A-young, Choi
A-young Choi is a master's student in the Department of Media at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. Her research focuses on group dynamics in online communities, particularly how conversational relationships form and persist among participants. She uses social network analysis and computational text analysis to trace these patterns in large-scale conversational data. She received her B.A. in Sociology and in Social Science Convergence from the same university. She is affiliated with the Digital Curation Lab at Kyung Hee University. Additional information about the lab is available at https://www.digitalcurationlab.com/
Session
Kakaotalk, the most widely used instant messenger in South Korea, allows anyone to create open-chat rooms where up to 4,000 users can converse. Users can search for and anonymously join these rooms by topic. Such rooms may receive hundreds of messages daily, yet only about ten are visible on a single screen. Thus, tracking the conversation and reviewing another participant’s earlier remarks requires additional effort. Despite these communicative constraints, open-chat rooms have not been adequately examined in research on how users form ties through online conversation. Accordingly, this study examines how message characteristics and the frequency of co-participation shape the formation of conversation ties in these rooms.
The formation of conversation ties may be associated with the extent of similarity in the content of two users’ messages. Users judge from message content how far their interests overlap with another's, and the presence of someone with similar interests lowers the burden of addressing a stranger, engaging the tendency to associate with similar others.
Furthermore, the formation of conversation ties may be associated with the similarity of two users’ message lengths. Length may signal the engagement a person brings to the conversation. Long messages elaborate on thoughts and experiences, whereas short ones remain cursory. Users may address participants whose message lengths reflect a level of engagement similar to their own.
Lastly, the formation of conversation ties may be associated with the frequency with which two users participate in the same conversation. Repeated co-participation in the same conversational stream heightens users’ awareness of one another.
To this end, this study uses a multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure (MR-QAP) to examine how message similarity, differences in message length, and the frequency of co-participation are associated with the subsequent formation of conversation ties. A total of 110,515 messages were collected over roughly four months from an open-chat room focused on AI and divided into two periods, T1 and T2. Rapid developments in AI quickly render accumulated knowledge outdated, making this room well suited to observing how users assess one another and form ties from limited cues. A conversation tie was defined as a directed link from each speaker to the immediately preceding speaker. The T2 network, whose nodes were 349 active participants, served as the dependent variable, while predictors were constructed from T1. Message similarity was measured by cosine similarity between users’ messages, length difference by the absolute difference between their mean message lengths, and co-participation by the number of times they joined the same conversational stream. The T1 network and measures of preferential attachment, reciprocity, and transitivity derived from it were included as controls.
Message similarity is expected to promote the formation of conversation ties by revealing shared interests when little other information is available. Message length difference, by contrast, is expected to have a negative effect because a larger difference indicates dissimilar levels of engagement. Co-participation frequency is also expected to have a positive effect because it increases the likelihood of tie formation through greater mutual awareness and more opportunities to respond.
Overall, conversation ties in open-chat rooms are expected to form through immediate responses to message-level cues when participants have little accumulated information about one another. If our expectations are supported, they extend conventional accounts to a setting where the cues that guide attention are not records of past activity but the messages themselves. This study provides a starting point for examining how mechanisms identified in prior research operate differently in open-chat rooms and which other factors may become influential.