Official website: http://SocialMediaAndSociety.com/
Twitter hashtag: #SMSociety14
Venue: Ryerson University – Ted Rogers School of Management
Address: 55 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5G 2C5
The advent of social media has introduced new challenges to the study of social influence, including the ability for people to interact anonymously and asynchronously. People now have access to a wide range of online communication and information: tools that can make it easier to spread their ideas and try to influence others independent of time and space. Yet networked individuals use the internet, mobile devices, and multiple social networks to get information at their fingertips and act on it, empowering their claims to expertise. Thus, in a networked society, it can be more challenging to convince others that your way is the right way when online participants have access to online resources (information or other people) that may offer alternative points of view.
This panel will feature five papers from the special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist journal on “Networked Influence in Social Media” edited by Anatoliy Gruzd and Barry Wellman (http://abs.sagepub.com/content/58/10.toc) and will discuss online social influence in its diversity: who is exercising influence, how it is done, how to measure influence, what its consequences are, and how online and offline influences intertwine in different contexts. The central thesis of the panel is that social influence has become networked influence. Influence is networked in two ways: by occurring in social networks and by propagating through online communication networks.
Background: As social and political movements around the world attempt to deal with complex challenges, social media plays a key role in movement-building, organising events and campaigns, and communicating movement messages. This research focuses on the role of social media in facilitating the restructuring and growth of the antifascist movement in Athens following the 2010 protests in Syntagma Square. As Makrygianni and Tsavdaroglou (2011) note Greek urban space has played a significant role in shaping protest during and after the junta, with the Exarcheia neighbourhood being a central base for activist organising. After Syntagma, activists moved from Exarcheia into neighbourhoods throughout Athens, establishing communities which form the basis of antifascist organising and which remain connected through both commercial and independent social media platforms.
Objective: This paper aims to demonstrate the complexity of links between social media and offline communities, including the ways in which each are mutually constitutive, and to provide a deep and nuanced analysis of how a particular community uses social media. Using the Greek case study, it addresses broader questions about the limitations and affordances of different social media platforms in building social movements (see also Gerbaudo, 2012; Juris, 2012; AUTHOR).
Methods: This work uses a grounded mixed-methods approach to investigate the ways in which the particular histories and geographies of Athens affect activists' use of social media, and the ways in which activists are reshaping networking technologies in order to build systems which are more supportive of activist interests (as opposed to the interests of corporations or governments). The research combines quantitative analysis of Twitter accounts associated with the Athens antifascist movement; analysis of issue-oriented hyperlink networks of independent media platforms such as the Indymedia forums and neighbourhood anti-fascist blogs (see also Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Marres & Rogers, 2005); and 34 in-depth semi-structured interviews with activists, carried out in April and May 2013. The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods allows us to avoid some of the biases present in social movement research which focuses purely on online data (see Tufekci, 2014).
Results: This research highlights the interrelationship between social media and the physical configuration of protest, demonstrating how supposedly 'placeless' media is built on, and supports, physical communities of resistance. For example, activists’ decisions to use particular social media platforms are strongly influenced by the offline communities which they are a part of, while these platforms also serve a vital role in sustaining and mobilising those communities. This research also shows some of the tensions involved in activists’ choices to eschew the use of commercial social media platforms, including the risk of growing insularity within movements. More generally, this work provides important lessons about the ways in which activists are responding to the crises caused by neoliberalism and building new possibilities for community solidarity.
Conclusions: The combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis allows us to build a nuanced picture of social media use in a particular activist community, demonstrating the value of this research method. It also highlights important trends frequently overlooked in related research, such as strategic non-use or covert use of social media.
References:
Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2013). The Logic of Connective Action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Gerbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets and the streets: Social media and contemporary activism. London: Pluto Press.
Juris, J. S. (2012). Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation. American Ethnologist, 39(2), 259–279. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01362.x
Makrygianni, V., & Tsavdaroglou, H. (2011). Urban planning and revolt: a spatial analysis of the December 2008 uprising in Athens. In A. Vradis & D. Dalakoglou (Eds.), Revolt and crisis in Greece: between a present yet to pass and a future still to come (pp. 29 – 57). Oakland, Baltimore, Edinburgh, London & Athens: AK Press and Occupied London.
Marres, N., & Rogers, R. (2005). Recipe for tracing the fate of issues and their publics on the web. In B. Latour & P. Weibel (Eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (pp. 922–935). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tufekci, Z. (2014). Big Questions for Social Media Big Data: Representativeness, Validity and Other Methodological Pitfalls. In ICWSM ’14: Proceedings of the 8th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Ann Arbor, MI. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1403/1403.7400.pdf
Background: Privacy concerns and privacy behaviors are related concepts, but paradoxically do not often correlate well (Reynolds, et al., 2011; Taddicken, 2014; Zafeiropoulou, et al., 2013). The contradiction between stated privacy preferences and actual privacy behaviors has suggested a willingness to trade privacy regulation for social goals (Ellison, et al., 2011) or for the convenience that these platforms bring to managing social relationships (Krasnova, et al., 2010). Though the uses and gratifications of social media platforms, and motivations for their use, have been well mapped by researchers (e.g., Chen, 2011; Park, et al., 2009; Quan-Haase, et al., 2010), how the social utility of these platforms intersects with a user’s privacy attitudes and actual privacy behaviors is only just now garnering attention. One study examined users’ willingness to trade privacy for monetary gain (Acquisti, et al., 2013), but further examination of other forms of privacy exchanges is warranted.
Objective: This study examines the relationship between sociality, social media utility, and privacy in an attempt to explore the contextual dimensions of privacy regulation processes. The goal is to provide greater insight into how everyday privacy practices and concerns relate to social media use, and also to how the utility of social media platforms, such as gains in social capital and desire for entertainment, influence privacy producing behaviors.
Methods: A self-administered, web-based survey of approximately 450 social media users collected data on privacy concerns, online privacy strategies and behaviors, the uses and gratifications that social media experiences bring, and measures of social capital. Methods of statistical exploration included principle component analysis, canonical correlation analysis and regression.
Results: The data reveal that concerns about a loss of information control, the future life of information, and authoritarian misuse of information factor both into the use of technological measures for privacy protection and also the deployment of more socially-oriented content curation strategies. Social media use related to the acquisition of bridging social capital and facilitation of identity management processes is tempered by privacy concerns which relate to concerns for the future life of information and the potential loss of information control. Use of social media out of habit is associated with the use of social curation strategies as a privacy regulation focus; to a lesser extent, the use of social media with an entertainment focus is linked to the use of systemic controls in privacy management.
Conclusions: This study provides a better understanding of how various dimensions of social media use relate to privacy concerns and privacy management practices, and ultimately how the dynamic of privacy and sociality is understood and enacted by users, It adds to the growing base of literature on how sociality and privacy intersect through the use of social media, and how privacy concerns are mitigated through privacy producing behaviors.
References:
Acquisti, A., John, L. K., & Loewenstein, G. (2013). What Is Privacy Worth? The Journal of Legal Studies, 42(2), 249–274. doi:10.1086/671754
Chen, G. M. (2011). Tweet this: A uses and gratifications perspective on how active Twitter use gratifies a need to connect with others. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(2), 755–762. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2010.10.023
Ellison, N. B., Vitak, J., Steinfield, C., Gray, R., & Lampe, C. (2011). Negotiating Privacy Concerns and Social Capital Needs in a Social Media Environment. In S. Trepte & L. Reinecke (Eds.), Privacy Online: Perspectives on Privacy and Self-Disclosure in the Social Web (pp. 19–32). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-21521-6
Krasnova, H., Spiekermann, S., Koroleva, K., & Hildebrand, T. (2010). Online social networks : why we disclose. Journal of Information Technology, 25(2), 109–125. doi:10.1057/jit.2010.6
Park, N., Kee, K. F., & Valenzuela, S. (2009). Being immersed in social networking environment: Facebook groups, uses and gratifications, and social outcomes. Cyberpsychology & Behavior : The Impact of the Internet, Multimedia and Virtual Reality on Behavior and Society, 12(6), 729–33. doi:10.1089/cpb.2009.0003
Quan-Haase, A., & Young, A. L. (2010). Uses and Gratifications of Social Media: A Comparison of Facebook and Instant Messaging. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 30(5), 350–361. doi:10.1177/0270467610380009
Reynolds, B., Venkatanathan, J., Gonçalves, J., & Kostakos, V. (2011). Sharing ephemeral information in online social networks: privacy perceptions and behaviours. In Human-Computer Interaction–INTERACT 2011 (pp. 204-215). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-23765-2_14.
Taddicken, M. (2014). The “Privacy Paradox” in the Social Web: The Impact of Privacy Concerns, Individual Characteristics, and the Perceived Social Relevance on Different Forms of Self-Disclosure. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(2), 248-273. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12052
Zafeiropoulou, A. M., Millard, D. E., Webber, C., & O’Hara, K. (2013). Unpicking the privacy paradox. In Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference - WebSci ‘13 (pp. 463–472). New York: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/2464464.2464503
Background: Social media plays an increasingly critical role in our political life – political parties and politicians use it to push their political agendas and advance their causes, and common people use it to share their political views and play an active role in elections and alike. This is witnessed by the recent and historical 2013 Iranian presidential election, where social media such as tweeter was used extensively.
Objective: The paper aims to provide a peek into the Iranian political landscape by quantitatively studying tweets collected during the 2013 Iranian presidential election with the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. Specifically we are interested in the makeup of the online population who participated in the election one way or another, including their political orientation, their view on election participation, and their sentiment on individual presidential candidates.
Methods: We used Twitter search API to collect statuses containing hashtags and keywords relevant to Iran and Iran election. We collected data between May 21, 2013 and June 29, 2013 (Our data set cover tweets between May 14 and June 29). The data collection yielded in 3006528 tweets about Iran and election.
A language identifier was trained and used to identify the language of every tweet. For this study we focused only on the 460K Persian tweets that we identified. Classifiers were trained to automatically to identify the subject (political or non-political, election-related or otherwise) of a tweet, the candidates mentioned in a tweet and the sentiment towards them, the political orientation of the tweeting user and his/her view on election participation. In addition, a classifier also detects sarcasm in the tweet.
We manually annotated data to serve as the training and test data for the classifiers. We started with a pilot annotation, in which three annotators annotated the same 300 tweets. The pilot annotations were reviewed and adjustments were made to the guidelines before we annotated another 3,600 tweets - 1,200 tweets per annotators with 200 tweets overlapping between each pair of annotators. The trained classifiers were run on the 460K Persian tweets and quantitative analyses were conducted on the results.
Results: The results of this study show that the sentiment of Persian tweets were very positives towards the reformist candidates and very negative regarding the conservatives. Our findings reveal that the political environment of Persian Twitter is highly dominated by Reformist (pro-democracy) groups and confirms the findings of our earlier study on the community detection on the Twitter communication networks (mention and retweet networks) (Citation Removed). This suggests a difference between Persian Twitterverse and Blogosphere. Kelly and Etling (2008) in their study of Persian blogosphere suggested a more balanced environment, divided evenly between reformist and conservatives. Therefore, we can argue that different social media environments have different political landscapes.
Conclusions: The paper demonstrates NLP technologies, proven critical and effective in quantitative studies of political discourse in social media, lend us a way to examine social communication in a depth and at a scale that never existed before. We plan to expand our research to other languages and genres in the near future.
Refenreces:
Kelly, J., & Etling, B. (2008). Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere. Berkman Center. Retrieved from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2008/Mapping_Irans_Online_Public
Background: In 1927, Walter Lippmann published The Phantom Public, arguing for what he referred to as the ‘fallacy of direct democracy’. Lippmann wrote, “I have not happened to meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen” (Lippmann, 1927: 11). Had we the faculties and the system for enabling millions to realize popular rule, to control all areas of government ranging from the military, to health care, to infrastructure, to education, none of us would have time for work, family or enjoyment. In this ‘fantasy’, Lippmann argued, society would remain at a standstill, or worse yet, be doomed.
Repurposing Lippmann, this paper argues that new and existing data privacy legislation derived from the OECD Privacy Principles (e.g. Canada, EU, Brazil and US) strongly favors a flawed informed consumer choice model that perpetuates a similar fantasy – personal data sovereignty. Had we the faculties and the system for enabling every digital citizen the ability to understand and continually manage the evolving data-driven Internet, to control the data being collected, organized, analyzed, repurposed and sold by every application, commercial organization, non-commercial organization, government agency, data broker and third-party, to understand and provide informed consent to every terms of service agreement, and privacy policy - would we have time to actually use the Internet? To work? To enjoy? This is the fallacy of personal data sovereignty in a digital universe increasingly defined by big data.
If it is true that the fallacy of direct democracy is similar to the fallacy of personal data sovereignty, then the pragmatic solution is representative data sovereignty; a combination of for-profit/non-profit digital dossier management and government oversight ensuring the protection of personal data, while freeing individuals from what Lippmann referred to as an ‘unattainable ideal.’
Objective: Through a combination of policy and case study analysis, this paper aims to demonstrate the limitations of legislative efforts that favour informed consumer choice models of personal data privacy. New and existing forms of representative data sovereignty are discussed as more pragmatic alternatives.
Methods: A policy analysis of 4 legislative efforts (drawing from the OECD’s Privacy Principles) favouring an informed consumer choice model is conducted. These efforts include: Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, the EU’s Data Protection Directive, Brazil’s Marco Civil legislation and the U.S. Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. Three case studies are analyzed to provide justification for the policy critique: Noam Galai’s ‘Stolen Scream’, Max Schrem’s europe-v.facebook.org, and Hunter Moore’s revenge porn business. A discussion of the successful strategies of various identify theft protection companies, early representative data sovereigns (for example, Lifelock), will follow.
Results: The policy/case study analysis demonstrates that flawed informed consumer choice policy models are both widespread and incapable of addressing the challenges to data sovereignty posed by big data.
Conclusions: The possibilities presented by representative data sovereignty, evidenced by the successful efforts of various for profit enterprises operating mainly in the United States suggest that alternative policy approaches to data sovereignty must be considered.
References:
Lippmann, W. (1927; 2009 edition) The Phantom Public. New Jersey: Transaction
Publishers.
Background: Content analysis offers an effective approach to inquiring into ethical challenges in social media based research. Content from social media sites used for the small number of research studies conducted to date, taken in conjunction with the various national human research ethics guidelines, offer a means of understanding how ethical challenges of privacy and anonymity can be (and are being) addressed for responsible social media-based research.
Objective: The paper explores the ways in which privacy/anonymity of participants can be ensured in social media-based research in the Australian context. Using the notion of trust and privacy within a set of selected social media channels through which participants are recruited for specific research studies, we initially identify what is being done and analyse the effectiveness of these approaches. Subsequently, we seek to identify emerging avenues of exploration and offer strategies for enhanced efficacy.
Methods: Content analysis was used to examine a purposive sample of ethics applications where social media had been utilised for participant recruitment. Parameters for ensuring privacy and anonymity of participants were analysed and compared against the track record of specific social media platforms on ensuring privacy and anonymity to validate the claim. In addition, we analysed parameters instituted specifically by Australian universities as well as the national Privacy Law protection measures.
Results: The content analysis uncovered challenges that need to be addressed in the Australian context, if social media-based research is to be used effectively for recruitment of research participants. This paper focuses on the Australian experience, but provides insights to the application of a similar approach in, for example, the USA, Canada or the European Union.
Conclusions: Content analysis and information visualisation exploiting visual analytics techniques with a purposive sample, within a specific country (Australia) has provided insights that can help in understanding what is being done and what needs to be done to address the ethical challenges in social media research – initially, from an Australian perspective.
References:
Swatman, P.M.C. (2012). Ethical Issues in Social Networking Research. Victoria/Tasmania University Ethics Network Seminar, Deakin University, 1 August 2012, Available from: http://www.deakin.edu.au/health/research/research-downloads.php
Background: Governments use social media for a range of activities and engagements with citizens, often involving shifts in public policy to engender greater openness, transparency and accountability. These processes, that document decisions and interactions, generate information artefacts that are potentially records of government, however, such records are difficult to identify, manage and preserve (NARA, 2010).
Objective: This paper aims to spotlight the policy and records related issues that arise through interactions between government and citizens via social media. Using the government of Canada as a case study, this paper highlights the records related challenges encountered as a result of agencies’ rapid adoption of social media in advance of robust policy and/or recordkeeping instruments, as well as the tensions that exist between the traditional information management workflows and the ever evolving affordances of social media platforms.
Methods: Multiple methods were used in the study. Content and contextual analysis of a one-month sample of government of Canada Twitter accounts was undertaken to understand the characteristics of the information artefacts generated. 28 individual semi-structured interviews with federal government social media users and information managers were conducted and analyzed, and relevant government policies, legislation and documentation were analyzed to identify potential impediments and/or omissions that hinder the effective collection, management and preservation of social media artefacts.
Results: Content analysis shows that agencies’ official communicative intents are closely aligned with organizational mandates, however, there is a substantial amount of inter-governmental communication that occurs with external third-party platforms. Analysis of the data shows that government agencies are attempting to capitalize on the temporal “real-time” qualities of social media, however, the current hierarchical information processes present in government potentially conflict with the technological affordances of the social media platforms adopted for use. The existing hierarchical information practices present in government agencies still strongly inform information flows and policy development within the government of Canada. Additionally, emerging value tensions exist regarding social media use -- both as it manifests in the treatment of content and the tensions related to system design, as they manifest between intended and adopted use.
Conclusions: These evidence based findings support the necessity for investigating changes to the social media information management practices and policy development frameworks within government agencies, with the intention of better facilitating the ongoing management and long-term preservation of the artefacts generated.
References:
National Archives and Records Administration. (2010). A report on federal web 2.0 use and record value. Washington, D.C., U.S. http://www.arcives-gov/records-mgmt/resources/web2.0-use.pdf
Background: With 73% of internet users using social network sites (Pew Internet, 2014), important questions have been raised regarding privacy and identity management in online venues. Through implied surveillance, organizations may influence the way that individuals feel they can present themselves online. This influence can lead to identity compression (McEwan & Mease, 2013). Due to the outsize influence of workplaces in society, individuals may feel that they need to conform to generalized professional standards (McEwan & Mease, 2013) or to the gaze of selected high status others within the workplace (Hogan, 2010). New stories highlighting organizational consequences may provide warnings to individuals regarding the need to remove presentations of undesirable facets of self or face adverse actions in the workplace and job market.
Objective: This paper explores comments on a Yahoo! article reporting on a trend of employers asking for social media passwords during interviews. While reports of such behavior on the part of employers may be overblown, the comments represent collective assessment of perceived organizational control via surveillance of social media.
Methods: An inductive qualitative theme analysis was conducted on 4,725 unique comments.
