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“To follow and to be followed” has become the new normal in news communication in the age of social media. News audience follow news via social media while they are being followed by news anytime anywhere. This new normal has created a pressing need to investigate whether social media have brought any changes to both party-controlled and market-oriented news media in China in reporting crises. Comparing Xinhua News Agency (party-controlled) and The Paper (market-oriented), this study investigated how they reported COVID-19 and how their news consumers engaged with their COVID-19 news stories on Jinri Toutiao, a popular and yet special form of social media. This study found that Xinhua News Agency continued to stay overwhelmingly positive, while The Paper was more neutral in reporting the health crisis. Xinhua News Agency was surprisingly more episodic than The Paper in framing the pandemic. The Paper, however, had a higher level of user engagement than Xinhua News Agency. To cater to the changing news-seeking behaviors and patterns, both party-controlled and market-oriented news media have changed their operations, but not their fundamental orientations.

The collective knowledge system has been advancing rapidly in the recent past. The digitalization of information in many online media—such as blogs, social media, articles, webpages, images, audios, and videos—provides an unprecedented opportunity for the extraction and identification of a knowledge trend. Prominent journal and conference proceedings usually contain extensive amounts of textual data that can be used to examine the research trends for various topics of interest and to understand how this research has helped in the advancement of a subject such as transportation engineering. The exploration of the unstructured contents in journal or conference papers requires sophisticated algorithms for knowledge extraction. This paper presents text mining techniques to analyze compendiums of papers published from TRB annual meetings, the largest and most comprehensive transportation conferences in the world. Topic models are algorithms designed to discover hidden thematic structure from massive collections of unstructured documents. This study used a popular topic model, latent Dirichlet allocation, to reveal research trends and interesting histories of the development of research by analyzing 15,357 compendiums of papers from 7 years (2008 to 2014) of TRB annual meetings.

The aim of the present study was to assess the frequency of uses and preferences of information and communication technologies (ICTs) among Latin American chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients. We conducted an anonymous cross-sectional survey study on Latin American COPD patients. The adapted version of the Michigan questionnaire was employed in eligible outpatients in different cities of Latin America. We categorized age and educational levels into three groups. The time passed since COPD diagnosis was categorized as ≤5 years and >5 years. χ2 and crude and adjusted logistic regressions were performed. A total of 256 patients were enrolled with a mean age of 68.7 years old. The most recurrently used ICTs were short message service (SMS; 47.1%) and WhatsApp (30.7%) for receiving COPD information. Moreover, SMS (85.8%) and Facebook (36.1%) were rated as useful for asking physicians information about COPD. Regression analysis showed that the best predictor for patients using ICTs, for any purpose, was higher education (undergraduate or graduate school). Understanding the preferences of ICTs among COPD patients could help improve patient’s outcomes through developing applications in response to specific requirements of each patient.

Background Alternative metrics to traditional, citation-based metrics are increasingly being used. These are complementary to traditional metrics, like downloads and citations, and give information on how often a given journal article is discussed and used in professional (reference managers) and social networks, such as mainstream media and Twitter. Altmetrics is used in most journals and is available in all indexed headache medicine journals. Whether Altmetrics have an input on traditional, citation-based metrics or whether it is a stand-alone metric system is not clear. Actively promoting a paper through media channels will probably increase the Altmetric score but the question arises whether this will also increase citations and downloads of this individual paper. Methods Focusing on this point we performed a randomized study in order to test the hypothesis that a promotion intervention would improve citations and other science metric scores. We selected 48 papers published in Cephalalgia from July 2019 to January 2020 and randomized them to either receive an active promotion through social media channels or not. The primary outcome used was the difference between mean article citations with versus without intervention 12 months after the intervention period. Results The results show that the alternative metrics significantly increased for those papers randomly selected to receive an intervention compared to those who did not. This effect was observed in the first 12 months, right after the boosting strategy was performed. The higher promoted paper diffusion in social media lead to a significantly higher number of citations and downloads. Conclusion Further promotion strategies should be studied in order to tailor the best cost-benefit intervention.

