From Paradigmatic to Syntagmatic Communities: A Socio-Semiotic Approach to the Evolution Pattern of Online Travel Communities

This paper presents the results of an observatory research which explores the users’ participation in three different travel related virtual communities. The behaviour of the first top ten users has been observed in three different timeframes recording both outcoming interactions (e.g. from the studied user to other users) and incoming ones (e.g. from other users to the studied one). Then, a socio-semiotic linguistic approach has been adopted to explain the users’ behaviour and to hypothesize a possible evolution pattern for the communities.

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