Social media use research remains dominated by self-report measures, despite concerns they may not accurately reflect objective social media use. The association between commonly employed self-report ...measures and objective social media use remains unclear. The aim of this study was to determine the degree of association between an objective and commonly employed subjective measures of social media use. The study specifically examined a single-estimate self-report measure, a problematic social media use scale, and objective use derived from smartphone data, in a sample of 209 individuals. The findings showed a very weak non-significant relationship between the objective measure and the single-estimate measure, (r = −.04, p = .58, BF10 = 0.18), and a weak significant relationship between the objective measure and the problematic social media use scale (r = .19, p = .01, BF10 = 3.04). These findings converge with other recent research to suggest there is very little shared variance between subjective estimates of social media use and objective use. This highlights the possibility that subjective social media use may be largely unrelated to objective use, which has implications for ensuring the rigor of future research and raising potential concerns regarding the veracity of previous research.
•There is an overreliance on self-report measures of social media in research.•There was no relationship between single estimate self-report social media use and actual social media use.•There was a weak relationship between scores on a problematic social media use scale and actual use.
•This research explores how social media influence team and employee performance.•Qualitative study of a large financial service firm in China.•Work-oriented and socialization-oriented social media ...are complementary resources.•This complementarity improves team and employee performance.•This paper contributes to Information Systems research on business value of social media.
How does the usage of social media in the workplace affect team and employee performance? To address this cutting edge and up-to-date research question, we ran a quasinatural field experiment, collecting data of two matched-sample groups within a large financial service firm in China. We find that work-oriented social media (DingTalk) and socialization-oriented social media (WeChat) are complementary resources that generate synergies to improve team and employee performance. The instrumental value provided by work-oriented social media is reinforced by the expressive value provided by socialization-oriented social media, which help firms to create business value from information technology investments.
This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking ...services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoundly affects our experience of online sociality. In a short period of time, services like Facebook, YouTube and many others have come to deeply penetrate our daily habits of communication and creative production. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Offering a dual analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of social media, the author dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecosystem of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, filtering content, governance and business models rely on shared ideological principles. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. “Sharing,” “friending,” “liking,” “following,” “trending,” and “favoriting” have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become “social.”
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has not only caused significant challenges for health systems all over the globe but also fueled the surge of numerous rumors, hoaxes, and ...misinformation, regarding the etiology, outcomes, prevention, and cure of the disease. Such spread of misinformation is masking healthy behaviors and promoting erroneous practices that increase the spread of the virus and ultimately result in poor physical and mental health outcomes among individuals. Myriad incidents of mishaps caused by these rumors have been reported globally. To address this issue, the frontline healthcare providers should be equipped with the most recent research findings and accurate information. The mass media, healthcare organization, community-based organizations, and other important stakeholders should build strategic partnerships and launch common platforms for disseminating authentic public health messages. Also, advanced technologies like natural language processing or data mining approaches should be applied in the detection and removal of online content with no scientific basis from all social media platforms. Furthermore, these practices should be controlled with regulatory and law enforcement measures alongside ensuring telemedicine-based services providing accurate information on COVID-19.
There is growing awareness about how social media circulate extreme viewpoints and turn up the temperature of public debate. Posts that exhibit agitation garner disproportionate engagement. Within ...this clamour, fringe sources and viewpoints are mainstreaming, and mainstream media are marginalized. This book takes up the mainstreaming of the fringe and the marginalization of the mainstream. In a cross-platform analysis of Google Web Search, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, 4chan and TikTok, we found that hyperpartisan web operators, alternative influencers and ambivalent commentators are in ascendency. The book can be read as a form of platform criticism. It puts on display the current state of information online, noting how social media platforms have taken on the mantle of accidental authorities, privileging their own on-platform performers and at the same time adjudicating between claims of what is considered acceptable discourse.
How poor urban youth in Chicago use social media to profit from portrayals of gang violence, and the questions this raises about poverty, opportunities, and public voyeurism Amid increasing hardship ...and limited employment options, poor urban youth are developing creative online strategies to make ends meet. Using such social media platforms as YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, they're capitalizing on the public's fascination with the ghetto and gang violence. But with what consequences? Ballad of the Bullet follows the Corner Boys, a group of thirty or so young men on Chicago's South Side who have hitched their dreams of success to the creation of "drill music" (slang for "shooting music"). Drillers disseminate this competitive genre of hyperviolent, hyperlocal, DIY-style gangsta rap digitally, hoping to amass millions of clicks, views, and followers—and a ticket out of poverty. But in this perverse system of benefits, where online popularity can convert into offline rewards, the risks can be too great.Drawing on extensive fieldwork and countless interviews compiled from daily, close interactions with the Corner Boys, as well as time spent with their families, friends, music producers, and followers, Forrest Stuart looks at the lives and motivations of these young men. Stuart examines why drillers choose to embrace rather than distance themselves from negative stereotypes, using the web to assert their supposed superior criminality over rival gangs. While these virtual displays of ghetto authenticity—the saturation of social media with images of guns, drugs, and urban warfare—can lead to online notoriety and actual resources, including cash, housing, guns, sex, and, for a select few, upward mobility, drillers frequently end up behind bars, seriously injured, or dead.Raising questions about online celebrity, public voyeurism, and the commodification of the ghetto, Ballad of the Bullet offers a singular look at what happens when the digital economy and urban poverty collide.
