Coping with information in social media: The effects of network structure and knowledge on perception of information value

The explosive growth of social media has intrigued many scholars to inquire into why people willingly share information with others. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to how people determine which information they share in the networked environment. In this study, a 2 (network density – dense vs. sparse) × 2 (knowledge – expert vs. novice) × 3 (information valence – negative vs. neutral vs. positive) online experiment was performed to examine how the three factors interact and cross over in shaping individuals’ perceptions of the value of information for themselves and for others in the network. Results show that individuals’ perceptions of information value are influenced not just by their level of knowledge, but also by how the network environment is structured. Implications for the findings are discussed.     

Predicting social cues during online discussions: Effects of evaluations and knowledge content

This study examined whether evaluations (agreements, disagreements), knowledge content (new ideas, justifications), or social cues (SCs) in recent messages affected a current message’s positive or negative SC during asynchronous, online discussions. Using statistical discourse analysis, we modeled 894 messages by 183 participants on 60 high school mathematics topics (typically eight people posted per topic) on a mathematics problem solving website not connected to any class or school. Results showed that recent agreements increased the likelihood of positive SC, whereas justifications reduced it. Disagreements increased the likelihood of negative SC, whereas new ideas reduced it. Meanwhile, recent positive or negative SCs did not affect the likelihood of a subsequent SC. Together, these results suggest that judicious use of positive SCs rather than negative SCs during disagreements can help students both construct knowledge and maintain social relationships.     

Investigating online information disclosure: Effects of information relevance,trust and risk

Organizations rely on customer information to design new products and offer new services. However, people should not share their personal information online. We produced and tested a model of information disclosure. While prior work focused on the effects of trust and its relationship to risk in determining intent to disclose information, we assumed that information relevance was a critical antecedent to disclosure and that both relevance and trust could alleviate perceptions of risk associated with disclosure, thereby increasing peoples’ intentions to disclose information. We tested our model using 264 subjects in an experimental setting. The results showed the importance of relevance on intentions to disclose information – allowing us to draw implications for practice about voluntary information disclosure in online settings.     

Depth perception in shuffleboard: Depth cues effect on depth perception in virtual and augmented reality system

The virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications have been widely used in a variety of fields; one of the key requirements in a VR or AR system is to understand how users perceive depth in the virtual environment and AR. Three different graphics depth cues are designed in shuffleboard to explore what kind of graphics depth cues are beneficial for depth perception. We also conduct a depth‐matching experiment to compare performance in VR and AR systems using an optical see‐through head‐mounted display (HMD). The result shows that the absolute error increases as the distance becomes farther. Analysis from the inverse of distance shows that box depth cues have a significant effect on depth perception, while the points depth cues and line depth cues have no significant effect. The error in diopter in AR experiment is lower than that in VR experiment. Participants in the AR experiment under medium illuminance condition have less error than those under low and high illuminance conditions. Men have less error than women in certain display conditions, but the advantage disappears when there is a strong depth cue. Besides, there is no significant effect of completion time on depth perception.     

Design and analysis of depth cues on depth perception in interactive mixed reality simulation systems

Implementing an interactive mixed reality simulation system is an economical and risk-free method for skill training. However, research to enhance the accuracy of mixed reality simulation has always been a challenge. One of the key indicators of a simulation's accuracy is the user's depth perception. Adding depth cues to the simulation scene can effectively increase the accuracy of depth perception. Therefore, in this study, we designed five depth cues to find the one most beneficial for depth perception: (1) depth bar, (2) location ball, (3) fixed window, (4) 3D wireframe, and (5) movable silhouettes. These depth cues were tested using an experimental system with two sets of experimental settings. The first experiment compared the five depth cues at five different viewing distances and showed that the movable silhouettes benefited depth perception accuracy the most. The second experiment compared depth perception accuracies among three different horizontal tilt settings, showing that depth perception accuracy is dependent on the horizontal tilt. Furthermore, different depth perception accuracies were obtained with and without depth cues, proving that the effects from the horizontal tilts were independent of depth cues. The results of these studies provide references for designing interactive mixed reality simulation systems.     

