Abstract
The present study seeks to address the development of new online social groups in the context of a repressive offline environment. More specifically, it seeks to quantitatively assess the structure of a single, large, politically-focused online group to analyze the group’s participatory structure. Developing a picture of this participatory structure will potentially uncover patterns of behavior and a distribution of participation within a group that, while technically open, is potentially dominated by a small group of users. The second portion of the present study’s analysis centers on an exploration of hyperlink usage whereby hyperlink activity is qualitatively categorized by the web page to which a user hyperlinks from the group’s main discursive platform. This hyperlink analysis will explore the relationship between the group itself and the larger online information. Patterns of usage, specifically the relationship between the categories of hyperlinks and the level of participation of the user that posts a given link will be used to assess the degree to which an elite group of “opinion leaders” develops in an open online group and the extent to which that group of “opinion leaders” sets the discursive agenda by linking to particular categories of web pages at varying rates.
The group at the center of the present study is the April 6th Youth Movement group, hosted on Facebook. The findings in the following study affirm previous research in the social sciences and uncovers a pattern of power law distribution of contribution, whereby a small number of individuals are responsible for an exponentially higher amount of participation than others. This small group of individuals is at the helm of a group of 75,000 members, of which only .05 percent engaged actively at all with group during a two-week constructed sample. This small group of active users were also responsible for posting significantly more content that referred other members to other web pages inside the movement’s information sphere. These findings are significant because they undercut conclusions that point to the online discursive sphere as a potential alternative to a traditional offline sphere that is closed off to much of the population.
The methodology in this thesis is set apart from previous research because it takes a case study approach to the sample – by selecting a single group to track – but applies a quantitative hyperlink analysis to more clearly analyze the group’s structure and activity. The methodology is a unique blend of quantitative – analyzing all output of a group in a constructed sample – and qualitative – coding hyperlinks into qualitative categories for further comparison.
The findings of the thesis are perhaps disappointing to those who envision an online public sphere as the solution to many obstacles to freedom of expression and association in authoritarian-controlled societies. If discursive online spheres are commandeered by a select few who set the agenda for an amorphous and inconsistently committed group of users, the potential for coordinated offline activity or coherent discussion of wider social problems seems limited. Further study of other groups within the political sphere of Egypt, the MENA region, and the world are necessary before any generalized conclusions can be extrapolated concerning online political group structure.¬¬¬