Social Ability in Online Groups: Representing the Quality of Interactions in Social Computing Environments

We propose social ability as a construct that will contribute to the development of social computing models. Completely online group experiences vary according to the composition of tools, tasks and individuals. This conditionality creates challenges for social computing researchers who seek to model social behavior online. We use social ability as a frame to describe how members of completely online groups (COGs) experience the social nature of their interaction and how the nature of their social computing changes over time. We show how social ability measures for COG participants change during collaboration and describe how two social ability factors - social presence and perceived written communication skills - are related to participation and contribution in online group activities. The findings from this mixed methods study show that members who participate in online groups experience increases in perceived written communication skills and peer social presence, suggesting that completely online group work influences social ability.

I. Introduction

Social computing is more than the identification of multidimensional clusters from usage logs. Parson [16] popularly described the importance of the normative aspects of social organization. Lockwood [15] in turn critiqued this focus on normative social structure, arguing that it is the non-normative or, to use the vernacular of the day, deviant behavior through which systems of social organization evolve. Social computing systems evolve more rapidly than the systems Parsons or Lockwood studied. Social computing represents a form of social experience and a range of new computing capabilities that enable, sustain and constrain social experiences. The phenomenon of rapid change to social structure in social computing contexts calls for the development of new constructs to explicate the nexus of person, task and tools in social computing.