Results: Some commenters placed the blame for the problem of asking for Facebook codes on the employers or higher authorities. Commenters found it was unethical for employers to gather such information and also thought it was bad hiring practice because asking for Facebook passwords would yield discriminatory information that employers should avoid (such as race, age, creed, sexual orientation) or because people who gave up passwords easily would not be good stewards of the organization’s internet security. Commenters also pointed to asking for Facebook passwords as one stopping place in organizational creep, noting that employers already ask for drug tests and credit checks and speculating how far employers will go in the future. In regards to higher authorities, many commenters invoked images of fascism (typically by invoking Hitler or Big Brother but also through blaming Obama or Republicans for promoting an authoritarian state). Some comments encouraged resistance through refusal (simply not giving up the passwords), manipulation (providing false account information), and quid pro quo (asking for the interviewer’s password). Other commenters suggested that individual users are at the root of the problem. These commenters sometimes praised themselves as virtuous non-users and argued for the irresponsibility of social media users for using the sites at all or posting undesirable artifacts to their Facebook account. Other commenters thought asking for passwords was reasonable for occupations such as law enforcement (good for some) and that only those with something to hide would express concern about giving their password.
Conclusions: The emerging codes represent a complex reaction to organizational surveillance. The collective commentary illuminates several paradoxes in reactions to identity compression. Commenters appear to want to remain concealed from organizational gazes while remaining a part of the greater social network. In claims to fascism and organization creep they express futility, but another vein of the commentary presents individuals as being able to outsmart authority by either manipulating technology or staying off social media. These findings may reflect the difficulty people have in living multi-faceted crystallized selves while presenting mediated compressions of self (Tracy & Trethewey, 2002; McEwan & Mease, 2013).
References:
Hogan, B. (2010). The presentation of self in the age of social media: Distinguishing performances and exhibitions online. Bulletin of Science Technology & Society, 30, 377-386.
McEwan, B., & Mease, J. (2013). Compressed crystals: A metaphor for mediated identity expression. In C. Cunningham (Ed.). Social networking and impression management: Self-presentation in the digital age. (pp. 85-106). Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Tracy, S. J., & Trethewey, A. (2005) Fracturing the real—self—fake—self dichotomy: Moving toward crystallized organizational identities. Communication Theory, 15, 168-195.
Central to any consideration of the function of social media in society today has to be an examination of the conventions of use and reuse of social media content in the context of questions of the privacy of user information and copyright of content posted. This panel will focus on current practices and the often conflicting conventions of use in the respect for or disregard of copyright in different spheres, and the question of ethics of use in anonymizing content or (re)posting freely with identifiers intact. The goal is to present a much needed, rigorous examination of how social media content is being re-used on different platforms, by whom, and for what purpose. This inquiry is an issue of central importance for Canadians and globally as, unless we experience an infrastructure collapse, these concerns will increase and not abate.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
This panel will be conducted in the fishbowl style, encouraging attendees to take part in the conversation.
This fishbowl session will be used to conduct research by the panel organizers. The study intends to investigate the effectiveness of the fishbowl method in facilitating dialogues, interactions and knowledge co-construction among researchers with shared interests. There will be a note taker keeping fieldnotes of the discussion that occurs during the session, without collecting any identifying information of the participants. Fieldnotes will be used to reflect on flows and dynamics of the session in a future paper. At the end of the session, we will ask you to complete an anonymous paper survey to provide feedback. This survey will not request name or other information that will identify you.
Anyone can attend this panel without being included in the study.
The study received the ethics approval from the University of Guelph Research Ethics Board .
Please read the information letter for more details.
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This panel begins with the premise that image-making is becoming a central component of social life online. Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr and other image-sharing social media are constantly growing in users and importance. Concurrently, an increasing amount of communication on Facebook and Twitter happens through images. We live in a world where the visuals – GPOY (Gratuitous Photo Of Yourself), selfies, family photographs, cultural references, digital snapshots, and medical images (e.g., ultrasound pictures, CT scans) shape the way we know our life and perform our self. Within the visual social media landscape, images serve as a crucial conduit for and reflection of our identity. Visualizing the private self via social media constitutes both our public and private self simultaneously.
This panel consists of four connected presentations, all of which focus on how one’s private life – the otherwise hidden, labeled, humorous, or subversive self – is visualized through social media for public consumption. Based on each presenter’s original empirical research, the panel explores interconnections of the self, subjectivity, identity, community, visuality, digital media, embodied technologies, and materiality. Both individually and collectively, our panel intends to: 1) provide current examples of visual self-expression on social media often portrayed colloquially as ridiculous or narcissistic, but are suggestive of innovative modes of identity practices; 2) comment on the processes through which private images transform into cultural and symbolic artifacts, while becoming forms of performative, public identity; and 3) inspire spirited discussion among presenters and the audience attending the panel.
In her presentation “I have seen you naked – platform affordances, audience segregation and impression management on tumblr and Facebook,” Katrin Tiidenberg explores trans-platform communication around selfies. Based on three years of ethnographic work with a community of self-shooters, Tiidenberg looks at how people read each other’s visual content (images and selfies) on Tumblr and Facebook. On Tumblr, these informants post sexual, (semi-)nude selfies, bringing their gender, embodiment, and sexuality into the forefront. On Facebook, their content most often emphasises the roles and social statuses as parents and professionals. Based on visual discourse analyses of seven informants’ Facebook and Tumblr presence and interviews, Tiidenberg explores the relational being (Gergen, 2009) at the intersection of platform affordances and audience segregation strategies (Goffman, 1959).
In her presentation “ ‘On the Skin Teared’ Affective Reproduction of Self-Injury Online,” Yukari Seko discusses photographic expression of self-injury (SI) as a mode of embodied, subversive self-expression that challenges dominant psychomedical norms. The memory of self-harm captured on photography provokes anxiety concerning human suffering on the part of viewers, while at the same time, suggests a promise of autobiographical reification and a paradoxical potential of self-aestheticization. Using visual rendering of self-suffering on Flickr as a case study, Seko aims to ignite discussion on various boundaries that are transgressed via the act of online visual self-expression, including the boundaries separating private and public content, body and mind, as well as the virtual and the real.
In her presentation “Public Identification Based on Place: Visual Discourses of Alabama-Based Belonging Within Online Social Network Sites,” Jenny Korn focuses on place-based homophily as a way to form community (Lazarsfeld and Merton, 1954; McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook, 2001). Counter to historian expectations, as the Internet has brought together people globally, individuals have asserted their geographic identity as a way to form community in online contexts that are characterized by geographical dispersion in which place is not easily observable (Rosen, Lafontaine, and Hendrickson, 2011). Korn analyzes visual discourses of images depicting Alabama-based belonging as cultural representation (Harner, 2001), location iconography (Blake, 2002), and public symbols (Davidson and Entrikin, 2005). She finds that in an Internet space that enables transgressions across physical boundaries, users return to symbols of place around which to revive familiar notions of identity.
Background: Social media brings with its inherent interactive features new possibilities for businesses and marketing. One example is content marketing, a technique of creating and distributing content to attract and influence a clearly defined audience. However, successfully using social media in marketing does not come easy. To be impactful, digital content must carry the elusive qualities of being “sharable” and “likeable,” making marketing increasingly complex (Gensler, Völckner, Li-Thompkins, & Wiertz, 2013; Singh & Sonnenburg, 2012).
Social media usage studies show that consumers use different social media platforms for information gathering as well as entertainment purposes. Hence, consuming as well as producing content (Bruns, 2008) with multiple media and diverse platforms is becoming the norm.
This means that users (and/or producers) have become more skilful and used to high quality social media content. Thus brands are scrambling to find the key to creating engaging content, and competing in the online space requires ongoing content creation involving strategic and creative thinking.
Objective: This paper introduces a story-focused analytic model that can be used to assess how brands communicate identity and achieve brand loyalty across digital platforms. The model was built using a theoretical framework informed by narrative theory (Hyvärinen, 2007), transmedia theory (Phillips, 2012), and marketing (Zinnbauer & Honer, 2011), and tested on an award-winning brand in content marketing, Warby Parker[i].
The paper argues that the concept of “storyworlds” should be central to cross-platform content marketing. Transmedia studies (Blumenthal & Xu, 2012) explains that stories are most effective when they are communicated across multiple platforms because they require users to gather information themselves in order to piece together and deeply understand the world of the story. When a user pulls together unique pieces of a story from different platforms, they become immersed in the story’s narrative world.
Methods: The content analysis model consists of a coherent and relational set of qualitative analysis instruments, including multimodal analysis (i.e. the systematic analysis of multiple communication channels) and transmedia analysis. By using a multi-method approach, the model aims to answer the specific needs of social media analysis. The model hence analyses the marketing campaigns at the level of the story, the platform, and the individual modes.
Results: The defined elements of narrative, transmedia, and marketing discourse informed the coding of Warby Parker campaigns. Codes that appear frequently in the texts are considered useful for building cross-platform brand stories, whereas non-dominant codes are considered less useful.
The insight that resulted from this coding informed a criteria catalogue that includes a high-level theoretical structure, with specific dominant elements pulled from the data collection, which the project recommends are useful in the process of planning cross-platform brand stories.
Conclusions: Conclusions suggest that the theoretical areas studied and identified as relevant to cross-platform storytelling are indeed applicable to the analysis of cross-platform brand texts. The multimodal analysis instruments as well as the cross-platform focus particularly helped with the framework, given that the analysed campaign encompassed several social media, i.e. blogs, Instagram, and the company website.
References
Bruns, Axel. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.
Content Marketing Institute (2014). What is content marketing? Retrieved from: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/
Gensler, S., Völckner, F., Liu-Thompkins, Y., & Wiertz, C. (2013). Managing brands in the social media environment. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 27, 242-256. doi: 10.1016/j.intmar.2013.09.004
Hyvärinen, M. (2007). Analyzing narratives and story-telling. In P. Alasuutari, L. Bickman & J. Brannen (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Social Research Methods (pp. 447-460). London: Sage.
Phillips, A. (2012). A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling. USA: McGraw-Hill.
Singh, S. & Sonnenburg, S. (2012). Brand performances in social media. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 26, 189-197. doi: 10.1016/j.intmar.2012.04.001
Zinnbauer, M. & Honer, T. (2011). How brands create social currency – a framework for managing brands in a network era. Marketing Review St. Gallen, 28(5), 50-55. doi: 10.1007/s11621-011-0063-8
[i] http://www.warbyparker.com
Background: Under our current social context, discussing issues related to race is often very difficult and perceived as impolite in society. As a result, there is strong sentiment from people to feel that race (and consequently racism) is a thing of the past. Although overt forms of racism in a public setting aren’t as common as in the past (for the most part), one just has to shift focus to the online world, where overt forms of racism are rampant on various social media sites like Twitter. What is important to point out is that “new modes of communication mean it is easier than ever to find and capture this type of language” (Bartlett et. al, 2014: 5).
Objective: My current research project is looking at racist tweets in Canada (www.twitterracism.com). Initially, I was interested in understanding how racist Canadians are on twitter and how the online level of racial intolerance connects to reported incidents of racism in the offline world (if at all). As the project progressed, however, it became clear to me that a quantitative approach for this study was not feasible. As a result, my research focus shifted qualitatively towards understanding the context these racist terms were being used on Twitter in six Canadian cities: Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg. This project is an overview of my 2013 case study of a small sample of racist tweets in Canada.
Methods: Between June, July, and August of 2013, data was collected on Twitter (using the Streaming API method) via Hootsuite, a social media management platform, to track the amount of times certain racist words were used on Twitter originating from users located in certain Canadian cities. Hootsuite was used to collect data since the platform allows users to search for tweets by both keywords and geographic location (something which cannot be done using the basic Twitter search API). Locations provide an ideal access point for researchers interested in geographically bounded research, however, it is still fairly limited since only about 1% of all traffic on Twitter is “geotagged” (Gaffney and Puschman, 2014), meaning only a small number of users are opting in to have their geographical location shown with their tweet. This data, however, carries immense commercial value (Wilken, 2014) and it is likely that the proportion of geotagged tweets will increase in the future (Gaffney and Puschman, 2014).
For this project, each city was searched via hootsuite, looking for any tweets containing the following racist words in a negative context: native(s); white trash; nigger(s); paki(s); and chink(s). These words were chosen because the majority of the words represent the most common racist terms associated with specific racialized groups. The term native, which is not usually associated with being a racist word, was surprisingly used in a negative way on twitter, and as such, was included as one of the key terms for this data set. In order to determine if a tweet was used in a negative fashion, I would read each tweet individually and only capture tweets that were overtly negative in nature (see Appendix I for examples of tweets captured). I would not capture any tweets which were used in a joking nature, nor would I capture tweets which appeared to use the terms in a “collegial” way (i.e. people referring to other similar race groups as “My nigga” or “that’s my paki”).
In order to capture this data using hootsuite, a search query was created to reflect the key word being searched originating from the cities latitude and longitude coordinates. For example, when searching for the key word paki originating from the city of Edmonton, the following was typed into the Hootsuite search bar: paki geocode:53.5381965637,-113.5029678345,100km. Essentially, what this syntax is looking for is the word (paki) originating from the coordinates of 53.3 and -113.5 (which is Edmonton’s geo-location) and the surrounding 100 kilometers. The same search query was used for Calgary, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Montreal, and Toronto, and over the span of three months, each tweet that came up which contained one of the above racist words from these cities was read by the researcher to determine the context of the tweet.
Results: For the purpose of this project, only tweets which contained the above words in a negative context were captured in the data and saved in an excel spreadsheet for further content analysis. The total number of tweets collected over the three month period was 776.
Conclusions: This data offers some initial results that generate a sense of a) where the most racist tweets come from and b) what racialized groups are commented on in a negative way on Twitter in the six Canadian cities. After conducting a content analysis of the tweets, the following seven categories were established to understand how racist language is being used on Twitter in these six Canadian cities: 50% “Real time” response; 28% Negative Stereotype; 12% Casual use of slur; 4% Responses to racism; 2% Targeted abuse (online), Appropriated, and “Non-Derogatory”.
References:
Bartlett, Jamie, Reffin, Jeremy, Rumball, Noelle, and Williamson, Sarah. (2014). Anti-Social Media. Retrieved from: http://www.demos.co.uk/files/DEMOS_Anti-social_Media.pdf?1391774638
Gaffney, Devin and Puschman, Cornelius. (2014). “Data Collection on Twitter”. In: Twitter and Society, eds. . Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschman (New York: Peter Lang Publishing): 55-68.
Wilken, Rowan. (2014). “Twitter and Geographical Location”. In: Twitter and Society, eds. . Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschman (New York: Peter Lang Publishing): 155-168.
[1] Apart from the “real time response” category, the remainder of the categories used for the content analysis were inspired by the 2014 DEMOS study Anti-Social Media. A full list of the definition of each category can be found here: http://www.demos.co.uk/files/DEMOS_Anti-social_Media.pdf?1391774638, p. 24
Background: East Los High (ELH) is a teen drama purposefully designed to promote safe sex and teen pregnancy prevention among Latino youth in the United States. This 24-episode TV show was premiered exclusively on Hulu in June 2013. It features transmedia storytelling by using a variety of digital media platforms to roll out additional content, engage viewers, enrich their narrative experience, and promote health and social messages. Twitter has an important social media platform for these efforts.
Objective: As part of a comprehensive, multi-phase, multi-method program evaluation, this study aimed to understand the structures of the ELH Twitter hashtag network and explore the potential to build a better community around the show, enhance the efficacy of its health messages, and ultimately help obtain its social objectives.
Methods: Social network analysis is a useful method for understanding the structures of social media networks (Gruzd & Haythornthwaite, 2013). We used NodeXL to calculate key network indicators and generate visualizations of the interactions between @EastLosHighShow and its 2,136 Twitter followers with tweets that included #ELH, #ELHaddict(s), and/or #EastLosHigh from May 1, 2013 to January 31, 2014.
Results: Network analyses revealed a clear core-periphery structure among the linked users and a large proportion of isolates in the network. The core group was comprised of ELH and eight of its cast members, whereas the periphery was a sizable mix of ELH viewers, advisors, and other media organizations. A majority of the followers (80.7%) did not use the ELH hashtags to tweet about the show. In addition, we also discovered that most of the advisors, media organizations, and influencers that ELH listed on its official Twitter account did not follow back, or even if they did, they did not tweet about ELH frequently. The non-followers and isolated followers are the latent ties, representing social capital yet untapped.
Conclusions: Network analyses and visualizations rendered an onion-like layered structure in the ELH hashtag network. For ELH to build a better Twitter community, we provide recommendations based on Smith, Rainie, Shneiderman, and Himelboim’s (2014) Pew Report: (1) ELH maintains the enthusiastic hub of core members but also mindfully engages the fans to join their conversations; (2) ELH activates the salient latent ties and encourage their listed advisors and connected media organizations (especially those with high number of followers) to follow back and help promote the show; and (3) ELH converts the isolated followers from passive lurkers to active participants in discussions about the show, the cast, and the social and health issues.
References:
Gruzd, A. & Haythornthwaite, C. (2013). Enabling community through social media. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 15(10): e248. doi:10.2196/jmir.2796
Smith, M., Rainie, L., Shneiderman, B., & Himelboim, I. (2014, February 20). Mapping Twitter topic networks: From polarized crowds to community clusters. Available on http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/20/mapping-twitter-topic-networks-from-polarized-crowds-to-community-clusters/
Background: Commercial enterprises increasingly make use of Social Media in order to motivate their customers, or internet users in general, to participate e.g. in design contests, in company-run internet communities, or in mutual support platforms. Such “crowdsourcing” activities have in common that companies intend to utilize the generated work effort of internet users.
Objective: The paper focuses on the unintended consequences of the efforts of commercial enterprises to utilize contributions of participating users and discusses its theoretical implications. Analysis mainly builds on empirical findings of an own research project – which operated from Nov. 2009 to Oct. 2012 and was funded by the [name of country removed for blind review] Research Foundation – analyzing the social practice of companies’ crowdsourcing efforts in [name of country removed for blind review].
Methods: The study is based on an explorative research design guided by the methodological principles of Grounded Theory. 22 qualitative panel case studies of company-run crowdsourcing platforms were conducted. The structure and content of the Social Media platforms and the ongoing web-based communication both among participating users and between users and operators were continually documented and analyzed, and complementary qualitative interviews with operators and selected participants were conducted.
Results: Users do not necessarily act as “customers” or even “consumers” when participating in enterprise’s Social Media platforms, but also in other, “private” roles (e.g. product designer, discussant, consumer activist, or counselor to other participating users). Accordingly, users may follow their own distinct goals and not act as expected by the enterprise.