Mixed Methods Perspectives on Communication and Social Media Research addresses the need for a discipline-cum-methodology-tailored book that navigates the current research spectrum of communication ...and social media ("CommSocMed"). It examines contemporary and relevant issues that intertwine the expansive spheres of CommSocMed.
Authored by professionals with extensive academic and in-depth research and industry experience, the book highlights research-based themes that mirror qualitative and quantitative methodologies vis-à-vis socio-cultural, political, educational, and organisational issues and challenges. The first two sections present the mutually interwoven disciplines of CommSocMed where research works cover a comprehensive range of designs such as narrative analysis, case study, recombinant memetics, discourse analysis, visual semiotics, ethnography, content analysis, feminist theory, descriptive-survey, descriptive-correlational, model-building/testing, experimental, and mixed methods. The third section is a concluding segment which synthesises all the scholarly contributions in this volume.
This book will serve as an authoritative reference for mixed methods research in CommSocMed and will be highly relevant reading for academics, researchers, postgraduate students and undergraduates in communication (for example, instructional communication, marketing communication, organisational communication, political communication, strategic communication), social media, and social sciences.
Social media have become increasingly integrated into the daily lives of adolescents. There are concerns about the potential detrimental effects of adolescents' social media use (SMU) on their mental ...health. Using a three-wave longitudinal study among 2109 secondary school adolescents (Mage = 13.1, SDage = 0.8), the present study examined whether high SMU intensity and addiction-like SMU problems were bidirectionally associated with low mental health, and whether these associations were mediated by increased levels of upward social comparisons, cybervictimization, decreased subjective school achievements, and less face-to-face contact with friends. In doing so, mental health was measured by depressive symptoms and life satisfaction. Findings from random intercept cross-lagged panel models showed a direct unidirectional association between SMU problems and mental health: SMU problems were associated with decreased mental health one year later, but not vice versa. SMU problems also predicted increased levels of upward social comparisons and cybervictimization one year later. Yet, these processes did not mediate the observed effect of SMU problems on decreased mental health. Over time, SMU intensity and mental health were not associated in any direction; neither directly, nor indirectly through any of the mediators. Findings of our study suggest that harmful effects of SMU intensity may be limited and highlight the potential risk of SMU problems to adolescent mental health.
•There are concerns about adolescents' social media use (SMU).•Over time, SMU intensity and mental health were not associated in any direction.•SMU problems predicted decreases in mental health one year later.•SMU problems also predicted increases in social comparison and cybervictimization.•Particularly SMU problems may pose a risk to adolescents' mental health.
We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and nonpolitical issues, explored whether online ...communication resembles an "echo chamber" (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a "national conversation." We observed that information was exchanged primarily among individuals with similar ideological preferences in the case of political issues (e.g., 2012 presidential election, 2013 government shutdown) but not many other current events (e.g., 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2014 Super Bowl). Discussion of the Newtown shootings in 2012 reflected a dynamic process, beginning as a national conversation before transforming into a polarized exchange. With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination; this is an important asymmetry with respect to the structure of communication that is consistent with psychological theory and research bearing on ideological differences in epistemic, existential, and relational motivation. Overall, we conclude that previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.
Online hate and extremist narratives have been linked to abhorrent real-world events, including a current surge in hate crimes
and an alarming increase in youth suicides that result from social media ...vitriol
; inciting mass shootings such as the 2019 attack in Christchurch, stabbings and bombings
; recruitment of extremists
, including entrapment and sex-trafficking of girls as fighter brides
; threats against public figures, including the 2019 verbal attack against an anti-Brexit politician, and hybrid (racist-anti-women-anti-immigrant) hate threats against a US member of the British royal family
; and renewed anti-western hate in the 2019 post-ISIS landscape associated with support for Osama Bin Laden's son and Al Qaeda. Social media platforms seem to be losing the battle against online hate
and urgently need new insights. Here we show that the key to understanding the resilience of online hate lies in its global network-of-network dynamics. Interconnected hate clusters form global 'hate highways' that-assisted by collective online adaptations-cross social media platforms, sometimes using 'back doors' even after being banned, as well as jumping between countries, continents and languages. Our mathematical model predicts that policing within a single platform (such as Facebook) can make matters worse, and will eventually generate global 'dark pools' in which online hate will flourish. We observe the current hate network rapidly rewiring and self-repairing at the micro level when attacked, in a way that mimics the formation of covalent bonds in chemistry. This understanding enables us to propose a policy matrix that can help to defeat online hate, classified by the preferred (or legally allowed) granularity of the intervention and top-down versus bottom-up nature. We provide quantitative assessments for the effects of each intervention. This policy matrix also offers a tool for tackling a broader class of illicit online behaviours
such as financial fraud.
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