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This paper (1) draws on a review of the literature on instructional video to map onto one model of professional development the learning goals and reflective activities that are most likely to develop the potential of instructional video to change beliefs and develop critical consciousness, and (2) provides anecdotal evidence to explore the potential of instructional video in an asset-focused, transformative, and responsive model of professional development in culturally responsive teaching. The paper concludes that instructional video can be an effective tool for professional development in culturally responsive teaching because people often need to see transformations in teaching and learning before they can believe such transformations are possible. PAPER TWO: "LISTEN THEN, OR, RATHER, ANSWER": CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO SOCRATIC EDUCATION. The popularity of Jacques Ranciere in recent work in educational philosophy has rejuvenated discussion of the merits and weaknesses of Socratic education, both in Plato's dialogues and in invocations of Socrates in contemporary educational practice. This paper explores the implications of this trend through comparing Ranciere's educational thought to an analysis of Socratic education in Plato's Republic. The paper also draws on the educational literature on Socratic education to provide further context to explore the usefulness of both Ranciere and Socrates for contemporary teaching. PAPER THREE: PEOPLE MAKE REVOLUTIONS, NOT TECHNOLOGY: THE ROLE OF FACEBOOK, TWEETS, AND TEXTING IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF YOUTH ACTIVISM. This paper explores one teen's experience using social media to organize a high school walkout. Jonathan Ortiz learned about education budget cuts from his teacher, and leveraged social media and texting as political organizing tools. The paper explores what it meant for Jonathan to develop as a youth activist during a time when social media and texting have made organizing faster and more efficient. The paper concludes (1) face-to-face relationships provided the most impactful developmental opportunities for Jonathan as he came of age as a youth activist, and (2) social media may be more likely to support the development of youth activism when adult mentors intervene with strategies of facilitation and teaching. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This research study was meant to examine the extent to which public relations messaging in select religious-affiliated private higher education institutions align with the institution's individual mission statements. Each institution was explored as an individual case. The cases were comprised by examining three religiously-affiliated higher education institutions in New York State: Canisius College, Niagara University, and St. Bonaventure University. All three institutions were selected because of shared similar characteristics/demographics. The data collected from each institution was publicly available either from the institution's website or their stated, respective social media platforms. Data from the 2016 calendar year was collected for each institution and analyzed by descriptive coding and thematic coding methodologies with an inductive analysis based on grounded theory. Each institution's data was analyzed independently as a case study and then results were contrasted amongst the three cases. The datasets were also analyzed by three different, independent coders/investigators, proving intercoder reliability and validity, and the results from each compared and merged to comprise the results for each case. Institution 1, Canisius College, had the most content related to their mission statement, with Institution 3, St. Bonaventure University, trailing closely behind. Institution 2, Niagara University, had the least amount of communication activity related to their mission statement. Remember, these results are based upon how the researcher viewed and analyzed the data. The data also made some interesting indications. The first indication is that a majority of the messaging for each institution does not align with their respective mission statements. As good stewards of communication, relationship building, and leadership within an organization, the public relations professional should be keenly aware of and attempting to make an alignment between external communication and the mission of the organization. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

In the United States, the internet is a vital resource for LGBTQ+ youth to meet their sexual and reproductive health information needs, especially those who cannot receive necessary information from family, healthcare providers, and classrooms. In this dissertation, I present three papers that connect content moderation policies and their impacts with access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health information. Participants in all three studies developed goals and expectations for social media, which became difficult to achieve in their respective information contexts. Through ingenuity, persistence, and algorithmic folk theorization, participants developed strategies to resist platform policies and attempt to achieve their goals. This dissertation's first paper is an interview study further exploring how LGBTQ+ youth seek sexual and reproductive health information online. LGBTQ+ youth participants occupied existing online spaces not explicitly related to health information but would naturally encounter relevant information online in these spaces. These information encounters led participants to shift their information seeking behaviors to intentional sexual health information seeking. Participants explained social media's importance in sexual health and reproductive health information seeking, although many expressed concerns about information credibility. In the second paper, I interviewed healthcare providers and sexual health educators who create sexual and reproductive health content on social media. I explore how experts created accurate health content that users like the LGBTQ+ youth participants might encounter online. Providers and educators overwhelmingly felt that content moderation policies restricted their abilities to share comprehensive and medically accurate sexual and reproductive health information. Participants developed, tested, and shared algorithmic folk theories to make sense of their experiences as content creators. Shadowbanning was a particularly troublesome content moderation experience for participants. For the final paper, I used qualitative surveys and interviews with social media users who experienced content moderation to further understand how they make sense of what they believe to be shadowbanning. Participants used strategies similar to the providers and educators for understanding their content removals and perceived changes in social media engagement and metrics. I propose algorithmic altruism as one such strategy where users collectively understood and resisted how they experienced platform moderation algorithms. Although shadowbanning is difficult to define and platforms typically deny its existence, participants believed it happened to them and used strategies to "prove" that it happened to them. This dissertation extends previous research on content moderation, affordances theories, and algorithmic folk theories. Sexual and reproductive health information on social media provides a unique context for considering how these three research areas coalesce. Social media's imagined affordances influence what participants think they can achieve online. I argue that participants use resistance strategies such as algorithmic folk theories to still use the social media affordances they imagine are possible, especially when experiencing unclear content moderation practices. Opaque content moderation policies shift the burden to users making sense of their online experiences and evading shadowbanning or content removals. In this sexual and reproductive health context, this shift means that providers and educators struggle to share comprehensive and accurate information with potential viewers like LGBTQ+ young people. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The purpose of this paper is to examine how social media influences the decision-making processes of high school principals. Specifically, this study will focus on principals' use of community and stakeholder social media content as data in the information collection step of the decision-making process. The study will evaluate the principals' responses to the researcher's interview, which will focus on how principals interact with social media, the importance principals place on social media, and their personal beliefs regarding social media's place in their decision making as a building leader. Social media has shown itself to be a tool through which educators, students, and school stakeholders can interact. Educational leaders worldwide have embraced social media as a pathway by which information can be shared and educational opportunities can be expanded. Through my experience as a teacher and administrator in multiple schools and school settings, I have witnessed the improvement of educational equity provided by social media through which all socio-economic classes can benefit. What was once a medium for chatting with friends and keeping in touch with out-of-town relatives has matured into an indispensable educational tool that allows educators to maximize the reach of their classroom. Literature will be examined regarding the use of social media by students, teachers, and school central offices. However, the all-encompassing and often instantaneous nature of social media needs to be examined from the perspective of building leaders. This study will utilize Leithwood and Steinbach's (1995) Expert Problem Solving as the theoretical basis for educational leaders' decision making and the influence social media has on this process. High school principals are responsible for dozens of decisions every day. A better understanding of the role social media has in the decision-making processes of high school principals will affect students, teachers, parents, community members, as well as the principals themselves. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

