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Log In Sign Up. Unfollow Follow Unblock. Other Affiliations:. File-sharing collectives have significantly disrupted models of digital media distribution since their emergence and widespread popularization in the late s.
This study investigates how semi-anonymous and decentralized collectives This study investigates how semi-anonymous and decentralized collectives construct their communities of practice. Conducting a case study of a private torrenting community, data were gathered via participant observation, interviews, and online postings i.
Findings challenged dominant notions of opportunism, selfishness and task-oriented individualism advanced by Human—Computer Interaction scholars. Three key constructs were identified in private torrent community building: boundary construction, membership maintenance, and a sense of belonging and solidarity.
This analysis elucidated the foundations of a purely virtual community, and its potential to reform basic constructs of community building, social exchange, stratification and social control. A short overview of the research is provided below. To jump to a specific section click on the relevant link.
Although some variation can be noted over the years, using mixed method analysis much of the discourse led by HCI research relating to Peer-to-Peer P2P communities was divided into four meta-phases as follows:. This study sought to uncover the ways that semi-anonymous and decentralized collectives construct a community. Previously BitTorrent communities have been investigated with an eye to their technological facet through an HCI lens.
Ethnographic investigations of other online communities highlighted rituals, norms, identity construction, and the phenomenology of users. In this study, I aimed to converge the methodological approaches underlying both research traditions by developing a balanced methodological approach that attributed importance to both the cultural and technological properties.
BitTorrent communities exist as closed and secretive environments, working through pirated materials, and persecuted by the authorities. Therefore, engaging its members and relaying their worldviews can be challenging. Following the anthropological legacy of studying covert communities such as delinquent and deviant groups , an ethnographic approach for studying communities such as BitTorrent has been developed.
To unveil the cultural structures that propel a BitTorrent community, case study analysis has been used. To this end, an exclusive community was selected called MusicTorrents pseudonym. To this effect 7 subjects participated in in-depth interviews, accompanied by numerous informal conversations and correspondence.
In addition, some interview subjects served as key informants assisting with the interpretation and mediation of the community. The data was gathered in an explorative manner, utilizing a modified implementation of participant observation and semi-structured interviews that ranged from 45—90 minutes.
The interviews were conducted by media communications, primarily Skype, irc, private message, and over the phone and in-person interviews that were conducted in places where the subjects could feel comfortable revealing their identities and geographic locations. All of the gathered data was then organized and categorized using Nvivo, a mixed method data analysis software.
The data was systematically analyzed to create a holistic and methodologically accurate characterization of the culture, rules, economy, and philosophy employed in the construction of the virtual MusicTorrents community. MusicTorrents exists in an underexplored arena, the virtual one.
It is a small subset of the larger Internet that not many people are aware of. Although the community exists primarily to facilitate the distribution of media between peers, it has evolved as third places frequently do into a something that goes beyond the scope of its original purpose. Additional informal sources were also explored as informants and mediators of information.
These bloggers were relevant because they have access to and provide information about a community that is secretive and restricted, releasing information that would otherwise be inaccessible.
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