Furthermore, the particular public quality, and permanent visibility of Social Media-based communication leads to unintended effects for the enterprises: Users refer to and communicate with each other, mobilize for issues important to them, approach the enterprise collectively as crowds or communities and often act adversely against the enterprise. If the operator of the platform attempts to suppress adverse communication, users move on to external Social Media sites to utter their complaints.
Conclusions: In order to refer to an enterprise’s products or performance, users do not depend on company-run platforms, but can also initiate their own sites, e.g. on Facebook, in order to mobilize (for or) against the enterprise. Thus, Social Media lead to a democratization of consumer-producer-relations by opening up new opportunities for consumers to “voice” (in Hirshman’s sense of the term).
For enterprises, internet users constitute a new form of social environment which they cannot address in familiar terms such as “customer relationship management”. Rather, enterprises have to develop new forms of “community management” in order to address the collectivity of the users adequately.
Background: While major Canadian theatres, such as Canadian Stage and the Canadian Opera Company, integrate social media into their marketing practices, smaller, independent productions have begun to use social media as the form and content of performances themselves.
Objective: Using two case studies that incorporate Twitter into theatre—Rob Kempson's #legacy (2014) and Jonathan Goldsbie's Route 501 Revisited (2012)—this paper highlights how social media performance challenges existing theatre conventions as well as popular uses of social media platforms. Through these examples, I aim to demonstrate how intermedial performance can be used as a mode of intervention that can “performatively reconfigure”(Wiens) spaces of social media. This paper establishes how, through varying degrees of interaction between audiences and social media, both attempt to alter the ways in which we use social media on a daily basis.
Methods: My methodology incorporates performance analysis and a close study of the show related tweets. The productions continue to exist through their hashtags, #route501 and #legacy. In my examination of these tweets, I consider the kinds conversations the performance structures evoked and how active users were prior to and after the productions. Because the examples differ in their political content and aesthetic frameworks, my methodology for analyzing them will take into account differences in their aims and approaches and how these differences impacted on both the creative process and reception (including audience use of the hashtags).
Results: Most tweets using the hashtags come from avid Twitter users; however, there are a significant number of occasional users who were motivated to tweet more during the performances. The performances use Twitter to create a temporary community that considers how the site is used and its relation to everyday practices. While difficult to prove whether audience engagement continues or is radically altered through the performances themselves, additional related performances and tweets from after the performance days suggest the two shows had some longer term impacts on how users connect and mobilize via Twitter.
Conclusions: Theatre is a useful tool for reflecting on how we use social media sites like Twitter. Through remediation, these productions explore the kinds of social relations participatory media catalyse. However, at times these productions go beyond simply critiquing the social web and use performance to imagine new modes of connection possible in digital spaces. While the temporal limitations of the works prevented sustained engagement in some cases, these productions highlight the potential of art and performance as spaces in which to rehearse forms of digital interaction—relations that continue outside of the performance time and space. This social media use builds upon existing performance practices that situate theatre as a site of community-building to model digital repertoires engaged in local politics and policies.
References:
Wiens, Birgit. (2010). Spatiality. In Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender and Robin Nelson (Ed.), Mapping Intermediality in Performance (pp. 91-96) Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP.
Background: Social media channels facilitated by Web 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2005) created new opportunities for interaction and innovation for public (Baumgarten & Chui, 2009) and private sector organizations (McAfee, 2006). The increasing adoption, use and impact of social media in organizational settings is resulting in a new kind of business paradigm termed as “Social Business” (Vatrapu, 2013).
Objective: There has been little focus on a systematic treatment of the phenomena of social business when compared to other business paradigms such as e-business in the scientific world. Extant literature reviews are on specific topics of interest rather than on the general topic of social business itself (i.e. Leung, Law, van Hoof, and Buhalis (2013); Guy (2012); Veil, Buehner, and Palenchar (2011)). Our objective in this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review on the general topic, formulate the dimensions of social business, and propose a social business cycle.
Methods: We followed a three step methodology for the review based on the systematic literature review research goals outlined by Okoli and Schabram (2010) and the content-oriented thematic categorization of the literature specified by Webster and Watson (2002). From encoding and analysis of the literature, we created the four dimensions of social business (Perception, Adoption, Practice and Management) and discussed each dimension in detail with the selected articles.
Results: The proposed social business cycle (Figure 1) starts with the organizational perception of the risks and benefits of social media. Based on this perception, the organization undertakes strategic decision on if, when and how to adopt social media channels. If the strategic decision is to proceed with the adoption, then the organization allocates appropriate resources and procures relevant tools for their social business activities and engages in practice. Finally, in the management phase, the organization defines and implements appropriate management frameworks aligned with its business goals.
Conclusions: In this paper we attend the gap of conceptualizing the phenomena by categorizing the existing literature into four main research dimensions. There is also a knowledge gap in understanding the IT artefacts for social business (such as social CRM etc) and the research gaps need to be filled within each research dimension of social business (Perception, Adoption. Practice, and Management). We hope this literature review will support and motivate further research in social business adding more findings to the current state of knowledge.
References:
Baumgarten, J., & Chui, M. (2009). E-government 2.0. Mckinsey Quarterly, 4(2), 26-31.
Guy, R. (2012). THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR ACADEMIC PRACTICE: A REVIEW OF LITERATURE. Kentucky Journal of Higher Education Policy and Practice, 1(2), 7.
Leung, D., Law, R., van Hoof, H., & Buhalis, D. (2013). Social Media in Tourism and Hospitality: A Literature Review. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 30(1-2), 3-22.
Mcafee, A. P. (2006). Enterprise 2.0: The dawn of emergent collaboration. Mit Sloan Management Review, 47(3), 21-28.
O'Reilly, T. (2005). Web 2.0: compact definition. Message posted to http://radar. Oreilly. Com/archives/2005/10/web_20_compact_definition. Html.
Okoli, C., & Schabram, K. (2010). A guide to conducting a systematic literature review of information systems research.
Vatrapu, R. (2013). Understanding Social Business. In K. B. Akhilesh (Ed.), Emerging Dimensions of Technology Management (pp. 147-158). New Delhi: Springer.
Veil, S. R., Buehner, T., & Palenchar, M. J. (2011). A Work‐In‐Process Literature Review: Incorporating Social Media in Risk and Crisis Communication. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 19(2), 110-122.
Webster, J., & Watson, R. T. (2002). ANALYZING THE PAST TO PREPARE. ANALYZING THE PAST TO PREPARE FOR THE FUTURE: WRITING A, Mis Quarterly(26), 2.Background: The analysis of online social interactions provides an insight to how online discourse functions across different social media platforms and in different online social situations. A critique of online rational-critical debate (as first defined by Jürgen Habermas) and the psychological concept of innergroup and outergroup social ties provide the basis for the analysis of what is termed unconstructive discourse.
Objective: This paper shows, through a case study of body policing discourse, the importance of understanding negative or unconstructive online discourse. Unconstructive discourse is any type of communication that does not contribute to the overall health, vitality, and/or well being of a public or counterpublic. More specifically, this paper focuses on the specific type of unconstructive discourse that takes place in online spaces and the reasons behind that type of discourse. The purpose here is to show that the type of discourse users of social media practice with other users is dependent upon the type of social bonds one user assumes to have with another.
Methods: A case study of discourse regarding body policing of a plus size fashion blogger—who had the audacity to post pictures from her swimsuit photo shoot—across two forms of social media was selected in order to examine ways in which unconstructive discourse takes place. The psychological concepts of inner- and outergroup ties were applied to the relationships between users engaging in discourse in order to categorize the social interactions. Additionally, the management of different types of social media was considered in order to establish how that might affect unconstructive discourse.
Results: Analysis showed that unconstructive discourse was more likely to happen when users perceived weaker social ties (outergroup). Whereas when social ties were thought to be stronger, or a continuous personal relationship was assumed (innergroup), discourse was largely positive or constructive in nature.
Conclusions: In order to better understand constructive discourse (its purposes and how it is effectively used), it becomes necessary to understand unconstructive discourse and its purposes. Analysis shows that one aspect of online interaction that fosters unconstructive discourse is the decreased accountability for outergroup interactivity. This knowledge may provide insights on how to subvert, manage, and redirect unconstructive discourse in online spaces.
References:
Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. (T. Burger & F. Lawrence, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. (Original work published 1962
Background: As primary evidence of influence and impact (Garfield 1963), citation and hyperlink relations have been used to build social networks that provide insights into academic, professional, and online political communities (Newman 2004, Adamic 2005, Fowler 2007). In this paper we explore networks constructed by generalizing citation and hyperlink relations to include any informal reference to an entity as a source of information (songs, books, organizations, biblical verses), whether viewed as credible or not, for example, “How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth.” We hypothesize that strong similarity of source citation patterns implies community affiliation.
Objective: In contrast to a citation network, which directly links authors or works, source extraction will in general produce a bipartite graph; the two types of nodes are sources (which may be any kind of information source) and group members (websites in our data). We use the similarity matrix of the group members to construct a K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) graph (positing a link between any two sites such that either is one of the K nearest neighbours of the other). We show that in cases where direct citation links are known, the KNN graph can function as well as the primary citation graph in helping to infer communities within the group, and that the KNN graph can generate reasonable community proposals when the direct graph is sparse or unavailable.
Methods: We first demonstrate the KNN graph concept on the political blog data of Adamic (2005), comparing the performance of the Louvain community discovery algorithm (Blondel 2008) using the primary citation graph with that of a spectral clustering algorithm (Ng et al. 2001) on the KNN graph, in recovering liberal and conservative blogging communities. Next we use a source extraction system based on the architecture of Choi et al (2005) to extract information sources from 700 web pages discussing climate change to attempt to recover the pro-climate change and anti-climate change groups with the data. In the climate change data, direct page to page links are rare, so we compared the performance of KNN-graph based clustering using only the information sources to that of a bisective clustering algorithm using the entire vocabulary, the so-called Bag-of-Words (BOW) model.
Results: On the political blog data, both the primary citation graph method and the KNN graph method discovered clusters that were over 95% composed of members from one political community (cluster purity). On the climate change data, the best KNN-clustering system outperformed the best BOW system in discovering pro- and anti- climate change websites (cluster purity: 72% vs. 65%).
Conclusions: The political blog experiment shows that similarity of citation pattern can be an effective proxy for direct citation links in inferring communities. The climate change experiment shows that similarity of source citation pattern is a better indicator of orientation on the issue of climate change (a key indicator of community affiliation) than similarity of word usage patterns in general. These results suggest that further generalizing the similarity relations considered might improve community detection.
References:
Adamic, L. A., & Glance, N. (2005, August). The political blogosphere and the 2004 US election: divided they blog. In Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Link discovery (pp. 36-43). ACM.
Blondel, V. D., Guillaume, J. L., Lambiotte, R., & Lefebvre, E. (2008) Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment. 10: P10008.
Choi, Y., Cardie, C., Riloff, E., & Patwardhan, S. (2005, October). Identifying sources of opinions with conditional random fields and extraction patterns. In Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 355-362). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Fowler, J. H., Johnson, T. R., Spriggs, J. F., Jeon, S., & Wahlbeck, P. J. (2007). Network analysis and the law: Measuring the legal importance of precedents at the US Supreme Court. Political Analysis, 15(3), 324-346.
Garfield, E. (1963). Citation indexes in sociological and historical research. American documentation, 14(4), 289-291.
Newman, M. E. (2004). Who is the best connected scientist? A study of scientific coauthorship networks. In Complex networks (pp. 337-370). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Ng, Andrew Y., Jordan, Michael I., and Weiss, Yair. (2001). On Spectral Clustering: Analysis and an algorithm. In Tesauro, G, Touretzky, D., and Leed, T. (Eds.). Advances in neural information processing systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Background: The practice of travelling abroad to receive (scientifically) unproven stem cell treatments has become an increasingly problematic global phenomenon known as ‘stem cell tourism’. A number of studies have explored online direct-to-consumer advertising by providers and news media portrayals of the stem cell tourism phenomenon (Lau et al., 2008; Ogbogu, Rachul, & Caulfield, 2013; Zarzeczny et al., 2010). There has not been an attempt, however, to track the clinics’ activities on social networks, such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, which in recent years have emerged as an important source of health information for the general public.
Objective: In this paper, we examine the Twitter profiles of nine stem cell clinics which have become popular destinations for stem cell tourism. These providers operate in jurisdictions such as China, India, Mexico, Ukraine, and the Dominican Republic, where there is no stringent regulatory oversight of experimental stem cell treatments. We conducted content analysis of relevant tweets to evaluate the clinics’ profiles on the micro-blogging network.
Methods: Using Twitter’s built-in search engine, we collected all English language tweets (n=363) between 2009 and 2013 that that were tweeted by the clinics or by users specifically referring to activities by these clinics. We coded the tweets for marketing claims, discussions of safety and efficacy of stem cell therapies, descriptions of patients' experiences, and other relevant medical information (e.g., mentions of types of stem cell transplants, diseases treated and treatment protocols).
Results: Advertisements of stem cell tourism activities and other promotional content were found in 84.7% of the tweets.There was an unbalanced portrayal of health risks and benefits (only 1.1% of tweets mentioned negative outcomes, while 35.1% indicated the effectiveness of stem cell treatments offered by the clinics). Patients’ experiences and testimonials were referenced in 11.1% of the tweets and were invariably described in a positive light. Medical information about the type of stem cell transplants and treatment protocols was rarely included. Finally, the assessment of the tone of Twitter posts showed that 60.2% were positive towards the practice of traveling abroad to receive unregulated stem cell treatments, 35.4% were descriptive (neutral tone), and only 4.5% were negative or raised critical concerns about health risks associated with unproven stem cell therapies.
Conclusions: When placed in the context of past research on the problems associated with the marketing of unproven stem cell therapies, this analysis of representations on Twitter suggests that discussions in social media have also remained largely uncritical of the stem cell tourism phenomenon, with inaccurate representations of risks and benefits for patients.
References:
Lau, D., Ogbogu, U., Taylor, B., Stafinski, T., Menon, D., & Caulfield, T. (2008). Stem cell clinics online: the direct-to-consumer portrayal of stem cell medicine. Cell Stem Cell, 3(6), 591-594.
Ogbogu U., Rachul C., & Caulfield T. 2013. Reassessing direct-to-consumer portrayals of unproven stem cell therapies: Is it getting better? Regenerative Medicine, 8(3), 361-369.
Zarzeczny, A., Rachul, C., Nisbet, M., & Caulfield, T. 2010. Stem cell clinics in the news. Nature Biotechnology, 28(12), 1243-1246.
Background: In this project, I use a linguistic toolkit to investigate how partly fictional identities are created through Twitter posts. The material for the study is drawn from a Twitter community of ballet enthusiasts: pre-professional ballet students, hobby dancers and ballet connoisseurs.
Objective: The project looks at the speech act patterns of Twitter communication within a community. One of the sub-objectives is to assess the importance and function of indirect complaints (‘yammering’) on Twitter, which, according to a widespread perception, make up the bulk of ordinary tweets, and to investigate their linguistic structure.
Methods: The methodology is twofold: on the one hand, I did a qualitative study of the examples following the tenets of computer-mediated discourse analysis and conducted semi-structures interviews. On the other hand, corpus linguistic analysis of the annotated corpus was carried out. The full corpus consists of 1000 tweets gathered from the 11 accounts during 2012-2013, on the whole including approx. 20 000 words. The corpus was balanced for gender (5 female, 6 male users), region (6 users from the UK and 6 from the USA), individual users (8 users contributed 100 tweets each, and the remaining 100 were split between two male users from the UK who posted very seldom) and interactivity (500 tweets were interactive. e.g. they contained some form of @address, and 500 were ‘monologual’). Following a pilot study, corpus was manually tagged for pragmatic categories. Besides, the multi-turn tweets received a special marker. This talk will focus on the indirect complaint category, which included the sublevel of annotation for topic, syntactic structure, upgraders and downgraders.
Results: Self-disclosure emerges as the main motivation behind the users’ discursive activity. Positive self-disclosure, largely on the topics that endow the author with the emblematic features of a ballet ‘hero’ – aches and injuries, dedicated exercise, performing onstage, appreciation of ballet as an art form – makes up the ‘ego’ interpretive repertoire that users frequently draw upon. Consequently, indirect complaints are very popular as speech acts that facilitate self-disclosure. In terms of topics, complaints about injuries and lack of dancing skill are most prominent. Syntactically, declaratives are most frequent, which is in line with the complaints’ self-disclosive function. Declarative sentences often include ellipsis or follow the minimal pattern ‘evaluation+NP’. Lexically, negative evaluative devices in form of emotion words and swear words are common. Framing is realised by hashtags which occur outside of the syntactic structure of the utterance and thus mitigate the face-threatening nature of a complaint.
Conclusions: On the whole, the study shows that Twitter users are well capable of exploiting the tension between the online and offline to their advantage. The virtual identity constructed through a variety of semiotic devices and discursive stances becomes more prominent and credible than the offline one, even in cases when the two are apposed. This is achieved through overt or covert self-disclosure that exhibits stable linguistic patterns.
Background:
“Hyperlocal media” describes the use of online communication platforms to disseminate information of specific relevance to defined geographic locales. When social media are used “hyperlocally” they are often imagined as neighborhood networks of active citizens in direct contact with one another, sharing informational and social capital about issues of local importance and organizing collective action to effect (D. Hill, 2013). Given the widespread fears over the decline of place-based community in the modern city (ie Putnam, 2000), the notion that social media could support a re-emergence of local community, and the associated civic benefits, has been met with excitement.
Objective:
In this paper we interrogate the notion of hyperlocal social media as a localised community and subsequently its relevance as a platform for urban civic life, drawing results from a two year cross-disciplinary study into the users and local community associated with one of the UK’s most successful hyperlocal blogs, Brockley Central.
Methods:
The research borrows methods from anthropology, human geography and network science. Initially we map the social networks of Brockley Central both topologically and geographically, using Twitter’s API to database its followers and their connections, and GIS software to geo-locate accounts. We construct a social network graph with followers of @brockleycentral as nodes, and following-relationships between accounts as edges. Through graph analysis we identify the key actors, their geographical locations and identify modularity classes that can be seen as communities within this social network. We build on this data with qualitative results drawn from interviews with users of Brockley Central.
Results:
Geographically, the network extends way beyond the Brockley neighbourhood, across the wider region of South-East London in an uneven distribution that appears to be shaped by physical barriers in the built environment. When Brockley Central itself is taken as a base node what emerges is a sparsely-connected network looking more like a vertical “one-to-many” structure, for the broadcast of information, than it does a laterally-distributed “community”. However a second layer of well-connected accounts –entities with privileged communication positions such as local politicians, businesses and other hyperlocal media – form the focal points for sub-networks with particular socio-geographical characteristics. Neither fully-distributed or fully-vertical, a “tree-like” structure emerges. Some of the “branches” formed consist of clusters with a high degree of spatial proximity while others are formed around the homophily of shared social categories such as professional interests, and are more grouped geographically. As shown elsewhere (Loureiro-Koechlin & Butcher, 2013), online community is neither placeless nor entirely local but converges where social and geographical labels overlap.
