Online Communities

Turismul în România a suferit schimbări considerabile în procesul de tranziţie spre economia de piaţă. Aceste modificări, însoţite de soluţiile neadecvate adoptate de autorităţi, au determinat o situaţie discordantă între ceea ce prezintă şi promovează Ministerul Turismului şi situaţia reală a industriei turismului şi a industriei hoteliere româneşti. Această situaţie a fost întreţinută şi de centralizarea precară sau eronată către Ministerul Turismului (MT)/ Autoritatea Naţională pentru Turism (ANT) a informaţiilor hotelierilor cu privire la hotelurile administrate, dar şi de slaba prelucrare a informaţiilor primite de către MT/ ANT, conducând la generarea unor informaţii eronate. Aceste date sunt practic inutile pentru oricare dintre categoriile de persoane interesate să afle mai multe cu privire la industria hotelieră românească şi cu atât mai mult pentru cei care doresc să le utilizeze ca punct de referinţă, în special în vederea deschiderii unor noi afaceri în domeniul ospitali...

Abstract.  This paper challenges traditional explorations of online communities that have relied upon assumptions of trust and social cohesion. In the analysis presented here, conflict becomes more than just dysfunctional communication and provides an alternative set of unifying principles and rationales for understanding social interaction and identity shape shifting within an online community. A model is advanced that describes the systematic techniques of hostility and aggression in technologically enabled communities that take the form of contemporary tribalism. It is argued that this tribe-like conflict embodies important rituals essential for maintaining and defining the contradictory social roles sometimes found in online environments. This research offers a critical interpretive perspective that focuses on the link between identity shape shifting behaviours and the power relations within an online financial community. The analysis reveals how conflict between positions of power can help to align the values and ideals of an online community. With this study we seek to motivate a re-examination of the design and governance of online communities.

The present article analyzes how young self-injuring women and men construct themselves as 'cutters.' The study draws on observations of a Swedish Internet community connected to self-injurious behavior and departs from a poststructuralist framework in order to analyze how members position themselves and others in relation to cultural discourses on self-injury. Two main discourses are identified in the Web community: the 'normalizing' and the 'pathologizing' discourses, which give contrasting versions of self-injury, self-cutters, and their scarred bodies. Within the normalizing discourse, self-injurious behavior is regarded as a legitimate practice for dealing with mental health problems, 'cutters' are resilient, and their blood and scars are beautiful. In contrast, within the pathologizing discourse self-injurious behavior is understood as morally reprehensible, self-cutters are pathological, and their bodies are repulsive. In the Web community, members invoke both discourses, which leads to ambivalent subject positions. This study shows that the seemingly contradictory subject positions of the two discourses in fact are interdependent on each other as members draw on both the normalizing and the pathologizing discourses in order to become 'authentic cutters.

Emotion has long been a contested concept and subject to different, often conflicting, definitions and approaches. Emotions have long been viewed in a reductionist way as solely biological components, as private components of the personality structure of an individual, or as entirely socially and culturally constructed. These views, that separate analytically different facets of emotion, reflect persisting dichotomies of human phenomena as nature vs. nurture, universality vs. culture-specificity, and private vs. public, which have served as the key organizing principles inWestern science and humanities.
Emotions, however, occupy a liminal space between divisions (Leavitt, 1996); they involve phenomena that are interactive and integrated with cognition (Izard, 2009), playing a key role in human development, in everyday social interaction, and in the organization of social and cultural life. Emotions are, then, to be understood as a not exclusively private object of inquiry (Zembylas, 2007). The study on emotion has
received an enormous increase since the 1980s with a marked rise in psychological studies, and gradually engendering more insight from sociology, political science, anthropology, communication, and cultural studies, among others (Döveling, Scheve, & Konijn, 2011). Scholars seemto have reached consensus on the usefulness of the term
“emotion” to refer to certain socially embedded psychobiological processes, even if they do not necessarily agree on how such processes cohere, or to what extent components such as arousal, feeling, appraisal, or facial expression can be given causal or definitional prominence (Beatty, 2013, p. 416).It is, however, agreed that emotions constitute a lens not only into the development of human evolution and cognition, but also into the complexities of meaning-making, the organization of roles and relationships in social life, and the way thesemay change over time. Emotions can then be conceptualized as a broad range of affective phenomena, including moods, feelings, affects, and related concepts (Döveling et al., 2011), which are not contained in a single domain, but rather belong to several domains, including the affective, the social, and the evolutionary/ motivational (Wilce, 2009). Emotions are particularly pertinent to the investigation of communication practices in online contexts.The article provids an interdisciplinary and intercultural lens to emotional communication in mediatized contexts of grieving, mourning, and memorialization and contribute to the understanding of the reflexive and social dynamics of sharing emotions online.

For some drug policy scholars, including us, the online marketplace Silk Road and its successors are inherently fascinating. When we first discovered Silk Road in 2011, on opposite sides of the globe, we could not believe it was real: people were buying illegal drugs anonymously through a global marketplace that resembled eBay or Amazon. We were instantly hooked. Rather than addressing our fellow cryptomarket-obsessed colleagues who will no doubt already be devouring the 12 articles in the issue, we would like to address the remaining readership of the journal, who may not know much at all about cryptomarkets and may wonder what relevance cryptomarkets have to broader drug policy scholarship.