During the past decade, college students have experienced increasing levels of anxiety, depression, and substance use, which impacts both academic performance and daily functioning. At the same time, declining levels of civic engagement among young adults highlights the importance of higher education's explicit goal of fostering the development of civic competencies necessary to engage in a democratic society. Current prevention literature recommends community-level approaches to address college students' psychosocial well-being, and prior research indicates that pedagogical high-impact practices (HIPs) that foster civic development through community-based learning (CBL) have the potential to simultaneously support the psychosocial well-being of students. This dissertation takes the form of three discrete manuscripts drawn from two separate studies that contribute to the scholarship of community-engaged teaching and learning, particularly as it relates to pedagogical practices that support both civic development and psychosocial well-being among college students. The first manuscript centers on the relationship between various types of HIPs involving CBL and the psychosocial well-being of undergraduates with marginalized identities, who have been found to experience the greatest academic and personal benefits through participation in HIPs. The second manuscript examines the case of a specific type of hybrid HIP that integrates CBL with community-based internships (CBIs), utilizing teacher-researcher methodology to identify CBI pedagogical practices that influence the development of undergraduates' civic competences. Finally, the third manuscript focuses on a specific methodological innovation in community-based research (CBR), another type of hybrid CBL HIP. Using social media as a platform for the CBR method called photovoice, this paper explores the experiences of community participants who utilized this approach to photovoice throughout a year-long CBR project that developed through the CBIs examined in the second paper. These research studies were possible due to funding provided by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Bringing Theory to Practice Project (BTtP) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The term social network sites (SNS) is used in this paper to recognize the communication between people that takes place in a network of systems in order to provide social associations. These sites provide a social connection through social media that enables a number of networks and technologies to communicate information for use in educational settings. The researcher chose to conduct a two-part interview series that did determine that these SNS do relate to academic learning. This qualitative research shows a connection to Social Network Theory and the Theory of Connectivism in how students are able to network connections and share knowledge. The case study further determined that these post-secondary students' use social media to communicate, collaborate, support academics, and for basic tools access. There were eighteen secondary theme categories that emerged as a result of axial coding in MAXQDA that filtered into the four primary theme areas. Overall, this case study yielded the most responses being recognized in the area of Social Media to Support Academics that is based on students' perceptions of using social media to support their learning and knowledge acquisition. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between learning modes and the use of social media for learning in undergraduate college students. Social media use among students has continued to grow for the past 10 years, yet, not many have been exposed to using it in an academic setting. The study was guided by Kolb's (1984) Experiential Learning Model, which categorizes learning mode preferences into a cycle of concrete experience (CE), reflective observation (RO), abstract conceptualization (AC), and active experimentation (AE). The non-probability sample included 143 undergraduate students enrolled at a federally-designated Hispanic-serving institution of higher education in South Texas. The study was correlational and retrospective in nature. A paper-based survey instrument was used to collect the data. The results showed that participants aligned most frequently with the concrete experience mode as a predictor of using social media to support learning. Google and YouTube were the most frequently used social media platforms that were utilized passively to search for information to support learning. Participants were least likely to use social media to collaborate with others or create their own content. While passive use of social media can be helpful in gaining academic information, its social aspect should be further explored. Integrating social media use in the classroom may provide the skills students need to fully realize its use as a collaborative and creative tool. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how the application of Systems Engineering tools and techniques can be applied to rapidly process and analyze the vast amounts of data present in social media in order to yield practical knowledge for Command and Control (C2) systems. Design/methodology/approach: Based upon comparative analysis of related literature a conceptual model is proposed and a Systems Engineering trade study conducted for capabilities to predict mass collective action based on social network analysis tools. Findings: The study conducted in the course of this research demonstrates significant relationships between Social Network Analysis (SNA) parameters, which describe Node Influence measured in an online social network, to reported crowd sizes at protest demonstrations. Furthermore, Network Communication variables measured in an online social network were also shown to have significant relationships to reported crowd sizes. It is concluded that while further study of larger datasets is needed, this avenue of approach is warranted and could lead to an operational online social media radar sensor system. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This Executive Position Paper describes the findings of a study investigating the utility of Facebook Groups in fostering community among participants in the Delaware INBRE and EPSCoR undergraduate research internship programs. In the first phase of the study, findings from the existing evaluation of the programs and themes from the literature were drawn upon to design a mock-up Facebook group that could be used during the internships. In the second phase of the study, research mentors, program leadership, and selected past student interns were interviewed about the current state of the internship programs and offered the chance to comment on the design and utility of the mock-up Facebook group design. Past student interns were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the potential of using the Facebook group, while mentors and leadership were cautiously optimistic. Students viewed the Facebook group as a potential venue for sharing of internship information and resources, as well as place in which they could receive feedback from research mentors and network with mentors and other students. Mentors and leadership saw the Facebook group as a tool that could be used for dissemination of information and monitoring of students' progress. In the third phase of the study, the design of the mock-up group was refined in light of the findings from the second phase, after which additional past student interns were invited to join the group on Facebook and complete a survey describing their feelings about its usefulness and potential value. Likely uses of the group cited by students included receiving feedback on research projects and research symposium posters and commenting on photos/videos or posters uploaded by other group members. Benefits that students felt they might gain through using the group included improved sense of community and getting help on posters from other students. Based on these findings, the incorporation of Facebook Groups into the internship programs is recommended and suggestions for its design are offered. Additional recommendations are made for changes that may be made to improve sense of community among internship stakeholders as well as other aspects of the internship programs. Finally, limitations to the findings of this study are discussed. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Growing internet usage has resulted in increased popularity of web-based tools in nutrition and health education. This research aimed to determine which education delivery medium,Facebook or leaflet, was most successful at increasing knowledge of folate and neural tube defects (NTD) in female university students. This quasi-experimental study (pre-test post-test comparison group design) involved three groups: Facebook folate and NTD education group (FBed) (n=53), leaflet folate and NTD education group (LFed) (n=49) and comparison group (n=47). Socio-demographic information was collected via a questionnaire at pre-test, and participants completed a folate and NTD knowledge quiz at pre-test and post-test. The Wilcoxon signed rank test was used to determine within-group pre-test post-test differences in folate and NTD knowledge score. Between-group differences in knowledge were determined using the Kruskal-Wallis test and the Mann-Whitney U test. Pre-test knowledge of folate and NTD did not differ between the three groups (p=0.408). Post-test knowledge of folate and NTD in both education groups was greater than in the comparison group, and knowledge score in the LFed group was higher than in the FBed group (all p

Contemporary social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, offer a wide functionality to their users. A person can do a multitude of activities - from online shopping to making video calls - without having to leave the platform for another website or application. However, it can hardly be disputed that these social media owe much of their popularity to two simple affordances of content sharing and feedback provision. Whilst these behaviours became commonplace for many people, little is known about how and why individuals make decisions about posting images and 'liking' content on social media. This thesis investigates the factors that shape social media photo sharing and 'liking' and studies the relationships between posting behaviours, reactions to feedback, and social engagement. Drawing on the variety of concepts, such as imaginary audiences, self-presentation, impression management, emotion regulation, reciprocity, and social grooming, the studies in this thesis explore why social media users share photos and 'like' posts, and how received feedback facilitates changes in posting behaviours. The first paper of this thesis focused on understanding why people share images online, how they choose photos to post, and how they react to feedback. The study employed semi-structured interviews, fictitious scenarios, and photo elicitation to explore the full journey of photo sharing from the creation of a post to post-feedback behavioural changes. The findings of the first paper facilitated the development of a conceptual model of the influence of 'likes' and comments on posting frequency and content change mediated by emotions. The outcomes of both papers highlighted the importance of received feedback in regulating photo sharing behaviours, and, thus, the aim of the third study was to explore social media engagement in more detail and investigate why individuals 'like' photos in the first place. The paper drew on the concepts of reciprocity, social grooming, relational closeness, tie strength, and emotion regulation to identify the patterns of 'liking' behaviours and the significant factors that shape them. Therefore, the results of this thesis contribute to the academic knowledge in the areas of self-presentation, impression management, imaginary audiences, emotion regulation, reciprocity, relational closeness, tie strength, and social grooming and have practical implications for digital marketing and social media user experience research.

Social media is progressing and advancing at a quick pace that requires dynamic research methods. This PhD therefore takes an alternative structure to a traditional thesis, consisting of four papers and applies mixed methods research in order to investigate social media within B2B domain. Specifically, the thesis applies relationship marketing theories and investigates how business relationships are developed and sustained through the uses of social media as an additional channel marketing tool. The 1st paper of the PhD is a systematic literature review consisting of 65 academic articles, which specifically focus on the topics of social media use within B2B organisations. Following the systematic review, the 2nd paper provides a comparative empirical investigation of the different practices employed by B2B, B2C and mixed business models, to explore the implied assumption in the literature that B2B businesses differ in their usage of social media from other types of business model, which is confirmed by the study. Following on from the findings of paper 2, the 3rd paper provides an in-depth investigation of the approaches taken by B2B firms in implementing social media, particularly focusing on the theoretical lens of developing dynamic capabilities around social media marketing practice. Finally, the 4th paper draws our focuses specifically onto the utilisation of social media as a relationship marketing channel in B2B firms, and investigates the activity, resources and actor layers which businesses utilize when using social media as a relationship management channel. The first paper is a systematic literature review. The second paper applies quantitative research methods, specifically utilising 449 responses to an exploratory panel- based survey and identifies differences in social media usage and its perceived importance as a communications tool. The 3rd and 4th paper apply a case study research method, consisting of the same 12 case studies with 47 in-depth interviews. The results of the 3rd paper show the journey organisations go through when implementing social media as a strategic tool and how organisations can put dynamic capabilities into practice and harnessing resources to build a capacity of sensing, shaping and seizing (3S Model) opportunities. The results of the 4th paper show how organisations use social media to develop relationships and networks. The thesis then draws all the papers together to discuss the practical and theoretical implications of the thesis for B2B relationship marketing theory, particularly around customer engagement and interaction, network management, multi-channel management, dynamic capabilities and strategic alignment.