Users reported little social contact directly through Twitter, rarely contributing their own information or participating in debate. Instead the traditional notion of community is supported indirectly. Being better informed about local development supports an abstract “sense” of belonging and better promotion of local groups and events leads to social ties being formed in person in these settings.
Conclusions:
It is argued that hyperlocal social media does not tend to act as a community in itself. Our findings support the notion that it enriches an ecology of events, spaces and technologies that together characterize the communication practices of the modern urban community (Broad et al., 2013).
References:
Broad, G. M., Ball-Rokeach, S. J., Ognyanova, K., Stokes, B., Picasso, T., & Villanueva, G. (2013). Understanding Communication Ecologies to Bridge Communication Research and Community Action. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 41(4), 325–345
Hill, D. (2013). On the smart city; A call for smart citizens instead. Retrieved March 18, 2014, from http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2013/02/on-the-smart-city-a-call-for-smart-citizens-instead.html
Loureiro-Koechlin, C., & Butcher, T. (2013). The Emergence of Converging Communities via Twitter. The Journal of Community Informatics, 9(3)
Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone. New York & London: Simon and Schuster.
Background: Social media have turned organizations’ attention towards users’ discussions, engagement and relationships. Thanks to their “interactive and participative qualities”, social media can “give a dynamic and lively dimension to advertising” (Van Dyck, 2014, p159) and other marketing communications, such as public relations. Organizations have realized the shifting power of communication from controlled to mass self-communication (Castells, 2009). In this new digital context, PR is going through “a paradigmatic change, both as a professional area and an academic field” (Damasio et al., 2012, p.16). Professionals have to cut through the clutter and come up with innovative, creative PR solutions. Although measuring effectiveness of PR campaigns on social media is still puzzling to academics and businesses alike, industry professionals seem to agree on what constitutes successful uses of social media for effective PR campaigns. During the last couple of years, we have witnessed the emergence of a new category in Advertising and PR festivals and competitions, that is Best use of social media in PR. Through award winning campaigns in these international festivals and competitions, this paper gives an opportunity for understanding how and why these case studies set a benchmark in the new PR era.
Objective: The aim of this paper is to uncover and analyze successful practices of PR strategies on social media. Success can be measured through various metrics: volume of sales, popularity among audiences, achievement of marketing objectives, etc. Accolades and recognition awards from the fellows in the industry is another measure of success. This presentation suggests uncovering and examining outstanding original and creative PR solutions in the new social media environment. It also discusses lessons of effectiveness that could be learned from such best practices.
Methods: Building on classic theories of excellence in PR and foundational academic work such as Grunig (1992, 2008), this research adopts a content analysis of successful PR campaigns, awarded at international and regional festivals and competitions.
A selection of 10 case studies has been studied. All cases have been awarded the Best use of social media in PR either at Cannes international advertising festival, the chartered Institute of Public Relations or IPRA, the International Public Relations Association. Combining qualitative and quantitative metrics, the analysis looks at the message and measures the social media usage as vehicles of the message.
Results: Initial results of this research show that there is a profound shift in successful PR practices that have moved creativity at the center of such campaigns. While a few years ago the attention was focused on using several platforms in order to reach exposure and generate emotion, recent winning campaigns have proved that ‘the bigger is not the better’, meaning the number of platforms used is not significant anymore. Some emergent practices were judged as outstanding although they have used only one platform or have produced one application (App). User’s engagement and added-value benefits have consistently proven key for success.
Conclusion: While Eyrich et al. (2008) report that PR practitioners prefer using established tools and venture minimally in using social networks and other ‘complicated tools’, early results of this research prove that awarded PR campaigns are created by, rather daring practitioners. Findings also suggest that creativity is not only central to the message, but also to the combination (the what) and manner (the how) of the social media channels used.
References:
Castells, M. (2009). Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Damasio et al. (2012). The PR pyramid: Social media and the new role of Public Relations in organizations, Revista Internacional de relaciones Publicas, Nº 4, Vol. 2, 11-30
Eyrich, N., Padman, M.L., Sweetser, D. (2008). PR practitioners’ use of social media tools and communication technology. Public Relations Review, 34, 412-414.
Grunig, J. E. (2008) Excellence in Public Relations and communication management, New York: Routledge
Van Dyck, F. (2014) Advertising transformed. The new rules for the digital age. London: KoganPage
Background: The influence of labor unions has waxed and waned in North America over the last two hundred years (Lichtenstein, 2002). Recent developments in communications have allowed firms to coordinate their operations globally (Hardt & Negri, 2000). Generally speaking, firms attempt to structure communication networks to aid in the multiplication and deepening of the global division of labor. However, these same communication platforms make possible the multiplication and circulation of class struggle as workers share knowledge across a variety of contexts (Dyer-Witheford, 1999).
Objective: This paper explores the political dimensions of online social media platforms with respect to the mobilization of workers engaged in class struggle. Critical theory has emphasized the ways in which communication technologies have facilitated asymmetrical power relations in contemporary capitalist society by highlighting issues like commodification, privacy, security, consumerism, political corruption, and ideology (Dean, 2009; Andrejevic, 2002). Conversely, this paper confronts online social media as both the means and the result of class antagonism. As the capitalist class attempts to harness technological development to the expanded subjugation of society through the imposition of work, the working class simultaneously seeks to use technology to realize greater autonomy and contentment in their own lives (Cleaver, 1981).
Methods: I build on my previous research on the use of social media by the group OURWalmart. OURWalmart is an employee-led organization working with the United Food and Commercial Workers union to improve working conditions for Wal-Mart associates. This organization relied on social media platforms extensively in the coordination of the Black Friday labor actions in 2012 and 2013. The next stage of my research consists of a comparative analysis of the various tactics and contexts in which social media have been deployed by a number of Canadian unions including the Service Employees International Union, Unifor Canada, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, and the Canadian Union of Public Employees. I pay particular attention to the affordances and limitations of social media platforms in the course of planning, coordinating, and circulating information about labor actions. I conduct interviews with union specialists in public relations, communications, and recruitment—as well as with rank-and-file union members—with an eye to assessing the current state of integration of online social media within broader organizing efforts.
Results: These interviews seem to indicate that particular deployments of social media impact the interactions between environmental factors, employer behavior, and union strategies. This impact appears alongside a cluster of ten key union tactics previously identified as influencing union organizing success (Milkman and Voss 2004).
Conclusion: Trade unions today face formidable challenges with respect to leadership, recruitment and retention, workplace democracy, and political climates charged with anti-unionism among political and business elites and rank-and-file workers. Online social media will play a decisive role in addressing these challenges. By deepening our understanding of the successes and failures of previous social media campaigns labor can struggle more effectively moving forward.
References:
Andrejevic, M. (2002). "The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 19(2): 230-248.
Cleaver, H. (1981). Technology as Political Weaponry. The Responsibility of the Scientific and Technological Enterprise in Technology Transfer. American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dean, J. (2009). Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies : communicative capitalism & left politics. Durham, Duke University Press.
Dyer-Witheford, N. (1999). Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Chicago, University of Illinois Press.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000). Empire. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Lichtenstein, N. (2002). State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Milkman, R. and K. Voss (2004). Rebuilding labor : organizing and organizers in the new union movement. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press.
Background: Completing the pilgrimage to Mecca (known as Hajj) represents one of the most profound experiences in the life of a Muslim. In recent years, we have seen an increase in pilgrims posting pictures and videos of themselves while at Hajj and posting these on youtube, facebook, etc. The importance of information sharing as testimonial (“I was there”) and as a means to document one’s journey is not new; yet, these emergent practices are significant in the context of young people’s expressions of spiritual and religious identities.
Objective: The paper aims to demonstrate how an analysis of a specific genre of selfie (the “holy” selfie, named after the location of the holy Kaaba and other holy sites in Mecca and Madinah where they were taken) provides a vocabulary and set of techniques for examining the “work” of the selfie (as evidence, as conversation, as affect). In doing so, this paper highlights youthful expressions of religious and spiritual identities and contributes to the emerging area of cyberpilgrimage.
Methods: We conducted a visual analysis of 50 selfies (including the contextual information and interpretation around them). We complemented these with in-depth interviews with seven young pilgrims who partook in holy selfies and asked them about the rationale and meaning of their practice.
Results: Preliminary analysis showed the significant variation in status among people who engaged in the practice, along with the importance given to the formation of connections among Ummah (community) members as a rationale for sharing the selfie.
Conclusions: Despite being a pivotal, transformational moment in the social and religious life of the pilgrim, there is a dearth of research on the informational aspects of this phenomenon. This study examines the selfie within the context of the unifying set of rituals performed in the Muslim world (Clingingsmith 2009: 1134), as well as an embodiment of the transhistorical and transnational Muslim community in the digital era.
References:
Clingingsmith, D.; Khwaja, A. & ; Kremer, M. (2009). "Estimating the Impact of The Hajj: Religion and Tolerance in Islam's Global Gathering." The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 124(3), 1133-1170.
Background: Brand communities play a key role in the marketing process by educating, influencing and engaging customers. Brand communities are defined as “a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001). Facebook pages of brands are one type of brand community which marketers use for building brand awareness, increasing conversion and engaging their customers. Much of the work on social media brand communities comes from practitioners, with a few exceptions (e.g., de Vries, Gensler and Leeflang, 2012; Goh, Heng and Lin, 2013; Laroche et al. 2012).
Objective: Previous studies have attempted to understand how influence works in social media or how word-of-mouth spreads in social media brand communities. This paper uses social network analysis to examine and understand the structure of competing brand communities on Facebook. We wanted to examine if the structure of communities of competing brands, which are positioned in close proximity to each other, tend to be similar or different.
Methods: We selected two different product categories with considerable volume and activity in Facebook – Luxury Brands and Retail. Using social network analysis, 4 brands within each of these categories were examined using social network analysis. For each brand, Facebook postings for a 12-month period were collected. The data included vertex (node) and edges (ties). Vertex included gender, language type (roughly refers to nations), and comment. Edge included sender, receiver, and post resource. We focused on the “Facebook fan page network”, which is an egocentric network. We conducted social network analysis, followed by one-way ANOVA using SPSS to see if graph metrics were statistically different across competing brands.
Results: We compared brand within geodesic distance, graph density, betweenness centrality and eigenvector centrality. Degree, Eigenvector Centrality and Clustering Coefficient have significant difference between luxury and retail industries. However, Betweenness and closeness Centrality didn’t show significant difference between two industries. Within retail brands, there were significant differences on all key graphic metrics. Similarly, with luxury brands also we found significant differences in network structure and processes. Some of the results are shown in Figures 1 and 2. Figure 3 shows differences network diagrams of two competing retail brands.
Conclusions: The network differences are indicative of differences in the social media strategies of competing brands and also differences in the type of fans attracted by differences. In the paper, research and managerial implications of our findings are discussed.
References:
de Vries, L., Gensler, S. & Leeflang, P.H.S (2012). Popularity of Brand Posts on Brand Fan Pages: An Investigation of the Effects of Social Media Marketing. Journal of Interactive Marketing. Vol. 26 (2), 83-91.
Goh, K, Heng, C. Lin, Z. (2013). Social Media Brand Community and Consumer Behavior: Quantifying the Relative Impact of User- and Marketer-Generated Content. Information Systems Research. Vol. 24 (1), 88-107.
Laroche, M., Habibi, M., Richard, M., and Sankaranarayanan, R. (2012). The effects of social media based brand communities on brand community markers, value creation practices, brand trust and brand loyalty. Computers in Human Behavior. Vol. 28 (5) 1755-1767.
Muniz, Jr A. M. and O'Guinn. T.C. (2001). Brand community. Journal of Consumer Research. Vol. 27 (4),
Background: Studies into recent social movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring show how committed individuals are appropriating social media to articulate a counter narrative, and contest selective or dismissive framing by mainstream media (Gleason, 2013; Lotan et al., 2011; Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013). These movements do not have specific, concise demands that can be easily explained by mainstream media, but present an open-ended, unspecified meta-narrative where participants seek to create their own meaning.
Objective: The paper investigates how processes of networked gatekeeping shape the dissemination and representation of news and information on the Idle No More movement in Canada on social media. Through an analysis of the actor types who used the Idle No More hashtag, #Idlenomore, this paper examines how social media spaces create a terrain for negotiation where strength on all sides offsets the other, demanding articulations, and accountability for such expressions, explanations, and descriptions of the movement.
Methods: We analysed 743,365 tweets gathered in November 2013 and identified as containing the hashtag, #Idlenomore. The data covers the period when movement started and was most active, from December 2012 and January 2013. Using classifications adapted from Lotan et al. (2011) and from Hermida et al. (2014), the top 500 actor types by influence and by retweet were coded, providing us two ways to analyse authority on Twitter.
Results: While the top actors by influence were primarily institutional elites such as journalists from mainstream media organisations and celebrities, measuring influence by retweet resulted in a more diverse set of actors. We observed processes of multi-vocal articulation where a crowdsourced elite composed of a greater proportion of indigenous and alternative voices rose to prominence as the most retweeted during a time of intensive media, political, and public attentions.
Conclusions: In many ways, Twitter imitates and replicates existing power structures in society by elevating those with influence through mainstream media. Yet retweeting creates conditions for supplanting influencers when those in the network resonate with the articulations offered by alternative voices. Alternative structures emerge within the network, facilitating a crowdsourced elite capable of negotiating the processes of articulation and resonance. Social media, and Twitter in particular, affords a contested middle ground for relevance, meaning and interpretation.
References:
Gleason, B. (2013). #Occupy Wall Street: Exploring Informal Learning About a Social Movement on Twitter. American Behavioural Scientist, 57. 966-982.
Hermida, A., Lewis, S., and Zamith, R. (2014) Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources on Twitter During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 19(3), 479-499.
Lotan, G., Graeff, E., Ananny, M., Gaffney, D., Pearce, I., & Boyd, D. (2011). The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. International Journal of Communication, 5, 1375–1405.
Meraz, S. & Papacharissi, Z. (2013). Networked gatekeeping and networked framing on #egypt. International Journal of the Press and Politics, 18(2), 1-29.
Background: The internet has created a rich social space where affinity groups gather to share experiences and learn from each other (Haas, Irr, Jennings, & Wagner, 2011; Parr, 2008). For individuals with health problems, the virtual world has provided another point of access to resources, services, support, and healing through online support groups. Counter to beliefs that the virtual world is open to anyone interested in participating, exclusive communities often obstruct the entrance, locking the doors to many communities. For those looking for acceptance into an online communities, the task of gaining entry includes negotiating both technological and discursive obstacles as there is often a requirement to introduce the self, and sometimes a need to apply for membership, when entering a community space. Digital discourse analysis provides an approach to explore how individuals negotiate online communities by using selfie bios to gain acceptance into a community of practice to gain entrance and belonging. When applied to mental health communities, this approach provides information on how people attempt to find support and the importance of particular types of literacy skills needed to access help.
Objective: This research contributes to the field of new media sociolinguistics (Thurlow & Mroczek, 2011) to consider intersections between discourse, technology, multimodality, and ideology by demonstrating how people navigate the norms of the digital and discursive landscape of online community spaces. This paper explores how the affordances of new media provide people opportunities to create communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; McLure Waski & Faraj, 2000) online while simultaneously creating barriers to entry.
Methods: This paper applies digital discourse analysis methods to examine the point of contact between selfie-bios and the application form required to gain access to journal within the online community HealthyPlace. By looking at a constellation of texts related to the online journal application process (journals homepage, journal interest form, and twenty eight corresponding selfie-bios), this case study sheds light on how people take up and reproduce community discourses in hopes of gaining admission into this virtual community.
Results: This case study extends on research that suggests becoming a member of an online support community requires strategic discursive competence (Stommel & Koole, 2010) by demonstrating how people reproduced discourse community ideologies and construct recognizable self-identities in relation to mental health disorder(s) through selfie-bios through the application process to the online journaling community. The digitally-mediated life story that is produced by responding to electronic application forms is unique to the digital age, reflecting the demands and constraints of the technology (Page, 2012). This paper will show how people exhibit discursive competence about mental health along with digital competence about digital auto-biography writing through selfie-bios.
Conclusions: Online community bios show how the online application process can facilitate access to community, or conversely, failed uptake brings the possibility of exclusion—raising the stakes of successful discursive performance. Digital discourse analysis allows us to rethink the intersection of language and technology at the point of entry into community by shedding light on the moves people make to gain acceptance into such virtual spaces and the affordances offered (and constraints of) new media.
References:
Haas, S. M., Irr, M. E., Jennings, N. A., & Wagner, L. M. (2011). Communicating thin: A grounded model of Online Negative Enabling Support Groups in the pro-anorexia movement. New Media & Society, 13(1), 40 –57.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
McLure Waski, M., & Faraj, S. (2000). “It is what one does”: why people participate and help others in electronic communities of practice. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 9, 155–173.
Page, R. E. (2012). Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction. New York, N.Y.: Routledge.
Parr, H. (2008). Mental health and social space : towards inclusionary geographies? Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
Stommel, W., & Koole, T. (2010). The online support group as a community: A micro-analysis of the interaction with a new member. Discourse Studies, 12(3), 357 –378.
Thurlow, C., & Mroczek, K. (2011). Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media. Oxford University Press, USA.
Background: Research into the complex relationship between Facebook, its users and the advertising industry has centred primarily around provocative concepts such as free labour (Terranova 2004), affective value (Arvidsson & Colleoni 2012), the “prosumer” (Lister et al. 2003), and retrofitted notions of the audience commodity (Fuchs 2011). Despite these significant contributions, as well as the attention the subject receives from media literacy specialists and privacy and surveillance scholars, we have little empirical data that maps viewpoints on the user side of Andrejevic’s (2013) knowledge asymmetry; that is, the extent to which users are aware of their own commodification and, crucially, how they feel about creating value for social media firms in exchange for gratis access to such platforms.
Objective: This paper asks: How do social media users understand, rationalize and attempt to appropriate the role played by their labour and personal information in creating social media advertising markets?
Methods: In a multi-lingual, international Q method study, we asked more than 300 Facebook users to explain and share their viewpoints about their role in the creation of Facebook’s advertising markets. We complement our Q method analysis with open and closed survey questions to help us map the various viewpoints that users have about their relationship with Facebook.
