the successful diet plans other people have tried.

·         He reads threads and followed the diet plan with the largest view counts.

·         He succeeds with the diet.

Rainy Day Scenario

·         A user wants to lose weight by using diet pills.

·         She begins a post asking other forum users for recommendations.

·         Many people leave comments recommending a diet pill and telling of their successful outcomes.

·         She chooses a diet pill that has been recommended many times.

·         She takes the diet pill and suffers side effects (nausea, diarrhea, and dehydration); then she falls victim to depression.

    Users share knowledge of variety of diet pills and supplements.

                            

How is online identity shaped and expressed through interactions in this community?

Donath (2007) explains that the strong ties in networks can give support to members of the group and weak ties make people feel less responsibility but provide more access to a variety of information. Users of caloriesperhour have both strong and weak ties. They give emotional support to each other, even though they don’t meet offline, and they interact often by sending private messages. Weak ties are characterized by the fact that most people don’t know each other but share information that they can’t get offline freely because of the limits of time, place, or accessibility. 

Users give emotional support to each other.

                              

Like Bodyspace, caloriesperhour is a passion-centric social network site. “Social network sites connect people because of a shared passion, such as religion, pets, or specific hobbies” (Ploderer et al, 2008). I believe that there are common reasons for users joining and participating in these two communities. First, both communities help users to monitor their progress in the pursuit of their passion, Bodyspace users post their body images to get feedback, mostly applause, from the audience, as in a bodybuilding show; while caloriesperhour users post body image to get suggestions for diet plans. Second, I agree with Ploderer’s statement that “passion-centric social network sites connect mostly people with no previous offline connections”. I have observed that most users of caloriesperhour forum don’t meet offline but freely interact with each other online. Although I feel that there are more chances for bodybuilders to meet other forum users offline since they participate in competitions and work out together at the gym. “People form new relationships with others on social network sites. Thus, social network sites provide them with a community of like-minded people that extends their offline connections with peers, friends and coaches” (Ploderer et al.). Unlike Bodyspace users, who want to get information on how to prepare for bodybuilding competitions, users in caloriesperhour focus on searching for individual diet plans. “Comparing oneself with others is essential in any competitive sport including bodybuilding … they compare themselves with others who are in a worse position in order to enhance their self-esteem” (Ploderer et al.). In addition, most users in Bodyspace already have information about the sport—in other words, there are more experts—while caloriesperhour users are mostly amateurs and have more tendencies to struggle and share why they failed to lose weight.

According to Wellman (2003), networked individualism comes from changes in society (social changes, land use changes, and technological changes). The Internet has caused networks in society to expand from face-to-face groups to online groups, where people access the Internet using mobile phones and create online identities to interact with other people in social network sites. Donath emphasizes the importance of trust in users sharing reliable information. In caloriesperhours.com, users sometimes give and get false information. Not every user is trustworthy and sometimes represent themselves with unidentifiable information in their profiles (no avatars, no real name, etc.); nevertheless, strong ties are built because they have the same interest.

References

Wellman, Barry, Anabel Quan-Haase, Jeffrey Boase, Wenhong Chen, Keith Hampton, Isabel Isla de Diaz and Kakuko Miyata (2003).  The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 8(3). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue3/wellman.html

Donath, Judith. (2007). Signals in Social Supernets. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1).  http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/donath.html

Ploderer, B., S. Howard & P. Thomas (2008). Being Online, Living Offline: The Influence of Social Ties Over the Appropriation of Social Network Sites. Proceedings of CSCW 2008.