A motives framework of social media website use: A survey of young Americans

Social media is increasingly important in daily life and is an especially important social interaction mechanism for young people. Although research has been conducted evaluating user types based on motives for using social media, no such framework has been extended to social media websites. We extend previous research by evaluating the underlying structure of social media website usage motivations using a 13 item survey and evaluations from 19 different social media websites administered to 1686 young Americans. Using a multidimensional scaling approach, we uncover 2 major motive dimensions underlying social media website use: fun-related and content-specific. Based on the derived dimensions, we generate a graphical “quadrant” system for classifying social media websites and depict all 19 social media sites based on their quadrant. We propose that our quadrant system can be used by other researchers to further refine understanding of social media website usage motives.     

Improving geolocation of social media posts

Pervasive social systems often take advantage of geographical information to provide real-time information to users based on their location. However, due to privacy concerns, many social media users do not share their exact geographical coordinates. In this paper, we describe our technique that predicts locations of posts that are not associated with explicit coordinates, a process called geolocation. Existing research has utilized the content of a post as well as the post author’s social media relationships with other users to estimate location. Our research provides a novel approach to geolocation by combining multiple techniques, as well as adding a new technique: estimating location by clustering similar social media posts that are centered in a geographical area.     

Understanding compulsive social media use: The premise of complementing self-conceptions mismatch with technology

Some anecdotal accounts and research reports have suggested that obsessive social media involvement could turn into a compulsive behavior among university students. Unfortunately, the research that sheds light on the possible conditional nature of that relationship is scarce at best. Therefore, this study tries to address this issue by developing a contingency-based model and tests it using data gathered from a sample of university students. The model postulates that compulsive social media use arises due to self-awareness factors, and together they in turn predict problematic learning outcomes. It also postulates that these relationships are moderated by the influence of technological factors. The results indicate that self-esteem has a significant negative influence on compulsive social media use and that interaction anxiousness has a significant positive influence on the same. The results also reveal that only compulsive social media use has a significant direct influence on problematic learning outcomes; and that social media complementarity plays a moderating role in the model. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice.     

社交媒体中的信息推荐

近年来社交媒体越来越流行,可以从中获得大量丰富多彩的信息的同时,也带来了严重的"信息过载"问题.推荐系统作为缓解信息过载最有效的方法之一,在社交媒体中的作用日趋重要.区别于传统的推荐方法,社交媒体中包含大量的用户产生内容,因此在社交媒体中,通过结合传统的个性化的推荐方法,集成各类新的数据、元数据和清晰的用户关系,产生了各种新的推荐技术.总结了社交推荐系统中的几个关键研究领域,包括基于社会化标注的推荐、组推荐和基于信任的推荐,之后介绍了在信息推荐中考虑时间因素时的情况,最后对社交媒体中信息推荐有待深入研究的难点和发展趋势进行了展望.     

Digitally enabled disaster response: the emergence of social media as boundary objects in a flooding disaster

In recent times, social media has been increasingly playing a critical role in response actions following natural catastrophes. From facilitating the recruitment of volunteers during an earthquake to supporting emotional recovery after a hurricane, social media has demonstrated its power in serving as an effective disaster response platform. Based on a case study of Thailand flooding in 2011 – one of the worst flooding disasters in more than 50 years that left the country severely impaired – this paper provides an in‐depth understanding on the emergent roles of social media in disaster response. Employing the perspective of boundary object, we shed light on how different boundary spanning competences of social media emerged in practice to facilitate cross‐boundary response actions during a disaster, with an aim to promote further research in this area. We conclude this paper with guidelines for response agencies and impacted communities to deploy social media for future disaster response.     

Social Media Burnout: Definition,Measurement Instrument,and Why We Care

Social media users have shown several burnout symptoms lately. In this research, we study the social media burnout issue from three perspectives, including a user’s ambivalence, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization. Building on the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), we designed a new scale to measure a user’s social media burnout. Using social media continuance as an example, we investigated the effects of social media burnout on a user’s post-adoption intention. We find that ambivalence, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization can all significantly negatively influence a user’s social media continuance.     

