Journal of Socialomics

Abstract

Is There Online Collective Identity within Social Bookmarking Systems?

Juan D. Borrero

Social tagging systems attract researchers in information systems and social sciences because they offer an enormous quantity of user-generated annotations that reveal the interest of millions of people. In this paper, we develop two hypotheses around the idea of online collective identity. We present a model in which agents exchange practical and symbolic resources via opinion and frame networks. The results discussed in the paper come from the analysis of a sample of a sample of 3,668 users, 2,148 URLs and 4,776 tags from the Delicious classification system on the subject of globalization of agriculture. Our social network analysis has identified differences between networks that reflect different degrees of explicitness within the Delicious online community and it has provided an understanding of social bookmarking systems that was not previously available. This research is one of the first to apply information to the frame components in an attempt to establish the implicit links within these networks.