The main objective of the paper is to anticipate a bibliometric analysis of the research on stock market prediction using social media sentiments. The study has taken out a total of 1450 documents from the year Jan 2010 to Dec 2020. This study attempts to identify a significant journal that has maximum documents, most prolific author, most cited papers, countries, institutions, co-authorship network analysis map, inter-country co-authorship network analysis map, and keyword occurrences. The study has used the Scopus database for analyzing the large set of data of research papers that are counted in the study. And the VOSviewer software is used for generating the maps such as co-authorship analysis network map and keyword occurrence network.

The paper is rooted in the observations from the two internet blackouts witnessed in Meghalaya in 2018 and 2019. The state is located in the North Eastern region of India and this study focuses on the Khasi population residing in the East Khasi Hills District. The study explores the complex role social media has played in information dissemination in the digital age. India currently leads the world in terms of internet blackouts and it has been imposed 538 times in the country. This phenomenon has become a reoccurring trend over the last few years with the rise in digital communications and technological affordances. The paper addresses the dualistic nature of social media and how it can be empowering on the one hand, and can also be a key contributor to mis(dis)information on the other. The study offers a non-digital centric approach by adopting digital ethnographic methods and offers insights into the social media practices and experiences of the Khasi participants as well as delving into the problematic nature of internet blackouts with respect to Meghalaya. Evidently, social media has become a space in which most individuals carry their identity, aspirations, views, history, and opinions.

In the last decade, an increasing number of users have started reporting Adverse Drug Events (ADE) on social media platforms, blogs, and health forums. Given the large volume of reports, pharmacovigilance has focused on ways to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to rapidly examine these large collections of text, detecting mentions of drug-related adverse reactions to trigger medical investigations. However, despite the growing interest in the task and the advances in NLP, the robustness of these models in face of linguistic phenomena such as negations and speculations is an open research question. Negations and speculations are pervasive phenomena in natural language, and can severely hamper the ability of an automated system to discriminate between factual and nonfactual statements in text. In this paper we take into consideration four state-of-the-art systems for ADE detection on social media texts. We introduce SNAX, a benchmark to test their performance against samples containing negated and speculated ADEs, showing their fragility against these phenomena. We then introduce two possible strategies to increase the robustness of these models, showing that both of them bring significant increases in performance, lowering the number of spurious entities predicted by the models by 60% for negation and 80% for speculations., Journal Paper, EBM

Virtual engagement of lives has been made possible with the advent of social media. Almost 80% of the day are spent virtually on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, etc. Usage of social media to connect to and communicate with the ones we care about is always healthy, termed as social networking. Social dysfunction occurs when the constant communication leads to the point where our real or offline life gets replaced by virtual or online life. There is a slight boundary between social networking and social dysfunction. When social networking is advantageous, social dysfunction affects emotional well-being. When emotional well-being is affected, many users experience a compulsion to dissociate from the real world as they find virtual world, full of fantasy and enjoyment. When the Internet was created, perhaps no one was aware of its potential. More than the convenience for sharing of information it has brought the world so close to crumbling the geographical boundaries. The more people-to-people communication is, the more is the strengthening of relationships, bonds grow stronger with ‘more’ social media platforms. Being on ‘more’ social media platforms has become a benchmark for living amidst the younger generation. Either as an activity of happiness or as an activity of pleasure, users tend to use social media at varying levels. This paper aims to conceptualize the the intricacies of social media in young lives and to discern whether their association is happiness or pleasure activity. The research method of this paper has a mixed-methods research design combining data from structured survey with information outputs from in-depth interviews.

