Characteristics and social impact of the use of social media by Chinese Dama

Against the backdrop of broader social changes, social media has developed rapidly in China, which has pushed the transition of the media environment from a traditional authority-dominated one to a modern media society. In particular, the use of social media by Chinese Dama can be perceived as an exemplar of media-driven social change. ‘Chinese Dama’ is a buzzword coined in tandem with the development of social media since 2013. This term represents a particular group of middle-aged Chinese women who reflect a distinctive social phenomenon in China. It is noteworthy that a growing number of Chinese Dama are learning to use social media and have established thousands of social media communities, exerting significant influence on the wider media and social environment. This study focuses on the major changes undergone by Dama, transitioning from being passively covered by media to becoming active users of social media, and this research analyzes the motivations and hallmarks of their social media activity. Although the use of social media by Chinese Dama, the traditional nucleus of Chinese society, has contributed to narrowing the digital divide and resulted in the Dama’s gaining more discourse power and ushered in new diverse lifestyles, we argue that the Dama also exert a far-reaching positive and negative influence on society, pushing for the modernization transformation of the Chinese society.     

Social Media,Political Expression,and Political Participation: Panel Analysis of Lagged and Concurrent Relationships

This article relies on U.S. 2‐wave panel data to examine the role of social media as a sphere for political expression and its effects on political participation. Informational uses of social media are expected to explain political expression on social media and to promote political participation. This study clarifies the effect of using social media for social interaction in fostering political expression and participation processes. Results indicate that social media news use has direct effects on offline political participation and indirect effects on offline and online political participation mediated via political expression. Furthermore, social media use for social interaction does not have direct influence in people's political engagement, but rather an indirect effect by means of citizens expressing themselves politically.     

Ideological motives,digital divides,and political polarization: How do political party preference and values correspond with the political use of social media?

Social media provides new platforms for political participation and ideological categorization. However, little research has been done on how party preference is related to politically active social media use. We begin with a consideration of how political participation on social media has evolved between various socio-economic and demographic groups in advanced information societies and especially in Finland. In our empirical analysis we examine the general use of social media as well as its use for political purposes with the aid of a nationally representative dataset, collected in 2017–2018 from 3724 Finnish citizens. We argue that there are notable differences between parties when examining their supporters’ social media use for political purposes. The differences are related to the digital divides and political extremes. The results confirmed the idea that new political movements made up of younger and more educated supporters have been successful by leveraging social media. The study also revealed that the ideological gap between party supporters is greater in social media especially when examining new kinds of politics based on cultural questions, identity issues, and post-materialist values.     

Paradox of richness: a cognitive model of media choice

Researchers have long studied the effects of social presence and media richness on media choice and the effects of media use. This focus on social presence and social psychological theories has led to valuable research on communication. However, little research (either empirical or theoretical) has been done to understand the ways in which media choices influence the cognitive processes that underlie communication. In this paper, we present a cognitive-based view of media choice and media use, based on dual process theories of cognition, which argue that in order for individuals to systematically process messages, they must be motivated to process the message and have the ability to process it. We argue that the use of rich media high in social presence induces increased motivation but decreases the ability to process information, while the use of lean media low in social presence induces decreased motivation but increases the ability to process information. The paradox of richness lies in its duality of impact: from a cognitive perspective, rich media high in social presence simultaneously acts to both improve and impair performance.     

Measuring consumer perception of social media marketing activities in e-commerce industry: Scale development & validation

The internet has changed the nature of shopping in the past two decades, which has supported the proliferation of e-commerce sites and thus shopping has shifted to e-shopping. Also, customers use social media to gain information on preferred products with the best price options, as social media provides shoppers a voice, and facilitate them to interact and share their opinion worldwide. Moreover, social media is extensively adopted platform for e-commerce. Although, social media marketing has achieved wide acceptance in business, especially in e-commerce, there is no scale in the extant literature to measure perceived social media marketing activities (SMMA) in an e-commerce context. Therefore, this study develops and validates a 15-item, five-dimensional scale for measuring perceived SMMA of e-commerce based on extant literature on e-commerce and social media marketing and five different studies conducted in this research. The scale revealed comprehensive psychometric characteristics as per the results from the diverse reliability and validity checks. It was revealed that perceived SMMA positively influenced purchase intention and brand equity; which endorses the nomological validity of the developed scale. The new scale provides both theoretical as well as managerial implications along with the avenues for forthcoming research.     

