Grebenshchikova T.A. Intentional approach towards defining a discursive community on the Internet

Abstract

The majority of authors consider discoursive community as a group whose members share common norms and goals and use common communication channel for its achieving. We analyzed virtual communities (N = 318, N = 158) and identified discoursive communities as different social groups. Network analysis applied to the online communities devoted to the political issues confirmed the scale-free graphs and revealed nodes with high degree as opinion leaders.