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“I Love You, My Dear Friend”: Analyzing the Role of Emotions in the Building of Friendships in Online Fanfiction Communities

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Social Computing and Social Media (HCII 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14026))

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Abstract

As people continue to develop friendships over the Internet in greater numbers than in-person, the complex factors behind them become important to study. One such factor is emotional expression, and we are motivated to better understand how it plays a role in both continuing existing and building new friendships. In this study, we examined the role of emotions in the formation of different degrees of bonds between members on Fanfiction.net, an online community where members post fanfiction and receive reviews from readers. We developed an emotional taxonomy and used it to qualitatively code 11,292 reviews from Fanfiction.net. We introduce a novel metric of counting characters in reviews, an adjusted character count (ACC). We found that both positive and negative reviews have implications on friendship building, such as through in-depth mentorship and co-creation. Through a mixed-methods analysis of different degrees of emotional expression and review length, we observe users going from shallow connections based on short reviews with low emotional expression to stronger relationships through repeated demonstrations of high emotional investment to tight friendships which transcend the fictional content being exchanged.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the students that helped us in our qualitative coding process: Isabella Nguyen, Arthur Liu, and Miaoxin Wang. We are also grateful for the feedback and support from Ruoxi (Anna) Shang, Andrea Figueroa, Jenna Frens and John Fowler. Finally, we are thankful for our reviewers for their insightful feedback that undoubtedly improved the quality of this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, USA

    Sourojit Ghosh, Niamh Froelich & Cecilia Aragon

Authors
  1. Sourojit Ghosh
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  2. Niamh Froelich
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  3. Cecilia Aragon
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sourojit Ghosh .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Adela Coman

  2. University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan

    Simona Vasilache

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Ghosh, S., Froelich, N., Aragon, C. (2023). “I Love You, My Dear Friend”: Analyzing the Role of Emotions in the Building of Friendships in Online Fanfiction Communities. In: Coman, A., Vasilache, S. (eds) Social Computing and Social Media. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14026. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35927-9_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35927-9_32

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