How compulsive WeChat use and information overload affect social media fatigue and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic? A stressor-strain-outcome perspective

Social media has been increasingly utilized as an effective avenue for individuals to obtain needed social support and health-related information, especially during the on-going global COVID-19 pandemic. However, surprisingly few empirical studies have concentrated on the detrimental impact of social media adoption on young adults’ psychosocial well-being and mental health. Drawing upon previous stressor-strain-outcome theoretical paradigm (SSO), the present research investigates how psychosocial well-being assessments, especially compulsive WeChat use and information overload could trigger social media fatigue and, furthermore, how social media fatigue would ultimately result in emotional stress and social anxiety. This article utilized the cross-sectional design whereby statistical data were collected from 566 young people to test the conceptual research model. This research results demonstrate that perceived information overload through WeChat could significantly trigger social media fatigue among young people. Moreover, perceived information overload could indirectly predict emotional stress and social anxiety through the mediation of social media fatigue. This present work has vital theoretical and practical implications for widespread adoption of newly emerging communication technologies to enhance mental health and well-being among younger generation during recent public health crises.     

社交媒体时代科普信息传播的困境与突破

科学技术普及实现了科技知识的传递和扩散。在信息时代,人们通过传统媒体和新媒体渠道可以很方便地接触到各种科学知识。社交媒体的广泛发展给科普信息传播工作带来了新的机遇与挑战。本文从社交媒体在科普信息传播中的创新应用介绍入手,总结了社交媒体的优势,分析了当前科普信息传播的困扰因素,提出了社交媒体时代科普信息传播应从提升公信力、实现跨平台体验及加强网络监管方面着眼突破。     

Social media and internet public events

Contemporary China is experiencing deeper reform and social transformation. The newly born social media have participated in the historical process of China’s reform and social change. Based on the existing literature of social media and internet public events, this article aims to study China’s internet public events through the perspective of social transformation theory, especially theories of the civic society and public sphere. This study has used case study to explore the role that social media play in social change in China through in-depth analysis of 57 typical cases. We found that social media are not only an important information source and means for online civil mobilization, but also provide citizens an open and free space for discussion of internet public events. The impact of social media in promoting social change was reflected in the supervision of governmental, judiciary and other public power; maintenance of justice and protection of disadvantaged groups; attracting the government’s attention, urging governmental information publicity and investigation of the events, and promoting social management innovation and institutional change. Social media are a helpful force in the construction of internet public sphere and civil society of contemporary China. Meanwhile, it is necessary to be cautious that social media is also likely to be a breeding ground for nationalist and populist discourses.     

Social media usage and organizational performance: Reflections of Malaysian social media managers

Social media usage among organizations is growing tremendously. Organizations are now building and maintaining social media public pages to improve their social network salience, enhance interest in their organizations, and build relationships with the online public. The majority of the studies on social media usage are based on the individual perspective while some are from the organizational perspective. However, not many studies have investigated the actual impact of social media usage on organizational performance. Therefore, using the qualitative approach, this study investigates the various purposes of social media usage and its impact on organizational performance. This study however, focuses only on the social media managers’ views. The senior managers of six organizations that are using social media are interviewed from which we find that social media is used for various purposes in organizations, such as advertising and promotion, branding, information search, building customer relations and many more. The results also show that social media has a greater impact on the performance of organizations in terms of enhancement in customer relations and customer service activities, improvement in information accessibility and cost reduction in terms of marketing and customer service.     

Examining the roles of social media and alternative media in social movement participation: A study of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

During the recent wave of pro-democracy movement across the world, new media technologies play a vital role in mobilizing participants. Much scholarly attention has been paid to the role of social media in empowering grassroots movements, but the rise of alternative media was somehow ignored. This study examines the impacts of social media and alternative media on social movement participation. The data came from a survey of 769 students from eight public universities in Hong Kong at the height of the Umbrella Movement. The findings revealed that acquisition of political information from social media and alternative media is associated with social movement participation through different mechanisms. Specifically, social media serve as an echo chamber where people are motivated to participate by perceiving a homogeneous opinion climate and forming a pro-protest attitude. In contrast, alternative media serve as an attitude intensifier to facilitate social movement participation.     

