A global community or a global waste of time? Content analysis of the Facebook site “Humans of New York”

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how stories of everyday experiences in urban settings from around the world foster and sustain a community that seemingly transcends national borders. Given that both urban and online experiences are increasingly prevalent in modern life, surprisingly little attention is paid to how these experiences might foster a sense of community in an online setting. We use Facebook’s Humans of New York (HONY) site, analyzing over 130,000 text comments, to explore this question. We apply content analysis and text mining techniques, using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software and multidimensional scaling (MDS) to visualize their latent patterns. Integrating Chayko’s theoretical model of “portable communities,” we find evidence suggesting the existence of a shared social context, of positive interaction, empathy, and support, irrespective of national boundaries.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. By popularity, we use a broad definition meant to capture how frequently the post is engaged with by users. As such, this does not capture sentiment or affect toward the share, although if an item is liked, the user most likely agrees with it to some degree.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elena Vesselinov

Elena Vesselinov is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her research interests are in the areas of social and spatial inequality, housing policy, gated communities, and comparative urbanization. Her most recent project explores the link between neighborhood economic diversity, housing interventions and educational outcomes. Vesselinov’s research has been supported by internal and external funding from sources such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Soros Foundation and others. For more information, visit elenavesselinov.wordpress.com.

Sebastián F. Villamizar-Santamaría

Sebastián F. Villamizar-Santamaría is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he also works as Director of Quantitative Research at the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies. He works on urban and environmental issues with a focus on class inequality.

Charles J. Gomez

Charles J. Gomez is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York, Queens College. His research interest is how complex knowledge flows across national borders using social network analysis and natural language processing. Read more at charliegomez.com.

Eva M. Fernández

Eva M. Fernández, an Associate Provost for Innovation and Student Success at Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY), leads initiatives that enhance student success through innovative teaching and learning, experiential education, and data-driven decision making. Fernández is a psycholinguist interested in cross-linguistic sentence processing; linked to her role in higher education administration, Fernández studies the impact of faculty development on student academic progress. She holds the rank of Professor at Queens College and has doctoral faculty appointments at the CUNY Graduate Center. Fernández is the author of a monograph and over two dozen journal articles and book chapters, coauthored a textbook, and is co-editor of four edited volumes; she currently has support from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.