Do Men Advance Faster Than Women? Debunking the Gender Performance Gap in Two Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Prior research on digital games illustrates a perceived gender gap in participation and performance, suggesting men as playing more and better than women. This article challenges the gender gap using longitudinal behavioral data of men and women in 2 MMOs in the United States and China. Results show that women advance at least as fast as men do in both games. Thus, perceived gender‐based performance disparities seem to result from factors that are confounded with gender (i.e., amount of play), not player gender itself. We conclude that the stereotype of female players as inferior is not only false, but also a potential cause for unequal participation in digital gaming.     

Driving a Wedge Between Evidence and Beliefs: How Online Ideological News Exposure Promotes Political Misperceptions

This article has 2 goals: to provide additional evidence that exposure to ideological online news media contributes to political misperceptions, and to test 3 forms this media‐effect might take. Analyses are based on representative survey data collected during the 2012 U.S. presidential election (N = 1,004). Panel data offer persuasive evidence that biased news site use promotes inaccurate beliefs, while cross‐sectional data provide insight into the nature of these effects. There is no evidence that exposure to ideological media reduces awareness of politically unfavorable evidence, though in some circumstances biased media do promote misunderstandings of it. The strongest and most consistent influence of ideological media exposure is to encourage inaccurate beliefs regardless of what consumers know of the evidence.     

Who creates Trends in Online Social Media: The Crowd or Opinion Leaders?

Internet slang words can very quickly become ubiquitous because of social memes and viral online content. Weibo, a Twitter‐like service in China, demonstrates that the adoption of popular Internet slang undergoes 2 distinct peaks in its temporal evolution, in which the former is relatively much lower than the latter. An in‐depth comparison of the diffusion of these different peaks suggests that popular attention in the early stage of propagation results in large‐scale coverage, while the participation of opinion leaders at the early stage only leads to minor popularity. Our empirical results question the conventional influentials hypothesis and provide some insights for marketing practice and influence maximization in social networks.     

Media Niche of Electronic Communication Channels in Friendship: A Meta‐Analysis

The current landscape of communication technologies is characterized by a wide variety of choices. As each medium provides different affordances, each may occupy a different niche and be used in different relationships. Drawing on the theory of the niche, we did a meta‐analysis involving 27 effect sizes from 22 independent samples to test the correlation between media selection/use and friendship closeness. Results showed that the 5 communication channels filled 2 different friendship closeness niches. Mobile phone calls and texting had stronger positive correlations with friendship closeness than instant messaging, social network sites, and online gaming. Culture, but not gender, moderated some of these correlations: Friendship closeness had a stronger positive association with SNS use and online gaming in collectivist cultures.     

Retracted: Antecedents and Consequences of Gender Swapping in Online Games

This study examines the reasons underlying gender swapping and its impacts on online gaming behavior. While previous studies considered gender swapping to be an abnormal or rare exception in one's self‐presentation, this study hypothesized that people swap genders as a rational choice based on practical benefits. An online survey was conducted with 318 male players of MMORPGs in Korea. Players swapped gender in games to gain benefits from other players under the condition of anonymity rather than to represent their own gender identity. Men playing female avatars displayed more socially amiable behaviors conventionally characterized as more feminine. Moreover, players were more willing to purchase virtual goods to decorate their gender swapped avatars, mediated by their emotional attachment to their avatar.     

Evaluating the Wisdom of Strangers: The Perceived Credibility of Online Consumer Reviews on Yelp

This study examined the effects of review valence, the reviewer profile, and the receiver's familiarity with the platform (user/nonuser) on the perceived credibility of a review on Yelp.com and on the receiver's attitude toward the reviewed object. The results demonstrated a difference in cue‐taking between users and nonusers. For users, there was an interaction effect of 2 profile cues (number of friends and number of reviews) on competence. Users interpreted the cues in combination, whereas non‐users were not influenced by them. The friends × reviews × platform familiarity interaction indirectly affected attitude through competence. Further, review valence was positively associated with perceived credibility and attitude. The findings support and extend the social information processing theory and cue combination literature.     

In Face on Facebook: Brooklyn's Drag Community and Sociotechnical Practices of Online Communication

Recently, Brooklyn has seen an explosion of drag culture, with dozens of performers taking the stage in any given week. Social media plays a vital role for members of this community, simultaneously allowing self‐promotion and community solidarity. Drawing on focus group interviews, we analyze the communication practices of Brooklyn's drag performers, examining both the advantages and drawbacks of social media platforms. Using conceptual frameworks of faceted identity and relational labor, our discussion focuses on affordances and constraints of multifaceted identity in online contexts and theories of seamful design. We contend that by analyzing online communication practices of drag performers, it becomes possible to identify gaps between embedded ideologies of mainstream social media technologies and the localized values of outsider communities.     

智能化网络考试监控系统开发

近年来随着高等教育事业的快速发展,为了节约教育成本、提高教学质量和教育的信息化程度,网络化、无纸化考试在高校得到了快速推广。但由于计算机网络是一个开放的系统,考试中电子文档资料可以十分隐秘地被复制和在学生间传递,造成很多严重的作弊行为。如何防范当前网络考试中考生的作弊行为及保障考试结果的公平性成为了急需解决的重要问题。本论文所开发的智能化网络考试监控系统克服了现有考试监控系统的不足,将各种网络考试实时监控信息机地结合在一起,实现了作弊行为检测、作弊行为发现及作弊行为报警三位一体的立体化管理。同时,所开发的网络考试监控系统独立于现有各网络考试系统,在不影响现有考试系统正常工作的情况下,实现了考试作弊行为的有效监控,使其具有良好的可推广性及可维护性。     

Exploring Virtual Librarianship: Second Life Library 2.0

ABSTRACT

In April 2006, Alliance Library System and Online Programming for All Libraries partnered to start the Second Life Library 2.0 in the online world Second Life and in August 2006 purchased an island on the Teen grid of Teen Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world, a descendant of multiplayer online games. Educational institutions have recently been drawn into Second Life's robust economy and vibrant cultural life. The Second Life Library 2.0 works with librarians from around the world and with other educational partners such as TechSoup, WorldBridges, and the New Media Consortium. Second Life Library 2.0 provides “traditional” library services such as ready reference, book discussions, and search assistance, but, at heart, it explores what it means to be a virtual library in a virtual world.     

Analyzing settings for social identity management on Social Networking Sites: Classification,current state,and proposed developments

The rising prevalence of Social Networking Sites (SNS) and their usage in multiple contexts poses new privacy challenges and increasingly prompts users to manage their online identity. To address privacy threats stemming from interacting with other users on SNS, effective Social Identity Management (SIdM) is a key requirement. It refers to the deliberate and targeted disclosure of personal attribute values to a subset of one's contacts or other users on the SNS. Protection against other entities such as the site operator itself or advertisers and application programmers is not covered by SIdM, but could be incorporated in further refinement steps. Features and settings to perform SIdM have been proposed and subsequently implemented partly by some SNS. Yet, these are often isolated solutions that lack integration into a reference framework that states the requirements for successfully managing one's identity. In this article, such a reference framework of existing and desired SIdM settings is derived from identity theory, literature analysis, and existing SNS. Based thereupon, we examine the SIdM capabilities of prevalent SNS and highlight possible improvements. Lastly, we reason about developing a metric to objectively compare the capability of SNS in regards to their support for SIdM.