I collaborated with Antonio Calleja and Emanuele Cozzo to deliver this piece of research. It has been hard work to delve deep into sociology but very gratifying.
The notion of “collective identity” plays a central role in contemporary society and its theorizing. We distinguish three broad categories of understanding collective identities: a) people share a collective identity when they share a common trait, b) people share a collective identity when they represent themselves as belonging to a specific category, c) people participate in a collective identity when they interact within a specific network of relationships. This last conception holds special relevance today: people organize by means of digital interaction networks and data is available for analysis with mature computational methods. However, there is currently no available formal definition of how to characterize collective identities emerging from digital interaction networks. We provide such a definition conceiving of collective identities as recurrent, cohesive and coordinated communicative interaction networks. We distinguish identity-cores (the organizational nucleus of coordinated agents), identity audiences that get influenced and broadcast information from the core, and the identity sources that inform and feed the core. We theoretically justify computational procedures to characterize collective identities in this way and applied them to three case studies on Facebook and Twitter. We finally discuss how this characterization relates to other dimensions of collective identity and its contemporary technopolitical relevance.
Barandiaran, X. E., Calleja-López, A., & Cozzo, E. (2020). Defining Collective Identities in Technopolitical Interaction Networks. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01549
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