This paper contextualizes and critically examines the incorporation of transactional features into two popular mobile social media apps: Instagram and Snapchat. It examines how mobile social media acts as an interface between culture and commerce. We situate this interface within a larger political economic context in which tech companies are embracing ‘fintech’ to drive growth. We argue that mobile social media platforms play a unique role in monetising personal data and context awareness through their development of ‘transactional affordance’ – a term we develop to understand new features allowing users to connect content to forms of payment. We argue that the success of these affordances is tied to labour associated with the ‘performative authenticity’ of social-media influencers. Our first case study examines the recent development of ‘shopping’ and ‘checkout’ features on Instagram, and the significance of this feature for the economic growth of parent company Facebook. We then look at how the specific development of augmented reality features on Snapchat serve as the basis for new transactional affordances in everyday contexts. We conclude the paper by arguing that the contextual commerce these phenomena entail signals a shift to a transactional culture in which everyday interactions become opportunities for consumption.

With increasing concerns about problematic social media use, self-control is expected to become an effective approach for excessive users to decrease possible harm for their well-being. This article explores the current literature on the conceptualization of self-control on social media. For this, 25 papers from seven academic databases were analyzed in the chronological order in a systematic literature review. The sequence of applied frameworks demonstrates a gradual switch from theories of planned behavior to theories justifying non-planned behavior and self-control failures. This finding explains the emphasis of recent studies on the impulsive behavior of excessive social media users and the application of dual-system theories. However, research design of selected articles included mainly self-report tools to investigate impulsive self-control failures which may result in contradictory findings and deficient theoretical grounding for self-control interventions. All investigated papers claim a negative impact of social media self-control failures on personal well-being.

This paper introduces a model for detecting low-quality information we refer to as the Index of Measured-diversity, Partisan-certainty, Ephemerality, and Domain (IMPED). The model purports that low-quality information is characterized by ephemerality, as opposed to quality content that is designed for permanence. The IMPED model leverages linguistic and temporal patterns in the content of social media messages and linked webpages to estimate a parametric survival model and the likelihood the content will be removed from the Internet. We review the limitations of current approaches for the detection of problematic content, including misinformation and false news, which are largely based on fact-checking and machine learning, and detail the requirements for a successful implementation of the IMPED model. The paper concludes with a review of examples taken from the 2018 election cycle and the performance of the model in identifying low-quality information as a proxy for problematic content. National Science Foundation Twitter

The paper examines the role of social media platforms in public relations engagement, focusing on the case of a leading non-profit organization in the UAE, namely Dubai Cares. Drawing on multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), the paper analyses the textual, paratextual, and visual modes of communication deployed by the organization, and investigates their role as (multimodal) discursive practices in constructing engagement and shaping power relations between the organizations and its publics. A key finding of the paper is that Dubai Cares’ online public relations efforts to promote its international recognition and legitimacy often come at the expense of addressing multiple power differentials between the organization and its stakeholders. The paper demonstrates how approaching engagement as a multimodal discourse, where power relations are at play, helps transcend the limitations of instrumental interpretations of the notion of engagement, thus obscuring its inherent discursive and social dimension.

Several methodologies in user centered research lead to the collection of large amounts of comments about a product or system. The growth of social media research has led to the development of sentiment analysis algorithms that computationally analyze the meaning of text. This paper utilized the Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoning (VADER) sentiment analysis technique to assess comments from a user centered design study for a rotorcraft degraded visual environment mitigation system. The sentiment analysis findings mirror results from the other measures of the user centered design study. This paper supports the use of sentiment analysis for large volumes of comment data from user centered design studies.

The transnational circulation of intimate care is increasingly mediated by digital communications. Research conceptualizing long-distance emotional intimacy in terms of ‘care chains’ has been influential in understanding international care economies. Yet, this framework has limitations for theorizing the role of media in communications of care. With a focus on the ‘left-behind’ family members of Romanian economic migrants, this paper investigates how the use of social media apps and mobile devices within the context of a major intra-EU labor migration phenomenon helps people stay in touch with their transnationally mobile loved ones. It draws on interview material elicited among the close family members of Romanian labor migrants living in Bucharest and surrounding areas. The analysis focuses on the sensory role of social media platforms and the materiality of smartphones in shaping relations of long-distance emotional care. Showing how video calling and photo sharing practices produce emotional experiences that are specific to contemporary combinations of platform-device technicity and social sensitization, the paper argues for conceptualizing transnational care as a mediated emotional experience. By theorizing the role of media in how care is not merely transferred but felt through mediation, the paper demonstrates how media practices produce a techno-emotional mediation of transnational care.