Impact of the usage of social media in the workplace on team and employee performance

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.     

基于社交媒体的事件感知与多模态事件脉络生成

随着信息技术的发展和社交媒体的流行,普通用户已经完成了从信息接受者到信息产生者的转变,每个人都可以实时分享自己身边的信息,也可以转发自己感兴趣的内容,这使得社交媒体的数据量迅速增长。在海量数据中蕴含着丰富的社会事件发生和发展的记录,如何有效地从这些数据中挖掘出有价值的信息成为了当前信息领域的重要问题。针对该问题,介绍了基于社交媒体的事件感知与多模态事件脉络生成。基于社交媒体的事件感知与多模态事件脉络生成旨在通过分析社交媒体中的文本、时间、图像、评论、观点、情感和用户交互等多模态数据,感知事件并刻画事件的关系,从而实现对事件的总结。讨论了基于社交媒体的事件感知与多模态事件脉络生成的描述模型、概念、发展历史、关键技术与挑战以及其广泛的应用领域,综述了社交媒体分析在事件感知和事件总结方面的研究进展,并对其未来发展进行了展望。     

Information sharing on social media sites

This study reports on an exploratory survey conducted to investigate the use of social media technologies for sharing information. This paper explores the issue of credibility of the information shared in the context of computer-mediated communication. Four categories of information were explored: sensitive, sensational, political and casual information, across five popular social media technologies: social networking sites, micro-blogging sites, wikis, online forums, and online blogs. One hundred and fourteen active users of social media technologies participated in the study. The exploratory analysis conducted in this study revealed that information producers use different cues to indicate credibility of the information they share on different social media sites. Organizations can leverage findings from this study to improve targeted engagement with their customers. The operationalization of how information credibility is codified by information producers contributes to knowledge in social media research.     

Mitigating information overload in social media during conflicts and crises: design and evaluation of a cross-platform alerting system

ABSTRACT

The research field of crisis informatics examines, amongst others, the potentials and barriers of social media use during conflicts and crises. Social media allow emergency services to reach the public easily in the context of crisis communication and receive valuable information (e.g. pictures) from social media data. However, the vast amount of data generated during large-scale incidents can lead to issues of information overload and quality. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes the semi-automatic creation of alerts including keyword, relevance and information quality filters based on cross-platform social media data. We conducted empirical studies and workshops with emergency services across Europe to raise requirements, then iteratively designed and implemented an approach to support emergency services, and performed multiple evaluations, including live demonstrations and field trials, to research the potentials of social media-based alerts. Finally, we present the findings and implications based on semi-structured interviews with emergency services, highlighting the need for usable configurability and white-box algorithm representation.     

Sexual intensity of adolescents' online self-presentations: Joint contribution of identity,media consumption,and extraversion

Adolescents produce and distribute a vast quantity of digital media content. A growing literature examines the sexually explicit (i.e., nude) content that adolescents share online. Because adolescents' sexual content need not be sexually explicit, however, this study examined the sexual intensity with which adolescents choose to present themselves in the context of a social media platform. Exemplifying the variability of adolescents' online sexual self-presentations, survey participants (N = 265; age range: 13–15 years) constructed social media profiles using components (e.g., photos, fashion brands) that varied in sexual intensity. In accord with predictions drawn from the Media Practice Model, the study found that the sexual intensity of adolescents' online self-presentations is a product of the sexual self-concept, a relationship that is partially mediated by sexual media diet and moderated by extraversion. This study bridges emerging research on sexual self-presentation with established literature on adolescents' sexual media uses and effects.     

