Patterns of Activity in Political Online Discussion Boards in South Korea

Canberra.
The next speaker in this ANZCA 2010 session is Sora Park, whose focus is on online participation behaviour in South Korea. As part of a larger study, she conducted a content analysis of online discussion boards - which are a major site for political discussion and organisation in the country. How is information exchanged, diffused, and consumed online through such spaces?

Korea has one of the highest levels of broadband penetration in the world; some 90% of the population use the Net daily, and some 29% participate in online discussions. During the political riots in 2008, online discussion boards were important for organising activities, but there are also concerns about the lack of balance in political discussion - a spiral of silence may be present here, reducing the presence of alternative voices.

So, Sora wanted to categorise user groups according to their level of participation in online discussion boards; to identify differences in message characteristics from different users; and to check for differences in responses to different user types. The study collected messages and replies from seven major online discussion boards, conducted systematic sampling, and coded the type of mesages.

Notably, there are significant differences between different discussion boards - ranging between 37,000 to 765 messages per week. The average number of messages posted by user was 26 per week, but this varied widely between boards, too. Some 0.2% of users posted more than 400 messages, some 0.9% between 300 and 400, , 1.8% between 200 and 300, 4.4% between 100 and 200, 31.9 between 10 and 99, and the rest (60.8%) less than 10 during the sampling period.

Typical topics included politics (27%, but 35% for active users), economy, social issues, culture, personal, and other; messages differed in style (factual, personal opinion, strong opinion, influencing - and more active users were more strongly attempting to influence others). Other style differences were that some messages provided personal background (uncommon for active users - perhaps because they were better known to others already), slandering (more common for active users), attempts to build consensus (low for both, but slightly higher for less active users), and based on facts.

Sora also examined response rates (clicks, replies, number of repliers, replies by the original message writers) - and interestingly, more active users received fewer replies. More active participants also tended to receive shorter messages, and replies tended to be less relevant to the message which came before them.

So: active participants appear to receive less attention and fewer responses; they received a higher proportion of short remarks that were less relevant to the topic. This appears to indicate that contrary to popular belief, more active users are not necessarily opinion leaders

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