Tennis influencers: The player effect on social media engagement and demand for tournament attendance

Understanding the interest of sports fans in professional tennis has valuable operational and marketing implications for tournament organisers, marketeers, player sponsors and the media. In sports, professional tennis in particular, the player effect on social media user engagement is still elusive. Using data from the 2019 Australian Open grand slam period, the authors examine Adler’s (1985) theoretical construct in the context of sports and social media. A social listening tool is used to probe more than 2 million posts and comments mentioning elite male and female tennis players on four major social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, over the grand slam period. It is shown that the effect of professional tennis players on social media user engagement extends beyond their talent. A selection of players had a strong positive impact on prompting social media activity, even after accounting for factors related to their performance, the tournament rounds in which they were featured and the opponents against whom they played. Furthermore, the connection between social media research and sports economics is considered by examining the relationship between a player’s effects on social media engagement and her/his differential influence on demand for tickets at the Australian Tennis Open. The authors further discuss how the social media star influence can be used, in combination with other quantitative measures, to optimise tennis tournament scheduling, determine player appearance fees and lift participation in the sport.     

Do social media campaigns foster vaccination adherence? A systematic review of prior intervention-based campaigns on social media

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance of large-scale campaigns to facilitate vaccination adherence. Social media presents unique opportunities to reach broader audiences and reduces the costs of conducting national or global campaigns aimed at achieving herd immunity. Nonetheless, few studies have reviewed the effectiveness of prior social media campaigns for vaccination adherence, and several prior studies have shown that social media campaigns do not increase uptake rates. Hence, our objective is to conduct a systematic review to examine the effectiveness of social media campaigns and to identify the reasons for the mixed results of prior studies. Our methodology began with a search of seven databases, which resulted in the identification of 92 interventions conducted over digital media. Out of these 92 studies, only 15 adopted social media campaigns for immunization. We analyzed these 15 studies, along with a coding scheme we developed based on reviews of both health interventions and social media campaigns. Multiple coders, who were knowledgeable about social media campaigns and healthcare, analyzed the 15 cases and obtained an acceptable level of inter-coder reliability (> .80). The results from our systematic review show that only a few social media campaigns have succeeded in enhancing vaccination adherence. In addition, few campaigns have utilized known critical success factors of social media to induce vaccination adherence. Based on these findings, we discuss a set of research questions that informatics scholars should consider when identifying opportunities for using social media to resolve one of the most resilient challenges in public health. Finally, we conclude by discussing how the insights drawn from our systematic reviews contribute to advancing theories, such as social influence and the health belief model, into the realm of social media–based health interventions.     

Research on Chinese social media users’ communication behaviors during public emergency events

In recent years, China has been in a period of social transition. Public emergency events have occurred frequently, and social media have developed rapidly. Social media users in China not only represent traditional audiences but also play an increasingly important role in crisis communication during public emergency events by expressing their views, discussing events with others and sharing information both online and offline. According to national telephone survey data from China, nearly two-thirds of the respondents engaged in communication behaviors during public emergency events, and more than forty percent of those users communicated by social media. Hundreds of millions of Chinese social media users are becoming the driving force of the public opinion field. To better understand social media users’ online information dissemination behaviors and influencing factors, we developed the hierarchical logistic regression model and observed that demographic variables (gender and age), social media use, people’s concerns regarding public emergencies and people’s need to monitor the government’s performance during public emergencies significantly influence online information dissemination behaviors. Our study has practical significance and academic value for understanding the online public opinion field and online political participation in China.     

Social media and political partisanship – A subaltern public sphere’s role in democracy

Social media, as a subaltern public sphere (Fraser, 1990), have a democratic function in providing an alternative platform for minorities and marginalized to defy mainstream discourses in the public sphere. However, social media have been found to have an echo chamber effect, which may be detrimental to democracy. They may help to accelerate the ascendancy of a “post-truth” era in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. A study on political polarization, however, showed that selective exposure and avoidance in social media are weak indicators of polarization (Johnson et al., 2017). This study examines the role of social media in democracy and partisan politics. The authors considered that despite the echo chamber effect, social media have a limited part to play in the formation of polarized stances compared with other factors, such as demographics, political orientation, and mass media use. The study tested two main hypotheses: H1: Social media use is associated with political stance that is marginalized in the mainstream media; H2: Political orientation has a stronger relationship than social media use with the stance toward political values and social issues.The results supported both hypotheses. Social media are associated with political stance that is marginalized in the mainstream media. However, when compared with other factors, the relationship between social media and stance becomes less obvious. Although the echo chamber effect may reinforce the original stance, social media do not exhibit a strong relationship with the stance toward political values and social issues. Partisan orientation and use of partisan mass media are found to have stronger links with variations in stance. Social media, however, provide a subaltern public sphere for those excluded from the dominant public sphere, thus extending the public sphere to accommodate multiple opinions and perspectives.     

