As promised, here is the full text of my PhD thesis.
Krotoski, Aleksandra K. (2009). Social influence in Second Life: Social Network and Social Psychological Processes in the Diffusion of Belief and Behaviour on the Web. PhD Dissertation. University of Surrey, Department of Psychology, School of Human Sciences. [pdf]
I have chosen to publish my full PhD thesis under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license. For more information on what this means, see the Creative Commons website.
Number of pages: 359
Number of words: 107,180
A wordle of the words used in the thesis:
Number of journals referenced: 126
Journals most frequently cited:
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (16)
Social Networks (12)
Public Opinion Quarterly (6)
Computers in Human Behavior (5)
CyberPsychology & Behavior (5)
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (5)
American Journal of Sociology (4)
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (4)
Number of unique authors referenced: 485
A wordle of the authors based on the number of articles authored by them:
Most frequent authors cited (primary and non-primary author):
M. Hogg (14)
Jeremy Bailenson (5)
R. Spears (5)
T.L Taylor (5)
J. Turner (5)
B. Wellman (5)
J. Katz (4)
S. Kiesler (4)
B. Latané (4)
M. Lea (4)
KYA McKenna (4)
T. Postmes (4)
E. Rogers (4)
T. Valente (4)
D. Williams (4)
Comments
Your work sounds fascinating and I’m looking forward to reading the thesis.
Interesting that you appear to refer to Second Life as “on the Web” in the subtitle. Obviously SL is not accessed with a web browser (yet?) so it’s not “on the web” in the sense of being a web site, web page or series of pages; are you using the term as generic for “the internet” or in the sense of “Web 2.0”?
Or perhaps my usage is archaic; I definitely think of “the web” as being a specific method of accessing information on the Internet (ie via a web browser accessing pages on a web site), in the same way that I might think of “gopher” or “RSS feed”. This could be because I have been at it for a while (created my first web site in the early 90s). Thus Second Life to me is accessed via the internet using a specialised application (not a web browser), and of course it has a web site (though the secondlife.com web site isn’t Second Life).
Now Twitter, you could say, is “on the web”, because its initial method of access was via a web browser and you (can) still access it that way – though I imagine the vast majority of users no longer do so.
Pardon my pedantry: I’m curious.
Looking forward to Virtual Revolution, btw…
just had a quick skim through the first bit of your thesis and have decided that i really want to read the rest of it. I’m currently studying for a degree in technology and I have thought about how the online and offline worlds are socialy connected as the course is progressing. Really getting into watching the virtual revolution series too.
Hi Aleks,
I would very much like to study your thesis but it seems it is not available for download any more. Would you please let me know if, and how, I can have a copy of it?
Best regards
Bahareh
HI Bahareh – I’ve been remiss about re-publishing all of my documents since I was attacked and had to move servers.
I promise to do it asap,
aleks
It seems interested subject
how I can get the your thesis
I try many time but failed
heyam
Hi Aleks
I’m getting a 404 not found error when I click on the link to your thesis. Any chance of fixing it?
Thanks, Marc
Same problem as everybody else seems to have: cannot get hold of what looks to be a fascinating piece of sociala psychological literature :(