Investigating Exhaust Data in Virtual Communities

Contemporary society is an “informational” or “networked” society, actualized by individuals engaging in communication processes that take place in online social networks. While interpreting “traces” as “documents in archives (which) for the most part come from witnesses in spite of themselves” ((Ricoeur, Memory, history, forgetting. University of Chicago Press, 2009: 171), we will explore how the users of virtual communities consider and use these traces in different ways than originally intended, thus acquiring different meanings. In specific, we will focus on two research questions in this chapter: (1) What are the features of the information that are left unintentionally by the users of virtual communities? and (2) What is the role of such unintentional information in virtual communities? In order to answer these research questions, we use data gathered by means of 49 semi-structured qualitative interviews (see Agostini & Mechant, International Journal Of Electrical, Electronics And Data Communication (IJEEDC) 3:19–23, 2015). Results show how the members of virtual communities play an active role in decoding “traces” as they rely on their own social contexts and are capable of changing messages themselves through collective action. We also demonstrate that sense of community is mediated by community awareness and that the regular exchange of information has a positive effect on the different dimensions that support sense of community.