This thesis introduces the concept data-driven service systems (DDSS) to clarify the increasing adoption of big data and analytics for changing and improving the service systems where a configuration of entities (e.g. companies, customers, competitors, and diverse stakeholders) performs service exchanges and resource integration to co-create value. Grounded in a value co-creation perspective (e.g. Vargo and Lusch 2004, 2008; Gronroos 2008, 2011), this thesis proposes a DDSS framework. The framework can serve as a set of theoretical constructs, a strategic tool, and an IT prototype for researchers and practitioners to specify, design, implement, and evaluate the use of data in promoting positive system transformation. This thesis includes three prepared journal manuscripts representing three applications that evaluate the utility of the DDSS framework. The first and second paper were conducted to examining dialogue data collected from Twitter customer care platform for addressing the research issue of service recovery. The first paper aims to provide a better understanding of customer complaint management in the dynamic service environment and uncover important activities and contexts that influence customer satisfaction. The second paper theorised a data analytical model for mining service recovery dialogues and advanced the dialogue analysis that used to be done by qualitative data analysis methods. The dialogue-mining model facilitates text mining and process mining to investigate three dimensions of dialogue including linguistic and semantic, process and relationship, and thus allows researchers to capture more insightful knowledge from a vast volume of dialogue data. Finally, Twitter dialogue data was further applied to investigate the issue of corporate social innovation in the third paper. This paper demonstrated a data-driven approach to extract and internalise stakeholder knowledge embedded in dialogues and thus, indicate opportunities for social innovation. For each paper, novel data analytical approaches were developed to analyse unstructured data that comprises 95% of big data. In particular, text mining was used to automate information extraction in unstructured dialogue data based on specific domain knowledge (e.g. ontologies, dictionaries). In this way, text-mining approaches can provide contributions beyond the methodological and shed light into focal research domains.

This paper examines the evolution of digital comedy through a comparative analysis of CollegeHumor and its offshoot, Dropout.tv, focusing on how each platform has approached the portrayal of diversity and inclusion. Utilizing a qualitative content analysis, the study contrasts selected episodes from both platforms to explore shifts in the representation of queer and POC comedians, and the thematic treatment of identity issues. The findings reveal that Dropout.tv significantly advances the inclusivity of comedic content, moving beyond CollegeHumor’s earlier reliance on stereotypical and controversial humor. This shift not only reflects changes in contemporary comedy but also highlights Dropout.tv's commitment to fostering a diverse and thoughtful comedic environment. The study proposes further research into audience perceptions to deepen understanding of digital comedy's impact on societal attitudes towards diversity and inclusion.

This research paper examines different image repair strategies and theories, and how well three different real-life examples of recent responses to crisis utilized strategies that are discussed. The literature review covers specific image repair strategies and theories, and then there is the analysis of specific cases where public figures went through a crisis and responded in an effort to clear their names. The findings summarize why each case was not successful, and why people with large followings need to know key image repair strategies that can help save one’s reputation.

Does diminishing access to print news have an impact on people’s propensity to believe misinformation? What if this misinformation emanates from an online source as opposed to a print source? The focus of recent research on misinformation has been narrow: (1) recognizing its existence and acknowledging its potential impact, and (2) generating and categorizing potential analytical types of misinformation. However, the ramifications of vanishing print media have so far been overlooked. This paper asserts a connection between news sources and misinformation beliefs, further positing that the decline in the quality and availability of quality print journalism predicates an individual’s belief in political misinformation. Although inconclusive results were found linking geography with a tendency towards using social media as a main news source, analysis of social media habits and beliefs using the 2020-2022 ANES Social Media Survey suggests that misinformation belief generally concurs along party lines; that is, most users of these sites will follow general political leanings toward or against fake news stories. However, as partisan users increase their exposure to online material, they become more likely to believe in the misinformation spread from politically like-minded sources as opposed to those who obtain news from print. Thus, these data suggest that misinformation relies on the size of the audience exposed to it alongside the time invested in reading and propagating these stories. Although a preliminary analysis, it suggests several avenues for further examination and study and introduces a basis for new research on the topic to better explore correlations of the phenomenon.

This document summarises the submitted research which has investigated online knowledge exchange and related it to the philosophical field of social epistemology. The broad aims have been: firstly to investigate what social epistemology theory can offer in the way of guidance and evaluative frameworks for the design of knowledge systems; and secondly, to determine what the empirical study of knowledge exchange platforms can tell us about epistemology as emerging from online practice. The submitted work consists of six papers that are a mixture of review/position papers and reports of empirical investigation. These have been published in information science journals and conference proceedings. However, following the established tradition of information science, the work is positioned as being cross disciplinary in ambition. After introducing the submitted papers and the inspiration for the research, the main theoretical positions of the research are outlined and justified. These were a naturalised social epistemological position, inspired by Alvin Goldman, but widened to a situated and systems-oriented view. The naturalised view of epistemology allows for consideration of evidence from psychology, and here some key theories in social and cognitive psychology are outlined. Finally, as the subject is human-computer-human interaction, the sociotechnical setting is established. Further, the main platforms of study in the empirical work — social question answering systems — are introduced and described. The main methodology and research approaches followed are presented next. A mixed methods philosophy was deemed suitable for this area of research and — alongside the review work — the broad web science method of combining network and data investigation with qualitative methods is justified. Review work included early collaborations with an information scientist and a philosopher which helped to bring together and clarify epistemological and sociotechnical themes. The discussion section presents some of the main themes and conclusions of the submitted work, including: 1) The identification of knowledge patterns and practices online; 2) Criteria for online knowledge exchange distilled from the social epistemology literature; 3) Some triangulations where theory from philosophy and psychology seemed to corroborate and serve to explain online behaviour; 4) Socio-temporal aspects to online knowledge exchange that are perhaps under developed in philosophy but apparent in practice; 5) Credibility cues and bias, seen as crucial to a rounded study of user interaction with online sources; and finally 6) Interventions suggested by the research which would aim to raise the quality and effectiveness of social media knowledge systems. Finally, conclusions and suggestions for further work are presented. These follow on from the submitted strands of research and present possibilities for how the work may be extended and improved upon. In common with the research, these combine philosophy, modelling, interaction design and qualitative methods. Such a combination is seen as essential to developing an enhanced understanding of how the web serves and could serve as a platform for human knowledge.

This paper examines how the current climate of mainstream media is changing, and how this may affect journalistic norms and practices. There are many outlets for consumers to receive news, including traditional media, such as television news, newspapers, magazines, etc. There is also social media. The future of mainstream media outlets, like television stations, newspapers, magazines and radio stations, seems to depend on the growing use of social media sites for the use of getting news. This research will focus on Instagram as an alternative to traditional media, and why people prefer to use this outlet to get their news. Particularly, the research will investigate whether social media users turn to it for their news for the purpose of entertainment, convenience, to pass time or to gain social information. It will also examine what newsrooms are doing to adapt to these changes.

