Online/offline community (O/OC), the integrated performance of community in a blend of online/offline activities is increasingly prevalent as online systems organise, mediate and broadcast forms of communal engagement. O/OCs are social machines where the focus is on the social achievement, rather than the computational outcomes, of the combined human-technical infrastructure. An O/OC model SPENCE is proposed as an analytical tool for describing social machines from the perspective of sociality. Twitter is a technical infrastructure and social network of shared online/offline community phenomena that is also a social machine combining social participation with conventional forms of machine-based computation. Drawing from the extensive Twitter research literature, a sample of papers are analysed against SPENCE, demonstrating the clarity of the organisation of interrelating themes of a range of perspectives in current Twitter research. It is concluded that SPENCE provides a lens of synthesis for the sociality dimension of a social machine and can be used in taxonomic activities (such as the social machines observatory) to differentiate social machines.

This paper presents an analysis of humour use in Sina Weibo in reaction to the Chinese salt panic, which occurred as a result of the Fukushima disaster in March 2011. Basing the investigation on the humour Proximal Distancing Theory (PDT), and utilising a dataset from Sina Weibo in 2011, an examination of humour reactions is performed to identify the proximal spread of humourous Weibo posts in relation to the consequent salt panic in China. As a result of this method, we present a novel methodology for understanding humour reactions in social media, and provide recommendations on how such a method could be applied to a variety of other social media, crises, cultural and spatial settings.

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