| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 傳播管理研究所 === 97 === Since APRANET, the predecessor of global internet, came into being during the 1960s, the advancements of networking technologies over the decades have created online communities such as MUDs, BBS, and newsgroups that allow users in different locations to exchange messages and share information. Nowadays, there are even wiki websites that invite all users to edit any page or to create new pages, and Yahoo! Answers, a community-driven knowledge market website where users can submit their questions and answer questions asked by other users. With such a variety of digital communities, individuals choose their own favorites to interact with others.
Especially in recent years, with personal blogs, online photo albums, and micro-blogging taking the lead, more personalized features such as the display picture and user name, deep profiling, avatar and even personal page, are integrated into online discussion forums for individual users to freely present themselves. On the other hand, there are Wikipedia and MIT OpenCourseWare, both web-base collaborative projects that invite the collaboration and contributions of users identifying with their founding goals. Based on these observations, this thesis takes personal and social perceive into account. The research adopted self-presentation and social identity as the factors that can affect community member’s participation, commitment, and knowledge contribution in the online communities.
As hypothesized, community member’s participation can motivates their commitment and knowledge contribution to the community. Furthermore, community member''s identification with the online communities fosters their participation and commitment while community member’s self-presentation, reflecting the degree of their participation and commitment though, has no direct relation in making any knowledge contribution to online communities.
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