Virtual Communities

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE CONVENED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES AT THE OPEN UNIVERSITY | 14-15 SEPT 2021
Following from last year’s Festivals Research and Covid 19: Virtual Community, Activism, Spirituality we are inviting snapshots from Festivals Research for a 2021 interdisciplinary conference organised by the Religious Studies department of The Open University.

This conference is concerned with the dynamic connections, relationships, intertextuality and interculturality of festivals, particularly in their constructions of imagined pasts and alternative futures. As an important type of cultural event, festivals provide an opportunity for interdisciplinary dialogue and critical engagement with contemporary and historical publics and places. The conference will address modern and historical festivals, their connections and disconnections with the state and counter publics, as well as themes such as ritual, community, spirituality, wellbeing and counterculture, and trends such as commercialization, secularization, globalization and cultural innovation.

Festivals pre- and post- Covid | Festivals and communities’ resilience 

Festival intertextuality and intercultural connections | Imagination at festivals

Festivals, mainstream and counterculture | Festivals and modern cultures

Methodologies for investigating festival cultures | Festivals East and West

Protestival rituals and performances | Rural and urban themes at festivals

Pulverised and micro festivals | Showcasing innovation and alternative futures

Green futures and consumerism at festivals | Religion, rituals and spirituality

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:
Dr Kinga Povedák (MTA-SZTE ‘Convivence’ Religious Pluralism Research Group) | Dr Sharif Gemie (University of Chichester) | Dr Amanda Lucia (University of California)

Submissions
We invite proposals for papers and panels on any aspect of this theme. Submissions may range from 10, 15 and 20 minutes. We welcome panel submissions in alternative formats, including artistic performances.

Please send a 200-word abstract plus a short bio, in one file to festcultures@open.ac.uk

Deadline for submissions: 31st of May 2021.

Abstract
Within the prevalent digital communication era, users have utilized digital connectivity to form social aggregations and virtual communities (VC) with unique features.  Recently, millions of internet users have joined one or more brand virtual communities to serve their communication, knowledge-seeking, entertainment, and self-fulfillment needs. Virtual communities represent different contexts, objectives, and technical configurations catering to diverse consumption patterns. This article is the first to present virtual communities’ typology focusing on passion, professional, social, and commercial brand communities. This article also explores a comparative framework for brand communities’ engagement profiles in the four types of brand communities. Moreover, it outlines recommendations for future research relating to VC’s engagement in behavioral studies.

This chapter looks at the new trends in Spanish youth migration in the context of the global crisis of 2008-14. It deals with the socio demographic profile of these migrants, their migratory projects and their networks of political activism. It is based on a research project, “New emigration from Spain: profiles, mobility strategies, and transnational political activism”, which was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (CSO2016-80158-R) and produced as part of a larger research project dealing with the phenomenon of recent Spanish emigration to several European countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany and France.

In order to clarify the research approach, we first present the theoretical background and literature on which this research is based, then introduce the main concepts within this field of studies and finally present the specific methodology of the research. After this, we look at the data collected in order to find out the mechanisms that would explain the role of virtual communities among Spanish young people who have moved abroad and their role in the interaction of Spaniards living abroad. The conclusion invites the reader to reflect upon the role of digital diasporas as well as to think of the potential social exclusion situations that young people might face in their online interactions.