This paper investigates the impact of social media influencer endorsements on purchase intention, more specifically, the impact advertising disclosure and source credibility have in this process. The proposed framework argues that advertising disclosure has a significant impact on source credibility subdimensions of attractiveness, trustworthiness and expertise; subdimensions that positively influence consumer purchase intention. Empirical findings based on 306 German Instagram users between 18 and 34 years of age reveal that source attractiveness, source trustworthiness and source expertise significantly increase consumer purchase intention; whilst advertising disclosure indirectly influences consumer purchase intention by influencing source attractiveness. Furthermore, the results reveal that the number of followers positively influences source attractiveness, source trustworthiness as well as purchase intention. All in all, this paper makes a unique contribution to product endorsement literature, with evidence highlighting how social media influencers and advertising disclosure may be used on Instagram to effectively increase consumer purchase intention.

Dissidents exist in every nation, always have, and perhaps always will – existing in that risky space between being patriots and being enemies of the state. Social media, on the other hand, is a fairly recent tool of communication defined by its heightened ductility in the hands of users. The admixture of social media and political dissidence has thrown many governments in a ceaseless panic, reflected in the raft of legislation enacted to control and constrain cyber activities. This paper studied the ‘social media dissidence’ phenomenon in Zimbabwe in the period 2016 within the context of digital media and the publics in Africa. The periodization understudy is noticeable because it bore witness to a variety of unsettling acts by individuals that provoked panicked responses from the state. Using qualitative data drawn from Facebook and Twitter and deploying Mamdani’s citizen and subject, the study examines the nature of the born-digital dissidence in a sample of two cases, #ThisFlag and #Tajamuka. The paper establishes the possibilities and limitations of deploying social media as a tool for expressing protest and dissidence. The study found that social media dissidence is marked by constant fluidity, transmogrification, crests, and troughs.

The contemporary outbreak of right-wing populism in combination with increasing migratory flows toward Europe raises concerns about the social construction of migrations and migrants and the policy orientations toward them. Research indicated worrying tendencies to perceive migrations negatively and criminalize migrants. However, this paper focuses on a different tactic adopted by a number of populist forces: the criminalization of sea-rescue NGOs. In particular, it presents the case-study of Sea-Watch 3, an NGO sea-rescue vessel which docked in Italy with several migrants on board in June 2019, after a long struggle with Minister of Internal Affairs Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League (a right-wing, anti-migrants populist party). By means of content analysis, the paper discusses Salvini’s Facebook communication strategy about the event. The aim of this study is to cast new light on how the criminalization of NGOs can be exploited to reinforce other aspects of right-wing populism, such as anti-elitism, nationalism, exclusionary politics, personalization, and polarization. In this respect, the implications of criminalizing sea-rescue NGOs for policy orientations and policymaking are also highlighted.

This paper explores why and how migrants use social media in different phases of the migration process, how they manage personal information on social media during migration, and whether they use libraries’ social media in any of the migration phases. An anonymous questionnaire was used to collect opinions and investigate the activities of migrant communities in New Zealand in the three above mentioned areas. The paper presents the results of a descriptive statistical analysis performed on the data. These results were categorized and presented under the following themes: demographic data, use of social media during migration, personal information management practices on social media, use of library social media during migration, issues arising from the use of social media during migration and positive impact of social media during migration. The main findings of our research showed that in the transitioning phase migrants use social media mostly for making the decision to move. In the settling phase, social media help them to cushion the anxieties associated with a move and also help them to make an informed decision in the new country. In the settled phase, participants used social media to stay connected with family and friends in the home country. Language barriers can restrict the use of social media during the moving process. Personal information on social media is not recognized as important and is not managed in any particular way. Libraries are present in the life of migrants but more as physical spaces and services than through their social media presence. Findings from this study can be of interest to libraries and other information providers developing services for migrants in physical and digital environments.