The future of online social networks (OSN): A measurement analysis using social media tools and application

The explosion of online social networks (OSN) has created an interactive and communicative global phenomenon that has enabled billions of users to connect to other individuals on Facebook and Twitter but also with media sharing platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. This study examines the current use of social media platforms and explores the factors that help define the long term implications of social media. The study employed a nationwide survey collected from 2012 to 2013 and is available from the PEW Internet research center of more than 2000 American citizens’ behaviour towards OSNs. The results revealed strong predictors of OSN that form the connections among users; and the core significant predictors: age, gender and access to mobile Internet that foster the adoption and usage of OSN in the future. Furthermore, online activities such as posting video content on social networks also highlighted the online usage patterns and trends of using social media to actively engage with other users more willingly than text. This is due to the viral nature of online media sharing on social media and as part of the video viewing and creating experience. An outline of practical implications of the findings and areas for future research is also discussed.     

The Social News Gap: How News Reading and News Sharing Diverge

This article seeks to explain variation in news sharing patterns on social media. It finds that news editors have considerable power to shape the social media agenda through the use of “story importance cues” but also shows that there are some areas of news reporting (such as those related to crime and disasters) where this power does not apply. This highlights the existence of a social “news gap” where social media filters out certain types of news, producing a social media news agenda which has important differences from its traditional counterpart. The discussion suggests that this may be consequential for perceptions of crime and engagement with politics; it might even stimulate a partial reversal of the tabloidization of news outlets.     

社会化媒体发展现状及其趋势分析

近年来,以Web 2.0为代表的新一代互联网技术迅猛发展,改变了传统的信息传播方式,使得基于互联网的社会化媒体从虚拟走向现实,正深刻影响和改变着我们的生活。文章对社会化媒体的发展现状进行了梳理,并从社会化媒体的特征、基础、分类以及与传统媒体的区别等方面深入分析其内涵,最后结合国内外实际,展望社会化媒体发展的新趋势。     

Effectiveness of web-based social sensing in health information dissemination—A review

Social media has moved ahead of just being a tool for adolescent users to share their personal lives (messages, pictures) but has also been taken up by healthcare stakeholders to disseminate health information worldwide. The role of social media in healthcare industry and impact of patient engagement has moved to centered-stage and is continuously propelled by patient demand, mobile technology and mounting influence of the native digital generation. The pace with which the social activity is growing, it is important to foresee what impact these web-based platforms are having on the deliverance and outcome of healthcare interventions. This survey looks at how far social media has been prove to be effective in disseminating health information and to what extent ontological advancing approaches have been helpful in extracting relevant knowledge from sheer amount of healthcare data.     

Social participation of the elderly in China: The roles of conventional media,digital access and social media engagement

China is the most rapidly aging country and has the largest aging population in the world. However, social participation is an important intervention to boost the active and healthy aging. The present study investigated the effects of media usage, together with social-demographics and health variables, on Chinese older adults. Drawing upon a national research project with a representative sample (N = 1,399) of older adults (55+) from 58 cities in China, the research findings revealed that conventional media, digital access and social media usage had positive effects on older adults’ informal social participation, while age moderated the relationship between informal social participation and digital access, particularly regarding access to tablet PCs and smartphones. Moreover, conventional media, digital access and social media engagement largely explained seniors’ formal social participation regardless of their social-demographic backgrounds. Finally, the roles of conventional media and digital media in older adults’ social participation are discussed.     

A meta-analytic review of the relationship between social media use and employee outcomes

Employees’ social media use and its relationships with work-related outcomes have received significant research attention in recent years. Extant research, however, has provided neither consistent findings regarding the extent and direction of such relationships nor consensus on potential moderators involved. To provide robust conclusions about the association between social media use and employee outcomes which could inform research and practice, a systematic culmination of findings from 29 empirical works published in peer-reviewed journals from 2009 to 2018 was conducted. The meta-analytic review assessed the relationships between employees’ social media use and employee outcomes (job performance, job satisfaction, work engagement, emotional exhaustion, and work-life conflict) and their moderators (types of social media, purposes of use, and background variables). The results of the random-effects model suggest that social media use, in general, had significant, small, positive relationships with job performance, job satisfaction, work engagement, and work-life conflict. Its relationship with emotional exhaustion, however, was significant but negligible. The sub-group and meta-regression analyses further identified the moderators among the positive associations found: purpose of social media use moderated the relationships of social media use with job performance and job satisfaction while job position moderated the association between social media use and job satisfaction.