Social media has evolved into a new era thanks to the convenience of internet 2.0. The proliferation of diverse social media platforms and the influence of social media influencers have opened opportunities for marketing innovation in the new media age. The emergence of influencers on social media platforms and the explosion of their numbers has stimulated companies and marketers to invest in a new, covert marketing strategy: influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is a means of social media marketing and an emerging digital advertising strategy. Messages delivered through this marketing mode are more likely to reach the target audience quickly and spread easily through viral marketing. These influencers are often not perceived as driven purely by commercial interests and are easily trusted by their followers, giving them a natural marketing advantage. Recently, an increasing number of companies have begun using these influencers to endorse their products or services, believing they can influence consumers’ attitudes and decisions. Additionally, some scholars have turned their attention to this emerging marketing mode and strategy. Influencer marketing research has focused on advertising, brand or product promotion, source characteristics and sponsorship disclosure. However, little research has been conducted on the value co-creation behaviour of audiences in influencer marketing. There are specific gaps in the existing literature. Based on service-dominant logic, this thesis proposes a research mechanism for audience value co-creation behaviour in influencer marketing with three dimensions: internal, external and peer effects. Framed by a post-positivist paradigm and quantitative methods, this thesis employs a research design featuring an online survey, experiment, and computer simulation. Through statistical analysis and mathematical modelling, this study examines the internal, external factors and peer effects that influence audience value co-creation behaviour. The research outcomes are presented in three individual papers, forming the core chapters of this thesis. Of these three papers, Study 1 and Study 2 were published in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Marketing Intelligence & Planning, and Study 3 was submitted to Computers in Human Behaviour. [...]

Parasocial Relationships, coined by Horton and Wohl (1956), are a type of one-sided relationship that is experienced between an audience and the performer. Though they cannot be reciprocated, people who have developed these relationships view them as other ordinary friendships (Eyal & Cohen, 2006). Historically these relationships were developed through television, however, with the advent of the internet, a new medium for interaction has been on the rise: Social Media. Social media has created a new avenue for these performer/viewer interactions by providing access to these celebrities and their content virtually anywhere and anytime. While there have been several instruments created to measure parasocial relationships in the past, and in a number of different contexts, none of them lend themselves to being implemented on celebrities of this new medium. The Parasocial Relationships in Social Media (PRISM) Survey was developed in order to address this gap in the literature. This multipart dissertation contains three papers investigating parasocial relationships and the methods used to measure them. The first paper explores the current instruments found in the communications, psychology, sociology, and marketing literature that have been designed to measure parasocial relationships, including their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. The second and third papers introduce the PRISM survey, how it was developed, and the methods used to validate it. The findings from studies two and three demonstrates the PRISM survey possess strong construct validity, reliability, and psychometric properties. Exploratory factor analyses conducted in paper two found the survey measures four dimensions of parasocial relations: Interest in, Knowledge of, Identification with, and Interaction with a given celebrity, while paper three found the survey to be invariant across different social media platforms. Together these papers support the PRISM survey’s ability to measure parasocial interactions created with online social media celebrities accurately across different social media platforms.

The Name, Image and Likeness Agreement has opened hundreds of doors for college athletics to make money based on their "likeness" and not their performance on the field. This new agreement levels the playing field for all athletes in college. Through a content analysis this paper will take a look at how the NIL is being discussed in various media channels such as TikTok and how this agreement is affecting the student athlete experience. Not every athlete is striking mega deals, but with this agreement everyone from Junior college to Division 1 has the opportunity to make money through avenues such as social media. While current athletes are the ones profiting, alumni, branding coaches and universities are all jumping in on the issue. As there are many unknowns about the rules of NIL, this paper will bring light to how those in power writing the rules are navigating these gray areas.

This paper explores how a community is formed in the Facebook group The M in UMW Stands for Memes and what role memes play in shaping a sense of community and sharing information. Based on previous research, there was a common theme found within the results of the studies; memes can be used to communicate information and a shared understanding is needed to have a sustainable online community. I chose to complete this study using a content analysis which allowed for an evaluation of the shared language used in the posts revealing how this mode of communication creates a sustainable online community. In doing so, I was able to answer the questions; what are the shared language and cultural capital needed to understand the discussions in the group and how are memes used to create community and communicate to the group members? I found that cultural capital played a crucial role in understanding the content of the group which was formed by the shared language in the posts and that humor was used across all posts to communicate information. In this paper, I argue that the effects of the group’s norms and values, consistent use of humor in posts, and creation of cultural capital through the shared language revealed how this community was formed and maintained using memes.

This paper employs netnography and critical discourse analysis to examine the ways gay men on Twitter foster Satanic communities and orient themselves to gay Satanic practice. How do these men centralize the language of pleasure, the erotic, and phallic objects as a linguistic ploy that both bathes in the pornographic and reifies their identities as Satanists? How does the use of taboos (incest, methamphetamine use, rape play, bondage, sexual demonology) within imagery shape the ways queer Satanists orient themselves within this social media context? For this project, I examine common language, terminology, and themes surrounding queer pornographic discourses on self-identified Satanists twitter pages as touchstones that shape, twist, and deconstruct gay Satanic devotional practice, a practice that is fed predominantly by gay, cisgender, white men from Anglophone countries who consume pornography and enact sexual pleasure as an extension of their religiosity. Each of these Satanists contribute to a synthesized look at the employment of gay pornographic imagery and language and its potential benefits and complications for practitioners who exist in this social media-driven contemporary moment, intent on drafting community and connectedness online. While these Satanists rely on oppositional rhetoric to construct their personhood as antithetical to Protestant Christianity, this paper explores certain remnants of a Protestant, neoliberal subject which still emerge within gay phallocentric Satanism. This phallocentrism, or connection to religious practice as deriving from the phallus (whether symbolically, iconographically, and/or physically), also is prevalent in larger social and religious communities that are separate from Satanisms, like symbolic use of the shiva lingam, the online reemergence of the Cult of Priapus, and specific Tantric practices that focus on semen retention.

Over the last two decades, there has been rapid growth of social media platforms both in availability and complexity. There is ample evidence in literature about the negative implications of social media exposure in emerging adults but there is a gap in literature about any potentially positive impacts social media exposure may have on this population of users. This paper will explore the potential for any positive impacts in the use of Facebook and increased amounts of political and civic engagement in users between 18 and 29 years of age. Using a secondary dataset of cross-sectional data (n = 1,228) collected in 2013 collected to better understand how young adults use social media to engage in community and politics, an OLS regression model will be used to test the following hypothesis: Increased time spent on Facebook is associated with increased political and civic engagement; increased number of friends on Facebook is associated with an increase in political and civic engagement; and, the more the user learns about politics on Facebook is associated with higher levels of political and civic engagement.

With the rapid increase of social network spam, it's essential to empower users with the tools to detect the harmful spam effectively. However, existing tools cannot meet the requirements. In this paper, we propose and develop a live detection tool that can detect ham and spam text and images from social networks, this tool will be trained on user collected data (Image and Text) using different classifiers, where text and images are pre-processed and then passed onto the classifier that the user can choose, the user is then able to save the model and load it whenever they want to use a social network, where this tool will show the user a notification alerting them whether the post they are looking at is spam or ham before they even get the chance to read the text or look at the image, thus protecting them from clicking on malicious links that might harm their computer and steal their data. Evaluation results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our tool.

The Patients’ Rights Act (Scotland) 2018 requires that Health Boards in Scotland encourage, monitor and learn from patient feedback. A range of mechanisms are used by healthcare organisations to capture and monitor the quality of care and services they provide, and to stimulate improvement where required. Historically these have been a mix of paper-based methods and face-to-face mechanisms. In recent years these traditional methods are increasingly being augmented by spontaneous sharing through social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter, and through dedicated patient feedback websites like Care Opinion. There is little published evidence regarding the legitimacy of capturing and interpreting patient feedback using social media. This research explores senior healthcare managers’ attitudes to and acceptance of online patient feedback, and its potential to inform improvements to health and care services. It considers the suitability of social media for monitoring patient experience and considers the main barriers to using this information to inform changes to healthcare services. Interviews were conducted with 18 senior clinical and managerial staff from three National Health Service (NHS) Boards in Scotland in order to build an in-depth understanding of their attitudes and experiences regarding the use of social media patient feedback for improvement to health and care services. A process of Framework Analysis was used to identify the key issues, concepts and themes expressed by interview participants. The results of this study show contrasting views on the usefulness and value of patient feedback. Participants highlighted the importance of understanding and accepting the patient perspective on their healthcare experience, whilst others questioned patients’ ability to judge the quality of their own care. The emotional impact of both positive and negative patient feedback on healthcare professionals was a key issue for participants. The findings from this study show that senior healthcare managers’ views on the legitimacy of patient feedback through social media are influenced by a number of factors, these include apprehension around the anonymous nature of social media patient feedback; the impact of age and IT skills; the risk to organisational and professional reputation: and concern about the loss of face-to-face communication with patients. The findings from this research study have a number of implications for the development of healthcare policy regarding patient feedback and experience, as well as for healthcare organisations in trying to maximise the benefit and impact of this information.