Extent of private information disclosure on online social networks: An exploration of Facebook mobile phone users

The present study adopts the Communication Privacy Management theory and investigates the factors that influence the extent of private information disclosure of Facebook mobile phone users. Using a sample size of 488 adult mobile phone users, the study further investigates the differential impact of age on the extent of private information disclosure. Results from the logistic regressions run reveal that use of smartphones to access social networking sites, use of multiple social networks, and being female decrease the likelihood of private information disclosure. In addition, usability problems increase the likelihood of information disclosure by older adults. The analyses show no association between perceived benefit and private information disclosure.     

Twittering the Little India Riot: Audience responses,information behavior and the use of emotive cues

In crises and disasters, social media not only facilitates mobilization, sharing of critical information, but also enables people to watch and participate as the crisis unfolds. Participation is now much more open to those beyond the immediately affected: the victims, the rescue workers and other stakeholders. This paper reports on a study of tweets collected during and after a rare occurrence of a violent riot in Singapore, illustrating the evolution of crisis responses, emotive cues information seeking and sharing behavior on Twitter over the lifecycle of the riot. Evidence of orientation of responses from the self towards the community as the riot progresses was found, contributing to ongoing research on community building in crises. Emotive cues were most dominant in the first hour of the riot, with various responses fluctuating over the riot's lifecycle. Emotive cues predicted most responses except for tweets that were reasoning about the riot, and also had an effect on informational tweets. Retweets drove most activity, and users also shared information and formed communal dialogue within their own networks. Despite the dominance of negative emotive cues and responses to the crisis, positive tweets – those singing praises and thanking stakeholders – were more likely to be retweeted.     

Effects of social support and personality on emotional disclosure on Facebook and in real life

This paper focuses on the roles of personality and social support in affecting the extent of emotional disclosure in social media (SM) and compares them to those in face-to-face encounters. Specifically, we consider the effects of the Big Five personality traits and perceptions of social support from friends, significant others, and family on the extent of sharing positive and negative emotions on Facebook (FB) vs. real life (RL). The data are collected via an online survey of a broad demographic range of FB users. Our findings suggest that certain personality traits (extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness), as well as perceived social support from friends, are significantly related to the disclosure of positive emotions on FB. We also report and discuss the differences between drivers of emotional disclosure in SM and RL, as well as offer suggestions for future research.     

Recognizing CEO personality and its impact on business performance: Mining linguistic cues from social media

Upper echelons theory suggests that CEO personality will influence organizational performance. However, difficulty in measuring CEO personality restrains related research. We capture linguistic cues CEOs leaving on social media and recognize their personality by text mining. To our knowledge, it is the first study introducing social media text mining approaches into the research stream that empirically inquires and extends upper echelons theory. Then, we investigate the CEO personality’s impact on both operational and financial performance. Results show that CEO Extraversion, Emotional Stability, and Agreeableness improve Cost Efficiency and Profitability, while CEO Conscientiousness reduces them. CEO Openness to Experience negatively influences Profitability, and all facets of CEO personality improve Employee Productivity except for CEO Conscientiousness. The contribution of our research is multi-sided: (1). methodologically, we introduce a text mining approach to measure CEO personality; (2). theoretically, we provide empirical evidence for upper echelons theory; (3). practically, our results help companies evaluate CEO candidates from a personality perspective.     

Expressing emotions in blogs: The role of textual paralinguistic cues in online venting and social sharing posts

Textual paralanguage cues (TPC) have been signaled as effective emotion transmitters online. Though several studies have investigated their properties and occurrence, there remains a gap concerning their communicative impact within specific psychological processes, such as the social sharing of emotion (SSE, Rimé, 2009). This study content-analyzed Live Journal blogposts for the occurrence of TPC in three phases of online SSE: initiation, feedback and repost. We compared these to TPC on a second type of emotional expression, emotional venting. Based on Social Information processing theory (SIP, Walther, 1992), and on the Emotional Mimicry in Context (EMC, Hess & Fischer, 2013) framework, we study predictive relationships in TPC usage in our phased model of online SSE. Results showed that TPC prevailed in SSE blogposts and strongly dominated in emotional venting posts. TPC was more common in affective feedback than cognitive. Moreover, the presence of tactile affective cues (i.e., hugs, kisses) in the initiation post predicted their presence in affective feedback. Results lend support to the idea that TPC are used in socio-contextual ways in online SSE and particularly extrapolate certain FtF nonverbal behaviors, such as the provision of socio-affective touch.     