Results: We identify a typology of three distinctive perspectives on the value of user generated content to social media advertising in which users tend to see Facebook as either: (a) a connectivity and networking utility; (b) an innovative business offering consenting consumers a symbiotic exchange of free access for the creation of advertising markets; or (c) a potentially exploitative monolith that profits from its asymmetrical knowledge relationship with users, characterized by its privileged access to and use of users’ personal information.
Conclusions: We reflect on the differences in and commonalities across these views and contribute to the theorization of new the new media audience by arguing that efforts to frame social media use as labour or commodification have little traction in any of the ways that the users themselves conceive of their activities. In response, we underline a series of normative concerns that do flow directly from our empirical evidence: a lack of critical media literacy about social media; general angst about privacy; and, an overwhelming sense that users have no agency over how social media is managed. We conclude by making a programmatic case for a research program on social media audiences grounded in what we call the sociology of analytics.
References:
Andrejevic, Mark. (2013). InfoGlut. New York: Routledge.
Arvidsson & Colleoni. (2012). Value in informational capitalism and on the Internet. The Information Society 28(3), pp. 135-150.
Fuchs, Christian. (2011). The contemporary world wide web: social medium or new space of accumulation? In Dwayne Winseck & Dal Yong Jin (Eds.), The political economies of media. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Lister, Martin, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, Kieran Kelly. 2003. New media: A critical introduction. London: Routledge
Terranova, Tiziana. (2004). Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London; Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press.
Background: The ‘selfie’ has become the dominant symbol of smartphone/camera enabled social media use at the present time. It is the key journalistic metaphor for individualization and narcissism among so-called ‘digital natives’, but has been subject to very little academic analysis. This paper makes a significant contribution to existing knowledge by ‘situating the selfie’ within the dynamics of digital autobiographic management among long-term social media users.
Objective: The paper aims to provide some detailed empirical data on how individuals are engaging in practices of social media profile management as visuality becomes increasingly significant in ordinary communication (Hand 2012) and personal analytics (Ruckenstein 2014). Drawing upon data gathered over ten years, we show how transitions in the configuration and use of devices, visual communication, and changing platforms have shaped the dynamics of profile management over this period.
Methods: The empirical data has been gathered during two phases: first, as part of a funded project that collected and analysed in-depth interview, focus group and ethnographic data from eighty-nine participants who were located in the United Kingdom, United States, China, and Australia, in 2004 and 2005. From this original data-set fifty-seven participants remained in communication through various social media, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter up to 2014. With their consent, these individuals’ lives have been observed and recorded as ethnographic data. Second, in 2013, the most social media active participants were contacted to participate in a follow-up interview specifically focused upon their long-term social network/media use and profile management. In-depth semi-structured interviews with twenty- seven women and fifteen men took place face-to-face and via Skype in 2013 and 2014, they were recorded via a digital recorder and fully transcribed for thematic analysis using Atlas.ti. These participants identified themselves as ‘long-term’ users of social media, who actively sought to modify their constructs of self in the choices they made and continue to make about status updates, shared content, tagged images and videos in order to create a personal (and public) autobiography that is intimately tied to their self-identity.
Results: Analysis of our interview data reveals significant continuities between selfie-making in social media profiles and earlier techniques of autobiographic self-reflection, but important gendered differences in the extent to which the real and imagined ‘friend-gaze’ is shaping the production and management of visual self-identity. For our interviewees, selfies are both ‘liquid’ (modified, in circulation, ‘live’) and ‘locative’ (tagged, ‘authentic’, ‘intimate’) in ways that exemplify the new practices of ‘prescencing’ in social media, where the personal image is reworked in the present in anticipation of future circulation and visibility.
Conclusions: In-depth empirical studies of long-term users of social media enable important insights into the emergence of ‘platformed sociality’ (van Dijck 2012) on the ground, as devices, conventions of use, and social media platforms are configured in ‘media manifolds’ (Couldry 2012) that are actively engaged with and negotiated in differentiated ways. The selfie can be understood empirically as an outcome of the unprecedented visuality of social media and the ubiquitous presence of connected devices, providing insight into how individuals, devices, and platforms interact.
References:
Couldry N (2012) Media, Society, World. Cambridge: Polity.
Hand M (2012) Ubiquitous Photography. Cambridge: Polity.
Ruckenstein M (2014) Visualized and Interacted Life: personal analytics and engagements with data doubles. Societies. 4: 68-84.
Van Dijck, J. (2013) The Culture of Connectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Background: For most people, media are their main source of scientific information. Twitter offers a new channel to disseminate, consume, and debate research findings. The interface between the science community and the public is shifting from traditional news outlets and their websites to natively web-based services (Brossard & Scheufele 2013).
Objective: The paper aims to demonstrate how scientific topics are discussed on Twitter and in traditional news outlets. Who are the central players? What does the network structure tell us about the diffusion of knowledge? How are web resources and other users referenced in tweets? The overall motivation for this research was to investigate how social media may enhance the flow of research-based knowledge.
Methods: During five weeks, 965 online science articles form six traditional news outlets (selected based on a classification by Weber & Monge 2011) were automatically collected and analyzed. A continuous topic detection method of public scientific issues was realized using latent Dirichlet allocation (see Blei 2012). This enabled the generating of a corresponding 35 day sample of 72,469 Twitter messages, retrieved by searching the API with the science news topic keywords (e.g. “climate change”).
Social network analysis is used to examine structures in the Twitter users who authored tweets about scientific issues. Network connections are considered present if the individual was mentioned, replied to, or had a post retweeted. With regards to the textual contents of the tweets and articles, topic models, co-occurrence analyses (Grimmer & Stewart 2013), multidimensional scaling, and sentiment analysis are explored. The unique feature of this paper is the dynamic linkage between tweets and news—this avoids an ex-ante restriction on a specific issue and its search terms (e.g. nanotechnology).
Results: Network analysis and visualization reveals patterns of interaction that characterize the science news Twitter community as comprising a large component with roughly 40% of the users. The indegree distribution is extremely skewed and reveals a set of dominant actors in the domain of science news. Unsurprisingly, these are professional news organizations such as The New York Times. Network structures indicative of conversational exchange are rare. A large proportion of science tweets, particularly as compared to tweets in general, contain a web link or mention another user in some way. Sentiment analysis shows that Science news are on average more positive than tweets, which in turn experience much greater sentiment variation. The contextualization of science issues (term co-occurrences) differs for some topics while it is essentially the same for others. Major topics in the time frame of data collection include Mars explorations, the Nobel Prizes, the U.S. government shutdown, breast cancer, and climate change.
Conclusions: The results of the network and link analysis point to a recommender role of Twitter as the service moves from a social interaction medium to a global information network, as others have noted (e.g. Braun & Gillespie 2011; van Dijck 2011). The empirical results and the literature review insights are synthesized in a bigger picture to foster future research.
References:
Blei, D. M. (2012). Probabilistic topic models. Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference Tutorials (pp. 77–84).New York: ACM. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2107736.2107741
Braun, J., & Gillespie, T. (2011). Hosting the public discourse, hosting the public. Journalism Practice, 5(4), 383–398. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2011.557560
Brossard, D., & Scheufele, D. A. (2013). Science, new media, and the public. Science, 339(6115), 40–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1232329
Grimmer, J., & Stewart, B. M. (2013). Text as data: the promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts. Political Analysis, 21(3), 267–297. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pan/mps028
Van Dijck, J. (2011). Tracing Twitter: the rise of a microblogging platform. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 7(3), 333–348. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/macp.7.3.333_1
Weber, M. S., & Monge, P. (2011). The flow of digital news in a network of sources, authorities, and hubs. Journal of Communication, 61(6), 1062–1081. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01596.x
Background: Homophily, the tendency for people to disproportionately form ties with similar others, is consistently observed in offline social communities (McPherson et al, 2001). The question remains unsettled whether homophily results from active choices made in an environment of alternatives or from the tendency of people to form ties in groups that are already homogeneous. Meanwhile, according to the dramaturgical tradition in sociology (Goffman, 1959) we play out our scenes according to assigned or assumed roles emerging from the beliefs, values and conventions of the groups surrounding us. How are role-play and social distinction accomplished in an online environment where the physical body is no longer visible (Boyd and Heer, 2006; Code and Zaparyniuk, 2009)?
Objective: The paper asks whether homophily and dramaturgical role-play appear online when the constraints and cues of the offline world are removed. At a distinctive social media website called The Bear Club (thebearclub.co.uk), participants refrain from sharing their human names, ages, demographic characteristics or appearance, instead depicting themselves as teddy bears by name, in blog posts and comments, in photographs, and in choosing “bear buddies.” Member bears each join one of 8 clans, and each clan is described as having a distinct personality (“shy,” “good listener,” “socialable and funny,” and so on). However, bears from all clans have equal access to information about the activity of bears in all other clans, erasing structural barriers to interclan-interaction. In the absence of both offline cues and online barriers, are these clan markers still associated with distinctive modes of expression and tie formation?
Methods: Observation of the complete population of 1,925 user accounts at The Bear Club included collection of content and network data regarding 5,213 selections of “bear buddies” and 17,140 comments on blog posts. Network analysis and content analysis were used to assess the salience of social distinctions in tie formation and clan identity.
Results: Observation of the clans in action and interaction show adherence to clan cues in some aspects but not others. For instance, members of 7 out of 8 clans were more likely than chance to form ties with fellow clan members, indicating the emergence of clan as a mark of social distinction. Content analysis revealed that clan members were disproportionately likely to use vocabulary associated with introductory descriptions of clan character on the website. However, these overall trends were countered by a number of specific examples to the contrary. Despite descriptions of various clans as more or less inclined to be friendly, these descriptions do not appear to be associated with the number of “bear buddies” chosen or blog comments posted by clan members.
Conclusions: In an online social media environment where offline cues for social distinction are removed and it becomes possible to escape even the limits of the physical body, new cues for interaction applied to new roles are introduced and heeded. Even fictional bears are recognizably human in the social worlds they create.
References:
Boyd, D., & Heer, J. (2006). Profiles as conversation: Networked identity performance on Friendster. In System Sciences, 2006. HICSS'06. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on (Vol. 3, pp. 59c-59c). IEEE.
Code, J. R., & Zaparyniuk, N. E. (2009). Social identities, group formation, and the analysis of online Communities. Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, 86-101.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday.
McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual review of sociology, 415-444.
Background: In higher education today, the intersection of digital technologies and changing work conditions creates intersecting, well-documented trends towards massive course experimentation, shifting funding structures, teaching precarity, and TEDtalk celebrity on the speaking circuit. Against this backdrop, the roles of academics and scholars within the larger public sphere are changing (Siemens, 2008).
One way in which scholars navigate these shifts is by forging identities via online networks (Veletsianos, 2013): by building reputations and networks as scholars within the new, open, online public sphere. This paper posits that blogging and social media participation constitute a new indicator of academic influence, both within networked circles and beyond, creating visibility and reputation that funders and media may recognize. But what kinds of identity positions count as influential, credible, and valuable within networked participatory scholarship? How do scholars “read” each other’s signals in this complex new public sphere?
Objective: The paper outlines how actively-networked scholars in an ethnographic study reported assessing the Twitter profiles of other networked scholars. The project explores ways in which influence, credibility, and value are constructed and understood by networked scholars: it aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the literacies and logics scholars employ in making sense of each others’ identities and academic influence in the networked public sphere.
Methods: The paper shares results from an in-depth ethnographic study of networked scholars. Fourteen participants’ Twitter and blogging outputs were observed over a three-month period, ten participants were interviewed about their own participation, and eleven offered reflections on their initial perceptions of the identity positions, value, and credibility of the Twitter profiles of volunteer exemplar identities. This paper outlines the findings of those reflections on how scholars ‘read’ each other and the meaning they make out of other scholars’ profiles.
Results: Close reading and analysis of participants’ reflections on Twitter profiles suggests that networked scholars develop complex literacies and logics for assessing influence and value. In some cases, these understandings of influence run parallel to more conventional or institutional measures of academic influence, but they also incorporate assessments of individual scale and identity attributes not generally factored into institutional scholarly reputations. Data is still being analyzed: findings will be complete by the time of #smsociety14.
Conclusions: Scholars’ individual goals and perceptions of purpose for their networked participation combine with the literacies and logics they employ to understand others’ presentation: together, these appear to shape scholars’ practices and relational interactions online. This networked engagement has real-world institutional effects, building ties that can lead to research collaborations, speaking engagements, and other material manifestations of academic influence: this research will offer a vocabulary and framework for understanding the implicit meanings and literacies that scholars employ in assessing each others’ identities and influence within the new public sphere of networked scholarship.
References:
Siemens, G. (2008). Learning and knowing in networks: Changing roles for educators and designers. Retrieved from http://www.ingedewaard.net/papers/connectivism/2008_siemens_Learning_Knowing_in_Networks_changingRolesForEducatorsAndDesigners.pdf
Veletsianos, G. (2013). Open Practices and identity: Evidence from researchers and educators’ social media participation. British Journal of Educational Technology, 44(3), 639-651.
Background: Traditional news organizations exist within an apparatus of accountability, held together by their reputation and the professionalization of the occupation of journalism. Legitimacy in journalism has been solidified over time, but with the emergence of online media, traditional journalistic standards have been challenged as online news organizations attempt to create a new standard to define the different kinds of journalistic practices that are occurring online and the role played by social media in this process. According to Pierre Bourdieu (1998), the standards that define whether a news organization is legitimate are based on whether those occupying dominant positions in the field recognize it as such. Recognition by someone who is considered legitimate grants legitimacy.
Objective: This paper explores the changing nature of the profession of journalism as a space of contested power relations and networked communities, focusing specifically on how a controversial online news organization – Breitbart.com – became a legitimate source for news. Using both the Anthony Weiner and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) scandals, this paper highlights Breitbart’s reliance on his online community, a distinct group of followers which I have termed “outlier sources” - individuals who have experienced or been part of a news event and can provide a first-hand account of what took place. With the mainstream media fearing Breitbart, it was clear that he was never going to receive press releases and tips from the establishment. As a result, he needed access to sources that could provide him with “the goods”. He positioned himself in the field as an outspoken critic of the left, encouraging like-minded individuals to reach out to him as sources, gaining legitimacy initially amongst the extreme right, later from mainstream media.
Methods: Ethnographic research was used to gain a greater understanding of Andrew Breitbart and his five websites. I conducted over 60 hours of interviews in Los Angeles with Breitbart in November 2011, five months before his death. I embedded myself in his environment, shadowing him daily from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., at his office, his home, at meetings and at appointments. I transcribed and coded the interviews, highlighting informal references to Bourdieu’s principle of legitimation: peer and/or public recognition (1998). I also interviewed his co-workers at Breitbart.com. In addition to my ethnography, I examined the tweets that were posted during the initial Anthony Weiner allegations. I also analyzed the transcripts that were recorded during the undercover investigations at three ACORN locations in the United States.
Results: In examining legitimacy and how it is achieved in the field of journalism, I established that the use of social capital was at the center. The field is strengthened not only by economic profit, but also through networking (a form of social capital). Specifically, Breitbart emerged as a legitimate player by creating a position for himself where those with similar views could approach him online with news tips and scoops. My study revealed that Breitbart’s websites comprise a conservative echo chamber where he has emerged as a mouthpiece for the Tea Party, subsequently encouraging like-minded readers to contact him with story ideas, enabling him to use them as sources.
Conclusions: An organization’s ability to gain legitimacy in the field of journalism is dependent on its capacity to leverage varying levels of social capital online. Understanding the use of social capital illustrates the increasingly networked nature of this evolving field, whereby the maintenance of online relationships is paramount.
References:
Bourdieu, Pierre. (1998). On Television and Journalism. London: Pluto Press
Background: Our work is situated in the emerging fields of Data Science (Cleveland, 2001), Computational Social Science (Lazer et al., 2009) and Social Media Analytics (Vatrapu, 2013). Computational methods, formal models and software tools for big social data analytics are largely limited to graph theoretical approaches (Gross & Yellen, 2005) such as social network analysis (Borgatti, Mehra, Brass, & Labianca, 2009) informed by the social philosophical approach of relational sociology (Emirbayer, 1997). There are no other unified modelling approaches to social data that integrate the conceptual, formal, software, analytical and empirical realms (Mukkamala, Hussain, & Vatrapu, 2013).
Objective: Our objective is to present, discuss, and empirically demonstrate an alternative holistic approach to relational sociology, graph theory, and social network analysis. Our alternate holistic approach is based on associational sociology (Latour, 2005), set theory and fuzzy set theory (Ragin, 2000), and social set analysis (Mukkamala, Hussain, & Vatrapu, in press/2014).
Methods: First, we present and discuss a theory and conceptual model of big social data. Second, we outline a formal model based on fuzzy set theory and describe the operational semantics of the formal model with real-world a social data example from Facebook. Third, we briefly present and discuss the Social Data Analytics Tool (SODATO) that realizes the conceptual model in software and provisions social data analysis based on the conceptual and formal models. Fourth, we use SODATO (Hussain & Vatrapu, 2014) to fetch social data from the facebook wall of a global brand, H&M and conduct a sentiment classification of the posts and comments. Fifth, we analyse the sentiment classifications by constructing crisp as well as the fuzzy sets of the artefacts (posts, comments, likes, and shares) and explore correlations to the real-world outcomes of quarterly sales.
Results: SODATO was used to collect analyse facebook wall data of H&M from 01-Jan-2009 to 31-July-2013. The data corpus consists of 100,465 posts, 262,588 comments on posts, 7, 779,411 likes on posts and comments across 3,134,249 unique facebook ids/users We found statistically significant correlations between real-world business outcomes (quarterly sales) and social media activities (measures of social graph (posts, likes, comments) as well as social text (positive, negative or neutral sentiment expressions). Findings from the crisp set and fuzzy set analysis of actor and artefact sentiment reveal seasonal variation (more peaks during the spring and fall period where the fashion industry traditionally reveals new products) as well as crisis periods (for example, garment factory accidents in Bangladesh).
Conclusions: An unified approach combining social graph analysis with social text analysis as shown in the paper can help better understand the relationship between real-world events/outcomes and social media activities. Our argument is not that relational sociology, graph theory, and social network analysis are invalid or ineffective. Instead, as articulated and demonstrated in this paper, a fundamental change in the foundational mathematical logic of the formal model from graphs to sets can yield new social science insights beyond informing new formal models, computational methods and software tools.
References:
Borgatti, S. P., Mehra, A., Brass, D. J., & Labianca, G. (2009). Network analysis in the social sciences. Science, 323(5916), 892-895.
Cleveland, W. S. (2001). Data science: an action plan for expanding the technical areas of the field of statistics. International statistical review, 69(1), 21-26.
Emirbayer, M. (1997). Manifesto for a relational sociology. The American Journal of Sociology, 103(2), 281-317.
