It has been suggested that local online community chat rooms and the dialogue which permeates those forums might be a good way to determine if the local community and the people living in it are friendly and the town has the proper ambience and atmosphere. That makes sense right? If everyone is being polite online because they know other people in the community are also online, and if they realize it is a tightknit community, the chances are people will be more polite, right? Sure, that makes sense, but I’d like to take this conversation to a higher intellectual level.
Namely I’d like to say that if the communication is too tight, and too friendly, it might also be considered shallow, nonintellectual, and people may be afraid to speak their mind. In that case the social dynamic, political correctness, and overbearing authority of the community may indeed be taking its toll on the individual, and perhaps curtailing creativity, original thought, and anything that isn’t of the approved method.
In other words whereas the analyzing of these community chat forums might show that the local society is cohesive, it might also show that there is too much authority, and people are afraid to speak. Now then, in this debate let’s take the positive side of the argument, one which I would be rather inclined to believe, and would feel pleased if that were in fact the case, even though I am yet to be convinced of this.
There is an interesting paper you might like to read titled; ” Counting Little Words in Big Data: The Psychology of Communities, Culture, and History,” by Cindy K. Chung, and James W. Pennebaker, University of Texas at Austin.
In this paper the expert researchers did a study using WikiPedia forums for mid-sized cities and they analyzed the verbiage, and the positive and negative banter and discussions, then determined a scale of cohesiveness. What does all this mean? Further, for those cities with the most cohesiveness, would that mean that the community was “tighter” and more on the same page, more tolerant, and/or politically correct?
But could it also mean that people felt stifled to say what was really on their mind because they had little if any self-esteem and lacked individuality? If so would a community which monitors speech through political correctness or has perhaps a higher level of college graduates conditioned to act and speak in a certain way, be somewhere you’d want to live?
So, let me ask you a question; “Should we be analyzing Community Chat Forums to determine the Most Cohesive Local Societies?”
If so, what will we find?
1. Good Schools
2. Strong Economy
3. Low Crime Rates
4. Full-Time Employment
Are there additional correlations to the level of civility in the online chat forums of local community based discussions? The jury is still out as far as I’m concerned, but this research paper is rather compelling, and although I am challenging it here today and its findings, I find the whole thing rather fascinating and intriguing, and I think you will too. I do recommend that you do spend a little extra time to do some personal research of your own on this topic. Please consider all this and think on it.