Online comment can be informative or misleading, entertaining or maddening. Haters and manipulators often seem to monopolize the conversation. Some comments are off-topic, or even topic-less. In this ...book, Joseph Reagle urges us to read the comments. Conversations "on the bottom half of the Internet," he argues, can tell us much about human nature and social behavior. Reagle visits communities of Amazon reviewers, fan fiction authors, online learners, scammers, freethinkers and mean kids. He shows how comment can inform us (through reviews), improve us (through feedback), manipulate us (through fakery), alienate us (through hate), shape us (through social comparison) and perplex us. He finds pre-Internet historical antecedents of online comment in Michelin stars, professional criticism and the wisdom of crowds. He discusses the techniques of online fakery (distinguishing makers, fakers, and takers), describes the emotional work of receiving and giving feedback, and examines the culture of trolls and haters, bullying and misogyny. He considers the way comment — a nonstop stream of social quantification and ranking — affects our self-esteem and well-being. And he examines how comment is puzzling — short and asynchronous, these messages can be slap-dash, confusing, amusing, revealing and weird, shedding context in their passage through the Internet, prompting readers to comment in turn, "WTF?!?"
In an online experiment we examined the role of self-control in recognizing social cues in the context of disinhibited online behavior (e.g., flaming and trolling). We temporarily lowered ...participants' self-control capacity with an ego depletion paradigm (i.e., color Stroop task). Next, we measured participants' sensitivity to social cues with an emotional Stroop task containing neutral, negative, and taboo words. Sensitivity to social cues is represented by the increase in reaction time to negative and especially taboo words compared to neutral words. As expected, undepleted participants were slower to process the color of negative and taboo words. By contrast, depleted participants (i.e., those with lowered self-control capacity) did not react differently to taboo or negative words than they did to neutral words. The experiment illustrates that self-control failure may manifest itself in a failure to recognize social cues. The finding underlines the importance of self-control in understanding disinhibited online behavior: Many instances of disinhibited online behavior may occur not because people are unable to control themselves, but because they do not realize that a situation calls for self-control in the first place.
Major depression can be treated by means of cognitive behavior therapy, delivered via the Internet as guided self-help. Individually tailored guided self-help treatments have shown promising results ...in the treatment of anxiety disorders. This randomized controlled trial tested the efficacy of an Internet-based individually tailored guided self-help treatment which specifically targeted depression with comorbid symptoms. The treatment was compared both to standardized (non-tailored) Internet-based treatment and to an active control group in the form of a monitored online discussion group. Both guided self-help treatments were based on cognitive behavior therapy and lasted for 10 weeks. The discussion group consisted of weekly discussion themes related to depression and the treatment of depression.
A total of 121 participants with diagnosed major depressive disorder and with a range of comorbid symptoms were randomized to three groups. The tailored treatment consisted of a prescribed set of modules targeting depression as well as comorbid problems. The standardized treatment was a previously tested guided self-help program for depression.
From pre-treatment to post-treatment, both treatment groups improved on measures of depression, anxiety and quality of life. The results were maintained at a 6-month follow-up. Subgroup analyses showed that the tailored treatment was more effective than the standardized treatment among participants with higher levels of depression at baseline and more comorbidity, both in terms of reduction of depressive symptoms and on recovery rates. In the subgroup with lower baseline scores of depression, few differences were seen between treatments and the discussion group.
This study shows that tailored Internet-based treatment for depression is effective and that addressing comorbidity by tailoring may be one way of making guided self-help treatments more effective than standardized approaches in the treatment of more severe depression.
Clinicaltrials.gov NCT01181583.
South Korean masculinities have enjoyed dramatically greater influence in recent years in many realms of pan-Asian popular culture, which travels freely in part because of its hybrid ...trans-nationalistic appeal. This book investigates transcultural consumption of three iconic figures — the middle-aged Japanese female fandom of actor Bae Yong-Joon, the Western online cult fandom of the thriller film Oldboy, and the Singaporean fandom of the pop-star Rain. Through these three specific but hybrid contexts, the author develops the concepts of soft masculinity, as well as global and postmodern variants of masculine cultural impacts. In the concluding chapter, the author also discusses recently emerging versatile masculinity within the transcultural pop production paradigm represented by K-pop idol boy bands.
Sexual dysfunction is a common experience for women with the autoimmune rheumatic disease, Sjögren’s syndrome (SS); however, the lived experience of how the disease affects sexual functioning and the ...sexual environment remains unexplored. This qualitative study explores the conversations pertaining to female sexual function and the sexual environment that individuals with SS have on an internet forum. Qualitative data posted on one publicly accessible, worldwide, internet forum was extracted using an automated web scraping tool. A total of 247,694 posts across 23,382 threads were scraped from the forum in July 2019 and June 2022 (from the United Kingdom). A predetermined and theoretically informed keyword search strategy was used to screen the captured data for content relevant to the study aim. The dataset was cleaned to remove duplication and identifying information and screened for topic relevance. The Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis software tool, ATLAS.ti, was used to facilitate the data analysis process. Thematic analysis was conducted on 1443 female-oriented posts, and four key themes were identified: the symptoms of SS and their impact on the sexual environment; the emotional responses that are commonly evoked in response to sexual difficulties; the strategies that users have implemented to manage sexual problems; and the impact that a partner’s behavior may have on the sexual environment. Together these themes provide an insight into the nature of sexual difficulties for females with SS. Our findings provide novel insights to inform clinical discussions between practitioners and patients whilst further outlining the importance of undertaking qualitative research with this population.
The contours of journalistic practice have evolved substantially since the emergence of the world wide web to include those who were once strangers to the profession. Amateur journalists, bloggers, ...mobile app designers, programmers, web analytics managers, and others have become part of journalism, influencing the process of journalism from news production to distribution. These technology-oriented strangers—those who have not belonged to traditional journalism practice but have imported their qualities and work into it—are increasingly taking part in journalism, whether welcomed by journalists or shunned as interlopers. Yet, the labels that keep them at journalism’s periphery risk conflating them with much larger groups who are not always adding to the news process (e.g., bloggers, microbloggers) or generalizing them as insiders/outsiders. In this essay, we consider studies that have addressed the roles of journalistic strangers and argue that by delineating differences among these strangers and seeking representative categorizations of who they are, a more holistic understanding of their impact on news production, and journalism broadly, can be advanced. Considering the norms and practices of journalism as increasingly fluid and open to new actors, we offer categorizations of journalistic strangers as explicit and implicit interlopers as well as intralopers. In working to understand these strangers as innovators and disruptors of news production, we begin to unpack how they are collectively contributing to an increasingly un-institutionalized meaning of news while also suggesting a research agenda that gives definition to the various strangers who may be influencing news production and distribution and the organizational field of journalism more broadly.
This book centers on empirical studies of how students in small online groups make sense of math issues and how they solve problems together. It presents five analyses of group interactions in ...different phases of the Virtual Math Teams research project.
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