Gross, J. L., & Yellen, J. (2005). Graph theory and its applications: CRC press.
Hussain, A., & Vatrapu, R. (2014). Social Data Analytics Tool. DESRIST 2014, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), 8463(Springer), 368–372.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory: Oxford University Press.
Lazer, D., Pentland, A., Adamic, L., Aral, S., Barabasi, A. L., Brewer, D., . . . Van Alstyne, M. (2009). Computational Social Science. Science, 323(5915), 721-723. doi: DOI 10.1126/science.1167742
Mukkamala, R., Hussain, A., & Vatrapu, R. (2013). Towards a Formal Model of Social Data. IT University Technical Report Series, TR-2013-169, https://pure.itu.dk/ws/files/54477234/ITU_TR_54472013_54477169.pdf.
Mukkamala, R., Hussain, A., & Vatrapu, R. (in press/2014). Towards a Set Theoretical Approach to Big Data Analytics. Proceedings of IEEE Big Data 2014, Anchorage, USA.
Ragin, C. C. (2000). Fuzzy-set social science: University of Chicago Press.
Vatrapu, R. (2013). Understanding Social Business. In K. B. Akhilesh (Ed.), Emerging Dimensions of Technology Management (pp. 147-158). New Delhi: Springer.Introduction: Social media has come to play an important role in how scholars communicate (Rasmussen, 2012; Gruzd, 2011). DH scholars, those who use “computational tools to do the work of the humanities” (Unsworth, as quoted in Gold, 2012, p. 67), have been identified as early adopters and avid users of social media (Kirschenbaum, 2010; Ross et al., 2011). Ross et al. (2011) have described how Twitter plays a role during DH events as a form of backchanneling. It has also been shown that Twitter can be used to amplify DH scholarly communication (Howard, 2009), and that the use of Twitter to share your own work will result in a climb in its readership (Terras, 2012). This paper examines Twitter use by DH scholars from a uses and gratifications (U&G) perspective, investigating (a) how digital humanities scholars are using Twitter and (b) what gratifications they obtain from its use. The U&G approach provides a useful theoretical lens to study the use of Twitter by scholars. While the U&G approach has been utilized to study college students’ use of social media (Quan-Haase & Young, 2010) and specifically Twitter (Chen, 2011), it has not been applied to the study of scholars.
Methods: We conducted 49 semi-structured interviews with DH scholars to understand the scholars’ use of the social media tool, Twitter. Participants were recruited at DH conferences and events.
Preliminary Findings:
Twitter uses and gratifications
1. Maintaining awareness: Several participants noted using Twitter to maintain awareness in their field, keeping up with the work of other DH scholars. Some also remarked how easy it was to use Twitter in this respect; for example, allowing one DH scholar to “just slot it in.”
2. Back-channeling: Several participants noted their increased use of Twitter during conferences – both for those able and unable to attend in-person. Through Twitter, for example, presenters could communicate with their audience and get real-time feedback.
Twitter unfulfilled gratifications
1. Scalability of ideas and information: Participants commented the difficulty of scaling ideas to fit the 140-character format and its impact of stifling conversation and reliance on links to more information. Some spoke of tweet crafting as a skill and the need to develop strategies for providing enough context to ensure meaning.
2. Information management: While Twitter’s ‘favorite’ button may be used as a tool to collect tweets, some DH scholars expressed a need for more sophisticated information management tools to organize material located through Twitter.
Conclusions: We confirmed the importance of Twitter for our interviewees for both maintaining awareness and backchanneling during DH conferences. Moreover, we identified two unfulfilled gratifications of Twitter that point to opportunities for training and the development of tools to better support DH scholars.
References:
Chen, G. M. (2011). Tweet this: A uses and gratifications perspective on how active Twitter use gratifies a need to connect with others. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(2), 755-762.
Gruzd, A., Staves, K., & Wilk, A. (2012). Connected scholars: Examining the role of social media in research practices of faculty using the UTAUT model. Computers in Human Behavior, 28 (6), 2340-2350, DOI: j.chb.2012.07.004
Gruzd, A., Wellman, B., & Takhteyev, Y. (2011). Imagining Twitter as an imagined community. American Behavioral Scientist, 55(10), 1294–1318. doi:10.1177/0002764211409378
Kirschenbaum, M. (2012). What is digital humanities and what is it doing in English departments? In Gold, M. K. Debates in the digital humanities (pp. 1-8). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Gold, M.K. (2012). Day of DH: Defining the digital humanities. In Gold, M. K. Debates in the digital humanities (pp. 67-71). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Quan-Haase, A., & Young, A. L. (2010). Uses and gratifications of social media: A comparison of Facebook and instant messaging. Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, 30(5), 350-361.
Rasmussen Neal, D. (2012). Social media for academics. Sawston, UK: Chandos.
Ross, C., Terras, M., Warwick, C., & Welsh, A. (2011). Enabled backchannel: conference Twitter use by digital humanists. Journal of Documentation, 67(2), 214-237. doi: Doi 10.1108/00220411111109449
Terras, M. (2012). I, Digital: Personal collections in the digital era. Journal of the Society of Archivists, 33(2), 217-220. doi: Doi 10.1080/00379816.2012.722533
Background: Understanding public opinion is one of the most challenging tasks for communication/political scholars (Herbst, 1991). In contrary to an institutionalized and top-down construction of public opinion climate, most notably via “polling” systems, recent social media sites manifest citizens’ improvised opinion sharing, thus provide alternative indicators of spontaneous, bottom-up opinion climates. In particular, “rumors” that spread in social media represent “affect-laden” collective reactions to uncertainties (Peterson & Gist, 1951) and reveal publics’ hopes, fears, anxieties and/or hostilities (Oh, Kwon, & Rao, 2010; Oh, Manish, & Rao, 2013). Social media archives help to revive textual studies of rumors by allowing an easy access to otherwise ephemeral and time-sensitive rumor stories. Among different types of rumors, hostile rumors (Knapp, 1944; Allport & Postman, 1947; Garrett, 2011) reflect negative subcultural opinion climates, of which understanding may contribute to identify structures of social relations embedded in a society and subconscious sources of intergroup hostility.
Objective: This paper aims to explore semantic structures of hostile rumors spread in social media. By leveraging Twitter messages shared during an event of South-North Korea saber rattling in 2013, the paper highlights topical clusters of hostile rumors in comparison with non-rumor messages. The goal is to conduct a preliminary analysis to show how online rumormongering mirrors socio-historical antecedents of political schism, and how such antecedents are intertwined with a collective process of uncertainty reductions under a social crisis.
Methods: The study analyzes 2,500 unique tweets that were quota-sampled based on retweet frequencies. First, manual content analyses were conducted to distinguish hostile rumors from non-rumors. A series of z-tests was then conducted to identify which words/concepts occurred more prominently in one group than the other. Semantic network analyses (Yuan, Feng, & Danowski, 2013; Doerfel & Barnett, 1999) were conducted based on the co-occurrence matrices among these identified words/concepts. To address semantic structures in each text network, the Clauset-Newman-Moore clustering algorithm was employed.
Results: Semantic network analyses revealed four topical clusters from rumor messages, and three clusters from non-rumor messages. In the non-rumor network, the major themes were (a) government’s military strategies to the threat (Cluster 1), (b) international organizational response (Cluster 2), and (c) North Korea’s international relations (Cluster 3). In the rumor network, the emerged themes were (a) connections between particular politicians/events and North Korea (Cluster 1), (b) social and religious entities’ responses to the threat (Cluster 2), (c) Cold-war metaphors (Cluster 3), and (d) satires about Congress (Cluster 4). The comparisons between semantic structures reveal that non-rumor messages mainly discusses about institutional, formal measures to reduce uncertainty. On the other hand, hostile rumors uncover a hidden side of public mind, including skepticism about government’s readiness and intergroup polarity deeply rooted in ideology of the Cold war era (See Figures).
Conclusions: Social media data gives an unprecedented opportunity for political/communication scholars to explore improvised public opinion climates, especially under a crisis. In this preliminary study, we conducted semantic network analyses of Twitter messages during Korean threat situation 2013 to explore topical differences between rumors and non-rumor messages. Textual studies of online rumors can help in understanding informal process of collective interpretation of the situation and revealing subconscious public mind in a socio-historical context. While this study relied on manual content analysis to identify rumors, machine-learning detection of rumors will help scale up the scope of analysis.
References:
Allport, G. W. & Postman, L. (1947). An analysis of rumor. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 10(4), 501-517
Doerfel, M. L., & Barnett, G. A. (1999). A semantic network analysis of the International Communication Association. Human Communication Research, 25(4), 589-603.
Garrett, R. K. (2011). Troubling consequences of online political rumoring. Human Communication Research, 37, 255-274.
Herbst, S. (1991). Classical democracy, polls, and public opinion: Theoretical frameworks for studying the development of public sentiment. Communication Theory, 1(3), 225-238.
Knapp, R. (1944). A psychology of rumor, The Public Opinion Quarterly 8, 22–37.
Oh, O., Kwon, K. H., & Rao, H. R. (2010). An exploration of social media in extreme events: Rumor theory and twitter during the Haiti earthquake 2010.
Oh, O., Agrawal, M., & Rao, H. R. (2013). Community intelligence and social media services: A Rumor theoretic analysis of Tweets during social crises. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 37(2), 407-426.
Peterson, W. A., & Gist, N. P. (1951). Rumor and public opinion. American Journal of Sociology, 159-167.
Yuan, E. J., Feng, M., & Danowski, J. A. (2013). “Privacy” in Semantic Networks on Chinese Social Media: The Case of Sina Weibo. Journal of Communication, 63(6), 1011-1031.
Background: PM2.5 is a measurement for Air Quality Index (AQI) that the U.S. embassy in Beijing has been monitoring and been releasing through its Twitter account @BeijingAir since August 2008 (Anonymous, 2014). When the AQI data posted by the U.S embassy reached Chinese citizens, it generated risk consciousness of PM2.5 among the public and intensified disputations over the measurement and assessment of PM2.5. Before 2012, China used PM10 to measure air quality which did not show much air pollution. The Chinese government criticized the embassy’s PM2.5 program as “confusing”, and “insulting”. But The U.S. State Department denied the accusation and continued releasing the data (Congressional-Executive Commission on China, 2012). These disputations has attracted great domestic and international media attention and fueled online discussion in and beyond the Chinese Internet sphere, including the Twittersphere.
Objective: This study integrates Ulrich Beck’s risk society theory with digital media theories to examine the process of risk definition and assessment of PM2.5 and its consequences in China in the social media age. Risk is manufactured as a predominant product of modern societies, involving human agency in its production, distribution, and management (Beck 1992). The process of defining risk is "a power game" of individuals and organizations; those who have more capacity to contest in the public sphere have greater opportunity to define risk (Beck, 2006). Fitzgerald further argues that “the framing efforts of various institutional actors” co-construct the public perception of risk (2010, p.367). In this context, media can play a critical role in the risk society (Beck, 1992). Media provides a bridge between the public and experts, serving as the risk receptor and interpreter for citizens. Media can set the agenda, making a potential risk a public issue and facilitating "risk consciousness"(Beck, 1992, p.53).
Using Twitter API, the study collected tweets with the keyword "PM2.5" from June 5th to June 10th, 2012, the time period in which the Chinese and the U.S. officials quarreled over the U.S. embassy’s PM2.5 program. The dataset contained 1151 twitter accounts and 2051 tweets.
This study focuses on two sets of questions. First, who are the institutional and individual actors involved in the PM2.5 case? What roles do they play in the PM2.5 case? Who are the definition-givers, the agenda setters, and the opinion leaders? Second, what is the network structure among the actors competing and contending in and beyond the Twitter public sphere? Who are the bridges connecting otherwise unconnected groups? In what ways are actor attributes (language, geographic location, identity, ideology, power status, and other social markers), text (framing, emotion, and cognition features of tweets), and network properties (actors’ network size and position such as brokerage and centrality) related to being mentioned, retweeted, or replied to in the Twittersphere?
Methods: We will apply content analysis to the code actor attributes and use the text analysis software, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), to capture the emotional and cognitive aspects of tweets and media coverage, to better understand the actors’ competition in defining and interpreting risk in the public sphere. Network analysis will be conducted by UCINet and Exponential random graph models (ERGMs).
References:
Anonymous (2014). Top banana: WSJ’s Chinese readers liked Gary Locke. China Real Time. Retrieved from website: http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/03/04/wsjs-chinese-readers-give-gary-locke-high-marks/
Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity (Vol. 17). Sage.
Beck, U. (2002). The Terrorist Threat World Risk Society Revisited. Theory, Culture & Society 19(4), 39-55.
Beck, U. (2006). Living in the world risk society: A Hobhouse Memorial Public Lecture given on Wednesday 15 February 2006 at the London School of Economics. Economy and society, 35(3), 329-345.
Bucy, E. P., & Gregson, K. S. (2001). Media Participation A Legitimizing Mechanism of Mass Democracy. New media & society, 3(3), 357-380.
Congressional-Executive Commission on China, (2012).State monopoly of environmental quality monitoring and reporting: State secrets and environmental protection. Retrieved from website: http://www.cecc.gov/publications/commission-analysis/state-monopoly-of-environmental-quality-monitoring-and-reporting
Fitzgerald, S. T., & Rubin, B. A. (2010). Risk society, media, and power: The case of nanotechnology. Sociological Spectrum, 30(4), 367-402.
Fitzgerald, S. T., & Rubin, B. A. (2010). Risk society, media, and power: The case of nanotechnology. Sociological Spectrum, 30(4), 367-402.
Hilbert, M. (2009). The maturing concept of e-democracy: From e-voting and online consultations to democratic value out of jumbled online chatter. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 6, 87–110.
Mitchelstein, E., & Boczkowski, P. J. (2010). Online news consumption research: An assessment of past work and an agenda for the future. New Media & Society, 12(7), 1085-1102.
Background: Atlmetrics appear to be gaining some ground for discerning impact in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS), but official tenure and promotion policies and practices remain relatively traditional. Conservative academic culture may provide one explanation for delaying what appears to be the inevitable incorporation of some altmetrics into tenure and promotion decisions.
Objective: This paper reports on an ongoing study of altmetrics in LIS, which started with a survey of Deans, Directors, and Chairs of LIS programs (Julien & Bonnici, 2013), and moved to an analysis of the social media profiles of representative faculty members in the field (Bonnici & Julien, 2014). The current phase reported here explores official documentation regarding tenure and promotion policies at institutions hosting LIS programs, as well as practices used to analyze impact for tenure and promotion purposes. This triangulation of approaches to considering the use of altmetrics in LIS tenure and promotion practices provides a well-rounded picture for this field.
Methods: Official tenure and promotion documents at universities hosting LIS programs in the U.S. were analyzed for decision-making criteria. Analyses sought to determine the degree to which research impact is being measured and considered by traditional measures, such as citations in peer-reviewed journals, and/or by altmetrics, such as views, downloads, mentions, likes, and shares. In addition, interviews with a purposive sample of LIS Deans, Directors and Chairs, selected for diversity of type of program (iSchool or traditional), program size, and geography, provided evidence for on-the-ground practices regarding measurement of scholarly impact.
Results: Initial results suggest that official tenure and promotion documents do not typically specify impact measures, indicating that there may be flexibility in the metrics considered. Interviews with Deans, Directors, and Chairs about actual practices may provide further detail, however, about actual practices. Those interviews are ongoing, and complete data from both the document analyses and interviews will be presented at the conference.
Conclusions: Despite increasing interest and significant commitment to social media and altmetrics by some LIS scholars, tenure and promotion policies and practices appear to be slow to accommodate these newer impact measures. The authors posit that relatively conservative academic culture provides important context for understanding dissemination of these innovations.
References:
Julien, H., & Bonnici, L. (2013). Sooner or later? The diffusion and adoption of social media metrics to measure scholarly productivity in LIS faculty. Presented at the 2013 International Conference on Social Media and Society, Halifax, NS, Canada, September 14-15.
Bonnici, L., & Julien, H. (2014). Altmetrics: An entrepreneurial approach to assessing impact on scholarship and professional practice. Presented at the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education, Philadelphia, January 21-24.
Background: It is widely recognized that U.S. national politics have become more polarized over the last several decades, and that the proliferation of partisan news outlets (talk radio stations, partisan news channels, news web sites, and blogs) has contributed to public opinion polarization. While qualitative research has identified a number of rhetorical strategies used by partisan news outlets, including overgeneralization, sensationalism, misleading and inaccurate information, ad hominem attacks, and belittling ridicule of opponents, that produce polarizing emotional reactions in audiences (Sobieraj and Berry 2011), research on how consumption of partisan news may influence audience attitudes has been held back by measurement problems (Prior 2013).
Objective: We present a new text analysis technique, topic modeling with sentiment evaluation (TMSE), that combines four methodological elements (precise multiple-sample selection, topic models with latent semantic analysis, sentiment analysis, and correspondence analysis) in order to compare the degree of polarization of topics across text collections produced by social groups.
Methods: We demonstrate TMSE by analyzing reactions to the Trayvon Martin controversy in spring 2012 by commenters on two partisan news websites (the Daily Caller and the Huffington Post, with approx. 4000 lines and 130,000 words per sample).
Results: Based on studies of news media as an outrage industry (Berry and Sobieraj 2014) and of political pundit inaccuracy (Tetlock 2006), we predict that high-profile commentators will be more polarizing than other news personalities and topics. Results of the TMSE analysis support this prediction.
References:
Berry, J. M., and S. Sobieraj. (2014). The outrage industry: Political opinion media and the new incivility. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Prior, M. (2013). Media and political polarization. Annual Review of Political Science, 16, 101-127.
Sobieraj, S., J. M. Berry. (2011). From incivility to outrage: Political discourse in blogs, talk radio, and cable news. Political Communication, 28(1): 19-41.
Tetlock, Philip E. (2006). Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Background: Sharing is a concept which is under-theorized and under-conceptualized in the social media era. Traditional conceptualizations of the term posit it as both a form of distribution and as an expression of communion (John, 2013a), however Van Dijk (2010) offers sharing as a counterposition to privacy. Instead of a dialectical tension between public and private (Altman, 1975; Jurgenson & Rey, 2012; Petronio, 2002), or a continuum of closedness and openness (Ford, 2011), a focus on sharing acknowledges that it enables agency in the regulation of privacy, and also that it offers indirect benefits such as social capital formation. Both privacy and sharing can be empowering (Allen, 1988), but the specter of digital surveillance threatens individual agency over personal data. We suggest that the ways in which individuals discuss the concept of sharing personal information online offers insight into how sharing might be conceptualized today. Reader comments to online newspaper accounts offer a digital space for public deliberation and share characteristics of the social and analytical processes associated with public discourse (Manosevitch & Walker, 2009). Readers who comment on these stories may exhibit agency in resisting public agendas as set by mainstream media (Papacharissi, 2009) and may direct us toward an initial understanding of how readers conceptualize sharing, its norms, and its other unique dimensions.