This article is premised on research that suggests there is a gap between technology use for teaching and learning and the technology used in assessment. Digital technology such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, and news feeds are increasingly used in teaching and learning. On the other hand, assessment is often only in traditional essay form and frequently via pen and paper. This article examines the complex nature of multimodal design and argues for assessment that has constructive alignment, which sets out the interdependence of learning outcomes, teaching, and assessment where all three are aligned as equal partners. The aim of the research described was to investigate whether teacher–learners believed there was alignment between learning outcomes, activities, and assessment that utilized digital media technology. This article presents findings from a small-scale case study that drew on qualitative data from Student Evaluations of the Paper and from online surveys from four cohorts of participating teachers in a postgraduate adult literacy, language, and numeracy professional development program. There were three important findings from the data that indicated the importance of firstly having alignment of digital technology and course design outcomes, activities, and assessments and that this was clearly visible to the participants. The second finding indicated the content was relevant to the teacher–learners and involved them in constructing their own learning through authentic and practical activities and assessment. The third finding indicated that course outcomes, activities, and assessment tasks were aligned with multi-literacy skills. It is argued that academics design courses that are constructively aligned connecting learners with outcomes, activities, and assessment, which include an explicit focus on teaching the multi-literacy skills required in a world that is becoming increasingly digital.

Introduction Social media is increasingly used in the dissemination of medical research. Traditional measures of the impact of a paper do not account for this. Altmetrics are a measure of the dissemination of a publication via social media websites. The purpose of this study is to ascertain if the altmetric attention score of an article is a reliable measure of the impact it has in the field of critical care medicine. To this end, we investigated if a correlation exists between future citation count and altmetric attention score. Methods The top nine journals by impact factor in the field of critical care medicine were identified for 2014 and 2015. The 100 most cited articles from these journals were recorded to form the Scientific Impact Group, i.e. those with the greatest impact on the scientific community. The altmetric attention score was recorded for each article. The top 100 articles by altmetric attention score were also identified to form the Media Impact Group, i.e. those that generated the most online attention. Their citation counts’ were recorded. Statistical analysis was performed on each group to identify a correlation between altmetric attention score and citation count. Results There was a moderately positive correlation in the Scientific Impact Group, with a Spearman r score of 0.4336 ( P = 0.0001). A weakly positive correlation was found in the Media Impact Group, with a Spearman r score of 0.3033 ( P = 0.002). Conclusions There is a positive correlation between traditional bibliographic metrics and altmetrics in the field of critical care medicine. Highly cited papers are more likely to generate online attention. However, papers that generate a lot of online attention are less likely to have a high citation count. Therefore, altmetric attention score is not a reliable predictor of future citation count in critical care medicine.

Debate regarding how to conduct digital anthropology is currently contested, with two primary methodologies emerging: researchers who conduct projects wholly in cyberspace, and those who look at the use of digital technologies by their informants, contextualised in the offline world. This paper suggests a third way, arguing that immersive cohabitation is possible where online and offline fieldsites are viewed as part of a larger blended field. This paper builds on two years’ ethnographic fieldwork with Instagram to call for immersive cohabitation as a new method to be considered by digital anthropologists and ethnographers. Further to this blended approach, this paper argues for a move beyond participant observation to working as observing participants in the virtual. This dual approach restructures current anthropological methods for digital working to enhance the quality and depth of data collection whilst ensuring the continued currency of the anthropologist in a rapidly modernising and increasingly digitised world.

