Social Performances: A Sociotechnical Framework for Understanding Online Prosocial Behavior.

Abstract

Prosocial behavior describes actions, such as sharing and cooperation, intended to benefit others. In particular, the popular online activity of remixing, is especially dependent upon individuals to willingly share content that they have created for others to reuse and even profit from. However, what motivates these individuals to share their creations with relative strangers when there is no clear benefit to themselves? This dissertation presents an explanatory framework that helps to explain online prosociality through two main observations: 1) That these online content sharing environments afford social transparency by providing a view of all users and activity on the system through visualizations and displays. 2) That this socially transparent space enables the development of social currencies (or group scripts/norms) which encourage prosocial behavior in the system. The overall goal for the social performance framework is to provide an understanding of the prosocial sharing and, at the same time, be used to inform the design of systems that encourage this behavior. I apply this framework to a two-part study of prosocial sharing motivations in an online music remixing community, ccMixter. The first part of the study utilizes social network analysis to characterize and describe the dynamics of music sharing in the community. One of the findings is that a core group of members are responsible for much of the sharing and remixing activity in the community. In the second part of this study, I interview twenty-four members from this core group to investigate their motivations for prosocial behavior in ccMixter. A key finding was that these members were motivated to contribute and share because of the influence of group norms made socially transparent by the website. This study of ccMixter represents a first test of the analytical capability of the social performance framework. In general, the framework performed well, surfacing the joint influence of community norms and the affordance of the website on prosocial sharing. To further strengthen the explanatory power of the framework, future studies will seek to apply the framework to other online content sharing communities.