[Paper Review] Participating or Not Participating? A Sociomaterial Perspective of the Embeddedness of Online Communities in Everyday Life

Geri Harris, Babak Abedin|arXiv (Cornell University)|May 16, 2016

Social Media and Politics18 references4 citations

TL;DR

This paper proposes a sociomaterial framework to understand how online community participation is shaped by the entanglement of human agency and technological infrastructure. Using converging hermeneutic circles, it reconfigures participation as a dynamic, co-constituted process where technology and people mutually shape engagement, revealing that non-participation is not passive but materially and relationally embedded in everyday life.

ABSTRACT

Online communities are increasingly becoming a venue for socializing, engaging in politics, and conducting business. Ironically, the same enabling social media technology is encroaching into everyday life and reconfiguring relations of participation. Yet, while participation in online communities has been widely studied empirically, theoretical aspects of this social phenomenon need further investigation. This paper uses a sociomaterial perspective to further develop theoretical explanation of participation in online communities and the impacts of not participating online. A sociomaterial view of online community participation decenters the human participant and recognises the agency of technology, thus creating a richer understanding than epistemological paradigms. Using converging hermeneutic circles, the paper first reviews literature for evidence of sociomaterial applications to online community research, and then proposes a framework for expressing participation in online communities from a sociomaterial perspective. Subsequently, implications of the findings and the potential for future studies are discussed.

Motivation & Objective

• To address the theoretical gap in understanding the structural and relational dynamics of online community participation beyond individual agency.
• To examine how digital technologies are not neutral tools but active participants in shaping social relations and participation patterns.
• To investigate the implications of non-participation as a materially and relationally embedded condition rather than mere disengagement.
• To develop a theoretical framework grounded in sociomateriality that decenters the human subject and recognizes technological agency.
• To provide a foundation for future research on the socio-technical configurations of online communities in everyday life.

Proposed method

• Employing a sociomaterial perspective that treats technology and humans as co-constitutive actors in social processes.
• Using converging hermeneutic circles to iteratively analyze literature on sociomateriality and online communities.
• Synthesizing theoretical insights from critical realism and actor-network theory to frame participation as relational and material.
• Applying interpretive methods to trace how online platforms and user practices co-produce forms of inclusion and exclusion.
• Constructing a conceptual framework that maps the interplay between human actions and technological infrastructures in online communities.
• Drawing on empirical findings from prior studies to ground the theoretical framework in real-world sociotechnical configurations.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How do sociomaterial assemblages shape the conditions of participation in online communities?
• RQ2 In what ways does technology actively contribute to the constitution of participation, rather than merely enabling it?
• RQ3 How is non-participation not a passive state but a materially and relationally embedded condition in everyday life?
• RQ4 What theoretical frameworks can better account for the co-constitutive relationship between humans and technology in online communities?
• RQ5 How can a sociomaterial lens reveal new insights into the power dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in digital spaces?

Key findings

• Participation in online communities is not solely a matter of individual choice but is materially and relationally co-constituted by human and technological actors.
• Technology is not a neutral tool but an active agent that reconfigures social relations and shapes who can participate and how.
• Non-participation is not a simple absence of engagement but a condition shaped by the material and structural configurations of online platforms.
• The sociomaterial perspective reveals that online communities are embedded in everyday life through complex, dynamic assemblages of people, devices, and infrastructures.
• The framework developed in the paper offers a richer, more nuanced understanding of participation than traditional human-centered models.
• The study demonstrates that theoretical approaches must move beyond epistemological dualisms to account for the agency of technology in shaping social phenomena.