This essay describes my thesis for my BFA degree in Studio Art. This paper serves as a memoir of my journey as a painter to flow state. In this essay I outline how social media addiction causes anxiety and how I overcame that anxiety through being in the present through flow state and finding the sublime in my work.

Algorithms are used by social media platforms to gather information on users to better suggest updated content to maximize the time spent on their online platforms. The information gathered from the users (browsing history, search history, engaged posts, engaged channels, etc.) is analyzed by these algorithms and used to predict what content and channels to best offer the users for further engagement. Information such as liking patterns, following tendencies, content engagement behavior and more are fed to these algorithms to personalize the user’s experience. The goal of this paper is to compare the effectiveness of the algorithms’ ability to profile and induce users, in this case employed by Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube by tracking several variables, including interaction time and interaction rates with posts, channels, likes, and follows. The results of this study show the performance of each platform algorithm over weeks of observation and how they stack in terms of engagement effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the current reflective teaching practices of in-service teachers and to determine whether TikTok may be an effective and sustainable reflective teaching tool. There has been much discussion surrounding reflective teaching and how to develop and encourage reflection in preservice teachers (Calderhead, 1989; Liston & Zeichner, 1987; Loughran, 2002; Yost et al, 2000). Whether in-service teachers are consistently reflecting on their practice or the ways in which they are reflecting is not fully understood. Three assumptions guided this study. First, consistent and intentional reflection is an invaluable tool for teachers to grow professionally. Second, it is difficult to find the time to reflect meaningfully when teachers are wrestling with the everyday tasks and requirements of the job. Third, reflection is not a practice that can be meaningfully mandated. It has to be an organic teacher-owned process to be effective and sustainable. There was a thorough investigation of the #teachertok community, and five teachers are showcased to demonstrate how this platform can be used to develop professionally. Also, an anonymous survey was distributed to in-service teachers to better understand how they are currently reflecting. Three teachers (one novice, two experienced) were asked to use TikTok to reflect on their teaching practices for a five-week intervention period. They participated in a small focus group both before and after the intervention and completed weekly check-in surveys, which summarized their reflections and gauged whether it was an onerous experience. Results of the survey show that teachers are reflecting but not consistently. The findings of the intervention were positive, suggesting that TikTok is a useful reflective tool.

To achieve behaviour change, social advertisers have long utilised positive and negative advertising appeals employing different emotions and framing techniques. The evidence base indicates mixed results of effectiveness, making practitioner guidance on optimal advertising appeals unclear. Several gaps are evident in the literature that limit the understanding of maximising advertising appeal effectiveness to deliver behaviour change. First, the fragmented, mixed and inconsistent evidence within the literature of which emotional appeal is most effective limits practitioners understanding of how effective messages can be created. Systematic studies that synthesise knowledge can help to understanding which advertising appeals can be considered. Second, the literature is dominated with studies of fear and humour appeals, limiting understanding about the efficacy of other emotional appeals in creating positive behaviour change outcomes. This includes the lack of studies into emotional appeals utilising emotions such as shame and hope as well as co-active appeals where positive and negative emotions are utilised in an advertisement. Third, empirical examinations of the effectiveness of advertising appeals reported in peer review literature mainly employ indirect behavioural measures through self-reported data (e.g. attitudes and intentions), which do not always translate into behaviour. With the rapid evolvement of social media and machine learning methods many quantitative and qualitative metrics are readily available to evaluate advertising effectiveness more thoroughly. The use of such measures with the lack of validated frameworks for evaluating social media advertising messages is difficult for scholars and practitioners. Furthermore, current persuasion and social media marketing frameworks lack evaluation measures beyond social media engagements (e.g., likes) and intentions. This presents a need for a validated and reliable framework that takes the full suite of in social media engagement metrics and an more nuanced understanding of how to connect and track online behaviour change actions beyond social media to examine campaign effectiveness. Fourth, with the focus on conscious processes and measures in persuasion frameworks, unconscious measures remain underexplored. Scholarly calls are evident to investigate the role of sentiment on behaviours to further extend beyond self-reported data collection measures. Understanding the role of sentiment as an unconscious metric of public attitudes on behaviour enables governments and non-government organisations to focus attention on activities that reduce negative sentiment and increase public trust, helping in increasing public health campaigns’ effectiveness. In light of the aforementioned gaps, this thesis presents a series of published papers examining advertising appeal effectiveness with a core focus directed at understanding how advertising is linked to behaviour change.

This dissertation consists of three papers about leveraging representation learning for political science research. Representation learning refers to techniques that learn a mapping between input data and a feature vector or tensor with respect to a task, such as classification or regression. These vectors or tensors capture abstract and relevant concepts in the data, making it easier to extract information. In the three papers, I show how representation learning allows political scientists to work with complex data such as text and images effectively. In the first paper, I propose using word embeddings to calculate partisan associations from Twitter users' bios. It only requires that some users in the corpus of tweets use partisan words in their bios. Intuitively, the word embeddings learn associations between non-partisan and partisan words from bios and extend those associations to all users. I apply the method to a collection of users who tweeted about election incidents during the 2016 United States general election. Which partisan accounts get retweeted, favorited, and followed, and which partisan hashtags are used closely correlate with the partisan association scores. I also apply the method to users who tweeted about masks during the COVID-19 pandemic. I find that users with more Democratic-leaning partisan association scores are more likely to use health advocacy hashtags, such as #MaskUp. In the second paper, I look at the automated classification of observations with both images and text. Most state-of-the-art vision-and-language models are unusable for most political science research, as they require all observations to have both image and text and require computationally expensive pretraining. This paper proposes a novel vision-and-language framework called multimodal representations using modality translation, or MARMOT. MARMOT presents two methodological contributions: it constructs representations for observations missing image or text, and it replaces computationally expensive pretraining with modality translation. Modality translation learns the patterns between images and their captions. MARMOT outperforms an ensemble text-only classifier in 19 of 20 categories in multilabel classifications of tweets reporting election incidents during the 2016 U.S. general election. MARMOT also shows significant improvements over the results of benchmark multimodal models on the Hateful Memes dataset, improving the best accuracy and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) set by VisualBERT from 0.6473 to 0.6760 and 0.7141 to 0.7530, respectively. In the third paper, I turn to the issue of computationally studying language usage evolution over time. The corpora that political scientists typically work with are much smaller than the extensive corpora used in natural language processing research. Training a word embedding space over each period, the usual approach to studying language usage evolution, worsens the problem by splitting up the corpus into even smaller corpora. This paper proposes a framework that uses pretrained and non-pretrained embeddings to learn time-specific word embeddings, called the pretrained-augmented embeddings (PAE) framework. In the first application, I apply the PAE framework to a corpus of New York Times text data spanning several decades. The PAE framework matches human judgments of how specific words evolve in their usage much more closely than existing methods. In the second application, I apply the PAE framework to a corpus of tweets written during the COVID-19 pandemic about masking. The PAE framework automatically detects shifts in discussions about specific events during the COVID-19 pandemic vis-a-vis the keyword of interest.

Mobile devices offer users a constant connection to information and entertainment. Our society has become hyperconnected. We have unprecedented access to information at any time of the day. Mobile devices have the potential to make people more efficient and productive or more distracted and negatively influenced. The use of applications or apps on mobile devices brings with them unparalleled access to intimate information about the users of mobile devices. Corporations have been quick to provide apps that make life easier for, or entertain, the end-users. But the entertainment and access come at a price. That price is incredibly detailed information about the users, and it is being used and sold on the internet. Companies are requiring users to allow mobile applications access to far more detailed information than is necessary, and the end-user is unaware of just what the price they are paying is. This paper will explore the permissions that mobile apps request, a company’s terms of service, and third-party relationships to determine if software manufacturers are honest with their stated permissions or if apps are overreaching in their efforts to collect information about their users. An examination of application permissions and analysis of the data transmissions to and from the device on behalf of the application will be performed. This work aims to provide users with more insight into how to protect their confidential data and to improve users’ perception of privacy.