Understanding the effects of trust and risk on individual behavior toward social media platforms: A meta-analysis of the empirical evidence

Trust and risk have been theorized and empirically approved as the most influential factors affecting individual behavior toward social media platforms (SMPs). However, the evidence is scattered and the understanding of the effects is ambiguous. To address this problem, a rigorous and quantitative meta-analysis was conducted to investigate the empirical evidence of 43 studies in information systems research between 2006 and 2014. The findings suggested that trust and risk both had significant effects on individual behavior toward SMPs but that trust had a stronger effect. Moderating effects of trust objects (community members vs. platforms) and platform types (virtual communities vs. social networking sites) were found. Surprisingly, culture was found to exert no moderating effect. This paper contributes more generalized knowledge to social media research literature to the theory with regard to the influence of trust and risk on individual behavior toward SMPs. The knowledge serves as the foundation for future research efforts in social media. Implications for practice are discussed.     

Social media in conflicts and crises

ABSTRACT

The growing importance of social media in conflicts and crises is accompanied by an ever-increasing research interest in the crisis informatics field in order to identify potential benefits and develop measures against the technology’s abuse. This special issue sets out to give an overview of current research on the use of social media in conflicts and crises. In doing so, it focuses on both good and malicious aspects of social media and includes a variety of papers of conceptual, theoretical and empirical nature. In six sections, the special issue presents an overview of the field, analytical methods, technical challenges, current advancements and the accepted papers before concluding. Specific topics range from cyber deception over information trustworthiness to mining and near-real-time processing of social media data.     

Platform drifting: When work digitalization hijacks its spirit

Organizations are increasingly digitalizing the work associated with information exchange by using enterprise social media. However, social media’s openness to outsider users poses significant challenges to maintaining alignment between social media logic (or platform logic that guides decisions and actions on the platform) and the dominant organizational logic. Through an in-depth, longitudinal, abductive study of three successive social media implementations in a single organization, I explore the process of maintaining (or losing) social media alignment and its long-term consequences on the nature of the work. The paper shows that digitalization exposes the work to continuous adjustment within and across three elements of digital work: digital infrastructure work (embracing new uses of the platform at the user level), digital strategy work (redesigning governance policies), and aligning work (fitting uses with the platform logic underlying digital work). The findings show that despite initial social media alignment, through continuous coevolution of these three elements, the platform logic underlying digital community work eventually drifted away from supporting the organization’s original logic of cohesion to supporting an alternative logic of inclusivity. Accordingly, a process model of platform drifting has been developed. By taking a closer look at actual practices, the paper contributes to digital work research by identifying distinct elements of digital work involved in social media (mis)alignment and illustrates the profound, long-term consequences of social media on the nature of the work.     

Cyber-volunteering: Social media affordances in fulfilling NGO social missions

Cyber-volunteering behavior through social media is becoming popular among nongovernmental organization (NGO) members. Cyber-volunteering activities have become more aggressive with the availability of social media in recent years. The objective of this paper is to discuss voluntary behavior in fulfilling NGO social missions through social media usage based on affordance theory. There is substantial literature discussing social media affordances in the context of enterprise organization, but there has been less literature discussing the activities of NGOs in social media. Hence, seven key affordances derived from the enterprise organization were used in the context of NGO working behavior, visibility, editability, persistence, virtual collaboration, synthetic representation, individualized, and collective. This research applies a qualitative methodology using semi-structured interviews with 25 NGO members from seven selected Islamic NGOs in Malaysia that are active in different fields of Islamic education. The interviews focus on social media affordances that have influenced the execution of social missions in the NGOs. Data was analyzed using thematic coding based on the seven identified key social media affordances. The results suggest that the social media affordances related to cyber-volunteering are achieved through promoting, training, fundraising, knowledge sharing, and problem-solving activities. These affordances are highly influenced by cyber-volunteering behavior through work culture and personal privacy. The collective, individualized, and visibility affordances are most associated with cyber-volunteering behavior, followed by persistence, virtual collaboration, and editability, and synthetic representation is found to be the least.     