Objective: This study seeks to move beyond the binary of public and private, and towards developing a conceptual framework for sharing as a counterposition to privacy. We explore the conceptual dimensions of sharing in the public discussion surrounding news stories and blog posts on sharing personal data online to begin a discussion on how this idea situates to understandings of privacy today.
Methods: Using semantic network analysis, this study examines reader comments on 128 news stories and blog posts related to sharing personal information were published in the New York Times in 2013, a total of approximately 13,200 reader comments. Data was cleaned and refined using Automap, and imported into NodeXL for cluster analysis.
Results: The data revealed six dimensional clusters, which extend the conceptualization of sharing beyond its traditional roots of communality and distribution; these clusters include commercial and surveillance components. Notably, this demonstrates that in the discussion related to the sharing of personal information, commenters acknowledge the potential for commodification and monitoring, further suggesting that sharing, as it relates to personal information, may ultimately be understood as a form of objectification.
Conclusions: Our findings extend the understanding of the concept of sharing beyond its distributed or communicative roots, and seeming conflation of these dimensions by social media platform providers (John, 2013b). Personal information is “a fuzzy object of sharing” (John, 2013b), yet when given context, the sharing of personal information takes on tangible dimensions of commodification and objectification. We argue then, that sharing is contextual, much like privacy, as there are multiple and simultaneous understandings of the term depending on its application. Thus, we must recognize that “privacy” is not the only concept, nor the most salient, that matters in the discussion of privacy as it evolves in the social media environment.
References:
Allen, A. (1988). Uneasy access: Privacy for women in a free society. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield.
Altman, I. (1975). The environment and social behavior: Privacy, personal space, territory, crowding. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing.
Ford, S. M. (2011). Reconceptualizing the public/private distinction in the age of information technology. Information, Communication & Society, 14(4), 550-567.
John, N. A. (2013a). The Social Logics of Sharing. The Communication Review, 16(3), 113–131. doi:10.1080/10714421.2013.807119
John, N. A. (2013b). Sharing and web 2.0: The emergence of a keyword. New Media & Society, 15, 167-182. doi:10.1177/1461444812450684
Jurgenson, N. & Rey, P. J. (2012). Comment on Sarah Ford’s ‘Reconceptualization of privacy and publicity.’ Information, Communication & Society, 15(2), 287-293.
Manosevitch, E. & Walker, D. (2009). Reader comments to online opinion journalism: A space of public deliberation. Paper presented to the 10th International Symposium on Online Journalism, Austin, TX, April 17-18.
Papacharissi, Z. (2009). The virtual sphere 2.0: The internet, the public sphere, and beyond. In A. Chadwick & P. N. Howard (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics (230-245). New York, NY: Routledge. Petronio, S. (2002). Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
van Dijck, J. (2010). The culture of connectivity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Background: YouTube is an online video-sharing platform, a locus of participatory culture (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, & Robison, 2009), and is often identified as a social media website (e.g., Pauwels & Hellriegel, 2011). Contained within YouTube is a vast collection of content created by individuals who are not accredited teachers and do not use YouTube as a tool in any sort of formal educational context, but who have a goal to educate their viewers.
Authors have argued that the spaces that form around sites of participatory media represent valuable and fruitful learning environments (e.g., Gee, 2004; Jenkins et al., 2009). Informal educational spaces surrounding participatory media offer a unique perspective for educational researchers to understand what motivates students to engage with educational content without being prompted by a formal educator. As a YouTube viewer since 2007, I have watched communities such as the Nerdfighters (see Kligler-Vilenchik, 2013) form. The teenage members of these communities seemingly value intellect and education so much that not only do they watch educational content independently, but are moved to actively participate in some way (e.g., going to conventions or meet-ups, joining a book club with their favourite YouTubers, starting humanitarian groups, creating art, etc.).
There are extremely few examples in the literature where scholars employ humanities-based methodologies to pose questions around what trends in informal, user-generated educational content mean for the future of education when compared to a more traditional educational model, and this area is therefore rife with the potential for academic inquiry.
Objective: The paper aims to demonstrate that the informal learning that takes place in the communities surrounding certain educational/entertaining YouTube videos (e.g., within the Nerdfighter community) qualifies as what scholars (e.g., Jonassen and Strobel, 2006) call meaningful/authentic/engaged learning, and provides an opportunity for a kind of education that could only take place outside the constraints of a typical classroom.
Methods: Drawing from various constructivist literatures, including informal learning, situated cognition, and digital game based learning, the paper first situates informal educational YouTube content as a community of practice comprised of engaged learners. Criteria of meaningful/authentic/engage learning (e.g., the learning must be autonomous, self-directed, problem-based, etc.) are listed and discussed. The framework of meaningful/authentic/engaged learning is then mapped onto the space of informal educational YouTube content in order to demonstrate how the latter fits the criteria of the former. Nolan and McBride (2014)’s paper about digital game based learning and informal learning provides the template for this examination.
Results & Conclusions: The paper demonstrates that informal educational content on YouTube has the potential to engage young people in authentic and meaningful education. In their 2014 paper, Nolan and McBride argue: “The internal, virtual and physical location of children's digital learning and play is a critical, yet under-researched, phenomena” (pp. 19-20). Informal educational content on YouTube deserves serious consideration as a community of practice from educational researchers, and it is my hope that this paper will help to illuminate the topic and pave the way for more in-depth study.
References:
Gee, J.P. (2004). Situated Language and Learning: A critique of traditional schooling. New York NY: Routledge.
Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Weigel, M., Clinton, K., & Robison, A. (2009). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Jonassen, D., & Strobel, J. (2006). Modeling for meaningful learning. In D. Hung & M. S. Khine (Eds.), Engaged learning with emerging technologies (pp. 1–27). Dordrecht: Springer.
Kligler-Vilenchik, N. (2013). “Decreasing World Suck”: Fan communities, mechanisms of translation, and participatory politics. A case study report working paper, University of Southern California.
Nolan, J. & McBride, M. (2014). Beyond gamification: reconceptualizing game-based learning in early childhood environments. Information, Communication & Society, 17(5), 594-608.Pauwels, L. & Hellriegel, P. (2011). A Critical Cultural Reading of YouTube. In I. Management Association (Ed.), Virtual Communities: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications (pp. 2116-2133). Hershey, PA.
Background: “Opinion leaders” are influential members of society who are thought to use social pressure and social support to transmit media messages to the wider public (Katz & Lazarsfeld 1955). While opinion leaders once relied on the mass media to receive messages and face-to-face and telephone communication to transmit messages, in a new hybrid media system (Chadwick 2013) new tools and options exist.
Objective: The aims of this paper are twofold. First, the paper highlights the utility of incorporating digital data and visualizations of personal networks in the interview setting. Second, the paper aims to describe the ways in which opinion leaders make use of varying media tools in the process of transmitting political messages.
Methods: Twenty Canadian opinion leaders, all active on Twitter and interested in politics, are treated as mini case studies. Data collection of personal Twitter and Facebook networks, as well as other news media and social media used by that individual is conducted for a two week period. Following data collection, an in-person interview is conducted with each participant. During this interview the offline social network of each individual is elicited and visualizations of online networks are discussed and interpreted jointly by the researcher and participant.
Results: This mixed methods approach revealed that opinion leaders in this sample rely on a variety of tactics and tools to deliver political messages depending on factors such as identity performance per setting, topics, and events. In other words, opinion leadership in these cases is highly contextual.
Conclusions: Incorporating digital data and visualizations into the interview setting allows for the contextualization of findings. The specificity and quantifiable nature of digital trace data paired with insight from thoughtful reflection by the actor during the interview help tease out the intricacies of political messaging and opinion leadership. The chance to comment on, and help interpret data, also provides participants the opportunity to strengthen the dataset by filling in gaps and correcting misinformation while also providing explanations for why certain actions took place.
References:
Chadwick, A. (2013). The Hybrid Media System. New York: Oxford University Press.
Katz, E. and Lazarsfeld, P. (1955). Personal Influence. Glencoe, Ill : Free Press.
Social media have influenced not only the ways students connect with each other, but also the ways scholarship is organized, delivered, enacted, and experienced (Weller, 2011). The overarching objective of this panel is to examine the concept of Networked Participatory Scholarship, which refers to academics’ use of digital and social technologies to “share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and further their scholarship” (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012). The five researchers participating in the panel are making significant contributions to our enhanced understanding of how and why academics are engaging in digital, social, networked, and social scholarship via the use of social media. Each panellist will contribute to the session through a conversation between panellists. To summarize their contributions:
Scholars from disparate fields have discussed social media use in scholarship. However, such discussions are often disconnected.
Kimmons will disambiguate several terms describing emergent scholarship, including open, social, digital, and networked participatory scholarship and identify bridges between disciplines.
Gruzd will discuss results from a recently-completed SSHRC award that examined if, how, and why Canadian scholars and their international counterparts are using social media in their research.
Greenhow will discuss social scholarship and trends and challenges experienced by educational researchers in the United States based on a recent survey and interviews with PhD students, and early- and mid-career scholars.
Stewart will discuss the different ways and purposes scholars engage in networked participatory scholarship, based on a recent ethnographic study. She will examine changing identity roles for academics and scholars.
Veletsianos will synthesize the work presented above by discussing a framework he developed describing scholars’ social media participation. This framework views digital participation in networks of (a) knowledge creation and dissemination, (b) tension, (c) care and vulnerability, (d) disobedience, (e) fragmentation, and (f) transparency.
Background: A broad spectrum of strategies and resources are needed to address cases of domestic violence appropriately. This is not the least a fact because of the normalization of violence that takes place in the lives of many battered women. Social networks can provide crucial information and encouragement to use particular coping strategies. While researchers have mapped some of the available online resources and strategies for helping victims of domestic violence, there is virtually no research on the actual and concrete affordances of these resources.
Objective: This article uses a Swedish discussion forum for victims of domestic violence (henceforth called DVForum) as the focal point of a case study. This study has the two-fold purpose of mapping the content of the communication flowing through the network, and of assessing structural aspects of the social network with a focus on the potential for offering support. While one might focus studies on the design and usability of online support forums, this article is interested in the actual interactions — in discourse and network terms — of participants in a popular and seemingly well-functioning forum.
Methods: A six year sample from the DVForum was collected, and included 16,850 posts from 4,345 participants to 3,304 discussion threads. As a first analytical step, we look at the topics discussed. A combination of qualitative coding and text mining techniques helped identify the five topics of (1) Weakness, (2) Fear, (3) Emotional support, (4) Concrete strategies and (5) Empowerment. Furthermore, the participants in the DVForum were divided into categories based on the level and continuity of their participation.
Results: We identified two parallel processes in this support forum: One at the individual level, and the other at the collective level. We show how help-seeking individuals enter the forum expressing weakness and fear, but unable to themselves provide emotional support to others, or to formulate concrete strategies for taking control of their situation. Their discourse is then fed into the larger social system of the forum where they get help from moderate, and especially the core, participants to move towards a discourse characterized by less weakness and fear and a stronger orientation towards finding strategies to change their situations as well as supporting other individuals entering the forum. It is in this way that the forum, as a superindividual entity, develops into a functioning system for gathering experiences, advancing knowledge and providing support. The power of the forum to help participants break cycles of normalization, and to identify warning signals in their violent relationships, is a product of ‘collective intelligence’ as it harnesses, advances and archives stories and knowledge from individuals that together become something more than the mere sum of the parts.
Conclusions: The main conclusion of this paper is that one of the key mechanisms that can make online support forums work has to do with how the setting is made into a community of practice, and a vehicle for collective intelligence, rather than a mere aggregation of posts or isolated exchanges within a common topic. It appears that forums of the type analyzed may function in relatively self-regulating ways as a process of informal socialization and learning may create engagement and contribute to the creation of an abstract, but still joint, enterprise keeping participants together by mutual engagements and shared histories. Much like there is talk in other fields about ‘early adopters’, ‘opinion leaders’ and ‘lead users’, online support forums clearly seem to be in need of ‘givers’ who have acquired the necessary social capital to function as prime definers that hold the forum together and secures its functioning.
Background: Journalist and media critic Neal Gabler (2008) once famously decried the “tyranny of 18-49s” that governed decision-making in the American television industry. His critique was directed at the disproportionate prioritization that individuals in that age bracket received from media buyers and television programmers. This paper considers whether a similar dynamic is emerging in terms of the increasingly influential role that social media analytics – and thus, social media-active television viewers – are playing in the television industry, where the volume and valence of social media interactions related to television programs is becoming an important metric for assessing program success (Napoli, 2011).
Objective: In conducting this analysis, this paper expands, and refines Anand and Peterson’s (2000) notion of market information regimes, which are the socially constructed mechanisms via which marketplace participants assess their performance as well as the performance of their competitors. This paper examines the institutional dynamics surrounding social media data’s emerging role as a secondary market information regime in the audience marketplace.
Method: Drawing upon institutional theory, this paper examines the process of institutionalization surrounding a new market information regime, seeking to explain the dynamics around if and how a new, alternative market information regime is integrated (or not integrated) into the marketplace. The analysis draws from interviews with industry professionals, participant-observation at industry conferences and symposia, trade press reports, and industry white papers and presentations.
Results: This analysis highlights the tensions that arise in relation to established versus aspiring market information regimes, and the substantial cognitive hurdles that must be overcome for the displacement of the established market information regime to take place. It is argued that the barriers to displacement are particularly high for what are termed here currency regimes (those that serve as a currency in the marketplace), as opposed to other types of market information regimes delineated in this analysis, such as expenditure regimes (those that report on the distribution of consumer expenditures on the market) and quality assessment regimes (those that rank product or service providers on the basis of product/service quality or reputation). Further, the presence of multiple, competing providers of a market information regime is identified as an impediment to institutionalization. This analysis also illustrates the extent to which a marketplace’s willingness and ability to operate under both primary and secondary market information regimes if a function of the ambiguity and subjectivity inherent in the product around which the marketplace operates.
Conclusions: This study concludes that a marketplace that operates under multiple market information regimes is one in which a greater diversity of success criteria have been institutionalized, and thus is one in which a greater diversity of content types can be supported. However, this study also concludes that a market information regime derived from social media activity threatens to replace existing forms of misrepresentation and under-representation in the audience marketplace with new forms that could similarly bias the dynamics of cultural production.
References:
Anand, N., & Peterson, R.A. (2000). When market information constitutes fields: Sensemaking of markets in the commercial music field. Organization Science, 11, 270–284.
Gabler, N. 2003. The tyranny of 18–49: American culture held hostage. Norman Lear Center White Paper.
Napoli, P.M. (2011). Audience evolution: New technologies and the transformation of media audiences. New York: Columbia University Press.
Background: There are three general problems with contemporary empirical evidence on the quality of life changes related to the use of social networking sites (SNS). Despite the broad array of possible effects of SNS use, researchers predominantly concentrate on changes in sociability (social capital, loneliness), psychological well-being (life satisfaction), and political engagement. For example, we can assume that SNS use can help users become more knowledgeable in specific areas, yet this issue is rather neglected. Second, the evidence we have is contradictory, in particular in the cases of loneliness and well-being (cf., Baker & Oswald, 2010; Burke, Kraut, & Marlow, 2011; Ellison, Vitak, Gray, & Lampe, 2014; Kim, LaRose, & Peng, 2009; Lee, Noh, & Koo, 2013; Steinfield, Ellison, & Lampe, 2008; Valenzuela, Park, & Kee, 2009). Third, most studies (and, in fact, all those cited here) are based on either problematic online random samples, samples of university students, or samples of university staff – a fact that is quite surprising. In the proposed paper, the role of SNS use in reported Internet effects is reassessed by (1) focusing on changes in life satisfaction, knowledge, and sociability (data on political engagement are omitted from this paper for the sake of brevity); (2) confronting SNS use with other variables that can explain its effects (see below); and (3) using representative data (see below).
Objective: The primary objective of the paper is to help better understand the role of SNS use in explanations of the effects of Internet use on three dimensions of quality of life (life satisfaction, knowledge, and sociability). The second objective is to test the possible substitutive role of the basic parameters of a respondent's social network (size, heterogeneity, and network capital), other online information and communication activities, innovativeness, digital skills and sociodemographic variables.
Methods: The data in this analysis come from a CAPI survey that was carried out in June 2014 as a part of the project ‘World Internet Project - the Czech Republic II: Analysis of Social and Political Aspects of Unequal Internet Access’. The survey is representative for the Czech population over the age of 15; the sampling procedure was specially designed to include also both socially isolated and very busy respondents, who are usually underrepresented in standard quota or random sampling procedures. The size of the sample is 1316 respondents. The models are tested by employing multiple regression analysis.
Results: The author expects the hypotheses about the independent explanatory role of SNS use in knowledge and sociability to be confirmed and the direct link between SNS use and life satisfaction in the case of heavy users to be disproved. Moreover, part of the expected SNS effect should be explained by offline sociability, innovativeness and, in the case of knowledge, by specific information skills.
Conclusions: The paper shows new evidence based on representative data, taking into consideration previously neglected relations among SNS use, innovativeness, respondent's social network, and self-reported digital skills.
References:
Baker, L. R., & Oswald, D. L. (2010). Shyness and online social networking services. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 27(7), 873–889.
Burke, M., Kraut, R., & Marlow, C. (2011). Social capital on Facebook: Differentiating uses and users. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 571–580). ACM. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1979023
Ellison, N. B., Vitak, J., Gray, R., & Lampe, C. (2014). Cultivating Social Resources on Social Network Sites: Facebook Relationship Maintenance Behaviors and Their Role in Social Capital Processes. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, n/a–n/a. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12078
Kim, J., LaRose, R., & Peng, W. (2009). Loneliness as the cause and the effect of problematic Internet use: The relationship between Internet use and psychological well-being. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 12(4), 451–455.