In this paper, we are examining the sponsored advertisement posts/regular post on Facebook of a few business enterprises based in India to promote their products during first two phases of COVID-19 lockdown period. As a marketing and product promotion strategy, many business companies use social media platforms like Facebook and others to advertise their product through quick sponsored posts from time to time. As the use of social media has increased during the lockdown period when people are spending their whole time at home for a more extended period, these sponsored posts are more likely to be hit by the viewers. The present paper studies the contents of select sponsored posts/regular posts on Facebook to show how the “lockdown” period created atmospherics for E-commerce businesses. It also argues that by using topical words and phrases like “quarantine” and “work from home” respectively, as a tempting marketing strategy, the capitalist enterprises are using this time of distress, global misery and tribulation, for promoting their business.

The main purpose of this paper is to highlight the important information sources of the Public Health awareness used by the library and information sources in this Pandemic situation. Social distancing phase Information professional used a different medium to connect with their patron and try to serve the best manner. The role of the information professional in health information and health literacy is very vital. Information professional public health awareness information with the library patrons and the general public. In this paper, the researchers provide a brief introduction to different information channel support in information dissemination.

In response to the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak and the Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) urgent need for work related to transportation and pandemics, this paper contributes with a sense of urgency and provides a starting point for research on the topic. The main goal of this paper is to support transportation researchers and the TRB community during this COVID-19 pandemic by reviewing the performance of software models used for extracting large-scale data from Twitter streams related to COVID-19. The study extends the previous research efforts in social media data mining by providing a review of contemporary tools, including their computing maturity and their potential usefulness. The paper also includes an open repository for the processed data frames to facilitate the quick development of new transportation research studies. The output of this work is recommended to be used by the TRB community when deciding to further investigate topics related to COVID-19 and social media data mining tools.

The use of web-based surveys is currently increasing due to its cost-effectiveness and agility as it provides access to market researchers to web-connected populations who are unlikely to answer through traditional survey methods. However, survey response rates in market research are in general decline and among survey platforms, web-based surveys have the highest rates of non-response. Thus, there is a need to address the declining response rates for web-based surveys particularly unit response rates – the likelihood the respondent would answer the survey. This paper proposes a respondent prequalifying framework that reduces unit non-response rates of web-based non-probabilistic surveys. A checklist of respondent characteristics influencing the likelihood of unit non-response was developed. The framework was then adopted for its applicability by replicating the recruitment phase of two case studies wherein the prequalifying checklist was applied with consideration to the respondent profile requirements of each study. While this paper does not intend to provide robust empirical evidence to the proposed framework, it demonstrates a promising framework that can be used to increase unit non-response rate by comprehensively integrating the pre-qualifying factors in the domain literature and carefully developing such framework to the most plausible direction a web-survey can be implemented. Findings suggest that (1) the proposed respondent prequalifying framework increases the unit response by prequalifying the sample in the recruitment stage, and (2) increasing the threshold value may increase unit response rates with careful consideration to some significant issues such as the weights assigned to the prequalifying factors, the quality of the background information of the respondents in relation to the prequalifying factors, and the sensitivity of the survey topic. The proposed framework is developed with strong theoretical grounding and detailed discussion for its practical use is also provided. The framework benefits market researchers by reducing unit non-response costs and increasing efficiency in social media-based market surveys.

Being a family carer can be rewarding but can also lead to mental and physical exhaustion as well as feelings of social exclusion and isolation. Research has shown that the use of the Internet and online forums can provide an immediate place to find information and reassurance and that forum use can be an empathetic place to share experiences and seek emotional support. This article details a systematic literature search of research on carers of people with intellectual disabilities and/or autism using the Internet. A thematic synthesis of the resulting papers identified that online forums give carers a sense of agency by providing a place to go for informational support that may not be elsewhere. Carers also enjoyed the safe community of solidarity and emotional support that online forums provide. An important finding is the lack of published papers in this area with the inclusion of just eight papers.