This paper examines how social media metrics and website traffic have influenced journalists’ perceptions of what is newsworthy. Drawing on research that establishes a tendency for editors to adjust stories on their website based on audience preferences, the researcher hypothesizes journalists at higher levels of newsroom production will view metrics and traffic as more important than journalists at lower levels of newsroom production. This paper also examines if shareability can be considered its own news value. A survey of journalists indicates that news workers at all levels of production rely on more traditional news values to shape their coverage, though they do prefer for their stories to do well online.

Millennials are often scrutinized for what appears to be generational differences. However, the Millennials might not be as different as the older generations think, although they have one overwhelming challenge: technology. This paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages that entrepreneurs have experienced across several generations. In addition, the paper discusses whether the influence of social media is harmful or helpful to Millennial entrepreneurs. Overall, it is difficult to determine whether Millennials are at a disadvantage compared to previous generations. Millennials face monetary challenges, education barriers, and unsupportive home lives just as entrepreneurs of older generations. Though the effects from overuse of technology can be negative, it offers Millennials certain advantages that previous generations did not have. Through new methods such as online businesses, franchising, and personal branding, Millennials are continuing the ingenuity that defines entrepreneurship.

Background: Self-management with an action plan, as opposed to passive self-monitoring, improves health outcomes. However, engaging patients is challenging. Mobile technology, incorporating education, personalised asthma action plans and facilitating professional support, is an option for supporting asthma self-management. Clinical research has focussed on health-related outcomes rather than informing the features that patients want and will use in a self-management app. Technology developers focus on user engagement as opposed to developing telehealth based on clinical evidence, leaving patients struggling to choose safe telehealth to support their asthma self-management. Risk aversion results in legislation that can be a barrier to the development of asthma apps. Aims and objectives: Using phases of the MRC Framework for developing complex interventions, and the Oxford app roadmap to develop a prototype app, I aimed, from clinical, patient, technology and legislative perspectives to: •(Phase 1) Identify the evidence base •(Phase 2) Model key aspects of app development •(Phase 3) Explore the feasibility of a mobile app to support self-management. Methods: •(Phase 1) Systematic review, online social forum analysis, asthma apps review, and legislation regulation review were used to identify evidence. Results were analysed with reference to the PRISMS taxonomy of self-management support. •(Phase 2) Using results from phase 1, and with the advice of lay and professional advisory groups, I made decisions about the design of the prototype app and the feasibility study in phase 3. I also reviewed the legislative issues regarding self-management app development. •(Phase 3) I undertook a feasibility study of using asthma mobile apps. Within the three-month feasibility study, five practices in Lothian/Oxford and Asthma UK's social media invited adults with active asthma to try out our prototype app. I observed patient's download rate and app usage. Of the patients recruited from practices, I purposively sampled patients (based on age/sex, experience of asthma, current self-management and technology use) and interviewed them before and after using the app for one month about their preferred features. Interviews were transcribed, and thematically analysed with reference to the PRISMS taxonomy of self-management support. Results: •(Phase 1) Telehealth was at least as effective as traditional approaches to supported self-management. Most asthma patients using online social forums commented on self-monitoring features, such as logging peak flow and symptoms, as opposed to self-management features. No one explicitly discussed asthma action plans though some patients were positive to the apps which had incorporated an action plan. Similarly the most downloaded asthma apps offered self-monitoring features rather than action plans. Current medical device legislation is ambiguous: it is unclear if apps with an action plan are 'medical devices'. •(Phase 2) The final prototype app included the Asthma UK asthma action plan and monitoring features such as the morbidity questions of the Royal College of Physicians three questions, peak flow, use of reliever inhaler, other medication use and lifestyle status. A mixed method approach was chosen for the feasibility study. •(Phase 3) 111 asthma patients used the prototype app. The ownership of action plans increased 43% to 63% after the study. Most patients preferred digital to paper action plans though the digital format did not improve usage. Action plans and monitoring features were the most 'wanted' features by patients, GPs, asthma nurses and the administration staff in the practices. Some patients also 'wanted' more advanced features such as predictive exacerbation warnings, identifying precise triggers, learning about what caused/affected their asthma. Conclusions: Mobile apps are a feasible option to support asthma self-management. Ease of access to download is the key to adoption as well as sufficient motivation (e.g. personal invitation from their GP or asthma nurse). Motivation (specifically GP and asthma nurse's encouragement and perception of benefit) is the key to adherence, but it will be more effective if the app is easy to use. Action plans and self-management features were the most 'wanted' features by patients and professionals. Other features that patients 'wanted' varied; one size does not fit all. Advanced features might encourage on-going use of asthma apps to support self-management. Choice of features, service promotion and service deployment should be considered carefully when implementing mobile app in 'real world' setting. The key technological barriers were to provide seamless Wi-Fi and to connect the app with the practice's software platforms. 'Medical device' legislation is currently a barrier for self-management app development, further discussions with all stakeholders is needed to reach consensus on risks involved in incorporating action plans in an app.

This paper examines how does within the Pagan community uses social media, specifically Facebook groups, as a way of community building, knowledge gathering, and platform for digital ritual. The research was based on a combination of interviews and observational data gathered from various groups. To help analyze the data gathered, theoretical approaches of both mediatization and materiality are employed to understand how digital spaces are being used as a tool for those within the Pagan community within their religious tool-kit, as well as understanding how digital landscapes are being used in order to conduct ritual.

Non-professional investors often rely on information obtained from social media to make investment decisions. Extant literature has not examined the most effective strategy for the target company to counter the rumors so that investors will be more willing to continue investing in the target firm. Drawing on source credibility theory and the moral intensity model, I propose that the most effective strategy would vary given different agents who are selected to counter the rumor. After conducting a 2 x 3 (counter-rumor source x counter-rumor strategy) experiment with 272 non-professional investors recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, my study shows that when an internal agent (e.g., the CEO) acts as a counter-rumor source, shareholders are more willing to invest in the company when the internal agent utilizes a denial strategy rather than a reassociation or a questioning strategy. In contrast, when an external agent (e.g., a famous food blogger) serves as the counter-rumor source, the external agent can also use a questioning strategy in addition to a denial strategy to motivate shareholders to be more willing to invest in the company; however, the external agent still needs to avoid from engaging a reassociation strategy. Moderated serial-mediation analysis shows that the persuasiveness of the counter-rumor information and investors' perceived rumor intensity serially mediate the effect of counter-rumor source on investors' willingness to invest, and this effect is conditioned on the different strategy used to counter the rumor. Overall, the main effect of counter-rumor source suggests that external agents are perceived as more persuasive, which leads investors to perceive less rumor intensity, making them more willing to invest in the target company. The results of my paper can thus inform companies' social media policy.

In this paper, the author examines advertising on the video game live streaming platform, Twitch. Using a 2 (presence/absence of Transparasocial Interaction) x 2 (presence/absence of self-disclosure by the streamer), this study seeks to gain a better understanding of community perceptions of influencers, and advertising on the Twitch platform, a subject that is only recently becoming a topic of interest for advertising scholars.

For the purpose of this review, viral marketing is explained as the application of five connected components: Web 2.0, social media, virality, memes and marketing itself. In essence, memes disseminate virally through social media networks on the internet in ways that marketers can harness to reach consumers. But viral marketing is much more than creating funny image macros and hoping they go viral. The relevant components and their roles in viral marketing will be defined and explained in subsequent sections.The second portion of this paper will be dedicated to two brands that utilize viral marketing in intelligent ways. While the two topics of the case studies, Fortnite and Overwatch League, are very different in their approaches to viral marketing, both harness the power of viral marketing’s five components. While Fortnite utilizes a far-reaching approach, Overwatch League focuses on building a community that, to the members, feels closely-knit. Both strategies are proving successful for the brands and provide ample, vivid examples for how each component of viral marketing can be enacted. For Fortnite, this includes embracing user-generated content and partnering with EDM artist Marshmello. For Overwatch League, this means closing the gap between players and fans. Both unique strategies have earned their place in this paper for their understanding and implementation of viral marketing.Ultimately, my goal is to show that viral marketing is a legitimate strategy for the future and that there are pioneers in this moment achieving incredible feats through the approach.