El presente estudio se centra en el análisis de la comunidad virtual ScolarTIC, de Fundación Telefónica, desde la perspectiva de Marketing de contenidos. Las marcas en Internet, a través de diversas estrategias, buscan construir relaciones más directas, a partir de las interacciones con sus audiencias. La Web Social ha permitido un ecosistema donde abundan los espacios para construir estos mecanismos de conversación y relación en red. El contenido de valor, en diferentes formatos y plataformas, no solo se convierte en una forma de satisfacer necesidades y preferencias del grupo objetivo, sino también en una
estrategia de posicionamiento en el medio digital y de la propia notoriedad de la marca. La investigación busca evaluar la efectividad de las comunidades virtuales como estrategia de marketing de contenidos y analizar el tipo de retorno de inversión. Para esto se realiza el estudio de caso de ScolarTIC, a partir de una encuesta y un análisis de redes en uno de los espacios de conversación semanal, denominado #ScolarTICchat, que tiene la comunidad en la red social Twitter.
Promover una plataforma como ScolarTIC puede resultar en un beneficio más allá de lo invertido, que puede ser positivo para la compañía y la sociedad. Si bien existen objetivos no solo sociales, sino también de marca, enfocados en posicionar la imagen en innovación y
vanguardia tecnológica a través de esta plataforma, el impacto social también puede medirse en la finalidad que tiene la comunidad. La estrategia de marketing de contenidos diseñada tiene efecto en el posicionamiento de la marca en su grupo objetivo, en la construcción de reputación y de autoridad digital. La empresa logra alcanzar tendencias en Twitter, semana a semana, es decir; capta la atención de muchas cuentas más allá de sus seguidores sin invertir en más publicidad. Si bien esta estrategia de contenidos también genera costos, los beneficios superan el retorno económico en lo denominado ROI Social.


Libro de Actas del II Congreso de la Red Iberoamericana de Investigadores en Publicidad. ISBN: 978-84-09-23665-7

‘The Arts Territory Exchange and the S Project /alternative journeys’ - Gudrun Filipska. Paper and video presentation delivered at Sheffield Hallam University -The Artist's Journey # 3: Improfessional Practices Conference in association with the National Association for Fine Art Education, Februrary 2020.

The paper traces the concept of a real "responsive" community as defined by communitarians. Virtual/online communities have appeared due to the modernisation and information technology development in society. From the communitarian perspective of a community responsive to the needs of its members as well as demands of society, the author attempts to find out if the virtual communities still meet the conditions of "real" ones.

In this paper, we address the issue of how different personalities interact in Twitter. In particular we study users' interactions using one trait of the standard model known as the “Big Five”: emotional stability. We collected a corpus of about 200000 Twitter posts and we annotated it with an unsupervised personality recognition system. This system exploits linguistic features, such as punctuation and emoticons, and statistical features, such as followers count and retweeted posts. We tested the system on a dataset annotated with ...

In a nutshell, co-creation is described as a way to open up a company to the outside world, helping to generate product innovations and to update brand meanings. Drawing on the online community and co-creation literature, this paper aims at contributing to exploring the main intra-organizational challenges of online customer co-creation for innovation, from the viewpoint of middle managers. The intent is to broaden the existing conceptual understanding of the main internal factors hindering customer co-creation but also of the practices that could be adopted to best manage the related challenges. The study adopts a qualitative approach and is based on the results of eight in-depth, semi-structured interviews with digital and marketing managers, working closely with co-creation initiatives in the Italian food industry, with the aim of exploring intra-organizational challenges perceived by those who are directly involved in co-creation implementation. The results complement existing literature by 1) offering a more longitudinal vision of the implementation process-and the related internal hurdles, 2) identifying the most appropriate coping strategies and 3) formulating some hypothesis that could support an interpretative model of the capabilities needed to start the process and managing it in a strategic perspective.

Over the last couple of decades, I have literally received thousands of compliments, accolades and requests from individuals, organizations, investors, institutions and governments-including sovereign wealth funds and societies-from all over the globe ::: regarding the activities of Virtual Organization Management Institute and related entities ::: and for information on how they can be part of any of our global initiatives. The words most often used are "intriguing, fascinating, revolutionary, I want to know more." In connection thereof, my tendency has always been to point them to several of my articles, papers and treatises (totaling anywhere from dozens to hundreds to thousands of pages) in order to provide them with a deep insight into one or more of our global initiatives. For One Simple Reason:

Resumen Por medio de este artículo nos proponemos compartir una serie de reflexiones acerca de la formación mediada por las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC). Varias de estas reflexiones y consideraciones se desprenden de las experiencias y los aprendizajes en el marco de la creación y el desarrollo de la Academia de Innovación Política, que encuentra sus raíces a partir de una investigación que realizamos desde Asuntos del Sur, donde se mapearon 165 programas de formación de líderes y lideresas políticos/as y sociales en América Latina. Asuntos del Sur supo aprovechar los saberes adquiridos durante varios años de trabajo en los territorios, potenciar con herramientas prácticas y, a ello, sumarle el know how en innovación política para formar a nuestros futuros/as líderes y lideresas de la región. Palabras clave: educación en línea; TIC; formación de líderes; e-Learning; innovación política. Abstract The purpose of this article is to share some reflections about training courses mediated by information and communication technologies (ICT). Several of these reflections and considerations emerge from the learning experiences in the framework of the creation and development of the Academy of Political Innovation. The academy emerges from an investigation held by "South Affairs", in which 165 training programs for political and social leaders were mapped in Latin America. "South Affairs" not only profited from the knowledge acquired during several years of fieldwork, but it also enhanced the training courses with practical tools while adding the know how in political innovation to train future regional leaders.

The phrase face-to-face has been widely used as a comparative opposite to interactions online, while others have proposed that this is not a helpful distinction. We are, after all, if nothing else faces addressed to faces in Zoom meetings and other virtual platforms. Indeed, perhaps we are given cause to look towards our own faces and the faces of others far more readily than we might in “real life” whatever real life looks like. Furthermore, interactions traditionally face-to-face, when masked, leave something amiss, something lacking. I never realised how much facial cues I relied upon until I was bereft of 2/3 of them as faces grew more and more covered. How many of us, I wonder have felt that pull or lack? It challenges us, doesn’t it, to qualify what we mean by face-to-face? We mean, perhaps a way to read one another, to relate corporeally, and we wonder whether when meeting virtually the term “face-to-face” really cuts it, whether we are limited by those boxes on screen which confine us.

This presentation will use phrases like “his voice strange out of the mask” as a framing device to consider the way identity, embodiment, and a sense of waiting and longing, so critical to the narrative of Till We Have Faces, chimes with contemporary relevance in a world of distanced exchange. It seeks to unpack what the parameters of face-to-face interchange are, provocatively seeking to spark dialogue between the ephemeral grappling with physicality, with identity, and reality in Lewis’ Till We Have Faces and the ephemerality and yearning for togetherness of the pandemic world. The presentation will especially consider what it means to be heard, to be seen, to be understood, to have a sense of agency and identity. It will bring our 2020-2021 world into direct conversation with the question it argues so many of our hearts presently echo: “How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”, as we each long for that exchange with our relevant “they”. The presentation will explore and prompt discussion about what it means to have faces now, in the past, and in the desired or imagined future. Kicking discussion off with the question: Can we reach a kind of embodiment without seeing one another in the flesh, or must we constantly wait (un)Till we “have Faces” again?

The performer–viewer relationship premised on mediated intimacy is a pivotal element of porn. As social media afford more interactivity and flexibility for pornographic relationship-building, gay porn performers start to have an active presence on platforms like Twitter to not only promote their works, but also showcase what is ‘behind the scene’. This study provides a qualitative analysis of the Twitter feeds of performers affiliated with Helix Studios, a gay porn producer specializing in the twink genre. It is found that a networked intimacy is constructed through performers’ Twitter self-presentation. The networked intimacy pivots on the fantasy of the twink body, the romantic and sexual bonds among performers, and the fandom-facilitated interactions. Relational labour is dedicated to the authentication of performers’ professional persona through their private life. Under this aesthetics of authenticity, intimacy is commodified to sell sex, and sexuality is essentialized into a staged congruity between sexual acts and desires. Networked intimacy, as a common condition for gay porn production and consumption in a hybrid media system, develops into a multilayer shape on social media platforms. This case study of Helix Studios performers’ tweets reveals both precarities and potentials of networked intimacy in gay porn.