Sticks,stones and Facebook accounts: What violence outreach workers know about social media and urban-based gang violence in Chicago

Recent research has identified a relatively new trend among youth (12–24) living in violent urban neighborhoods. These youth use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to brag about violence, make threats, recruit gang members and to plan criminal activity known as Internet banging. Studies have typically examined youth communication by mining data on social media and surveying or interviewing youth about their social media behaviors. However, there is little to no empirical research that examines how adults who work directly with youth in violent, urban neighborhoods shape, conceptualize and intervene in urban-based youth violence facilitated by social media. Utilizing qualitative interviews with violence outreach workers, we asked outreach workers to describe how youth use social media and the extent to which they use social media to intervene in crisis that emerge in violent Chicago neighborhoods. Participants describe youth behavior that included taunting rival gangs, posturing and boasting about violent events. We also found evidence that social media enhanced crisis intervention work in violent neighborhoods when coupled with close, trusting relationships with youth.     

Opening organizational learning in crisis management: On the affordances of social media

Research on the role of social media in crisis management has led to a deeper understanding of their affordances. This research, however, is fragmented, with a primary focus on crisis response. We lack a clear conceptualization of the affordances that social media offer by learning from them to prepare strategically for crises. Based on a systematic review of 128 papers, we inductively build a framework of social media affordances for organizational learning in crisis management. We discuss their role and interplay in strategic crisis management, focusing on organizational crisis learning, and outline avenues for future research based on this foundation.     

因果关系及其在社会媒体上的应用研究综述

诸如物理学、行为学、社会学和生物学中许多研究的中心问题是对因果的阐述,即变量或事件之间直接作用关系的阐述。由于人们的日常行为和语言越来越多地映射到互联网上,或者根本就是互联网引起了大量新的行为和语言,致使社会媒体上存在大量的因果问题。与相关关系分析相比,社会媒体上的因果关系分析更加必要和迫切,首先,任何相关性的背后都隐藏着因果关系;其次,相关性分析得到的结论有时是不可靠的甚至是错误的;再次,基于相关性的方法无法用于管理、控制和干预变量或事件。论述了因果关系分析的必要性、重要性和社会媒体上存在的因果问题;综述了目前的因果分析与推断的基本理论、存在的问题和研究现状;通过比较现有因果关系分析的研究思路,预测未来的研究方向和因果分析理论及方法在社会媒体上的应用。     

基于Web of Science的社会化媒体环境下社区发现研究综述

社会化媒体是一种新型在线媒体,发现并研究其中的社区有利于揭示社会化媒体环境下信息传播与共享的特点和规律。该文基于Web of Science检索得到的文献数据,使用CiteSpace、SATI、UCINET等科学知识图谱软件,从共被引文献、关键词及突现词等角度构建了社会化媒体环境下有关社区发现的科学知识图谱,并对该领域的研究现状、知识演进过程、研究热点和研究前沿进行了可视化分析。     

An investigation of the impact of media capabilities and extraversion on social presence and user satisfaction

A significant body of research examines media use and user satisfaction, and these studies are mostly focused on the choice of a specific media. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of media capabilities and individual characteristics on social presence, and the subsequent impact on user satisfaction. Drawing on Media Synchronicity Theory, we propose a research model that identifies five physical media capabilities as the determinants of social presence (i.e. the degree to which individuals feel connected to others in online communities), and we then assess the effect of social presence on user satisfaction. Our results suggest that (1) certain media capabilities and (2) extraversion have a positive impact on whether individuals feel connected to others in online communities (i.e. computer-mediated communications). In addition, our moderation analysis shows that extraversion affects social presence differently across communication tasks, suggesting that social presence is a result of the dynamic interaction between media capabilities, the individual, and the task. These results should be of interest to organisations that rely upon virtual meetings to accomplish tasks, as well as to media developers who seek media capabilities that promote a feeling of connected communication between individuals in virtual space.