When and why do consumers help more or less after engaging in a prosocial behavior? This question has been an interesting topic of research especially in this time when social media has an influential effect on an individual’s ethical decision making. However, little effort has been made to understand and reconcile this conflicting behavior. Based on two philosophical approaches to ethics (normative and behavioral), this research identifies that consumers act prosocially not only because they are a good person, but they want to be viewed as a good person by others. This research makes novel predictions that these two motives have differential effects on the pursuit of subsequent prosocial behavior, and the dominance of a particular motive is determined by the type of social norms that are used in an initial prosocial campaign. Across three studies, the present research demonstrates that consumers express more favorable reactions toward the subsequent prosocial campaign when their initial prosocial behavior is encouraged by a normative message highlighting what they ought to do – the consistency effect of injunctive norms. On the contrary, consumers show less favorable responses toward the subsequent prosocial campaign when their initial prosocial behavior is motivated by a normative message that described how the majority of people behave in that situation – the licensing effect of descriptive norms. Two dimensions of moral identity (moral internalization and moral symbolization), which represent two motives for helping behavior, mediate the consistency effect of injunctive norms and the licensing effect of descriptive norms, respectively. This paper also proves how an additional moral message highlighting the internal aspects of helping behavior can mitigate the licensing effect of descriptive norms. Three causes that are important in society (helping underprivileged children, helping homeless people, and helping people with disabilities) and two different online platforms (Facebook and a website) are used to ensure the generalizability of the research. This paper is expected to spur future work clarifying divergent findings and examining consumers’ sustainable prosocial behavior

The present research proposed a social-cognitive model underlying adolescents’ social media feedback, evaluative distress, and mental health, and examined this model with five empirical studies. Paper 1 investigated causal effects of insufficient validation on social media, as threats to social status that can elicit evaluative distress escalating risks for internalizing symptoms in adolescence. In Study 1, a randomized experiment, ninth-grade adolescents (N = 613) felt more strongly rejected and reported more intense negative affect and self-referent cognitions when they received few (vs. many) likes on their social media posts. Study 2, a daily diary longitudinal study (N=145) showed that the more strongly rejected that adolescents felt after receiving fewer likes, the more depressive symptoms they reported, both in daily diary assessments over 2 weeks and at an 8-month follow-up. Study 3, a randomized experiment (N = 579) replicated the effects reported in Study 1 and showed that detrimental effects were most pronounced among adolescents who experienced peer victimization at school. Altogether, the findings in Paper 1 suggest that insufficiently positive social media evaluative feedback might accelerate the onset of internalizing symptoms among at-risk adolescents. Next, Paper 2 examined implicit theories of personality—the belief systems about dynamism of human traits—as a malleable individual differences factor that might alter adolescents’ evaluative distress on social media. In Study 4, a U.S. national longitudinal survey (N=2,451), adolescents’ naturalistically held entity theories of personality (a belief that people cannot change) predicted greater increases in evaluative distress on real-world social media between fall and spring. In Study 5, a randomized field experiment (N=133) that taught an incremental theory (a belief that people can change), treated adolescents who previously endorsed an entity theory reported lower levels of evaluative distress after receiving few likes on their social media posts. The findings in Paper 2 highlight the causal role of implicit theories as mental representations that shape adolescents’ stress coping with social media evaluative feedback. To conclude, implications of the current findings are discussed in terms of developing a social-cognitive model of status threats in adolescence, as well as testing theoretically-informed intervention that can target underlying beliefs to prevent maladaptive mental health trajectories during adolescence

In 1785, Thomas Jefferson wrote,“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of news writers who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper” (Sec.51). Jefferson’s views are as salient today as they were in 1785. Some 232 years later, a “mass of people” struggle to distinguish between news that is real and news that is false. The largest context for this struggle to date was the 2016 United States presidential election (Pew Center, 2016c). For some, the “fake news” found on social media has become a harbinger for the emergence of a despotic government (Pew Center). The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the phenomenon of fake news through the lived experience of graduate students in the United States. The prospective student participants were pursuing advanced degrees in higher education. This research study utilized the uses and gratifications theory (UGT) approach to analyze how and why people used social media during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In light of the influence of fake news on the 2016 presidential election, this study also aimed to investigate the reasons why people believed that fake news were appealing. The thematic analysis revealed people were gratified by the use of social media for connecting with friends and family, gathering and sharing information, and as a vehicle of expression. Participants found a significant amount of fake news stories on social media during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They tried to identify and differentiate between fake news and real news using the fact-checking websites and major news sources. However, the two significant themes that emerged during the interviews illustrated that the participants felt that fake news on social media were ideologically polarizing the society and affecting their personal relationships. Upgrade in public policies related to social media were recommended in this study.

This dissertation is comprised of three papers that analyze the relationship between political money, elite interests and policies. Individual papers in this work are connected through this overarching theme and the methodology that is used. Each paper employs statistical methods on large-scale datasets with an emphasis on network analysis. The first paper investigates the relationship between the strength of elite connections and the success of renewable energy and emission reduction policies. Based on an original dataset created from social media accounts of the ministers in 34 countries, this analysis uses a stochastic block model and modularity analysis to compare the strength of connections between different types of elites. The quantitative analysis is complemented by in-depth interviews conducted in seven European countries. The second paper explores the relationship between socio-political capital of state-level American politicians and their agenda holding power in legislation. Using a very extensive dataset on campaign contribution records and state-level bill proposals in the United States, this paper employs survival analysis to explore the aforementioned connection. The third paper is a quantitative description of the large datasets on federal- and state-level campaign contribution records and state-level bill proposals. Using visualization, network analysis, and clustering, the last part of the dissertation uncovers some of the connections between big political donors, parties, private sector, and legislation. The last paper in the dissertation also contains a typological identification section for donors and lawmakers. The goal of the dissertation is to expand the literature on elites, to explore what new stories can be told about political money in the United States, and to make use of large-scale datasets for more conclusive arguments in American politics and policy literature.

As the distinction between our online and offline selves continues to collapse thanks to the permeation of networked digital services into nearly every aspect of our lives, how we are able to express ourselves in digital space holds direct consequence for the world we experience offline. The way sexual relationships and power are pre-structured in online dating apps provides a focused example. This paper describes the author’s artwork No in Disguise, an interactive multimedia installation that features procedurally generated video of men reading transcripts of conversations the author’s collaborator, Kris Blackmore, held with male dating app users who expressed harmful attitudes toward women in their profiles. The work responds to arguments that claim that the harassment of women is merely the product of a deviant male minority. The author wrote software that deconstructs and randomly recombines the video of the readers’ facial features as they read, creating an endless procession of unfamiliar faces that look like every man and no man in particular. The installation also features video of the readers responding to the statements they read as well as an iOS app on several iPods through which visitors may read the original conversation transcripts. In this paper the author discusses his motivation, gives context for the project, and describes the decisions made at each step of designing the installation while integrating a discussion about the cultural narratives of gender, power, and permissions that social media platforms reflect and reinforce.

This paper analyses the deployment of counter-narratives on social media as part of counter violent extremism (CVE) strategies aimed at degrading Islamic State’s ability to recruit foreign fighters and inspire attacks abroad. It argues that the bulk of counter-narrative content emerges out of a small network of NGOs, think-tanks and organizations based in London which is conceptualized as a lattice. The quantity of counter-narrative content emerging from this lattice and elsewhere, whilst significant, is vastly mismatched by the scale of Islamic State content produced at their operational apex, and is frequently overestimated by policy papers and CVE reports from social media companies. Successful counter-narrative campaigns – identified by their adherence to academic communications theory and prevalence within CVE policy spheres – demonstrate the need for religious narratives in which normative Islam plays an active yet embedded role in modern societies outside of the so-called caliphate.