Motivational factors of information exchange in social information spaces

Research has shown that there are many barriers that hinder people to participate in online information exchange. We provide an overview about the research done so far and classify the found motivational factors. With two empirical studies we test the simultaneous impact of these factors in order to identify the most important ones. Study 1, a qualitative interview study with potential users investigates key motivational factors for information exchange. Study 2, a quantitative study with users of an established social information space relates all motivational factors to subjective and objective measures of participation in information exchange. We found that internal motivation, gain of prestige, quality and quantity of content and procedural fairness are the strongest motivational factors supporting participation, whereas time and effort requirements for contribution and fear of personal feedback are the strongest factors hindering contribution. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

The contribution of visual and proprioceptive information to the perception of leaning in a dynamic motorcycle simulator

Compared with driving or flight simulation, little is known about self-motion perception in riding simulation. The goal of this study was to examine whether or not continuous roll motion supports the sensation of leaning into bends in dynamic motorcycle simulation. To this end, riders were able to freely tune the visual scene and/or motorcycle simulator roll angle to find a pattern that matched their prior knowledge. Our results revealed idiosyncrasy in the combination of visual and proprioceptive information. Some subjects relied more on the visual dimension, but reported increased sickness symptoms with the visual roll angle. Others relied more on proprioceptive information, tuning the direction of the visual scenery to match three possible patterns. Our findings also showed that these two subgroups tuned the motorcycle simulator roll angle in a similar way. This suggests that sustained inertially specified roll motion have contributed to the sensation of leaning in spite of the occurrence of unexpected gravito-inertial stimulation during the tilt. Several hypotheses are discussed.

Practitioner Summary: Self-motion perception in motorcycle simulation is a relatively new research area. We examined how participants combined visual and proprioceptive information. Findings revealed individual differences in the visual dimension. However, participants tuned the simulator roll angle similarly, supporting the hypothesis that sustained inertially specified roll motion contributes to a leaning sensation.     

A methodology for estimating the value of privacy in information disclosure systems

In many types of information systems, users face an implicit tradeoff between disclosing personal information and receiving benefits, such as discounts by an electronic commerce service that requires users to divulge some personal information. While these benefits are relatively measurable, the value of privacy involved in disclosing the information is much less tangible, making it hard to design and evaluate information systems that manage personal information. Meanwhile, existing methods to assess and measure the value of privacy, such as self-reported questionnaires, are notoriously unrelated of real–world behavior. To overcome this obstacle, we propose a methodology called VOPE (Value of Privacy Estimator), which relies on behavioral economics' Prospect Theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) and valuates people's privacy preferences in information disclosure scenarios. VOPE is based on an iterative and responsive methodology in which users take or leave a transaction that includes a component of information disclosure. To evaluate the method, we conduct an empirical experiment (n = 195), estimating people's privacy valuations in electronic commerce transactions. We report on the convergence of estimations and validate our results by comparing the values to theoretical projections of existing results (Tsai, Egelman, Cranor, & Acquisti, 2011), and to another independent experiment that required participants to rank the sensitivity of information disclosure transactions. Finally, we discuss how information systems designers and regulators can use VOPE to create and to oversee systems that balance privacy and utility.     

Social impacts in social media: An examination of perceived truthfulness and sharing of information

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media display the combined opinion of users as collective opinion. The purpose of the work reported here was to examine how collective opinion might influence the perceived truthfulness and the sharing likelihood of health-related statements on social media. Experiment 1 revealed that, when evaluating the truthfulness of a statement, participants adopted the collective truthfulness rating associated with the statement. Similarly, Experiment 2 showed that the likelihood that participants would share a statement followed the collective sharing likelihood associated with the statement. These social impacts were extensive, taking place for statements perceived as true, debatable, and false. These results contribute new insights into how people perceive and share information on social media as well as how collective opinion might affect the quality of information on social media.     