This paper aims to provide an in-depth investigation of the role of social media images in conveying the meaning of "power" and "empowerment" in public antiviolence campaigns that aim to empower women in the Middle East. The research raises three qualitative questions of the way anti-violence adverts have represented Arab women in the social media; the way Arab societal culture affects the image of women represented in the adverts; and the extent to which these social adverts have empowered women to transfer their realities against domestic violence. The researcher uses a purposeful sample of six social campaigns that addressed women violence organized by six non-profit and governmental entities in different Arab countries in the period between 2013 and 2018. The paper used the theoretical framework offered by Cohen-Eliya and Hammer (2004) to analyze the extent to which these social media adverts have "!empowered" women against domestic violence. The input of this framework is that it studies how visual adverts have constructed relationships of power regarding the stereotypes of women in the Middle East. The paper finds that although these social media adverts aim to fight domestic violence, they enhance traditional stereotype of weak women and fall short of addressing the concept of "empowerment" through focusing on stereotypical images of powerless women. The paper highlights the need for new social media communication that would utilize the opportunities provided by social media to establish a new "transformative" image of the Arab woman about her cultural context. Moreover, the paper suggests that the concept of "empowerment" should be addressed at both individual and cultural levels through cooperating with governmental and non-profit organizations using social media communication to provide women with access to resources.

From data leaks of sensitive information to the degrading or halting of complete systems upon which integral societal process rely, there are daily reminders of the precariousness of networked institutions. This form of vulnerability extends beyond services to also threaten foundational values, such as privacy, movement, and free speech. Yet, given the awareness of vulnerability to cyber disruption, little is known about how massive cyber failures might disrupt the lives of ordinary people at a micro-scale. Because technology is imbued in everyday life, and people use internet systems in bundled, complex ways to accomplish a myriad of unknown activities, a complicated web of cyber-vulnerability likely exists. Thus, the goal of this paper is to explore one dimension of this vulnerability as it pertains to public security. Terrorism is predicted to remain an urban phenomenon, and terrorists are increasingly exploiting cyber-systems. The aims of terrorism to disrupt democratic systems are perfectly achieved by cyber disruption, and this paper explores how those goals were facilitated during the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013. By drawing on interviews with public safety officials and ordinary people who relied on the internet and linked technology during that emergency, I demonstrate the complex ways that cyber-systems limited the effectiveness of public security in times of terror. The results suggest a rethinking of the social amplification of risk paradigm that dominates in risk hazards research as well as several policy interventions in security communication and information dissemination, population management during crisis, and resilience.

Existing research into the depiction of female athletes has indicated that while they remain under-represented across traditional and online media outlets, social media is a potential tool for female athletes to redress this lack of coverage, and even contest and rework normative gender and sexual identities in sport. This paper challenges such arguments by offering a feminist thematic analysis of how five international female athletes are using social media to present their sporting and feminine selves within a neoliberal post-feminist moment characterised by individual empowerment and entrepreneurial subjecthood. Adopting a feminist critique of neoliberalism, and critically engaging Banet-Weiser's gendered “economies of visibility”, our findings demonstrate that, in a social media environment, female athletes are adopting new strategies for identity construction that capitalise on tropes of agentic post-feminist subjecthood to market themselves, including self-love, self-disclosure and self-empowerment. This paper advances the emerging field of inquiry into athlete social media usage by focusing on the ideological workings of neoliberalised gender discourse not only in the crafting of contemporary sporting femininities in digital spaces, but in recasting feminism as an individualised endeavour firmly located in the market.

