Sunday, June 28, 2026 Strategy, technology, media, and social systems

I Think

Sorin Adam Matei

Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.

Tag: model

Virtual Omaha

Map of Omaha Beach German fortifications (blue dropets) laid over the American operational map for June 6, 1944 (misaligned due to Google Maps limitations). Clicking the button “Google Earth” will show the 3d Model of the German fortifications and will correctly align…

IThink 01/15/2009

Sakai Project : Home : About Sakai tags: no_tag Current List of Participants | Project Bamboo tags: bamboo, project, humanities, digital, initiative, purdue, matei WizFolio Web 2.0 tags: citation, management, zotero Zotero is not a sword-swinging hero « Computer Helpers from Boreham…

The theory of mob rule in academia (and cyberspace)

A perfectly random rump through the meadows of hyperspace lead me from this post on In Trade about volatility as a predictor of bias to this blog full of equations, to this note and then to this Chronicle article about mobbing in…

A research agenda for collaborative consumer engagement and research methods

We’ve known for about half a decade, if not more, that the Internet allows deep and wide collaboration. We have tried to apply this new tool to academic research, open software development, creating business alliances, reinventing retail and, why not, sharing music…

Online Community Development: Principles, Practices, and Issues

Submitted on November 26, 2007, to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink)  Abstract: The widespread expansion of communication technology over the past century has resulted in a marked…

Welcome to I-berspace: Media Gratifications in Successful Virtual Communities

Submitted by Robert N. Yale on October 15, 2007 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink). Abstract This essay posits that virtual communities are successful to the degree…

About Intute: Arts and Humanities

One of the most interesting resources for virtual reality modeling and research in archeology. Specific link to archeology  About Intute: Arts and Humanities What is Intute: Arts and Humanities? Artifact and Humbul, two of the hubs of the Resource Discovery Network RDN,…

Investigations into Trust for Collaborative Information Repositories: A Wikipedia Case Study

Investigations into Trust for Collaborative Information Repositories: A Wikipedia Case Study Investigations into Trust for Collaborative Information Repositories: A Wikipedia Case Study Authors: Deborah L. McGuinness, Honglei Zeng, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Li Ding, Dhyanesh Narayanan, and Mayukh Bhaowal Book Title: Proceedings…

Front Porches and Public Spaces: Planned Communities Online

Front Porches and Public Spaces: Planned Communities Online Susan Huelsing Sarapin Comm. 632: Online Interaction Professor: Dr. Sorin Matei November 19, 2006 Introduction Where else today but in the cost-effective frontier of cyberspace can the average person construct a community?1 With widespread…

A Simple Helpful Site…

Powazek (2002) stated three key issues in his book Design for Community that should be initially considered when building a community; audience, content, and community. Likewise, Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002) in their book entitled Cultivating Communities of Practice spoke of a…

I Link, Therefore, I Am: Connection and Identity in Computer-Mediated Communication

By Susan Huelsing Sarapin Submitted on October 22, 2006 to the On-Line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2006, Purdue University Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink) Introduction Today, people all over the world are connected, or “tethered” (Turkle,…

Voices

Blogs are about having a voice – whether it be a political or civic voice (Wolf, 2004; Korblum, 2003) or a personal voice. We want to be heard in the political arena, in the news arena, and in the personal area. Why…

The Changing Nature of Expertise & Authority – Is it Anarchy?

Authority and expertise has changed. Weinberger’s chapter on “The Hyperlinked Organization” in The Cluetrain Manifesto (2004) and his chapter on “Knowledge” in Small Pieces Loosely Connected (2002) both talk about how authority no longer means what it used to mean. There are…

Televised Education without the Television

A thought on our discourse on television. Many people felt that TV was not an interactive medium – rather it was a passive medium that broadcasts messages. It made me think about the history of education. Traditionally, modern education has been broadcast…

Spaceaware: The Visible Past Version

Spaceaware is a research project I started a couple of years ago, which looks at how people make sense of information delivery experiences similar to the “hailing billboard” scene in Minority Report. (Remember the scene in which Tom Cruise is greeted by…

Emerging technologies, spatial behavior and community belonging

New media and emerging technologies continue to change not only our communication (Gunn, 2006; Jones, 2006), but also our relationships, our work, and our communities (Contractor, 2006; Walther, 2006). At the same time, our societies and organizations – i.e. the bodies within…

SIDE Theory, Small World Networks, and Smart Mob Formation: A Beginners Guide

Submitted by: Scott Sanders to the Online Interaction Seminar, COM 632Y, Spring 2006, Dr. Sorin A. Matei, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907. Summary: Social categorization, which is at the heart of SIDE theory, may often prove to be an incredibly powerful…

Networks Class AT UIUC

SPCM 529, NC, “Communication Networks” Professor Noshir Contractor University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign & Professor Peter Monge Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California Available via Access Grid and Polycom Videoconference 3 – 6 pm Tuesday, Central (4 – 7 pm…

Network forms of organizing: A MTML perspective

The metaphor of organization-as-networks directs attention to the dynamic nature of the process of organization as an emergent, evolving, and dynamic. At a global level, theorists have engaged with different forms of interdependencies, whether social, political or economic, as exemplified by Castells’…

Layered, Emergent and Adaptive Communication Network Systems

Lorraine Kisselburgh This week, Noshir Contractor introduces a rich array of information in discussing communication networks, new grid infrastructures, and social networking tools that can be leveraged to strengthen our communities – whether social, work, virtual, or even “exotic”. What follows are…

Communication Networks

After interacting with Noshir Contractor this week and going through the readings on communication networks and new forms of organizing, if you’re interested in more on this subject, you might want to look at the (interdisciplinary) workshop he is presenting in Bloomington…

Songs of the Mock Turtle: Ways of knowing in an online world

For many, the democratic and liberatory promise of the internet lies in the potential to allow collaboration, interaction, and exchange of information, ideas, and resources at a scale not otherwise possible (or at least, not highly probable) in a simple offline world.…

Revisiting propinquity in interpersonal and intergroup dynamics

Drawing on the earlier notion of electronic propinquity as postulated by Korzenny (1978), the role of several factors like communication skills, bandwidth, information complexity, mutual directionality, to name a few, all play a part in determining the amount of propinquity achieved in…

A Culture of Connectivity: Control and Marginalization

The chapter “The Sad Irons” in Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power illustrates not only the interplay between culture and technology but also the consequences of lacking connection to a technological network (Caro, 1982). Due to geographical…

The magic of experiments

John Henry makes the very persuasive point that magic thinking is at the very core of the modern experimental method. Francis Bacon, the inventor of the experimental and inductive methods was seriously committed to a research program inspired by magic. In the…