research-article

Chinese online communities: balancing managementcontrol and individual autonomy

Authors:

Michelle X. Zhou,

Fei MaAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 2193 - 2202

https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753658

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Existing studies of online social communities mainly focus on communities in the United States. Since Chinese social beliefs and behaviors largely differ from that of Americans, we hypothesize that Chinese online communities also greatly differ from their U.S. counterparts. In particular, we believe that Chinese online communities must balance management control and individual autonomy to accommodate both Chinese tradition and the social nature of online societies. In this paper, we present three studies to test our hypothesis. First, we use a structured observation (Study I) to examine community governance practices of 32 Chinese and American social sites. Based on the identified community governance practices, we use a cross-cultural survey of 208 Chinese and Americans (Study II) to learn about their behavior and attitude toward these practices. Finally, we interview 38 Chinese users (Study III) to help us further understand how Chinese online communities balance the needs of management and users. Not only do the studies confirm our hypothesis, but they also help us abstract two key design implications of social software to meet the needs of Chinese.

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De ALu Z(2024)#PoetsOfInstagram: Navigating The Practices And Challenges Of Novice Poets On InstagramProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642173(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642173
Jiang JNie PBrubaker JFiesler C(2023)A Trade-off-centered Framework of Content ModerationACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/353492930:1(1-34)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3534929
Huh JMarmor RJiang X(2016)Lessons Learned for Online Health Community Moderator Roles: A Mixed-Methods Study of Moderators Resigning From WebMD CommunitiesJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/jmir.633118:9(e247)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2016
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Index Terms

Chinese online communities: balancing managementcontrol and individual autonomy
1. Human-centered computing

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2010

2690 pages

ISBN:9781605589299

DOI:10.1145/1753326

General Chair:
Elizabeth Mynatt
Georgia Institute of Technology
,
Program Chairs:
Geraldine Fitzpatrick
Vienna University of Technology
,
Scott Hudson
Carnegie Mellon University
,
Keith Edwards
Georgia Tech
,
Tom Rodden
University of Nottingham

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 April 2010

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April 10 - 15, 2010

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642173
Jiang JNie PBrubaker JFiesler C(2023)A Trade-off-centered Framework of Content ModerationACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/353492930:1(1-34)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3534929
Huh JMarmor RJiang X(2016)Lessons Learned for Online Health Community Moderator Roles: A Mixed-Methods Study of Moderators Resigning From WebMD CommunitiesJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/jmir.633118:9(e247)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2016
https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.6331
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Kow YNardi BHinds PTang JWang JBardram JDucheneaut N(2011)Forget online communities?Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work10.1145/1958824.1958877(351-354)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2011
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