Social Roles in Electronic Communities

Individuals’ behavior in groups is constrained by several factors, including the skills, privileges and responsibilities they enjoy. We call these factors a social role, and explore using the concept of social roles as an analytical tool for studying communities in Usenet newsgroups. Our understanding of what roles are and how they function is derived from sociolinguistics, social psychology, and the ethnography of communication. We conducted an observational study of several Usenet newsgroups and, from the collected data, constructed a taxonomy of roles, with which we analyzed social interactions and their impact on newsgroup communities, especially how communities change over time.