Lee, K.-T., Noh, M.-J., & Koo, D.-M. (2013). Lonely People Are No Longer Lonely on Social Networking Sites: The Mediating Role of Self-Disclosure and Social Support. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 16(6), 413–418. doi:10.1089/cyber.2012.0553
Steinfield, C., Ellison, N. B., & Lampe, C. (2008). Social capital, self-esteem, and use of online social network sites: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 29(6), 434–445. doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2008.07.002
Valenzuela, S., Park, N., & Kee, K. F. (2009). Is There Social Capital in a Social Network Site?: Facebook Use and College Students’ Life Satisfaction, Trust, and Participation. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14(4), 875–901. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01474.x
Context: Thirty years have now passed since Kiesler, Siegel and McGuire’s (1984) landmark paper demonstrating an association between anonymity and antisocial behaviour via computer mediated communication. It is now a well-established cultural myth that anonymity breeds trolling, flaming, lowered inhibitions and ultimately problematic content. Yet, anonymity and pseudonymity persist in computer-mediated communication. As Hogan (2012) notes, these reasons are partially functional – such as a limitation of characters or distinct addresses. They may also be in response to online content as persistent and searchable. As Marwick and boyd (2011) note, collapsed contexts on public social media lead to complex ways to articulate positions that may be at odds with part of one’s audience. Pseudonymity is one response to the challenges of multiple audiences. These challenges concern both social graces and more contentious topics such as Mexican gangs (Bernstein et al., 2011) and coming out (Burgess and Vivienne 2012).
Thus, despite evidence that in laboratories individual display different activities under fleeting conditions, there is both a dearth of evidence from field studies and a need to strike a balance to protect free expression.
Objective: In this paper, we examine the use of identity markers in the popular online sites YouTube and Twitter. We examine comments on videos submitted by official political parties and Premier league football clubs. Both YouTube and Twitter encourage real names, but permit pseudonyms. They also have an API for the harvesting of extensive data on comments and users. By classifying boththe content and the identity markers of the individuals (such as having a photo, an old/new account, many friends and followers) we can move beyond a binary distinction of real names equated with good behaviour and pseudonyms associated with bad behaviour.
Methods: Both the classification of identities as real or pseudonymous and the classification of content as offensive or innocuous are non-trivial tasks. We take different approaches to these two tasks. For content, we use voting scores on Reddit.com’s political and football subreddits as baseline for positive and negative content and perform a naïve Bayes classification on comments to official videos and tweets from major figures. Reddit comments are useful for training as up/down voting is very common, leading to strong signals (even if there are obvious limits to this approach). For the classification of identities we employ crowd labour through Crowdflower with multiple coders focusing on features of accounts that suggest the account holder is resolvable (she is who she says she is) and findable (she is available in person through this account). Verification photos are the most resolvable while telephone numbers and home addresses make people the most findable. Using this approach we can investigate identity as a set of features rather than using a mere binary distinction of ‘real’ or ‘fake’. We model content using logistic regression with identity features as the independent variables and offensiveness drawn from the classification as the dependent variable.
Results: Preliminary results suggest that age of the account and the implied gender of the account holder are stronger features than whether a given name is used. Verification of these results will be included in the final paper.
Conclusions: Anonymity is an entrenched part of contemporary democracy, especially through secret ballot. Yet, democracies also accept that it must be permitted within a coherent framework that minimizes abuse (such as the use of poll cards). Such bounded identity practices make sense online as well. Herein, we can consider features such as account age, number of friends and linkages to other accounts as part of a risk model for offensive content. Thus, individuals need not reveal their name in order to be considered legitimate, so long as they invest in the identity they have chosen. As a methodological contribution, we also demonstrate a means for articulating identity on a gradient of identifiability rather than merely a binary distinction.
References:
Bernstein, M. S., Monroy-Hernández, A., Harry, D., André, P., Panovich, K., & Vargas, G. G. (2011). 4chan and/b: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community. In Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
Hogan, B. (2012). Pseudonyms and the Rise of the Real-Name Web. A Companion to New Media Dynamics, 290-308.
Kiesler, S., Siegel, J., & McGuire, T. W. (1984). Social psychological aspects of computer-mediated communication. American psychologist, 39(10), 1123.
Marwick, A. E. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114-133.
Vivienne, S., & Burgess, J. (2012). The Digital Storyteller's Stage: Queer Everyday Activists Negotiating Privacy and Publicness. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(3), 362-377.
Background: Social Media have become new channels for information and communication within political parties, among representatives and their voters or between representatives themselves at the Parliament. Specifically, literature on Parliament representatives’ use of Twitter focuses on several aspects: First, Lassen and Brown (2010) and Chi and Yang (2020) analyzed the relationship between members of Congress’ demographic characteristics and their propensity to adopt twitter, and Williams and Gulati (2010) stated that party pertinence and campaign resources are drivers of twitter adoption. Second, other researchers studied the parliamentarians’ behavior on twitter in terms of the content of their tweets (Goldbeck, Grimes & Rogers, 2010; Glassman, Straus & Shogan, 2013 ) and the characteristics of their interactions –replies and mentions- (Grant, Moon & Grant, 2010; Saebo, 2011; Thamm & Bleier, 2013). Lastly, more recently some researchers analyzed Twitter relations among representatives from a social network analysis perspective (Verweij, 2012; Smith, Rainie, Himelboim and Shneiderman, 2014; Yoon and Park, 2014).
Objective: We will contribute to the aforementioned literature analysing the Twitter interaction between the members of the Catalan Parliament. Our objective is to study if Social Media are changing relevant dimensions of party politics such as ideological and party boundaries or the members’ hierarchical position inside the party and which are the factors influencing Parliamentarians’ twitter behavior. Specifically, we will test the “spillover effect” and the appearance of “brokers” on a well-delimited political network: the members of the Catalan Parliament with twitter accounts in 2013-2014. In addition, we will examine the role of several political and socio-demographic factors on the rising of brokers.
Methods: Social Network Analysis is used to study from a double perspective the Twitter interaction between the members of the Catalan Parliament:
1) The following-follower relationship between the Catalan deputies in order to find out the brokers of the network by ranking their betweenes centrality. Moreover, we will also run a Logistic regression analysis (with four explanatory dimensions: a.-Internet behavior of the parliamentarians; b.- Parliamentarian activity of the deputies; c.-Socio-demographic characteristics of the members of the parliament; d.- Electoral relevance of the deputies’ party)
2) All the mentions and retweets made by the Catalan deputies in order to rank the Twitter interaction among the deputies and, consequently, between the groups to which they pertain, so we can ascertain the spillover effect between the Parliament’s groups.
Results: Network analyses revealed that the Catalan parliamentarians twitter networks (following-follower, retweets and mentions) are an example of a Tight Crowd Network community (Smith, Rainie, Himelboim and Shneiderman, 2014) which pave the way for the appearance of brokers. In that regard, regression analysis revealed that the age and the education level of the parliamentarians, their parliamentarian activity and the electoral results of their parties, are key factors of their broker behaviour. Moreover, the network analysis also shows that the communication in the Twitter Network of the Catalan deputies is mainly concentrated among the parliamentarian groups yet we observe that the two axis of the Catalan politics (Left-Right and Catalan nationalist or Spanish nationalist) play a role in structuring the relations on Twitter of the Catalan deputies boosting the interaction among the deputies who share the same axe position.
Conclusions: The overall conclusion is that Twitter doesn’t extend significantly communication and interactions over party boundaries between the members of the Parliament, but that the initiative and leadership in this media (that is, the brokers) is usually different from the official leaders of the party. Indeed, we also observe that the two axes of the Catalan politics play a relevant role in structuring the relations among the Catalan deputies on Twitter.
References:
Chi,F., & Yang,N. (2010). Twitter Adoption in Congress. Review of Network Economics, 10 (1),1-49.
Congressional Research Service. (2013). Social Networking and Constituent Communications: Member Use of Twitter During a Two-Month Period in the 111th Congress (7-5700, R41066). Washington, DC: Glassman,M.E., Strauss,J.R., & Shogan,C.J. Retrieved from http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41066.pdf
Goldbeck, J., Grimes, J. M., & Rogers, A. (2010). Twitter use by the U.S. Congress. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(8), 1612–1621.
Grant, W.J, Moon, B. & Grant, J.B. (2010). Australians Politicians Use of the Social Network Tool Twitter. Australian Journal of Political Science, 45 (4) 579-604.
Lassen,D.S., & Brown,A.R. (2010). Twitter: The Electoral Connection?. Social Science Computer, ooo(oo), 1-18. doi: 10.1177/0894439310382749
Pew Research Center. (2014). Mapping Twitter Topics Networks. From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters. Washington DC: Smith, A.M., Rainie, L., Shneiderman,B., & Himelboim.I.
Saebo, O. (2011). Understanding Twitter Use among Parliament Representatives: A Genre Analysis. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6847, 1-12. Doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-23333-3_1
Thamm, M., & Bleier, A. (2013). When Politicians Tweet: A Study on the Members of the Germ an Federal Diet. In ACM Web Science 2013. Paris, France. Retrieved from http://www.websci13.org/
Verweij, P. (2012). Twitter Links Between Politicians and Journalists. Journalism Practice, 6 (5-6), 680-691. Doi: 10.1080/17512786.2012.667272
Williams,C.B., & Gulati,G.J. (2010). Communicating with Constituents in 140 Characters or Less. Working Papers. Paper 43. Retrieved from http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/pn_wp/43
Yoon, H.Y., & Park, W.H. (2014). Strategies Affecting Twitter Based Networking Pattern of South Korean Politicians: Social Network Analysis and Exponential Random Graph Model. Quality and Quantity, 48 (1), 409-423.
Background: The use of so-called second screen devices such as smartphones and tablets to discuss live TV shows on social media is a growing trend and often referred to as Second Screen Experience (SSE). For example, the Nielsen lab found that 47% of tablet users in the US visit social media websites while watching TV (Nielsen, 2012). The Consumer Lab at Ericsson found a similar trend that 62% of viewers use social media while watching TV (Ericsson, 2012). The previous work in this area has primarily focused on studying recorded online interactions between social media users (e.g., Doughty, Rowland, & Lawson, 2011; Lochrie & Coulton, 2012). This study expands this line of research by observing how small groups of people watched a live episode of a popular TV show called Bones and how they interacted with others online and in the room during the show.
Objectives: The primary objective of this research is to study how people use second screen devices while watching a live TV show. In particular, we are interested in learning how and why people use social media to discuss a live TV show and how face-to-face interactions with other participants may influence online interactions and vice versa. The broad objective of this work is to see to what extent SSE might be contributing and sustaining the formation of online fan communities around a TV show.
Methods: The study was conducted in a lab setting with two groups of three participants - who knew each other prior to the study - watching a live episode of a popular TV show called Bones. During the session, the participants were given iPads and were encouraged to use their personal Twitter accounts to post and read messages using the official hashtag of the show - #Bones. Screen capturing software recorded what the participants did on the iPads, and two video cameras in the lab captured how participants interacted with one another during the show. The table and video recordings were analysed using NVivo, a popular program for qualitative analysis.
Results: The qualitative analysis revealed different patterns of user behaviour. Participants who did interact with others online, mostly communicated with Twitter users whom they already followed or who mentioned them on Twitter. The participants discussed the plot and key events of the show (e.g., who the killer is), scenes and particular objects in the show (e.g., a picture on the wall) as well as their room (lab) environment and activities (e.g., eating while watching). Asking questions about the show occurred only few times: three participants asked questions on Twitter, while one participant used Google to look for an answer. The video recordings showed the joy and contentment of the participants when they were mentioned by the official account for the show. One of the participants even posted a Twitter message (tweet) about this, while the other notified his friends in the room (but not online). Such behaviour would have been missed if we only examined tweets and not interaction in the room. Interestingly (but not surprising), the video recordings showed that the study participants generally did not focus on watching commercials; instead, they were either using their iPads or personal phones. This was also evident in the iPad recordings, as the participants reviewed new tweets and tweeted during the breaks. However, in general, proportionally the participants generated more tweets during the show than during the commercial breaks.
Conclusions: The empirical findings provided a better understanding of the SSE space that was not well explored before; that is the physical space (with other people in the room). An advantage gained from conducting a lab experiment is observing some interesting user behaviour that cannot be observed by studying their posted tweets; such as deleting and editing tweets or searching the web for answers instead of asking other Twitter users or friends in the room. For example, one of the participants used Google to find the correct spelling of a word mentioned in the show, then shared this information verbally with others. The evidence from this study also suggests that the participants generally do not pay attention to ads unless the content is relevant to their interests. An illustration of this action was clear when a participant who is interested in politics watched and discussed a political ad with others in the room. One important implication of this is that advertisers might find more effective to engage viewers through their “second” screens and not just through the first screen (TV).
Our future work will expand this exploratory study by conducting (1) a pre-study questionnaire to gather demographic information about participants and learn about their usual use of social media and mobile devices, and (2) post-study interviews with participants to uncover reasons behind some of their behaviour. We also will increase and diversify the study sample in terms of their demographic and psychographic characteristics.
References:
Doughty, M., Rowland, D., & Lawson, S. (2011). Co-viewing Live TV with Digital Backchannel Streams. In Proceedings of the 9th International Interactive Conference on Interactive Television (pp. 141–144). New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/2000119.2000147
Ericsson. (2012, August 28). Ericsson study: TV viewing increasingly accompanied by use of social media. TV & video consumer trend report 2012. Retrieved from http://www.ericsson.com/news/1636526
Lochrie, M., & Coulton, P. (2012). Sharing the Viewing Experience through Second Screens. In Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Interactive Tv and Video (pp. 199–202). New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/2325616.2325655
State of the media spring 2012 advertising & audiences part 2: By demographic. In (2012). The Nielsen Company. Retrieved from http://nielsen.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en/reports-downloads/2012-Reports/nielsen-advertising-audiences-report-spring-2012.pdf
Dubbed the ‘Social Media Capital of the Universe’ by the Wall Street Journal (“Brazil: The Social Media Capital of the Universe”) and home to the world’s second largest population of social media users (Forbes “The Future of Social Media?”), it is perhaps unsurprising that in Brazil these pioneering communication networks are imbricated in almost every aspect of the social totality. In politics, for example, social media is fiercely contested both by Federal politicians seeking to sway voters ahead of upcoming national elections (Economist “Winning Hearts and Likes”) and by civil society groups occupying the same networks to convene massive street protests that shocked the nation in 2013 (New York Times “Thousands Gather for Protests in Brazil’s Largest Cities”).
Although it is almost axiomatic that law marches several steps behind the lightning surge of technology, in Brazil the legislature passed a bill in March 2014 commensurate with the high profile of these communication platforms and one that holds massive implications for its approximately 83 million social media users (Socialbakers 2013): O Marco Civil da Internet or Civil Rights Framework for the Internet. Almost unique in the world as an effort to legislate the Internet oriented around user rights – as well as being the product of an unprecedented online public consultation - the Marco Civil demands the world’s attention as a case study in how law can constrain and enable the use of social media platforms. By analysing the concrete provisions of the law it is the goal of this paper to both identify the implications of the Marco Civil for the services offered by social media platforms in Brazil and the practice of their millions of users, but also its potential as a template for other countries to follow.
The Marco Civil established numerous rights and principles around issues such as interoperability, the use of open standards and data privacy though it is known particularly for two key struts that are crucial determinants of the manner in which social media platforms function: net neutrality and intermediary liability (Infojustice 2014).
The non-discrimination of data traffic is the promise of net neutrality and the Marco Civil establishes it as a general principle regulated by presidential decree with inputs from both the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee and ANATEL, the national telecommunications agency. The fact that Brazil is surpassed only by the US as a user population for video hosting site YouTube (Wall Street Journal 2013) demonstrates the significance of net neutrality to the local ecosystem: SNS premised on video and image sharing can continue to operate and grow without the threat of ‘throttling’.
Limitations on the liability of online intermediaries may lack the cache of net neutrality as a rallying cry for social media users but its implications are no less profound. Given the enormous upload of user content and its subsequent viral dissemination on SNS, were the platforms to be held legally responsible for all hosted material the entire premise of UGC would be undermined and the chilling effect on freedom of expression enormous. Instead, the legal security offered by this provision will likely provide a major fillip to Brazil’s already burgeoning web start-up scene as well as preserve the vibrant expressive qualities of social media.
By focusing particularly upon the above two provisions - as well as many other less-heralded but equally progressive stipulations on issues such as data protection and freedom of expression - this paper will demonstrate that the Marco Civil contains rich potential to preserve some of the essential communicative attributes of SNS as well as to safeguard the privacy and expressive rights of users that are under threat from state and corporate entities in other Internet communities around the world.
References:
Economist. (2014) Winning Hearts and Likes. http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21598975-social-media-will-play-big-part-years-campaign-winning-hearts-and-likes
Forbes. (2013) The Future of Social Media? http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2013/09/12/the-future-of-social-media-forget-about-the-u-s-look-to-brazil/
Infojustice. (2014) Brazilian Chamber of Deputies Approves Marco Civil Bill http://infojustice.org/archives/32527
New York Times. (2013) Thousands Gather for Protests in Brazil’s Largest Cities. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/18/world/americas/thousands-gather-for-protests-in-brazils-largest-cities.html?_r=0
Socialbakers. (2013) “Facebook Statistics by Country”. http://www.socialbakers.com/facebookstatistics/
Wall Street Journal. (2013) Brazil: The Social Media Capital of the Universe. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323301104578257950857891898?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424127887323301104578257950857891898.html
Background: The proliferation of social media has radically transformed the media landscape, establishing complex interactions between TV audience and Internet users. The analysis of these intricate relations provides a fundamental understanding of emerging patterns of media consumption and production. Researchers exploring the extent and consequences of these changes, are often faced with crucial methodological challenges.
Objective: The paper offers an innovative methodology combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to explore the connections between social media and television from a socio-semiotic perspective. Based on a case analysis, the paper examines the interactions between social media and TV fiction in order to provide researchers with new methods to understand emerging patterns of media consumption and production. The methodology developed is focused in two main areas: a) the analysis of the available resources on the Internet; and b) social media dialogues.
Methods: The case study comprises the analysis of 515 resources from 84 TV shows, and 7,840 comments made by 6,392 Internet users and 1,448 community managers in Facebook, Twitter and Internet forums. The statistical program SPSS, complemented with a descriptive database, was used to collect and provide quantitative data to analyze the Internet resources. This information was then analyzed from a socio-semiotic perspective in order to provide a contextualized overview of the TV fiction resources available on the Internet. In order to examine the discourses of Internet users, a series of socio-semiotic categories were implemented through Atlas.ti by applying 16,765 tags. Although built ad-hoc for specific projects, such categories constitute excellent examples of how to analyze large amounts of qualitative information and integrate the results with quantitative data.
Results: The analysis shows that Internet resources tend to be part of a coherent transmedia strategy, often orchestrated by TV networks and producers in order to increase the profitability of their shows. Online conversations are shaped as a “long tail” (Anderson, 2006), with two main topics (story and characters) and dozens of less frequent questions ranging from personal issues to aesthetics, among several others.
Conclusions: By combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, this ground-breaking methodology outlines, not only emerging media consumption trends, but also new production strategies. It provides a comprehensive system to analyze interactions between old and new media, while focusing on the social aspect of communication.
References:
Anderson, C. (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York, NY: Hyperion Books.