INVESTIGATION INTO ANONYMITY ON INTERNET

Investigation Into Anonymity On Internet

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION3

THEORY AND HYPOTHESES5

VIRTUAL NETWORK CONNECTIVITY5

VIRTUAL NETWORK CLOSENESS7

ANONYMITY9

SURVEY DESIGN AND SAMPLING16

THEORIES OF ANONYMITY IN ENVIRONMENTS17

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS32

THE SOCIAL USE OF TECHNOLOGY33

Suggestions for future research36

Strategy and privacy37

Application of AST to investigate SIDE theory38

CONCLUSION39

References42

INTRODUCTION

Knowledge is considered one of the most valuable resources for organizational growth. Organizational knowledge may provide sustained competitive advantage thanks to its unique characteristics such as intangibleness, difficult imitation, and complex organizational embedment. Most organizations, however, do not have all knowledge required in their possession within their organizational boundaries and thus need to search for outside source at either organizational or individual level. One way of making such connections to the external source of knowledge at individual level is by participating in virtual knowledge communities. Supported by today's unprecedented growth of electronic communication capability and infrastructure establishment, computer mediated communication (CMC) renders interpersonal networking more attractive and powerful by eliminating geographical and temporal constraints that exist in traditional face-to-face interaction.

Virtual community refers to “groups of people who communicate and interact with each other via electronic media”. And the notion of knowledge community is described as a group of people with a common interest, problem, experiences and practices. An important feature of knowledge communities is that they bring together knowledge and knower, typically supported and informed by knowledge bases provided over networks. The combination of these two concepts constitute virtual knowledge community and it has been labeled under different terms in the literature such as virtual communities of practice (VCoP), virtual teams, and electronic networks of practice (ENP). Virtual knowledge communities form relational structures or networks that enable efficient knowledge creation and sharing to share or pool knowledge. They exchange and share knowledge interactively, often in non-routine, personal, and unstructured ways, as an interdependent network. Individuals benefit from virtual knowledge community connections by gaining access to new information, expertise, and ideas that may not be available within an organization.

Given these importance of knowledge exchange in virtual communities, studies have been conducted in the information systems (IS) area. Arguably, however, findings of the studies often revealed inconsistent or sometimes counter intuitive empirical results. This is partly because those studies have taken into account only one side of knowledge exchange. From the knowledge sharing perspective, intention to obtain knowledge should be handled as equally important as intention to provide. Due to its reactive nature, knowledge provision intention needs the precondition of knowledge request. Without the initiation of particular knowledge request, intention to provide knowledge would be meaningless. Since a virtual community eliminates the spatial and temporal constraints of interaction, participants with intention to obtain knowledge can choose any virtual community that best satisfies their knowledge needs.

Drawing upon the gap in the literature, this study attempts to develop a model that better explains knowledge exchange in virtual context. One notable contribution of the current study is to introduce new concepts, Virtual Network Connectivity and Virtual Network Closeness. This study further examines the model by empirically testing related hypotheses through an online questionnaire ...