Being a Serial Transnational Activist

Transnational activism endures as a political practice turning a mirror onto the world's powerbrokers. We analyse a variety of transnational activism best characterized as serial by virtue of an observed systematic time and border‐spanning commitment to protest communication. Following statistical disambiguation of a dataset of 2.5 million unique Twitter users, we identified a subset of exceptionally prolific communicators and interviewed 21 of them. We show that a noted prominence in networked communication of otherwise unremarkable Twitter users may be an upshot of purposive strategies intended to publicize, support or help orchestrate collective action. Accordingly, we propose the term “engagement compass” to address the relationship between activists' life‐patterns and their personal investment in protest over time.     

Urban Social Media Demographics: An Exploration of Twitter Use in Major American Cities

This article explores intersections between place, race/ethnicity, and gender amongst American Twitter users and makes an argument that studying the intensity of tweets provides insights into how and why particular groups tweet. Given recent events in American political life such as the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri and the reactions by young, urban African Americans on Twitter, understanding the role of race, place, gender, and age is important. We observed the time between tweets of urban American Twitter users and explored whether the medium may be providing traditionally marginalized groups, such as young Black men, with potential avenues for mobilizing communication and access to resources.     

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.     

Effects of form and motion on judgments of social robots׳ animacy,likability, trustworthiness and unpleasantness

One of robot designers׳ main goals is to make robots as sociable as possible. Aside from improving robots׳ actual social functions, a great deal of effort is devoted to making them appear lifelike. This is often achieved by endowing the robot with an anthropomorphic body. However, psychological research on the perception of animacy suggests another crucial factor that might also contribute to attributions of animacy: movement characteristics. In the current study, we investigated how the combination of bodily appearance and movement characteristics of a robot can alter people׳s attributions of animacy, likability, trustworthiness, and unpleasantness. Participants played games of Tic-Tac-Toe against a robot which (1) either possessed a human form or did not, and (2) either exhibited smooth, lifelike movement or did not. Naturalistic motion was judged to be more animate than mechanical motion, but only when the robot resembled a human form. Naturalistic motion improved likeability regardless of the robot׳s appearance. Finally, a robot with a human form was rated as more disturbing when it moved naturalistically. Robot designers should be aware that movement characteristics play an important role in promoting robots׳ apparent animacy.     

The Double‐Edged Sword: The Effects of Journalists' Social Media Activities on Audience Perceptions of Journalists and Their News Products

As social media become popular news platforms, journalists and news organizations have been keen to capitalize on their potential to build and maintain audiences. However, little is known about the extent to which these efforts may have adverse implications. Based on normative theories, the present study investigates the influence of journalists' social media activities (specifically, self‐disclosure and interaction with other users) on audience perceptions of journalists. An experiment (N = 267) revealed that: Although both journalists' self‐disclosure and interaction positively influenced audience perceptions of the journalists in the personal dimension, interaction negatively influenced audience perceptions in the professional dimension; and the perceptions transferred to perceptions of news products, thereby mediating the relationship between journalists' social media activities and audience news perceptions.     

Emerging From the Cocoon? Revisiting the Tele‐Cocooning Hypothesis in the Smartphone Era

The tele‐cocooning hypothesis posits that mobile communication increases interaction with communication rich ties, while simultaneously weakening interaction with communication weak ties. In this study, we demonstrate how smartphones can be used to mitigate tele‐cocooning behavior by stimulating interaction with communication weak ties. Using a smartphone application to collect non‐identifying mobile communication log data, we conducted a field experiment with 193 Japanese participants. The treatment consisted of onscreen reminders designed to stimulate interaction with communication weak ties. The results indicate that the treatment promoted the activation of communication weak ties and the acquisition of information through those ties, suggesting that smartphones can be utilized to promote access to social capital.     

Social Media and Trust during the Gezi Protests in Turkey

The Gezi Protests, an environmental sit‐in that turned into a social movement in Turkey, is often compared to the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement with regard to the importance attributed to social media. This paper examines the role that social media played during the protests, with an emphasis on how trust was built and maintained among the protestors. In‐depth interviews with 21 active Gezi protestors revealed that social trust and system trust were intertwined in actual practices. On one side, technological affordances worked as an interface that facilitated social identification, which helped in trusting the person behind the information. On the other side, technological affordances themselves invited different levels of trust, subject to both physical constraints and technological barriers.     

Gaming Social Capital: Exploring Civic Value in Multiplayer Video Games

Recent research suggests that social interactions in video games may lead to the development of community bonding and prosocial attitudes. Building on this line of research, a national survey of U.S. adults finds that gamers who develop ties with a community of fellow gamers possess gaming social capital, a new gaming‐related community construct that is shown to be a positive antecedent in predicting both face‐to‐face social capital and civic participation.     

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.