The increasing use of Twitter by businesses has created the challenge of how organisations can use Twitter most effectively for marketing. Using data across several years of Twitter activity by both leading global brands and a non-profit organisation (NPO), this thesis presents measures that can be used by practitioners and researchers to assess the effectiveness of marketing communications on Twitter. It discusses the factors that predict consumer and stakeholder engagement with organisational tweets, and different Twitter strategies that have been successfully (and less successfully) used by leading global brands and a large non-profit organisation. The thesis consists of four separate but inter-related papers that have variously been published or accepted for publication. Each paper analyses different aspects of organisational Twitter activity, including an analysis of tweet features that impact on the frequency of retweeting of brands’ tweets and examination of reciprocity within the network of an NPO and its corporate partners. The thesis contributes to the literature by assessing what has been done on Twitter, what works and what does not, and by showing what it is possible to achieve on the platform in terms of effective communications. Firstly, the research evaluates Twitter activity both in commercial organisations and within the network of an NPO and its supporters by analysing their Twitter accounts’ activity, follower engagement and tweet structure. The research also compares and contrasts Twitter activity over a two-year period by both commercial brands and an NPO and therefore provides insights into the evolution of Twitter use. Secondly, the research develops and tests a theoretical model that predicts electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) on Twitter by assessing the effect of different tweet features on retweet count. The research also provides an approach to estimate minimum and maximum threshold levels for some tweet features that can be used repeatedly in tweets (e.g., hashtags and photos) and which can thus have a non-linear effect on retweeting. In addition, the research evaluates how consumer involvement with the product category, as represented by different industries, impacts on consumer responses and engagement with brand communications and subsequent eWOM on Twitter. This is important as the findings suggest that different industries need to use different communication strategies, depending on the brand context, in order to be successful on Twitter. Thirdly, the thesis discusses what it is possible to achieve on Twitter, in particular by reviewing how the medium can be used for reciprocal promotion within a network of organisations using co-branding and co-created tweets, even among those who compete. Finally, the thesis discusses implications for organisations using Twitter for marketing communications, and for further research into the use of Twitter for marketing.

The world has grown increasingly connected through social media. Despite this, many have been critical of and uncertain of the impacts of social media activism. Many scholars have studied social movements, others have studied social media, but few have combined the data especially in terms of geographic dispersion. In order to assess the role of social media in social movements, this paper analyzes Ferguson as a case study because of its role as a springboard for #BlackLivesMatter. The protests in Ferguson following the shooting of Mike Brown did not create the hashtag, but they did help push the hashtag into mainstream consciousness. I utilized data collected by Ray et al. (2017) in order to visualize the way that tweets about Ferguson expanded across borders and geographic barriers. Overall, many of the tweets looked to be inspiring other tweets due to tweets in isolation blossoming into more and more tweets even without widespread, traditional media coverage.

Climate change communication on social media plays a prominent role in efforts undertaken by state agencies, NGOs, and international organizations, to make citizens aware of this phenomenon. The images used to communicate climate change are of great importance, since they can help to effectively raise citizen awareness. Building upon news values theory and the concept of availability heuristics, this research paper aims to identify principles that can be used for effective visual communication of climate change on social media on a cross-national scale, based upon analyses of characteristics of images that foster interaction on Twitter. We conducted a content analysis of a random selection of images (photographs, illustrations, and graphics, n = 380), posted on Twitter that were included in the so-called 'top tweets' about climate change. The results indicate that the types of images that are used on social media are relatively similar to those employed by conventional media, although images of identifiable people are less frequently shown on social media. We also deduced that four practical principles are especially relevant to foster user interaction on Twitter through images: (i) show 'real people' (i.e. non-staged images of people that transmit real emotions), (ii) tell a story, (iii) include a local connection, and (iv) show impacts or actions by people who are directly affected. These practical principles are based on the more general principles of meaningfulness and personification, two foundations that can help to overcome some of the main barriers to citizens' perception of climate change as a relevant issue with serious consequences in their lives. Campaigns on social media that use imagery based on these practical and general principles can be effective in communicating the shared responsibility to address climate change. This can have a relevant impact on social perception, since it can encourage citizens to care about climate, which is regarded as necessary to increase participation in climate action. Key policy insights Social media can play a prominent role in campaigns to make citizens aware of climate change. Images can help to effectively raise citizen awareness of climate change. Four practical principles can be effective in increasing user interaction on social media with images about climate: show 'real' people, tell a story, include a local connection, and show people who are directly affected. Visual campaigns based on the more general principles of meaningfulness and personification can be effective in representing climate change as a relevant issue in citizens' lives. These practical and more general principles can have a relevant impact on the social perception of climate change and increase citizen participation in climate debate and action.

Within the last 10 years, social media has become an increasingly prevalent component in the daily lives of students, including those in universities. Although many social media sites were developed and updated within this timeframe, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, research on how the latter can be implemented as a pedagogical tool is minimal, appearing only relatively recently in comparison to that of others. More specifically, little research has been done to address the potential uses for Instagram within the field of art and visual culture education, including university courses. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to address how a curriculum model in a university visual culture education course can incorporate platforms associated with Instagram and the ways in which this impacts student engagement while also supporting pedagogical development. Coming from a formal art history background, my understanding of how one teaches and learns about art conformed to stereotypical views of education, such as taking notes with pen and paper and memorizing the information provided. Specifically, because I was discouraged from using technology in fine arts classes, I viewed it as being incompatible with this particular learning environment. However, upon entering the field of art education, it became clear to me that a sense of discomfort was present in the classroom when I employed policies that did not allow for the use of technology. Recognizing this disconnect, I sought to discover the ways in which an intentional application of personal technology use could be implemented into a visual culture curriculum to promote student engagement. As such, utilizing the theoretical frameworks of intersectional feminism, connectivism, and pragmatism, I employed the use of pedagogical action research to design and implement a new curriculum component for an art education course that focuses on visual culture's relationship to social justice and diversity. The Instagram account known as TabloidArtHistory served as my inspiration when redesigning components of the foundational course curriculum. Through a comparative approach, this account asks viewers to consider the relationship between traditional fine arts and broader contexts of popular visual culture. As such, I applied this comparative approach to the written assignments of the curriculum to get students thinking about social media's role in promoting social justice commentary through research and critical visual analysis. Over the course of two semesters, I also applied TabloidArtHistory's conceptual framework to my teaching. I recorded in-class observations, later analyzing them through a reflective journaling process to address my pedagogical practice. In addition, the redesigned student assignments also served as data sources, demonstrating how this social media tool allowed students to engage with not only visual analysis, but also applying a critical reflection of social diversity through writing. Findings from this research support the use of social media in the teaching and learning of visual culture and examine possibilities for future curriculum development.

This thesis explores new forms of scholarly communication and the practice of open science among UK based academics. Open science broadly refers to practices that allow cost-free open access to academic research. Three aspects of open science are examined in this study: open access to research articles; open access to research data; and publishing ongoing research updates using social media. The study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining a series of scoping studies using qualitative methods followed up by an Internet survey of 1,829 UK academics. Overall this thesis has shown that whilst there is support for open science, the use of open science by academics was limited. Many academics were not aware of RCUK's open access policy and had limited experience of making their research articles freely accessible online. Most academics did not share their primary research data online. Although some academics had used a range of social media tools to communicate their research, the majority had not used social media in their research work. Overall, male, older and senior academics were more likely to use open access publishing and share primary research data, but were less likely to use social media for research. Academics based in Medical and Natural Sciences were more likely to use open access publishing and share research data, but less likely to use social media for their research compared to academics from Humanities and Social Sciences. Academics who were aware of RCUK's open access policy and who recognised the citation advantages of open access were more likely to publish in open access journals. Academics that were aware of RCUK's open access policy and had used social media for research were more likely to self-archive research articles. Academics that had used secondary data collected by others and self-archived research papers were more likely to share their own primary research data. Academics seemed to be strongly influenced by their colleagues' recommendation for the adoption of social media in research. Those who considered that the general public should know about their research findings were more likely to share their research on social media. A group of academics were identified and described as super users who frequently communicated ongoing research on social media. These super users were more likely to use tablet computers and have received social media training organised by their institutions. It is clear that open science is going to be a major factor in future academic work and in relation to building an academic career. Many academics have recognised the importance of open science. However to date the use of the tools for open science has been limited. With the right guidance and reinforcement of relevant policies, the new forms of scholarly communication can provide a pathway to open science which would serve to benefit individual academics, research communities and the public good.