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Social Catalysts: Characterizing People Who Spark Conversations Among Others

Published:18 October 2021Publication History
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Abstract

People assume different and important roles within social networks. Some roles have received extensive study: that of influencers who are well-connected, and that of brokers who bridge unconnected parts of the network. However, very little work has explored another potentially important role, that of creating opportunities for people to interact and facilitating conversation between them. These individuals bring people together and act as social catalysts. In this paper, we test for the presence of social catalysts on the online social network Facebook. We first identify posts that have spurred conversations between the poster's friends and summarize the characteristics of such posts. We then aggregate the number of catalyzed comments at the poster level, as a measure of the individual's "catalystness." The top 1% of such individuals account for 31% of catalyzed interactions, although their network characteristics do not differ markedly from others who post as frequently and have a similar number of friends. By collecting survey data, we also validate the behavioral measure of catalystness: a person is more likely to be nominated as a social catalyst by their friends if their posts prompt discussions between other people more frequently. The measure, along with other conversation-related features, is one of the most predictive of a person being nominated as a catalyst. Although influencers and brokers may have gotten more attention for their network positions, our findings provide converging evidence that another important role exists and is recognized in online social networks.

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            • Published in

              cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
              Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 5, Issue CSCW2
              CSCW2
              October 2021
              5376 pages
              EISSN:2573-0142
              DOI:10.1145/3493286
              Issue’s Table of Contents

              Copyright © 2021 Owner/Author

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              Association for Computing Machinery

              New York, NY, United States

              Publication History

              • Published: 18 October 2021
              Published in pacmhci Volume 5, Issue CSCW2

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