The Internet has emerged as a communicative form that people use to create, sustain, and become part of communities. Communication is essential to fostering concrete interactions between group members, which provide the basis for the existence of comm ...
The Internet has emerged as a communicative form that people use to create, sustain, and become part of communities. Communication is essential to fostering concrete interactions between group members, which provide the basis for the existence of community, whether in a face-to-face situation or online. The strategies for the construction and assertion of identity within websites also play a key role in establishing commonalities and connections among group members needed for communities.
This project explored evolvement process and present situation, rule and order, and interpersonal relationship and social identity of internet community as social space in literature investigation. In the beginning of this project, I analyzed community structures to explore the Internet as a space in which communities are constructed, participants interact, and knowledge is transmitted. I examine the effect of emotional involvement and identity salience on community citizenship behavior (community loyalty, social participation, and advocacy participation) in cyber community. The results of the on-line survey analysis verify that emotional involvement influence on community loyalty, social participation, and advocacy participation. Identity salience also influence on community loyalty, social participation, and advocacy participation. This result mean, as like in offline community setting, emotional involvement and identity salience are important factor to evolve community citizenship behavior in online community. At last, we discuss several theoretical and practical implications, and suggest limitations for the research and future research issue.
From the second year of the project, I explored identity expression of cyber community. I investigated internet-item using motivation, emotional involvement on internet-item, purchase intention, and current input on internet-item of adolescents and adults. The results of the survey analysis for adolescents verify that internet-item using motivation consists of four components: show off, image management, self-express, self-satisfaction, conformity. And altogether, show off motivation and image management motivation has most powerful effect on item consumption behavior and item user satisfaction. And the he results of the survey analysis for adults verify that internet-item using motivation consists of six components: image management, fun, actual-self express, ideal-self express, other-consciousness, and conformity. And results of regression analysis show actual-self express motivation influences on behavioral/emotional involvement and satisfaction, and ideal-self express motivation influences on satisfaction and using intention.
In follow-up research, I explore personal media users' self concept and cyber-item using motivation, and their effects on cyber-item consumption behavior as item attachment, satisfaction, and using intention of item. To examine this proposition, this study investigated item users' self concept (actual self and ideal self), cyber-item using motivation and their item attachment, satisfaction, and using intention of personal media users. The results of the survey analysis verify that internet-item using motivation consists of six components: image management, self-express, reality-transcendence, fun, other-consciousness, conformity. And congruency level of actual-ideal selves moderates the effects of item using motivation on item attachment and user satisfaction.