During the last decade, the advance of Internet has enabled the emergence of previously nonexistent type of human social structures - virtual 'online' communities. As compared to the traditional communities, online communities are distinguished by the drastic reduction of the requirement for the physical proximity and geographical clustering of their members. The primary cause of this shift away from 'physically concentrated' communities to dispersed virtual ones is new long distance communication tools that Internet has provided. Along with the increase in quantity of communication that the new technology brought about, it also strongly influenced its quality. The paper suggests two simple mathematical tools for analysing the 'soft' (qualitative) sociological internal properties of virtual communities. The suggested tools are applied and their utility discussed on the example of one such virtual community, Croatian NGO 'Society znanost.org'. Classification-ACM-1998: J.4; Social and behavioral sciences - Sociology
[1]
P. Dalziel,et al.
Pareto, Parsons, and the Boundary Between Economics and Sociology
,
2006
.
[2]
J. Stepanic.
Social Equivalent of Free Energy
,
2004
.
[3]
David Gauntlett,et al.
Web. Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age
,
2000
.
[4]
Albert,et al.
Emergence of scaling in random networks
,
1999,
Science.
[5]
Josip Stepanic,et al.
Approach to a Quantitative Description of Social Systems Based on Thermodynamic Formalism
,
2000,
Entropy.
[6]
S H Strogatz,et al.
Random graph models of social networks
,
2002,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
[7]
César A. Hidalgo,et al.
Scale-free networks
,
2008,
Scholarpedia.
[8]
Larry Press.
McLuhan meets the Net
,
1995,
CACM.
[9]
Thornbjorn Knudsen,et al.
Zipf's Law for Cities and Beyond: The Case of Denmark
,
2001
.