A social network as information: The effect of system generated reports of connectedness on credibility on Twitter

Social media have gained increased usage rapidly for a variety of reasons. News and information is one such reason. The current study examines how system-generated cues available in social media impact perceptions of a source’s credibility. Participants were asked to view one of six mock Twitter.com pages that varied both the number of followers and the ratio between followers and follows on the page and report their perceived source credibility. Data indicate that curvilinear effects for number of followers exist, such that having too many or too few connections results in lower judgments of expertise and trustworthiness. Having a narrow gap between the number of followers and follows also led to increased judgments of competence. Implications of these findings are discussed, along with limitations of the current study and directions for future research.     

The key role of relevance in personalized advertisement: Examining its impact on perceptions of privacy invasion,self-awareness,and continuous use intentions

Internet advertising has become increasingly personalized as advertisers tailor content to individual users. However, this has led consumers to be concerned about their privacy. Based on rational choice theory and self-awareness theory, the current research explores the role of relevance in personalized advertisements and examines its impact on perceptions of privacy invasion, self-awareness, and subsequent continuous use intentions of personalized advertising. Analysis of survey data from 386 online users found that although privacy invasion perceptions are negatively related to continuous use intentions, perceived advertisement relevance mitigates consumer's privacy concerns. Perceived relevance was also found to be positively related to consumer's continuous use intentions through the mediation of self-awareness. This research identifies and highlights the importance of relevance in the tension between privacy concerns and personalized advertisements.     

Communication in virtual environments: The influence of spatial cues and gender on verbal behavior

As communication technologies continue to evolve, more people will engage in virtual social interactions. With this trend comes an increasing need for research on behavior within virtual worlds. This study contributes to that agenda by focusing on the influence of physical attributes of a virtual setting and gender on verbal behavior expressed by mixed-gender dyads in a virtual world. Computerized text analyses revealed linguistic differences as a function of both the physical and social complexity of virtual settings and gender. The latter differences included both quantitative and qualitative features of written communication. These results add important new discoveries to the literature on virtual psychology and highlight the value of using text analysis tools to investigate virtual interactions.     

“With a little help from new friends”: Boosting information cascades in social networks based on link injection

We investigate information cascades in the context of viral marketing applications. Recent research has identified that communities in social networks may hinder cascades. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel method for injecting social links in a social network, aiming at boosting the spread of information cascades. Unlike the proposed approach, existing link prediction methods do not consider the optimization of information cascades as an explicit objective. In our proposed method, the injected links are being predicted in a collaborative-filtering fashion, based on factorizing the adjacency matrix that represents the structure of the social network. Our method controls the number of injected links to avoid an “aggressive” injection scheme that may compromise the experience of users. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method by examining real data sets from social networks and several additional factors. Our results indicate that the proposed scheme can boost information cascades in social networks and can operate as a “people recommendations” strategy complementary to currently applied methods that are based on the number of common neighbors (e.g., “friend of friend”) or on the similarity of user profiles.     

The use of information technology among young adults--experience, attitudes and health beliefs

The aim of this study was to explore attitudes, coherence and health beliefs among young adults, related to their use and experience of information technology (IT). A qualitative approach was used and the data were collected through individual thematised interviews with 25 young IT users, aged 18–24. The interviews were analysed in line with the grounded theory method with a constructivist approach. The main findings were the young adults’ experience of the two sides of being social, efficient and independent here and now. They described almost unlimited opportunities in connection with IT, but they also had misgivings, and perceived risks regarding IT use. Feelings of freedom and being efficient were countered by feelings of restrictions on living space and of intangibility. Knowledge concerning these attitudes, coherence and health beliefs can be considered when designing epidemiological and ergonomic studies aimed at risk identification.     

Image and video disclosure of substance use on social media websites

The present study examines young adults’ use of social media websites, such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, to post public images and videos of themselves depicting alcohol consumption, inebriated behavior, or recreational marijuana use. A content analysis revealed that the majority of image and video representations of alcohol consumption depicted females in social gatherings while images and videos depicting marijuana use depicted solitary males. Videos typically were viewed frequently and gained positive ratings. Among a sample of college students, one-third of participants reported having posted a picture depicting substance use on a social networking site, with 97% aware that others engage in this phenomenon. Students’ perceptions of alcohol-related postings were generally positive or seen as a matter of individual choice while marijuana-related postings were generally viewed more negatively.