O texto discorre sobre o projeto da obra Desertesejo, de Gilbertto Prado, selecionando para ser desenvolvido no programa Rumos Itaú Cultural Novas Mídias de 1999 e sobre o seu restauro em 2014. Proposto como ambiente virtual 3D multiusuário, Desertesejo proporciona uma experiência interativa com a presença simultânea de vários participantes. O projeto explora poeticamente a extensão geográfica, as rupturas temporais, a solidão, a reinvenção constante e proliferação de pontos de encontro e partilha.

Alexander Kiossev is a professor of modern era cultural history, director of Sofia University's Cultural Centre of and editor-in-chief of Piron electronic magazine. Kiossev has focused his research on reading, the cultural history of communist totalitarianism and autobiographical perspective on history. He has published several books and edited numerous

When the Covid-19 pandemic caused a complete lock-down in Switzerland in mid-March 2020, making gatherings impossible, the Swiss choir conductor Franziska Welti decided to transform the weekly choir practices of both her choirs in Winterthur and Berlin into a virtual choir practice by using the videoconference tool Zoom. What started as relatively ordinary online-rehearsals, soon took on a life of its own. The repertoire of Welti’s choirs consists in arrangements of traditional songs from various cultures. Therefore, Welti soon invited her friend, the Georgian choir conductor Tamar Buadze, to one of these virtual choir practices to teach traditional Georgian polyphonic songs. Even though members had to be muted during the practice to prevent microphones interfering with each other, singing in two voices became possible for everyone. When Buadze spontaneously called in her son from the room next door to sing the bass line, choir members had the experience of singing in three voices.

Shortly after this experiment’s first success, Franziska Welti asked me to join her in expanding the project further. We started co-organising online singing workshops twice a week and invited traditional singers of various cultures as our workshop leaders. This proved beneficial for both the participants as well as the singing teachers (Armenia, Ukraine, Macedonia, Italy etc.). Our decision to base our project ChorOnline entirely on participants’ donations meant that people from more than 10 European and even Asian countries were able to take part in the sessions, independently of their economic situations. At the same time, our workshop leaders learnt how to use videoconference tools as an alternative for teaching, while at the same time they had the opportunity to make an income. This proved especially important for teachers living in countries that did and still do not offer any financial support for artists during this crisis.

Nurse education in the United Kingdom is changing. Widening participation initiatives present challenges for Higher Education Institutions, increasing numbers of Nursing Students from a wide range of backgrounds with diverse academic abilities. Changes also to the new NMC standards mean that those nurses qualifying from 2020 will need to be better prepared to deliver care to people with increasingly complex needs, thus requiring a wider range of skills, proficiency in those skills and a breadth of knowledge to support practice. Social Media has the potential to resolve some of these challenges and to enhance the delivery of nurse education, providing increased opportunities to engage Nursing students outside of the constraints of traditional classroom walls, whilst enhancing the development of student knowledge and skills. Online Communities of Practice may be developed via Social Media platforms such as Twitter, supporting the creation and exchange of knowledge through active engagement and a shared discourse between Novices and Expert clinicians and Academics in the field. Both a Student perspective and a recent student-led conference at University in the North of England are used here to illustrate how Twitter has the potential to benefit Nursing Students; contributing to an increase in student's social capital; and through real-time opportunities for feedback and reflection, the development of professional identities. A unique aspect of Twitter is also the ability to cross hierarchical boundaries without the limitations of friend requests and closed groups. Despite potential reservations around the use of Twitter with Nursing Students, such as the blurring of potential boundaries, it is argued that both Students and Academics alike, may benefit from its innovative use and that further research is needed to establish how it can be incorporated into new pre-registration Nursing programmes.