Informed consent may be unobtainable in online contexts. This article examines the difficulties of obtaining informed consent online through a Facebook case study. It is proposed that there are at least two ways informed consent could be waived in research: first, if the data are public, and second, if the data are textual. Accordingly, the publicness of the Facebook News Feed is considered. Taking account of the wide availability of Facebook users’ data, and reflecting on how public those users perceive their information to be, this paper argues that some Facebook data are properly viewed as public to semi-public in nature. A second issue is whether the Facebook News Feed data collection ought to be classified as document-based or human subjects research. Since the Facebook News Feed involves social interaction that may elicit ‘ethically important moments’, this paper proposes that observing it may constitute human subjects research. While informed consent is desirable for human subjects research, it is suggested that Facebook News Feed observations are comparable to observational research in a public space, and thus waiving informed consent in this online setting could be justifiable.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether off-task multitasking activities with mobile technologies, specifically social networking sites and short messaging services, used during real-time lectures have an effect on grade performance in higher education students. Two experimental groups and one control group were used in this research. While participants in experimental groups 1 and 2 were allowed to navigate Facebook and to exchange short messaging service messages via mobile phones during real time in class lecturing, the control group participants were allowed to take notes using only pen and paper in the same lecturing conditions during three consecutive experimental sessions. The results showed that when students were given the opportunity of non-lecture-related multitasking using mobile phones writing/sending short messaging services and looking at Facebook profiles/reading news feed/looking at shared multimedia/reading wall messages during the lecture, their grade performance was hindered compared to traditional pen and paper note-taking. Engaging in social media use while trying to follow instruction may reduce learners’ capacity for cognitive processing causing poor academic performance.

In this paper, we examine the relation between social media use and the absorptive capacity of organisations. Over the past 10 years, many organisations have systematically adopted social media. Trade press and consulting companies often claim that the systematic use of social media increases the performance of organisations. However, such claims are typically neither empirically grounded nor theoretically examined. In this paper, based on key informant interviews at 20 organisations, we examine these claims empirically and theoretically. Firstly, we examine the ways in which social media are used by organisations. We identify five different social media use types that support different organisational purposes (broadcast, dialogue, collaboration, knowledge management and sociability). Secondly, we analyse how these five social media use types relate to organisations' absorptive capacity. We find that particular social media use types (e.g., dialogue) support organisations' absorptive capacity and, ultimately, their performance although others (e.g., sociability) do not.

This paper is an exploration of student feedback to their participation and learning in the social and mobile-first multimedia newsroom run as part of the Bachelor of Journalism degree at the University of Wollongong, Australia. The paper draws on student responses to an online survey carried out in the wake of the final-year newsroom subject. Acknowledging one of the main aims of journalism, newsroom curriculum is to present ‘real-world’ experiences as authentically as possible. The paper explores the student observations in the context of a changing news media landscape, and the need for journalism education to remain relevant and contemporary.

With the advent of Web 2.0 tools and especially social media, researchers are increasingly active on the Web. This has resulted in a transformation in the scholarly communication process through which researchers share and bookmark research works in online platforms. In the present study, the influence of social networking sites on the field of Artificial Intelligence research was studied. The study analysed the influence of social networking sites on both conference papers and journal articles, as in a field like Artificial Intelligence both channels of research dissemination play important roles. The top 100 cited journal articles and conference papers in Artificial Intelligence published in 2009 and 2013 were analysed for their presence on social networking sites and online reference managers. It was found that amongst social networking sites, Mendeley had the greatest influence on research in Artificial Intelligence. Mendeley played the most remarkable role in transforming scholarly communication with the highest coverage of both journal articles and conference papers for both the years 2009 and 2013. It was found that the influence of social networking sites was greater for journal articles than conference papers, the latter still having a lower average Mendeley readership. The highest correlation between citation counts and Mendeley readership was found for journal articles published in 2009, followed by journal articles published in 2013, conference papers published in 2009 and conference papers published in 2013. The average Mendeley readership was also higher for journal articles than for conference papers. Mendeley readership was also found to be higher for journal articles and conference papers published earlier in time, indicating that research works published earlier in time were more popular in social networking sites and online reference managers.

This paper develops a way for analyzing the structure of campaign communications within Twitter. The structure of communication affordances creates opportunities for a horizontal organization power within Twitter interactions. However, one cannot infer the structure of interactions as they materialize from the formal properties of the technical environment in which the communications occur. Consequently, the paper identifies three categories of empowering communication operations that can occur on Twitter: Campaigns can respond to others, campaigns can retweet others, and campaigns can call for others to become involved in the campaign on their own terms. The paper operationalizes these categories in the context of the 2015 U.K. general election. To determine whether Twitter is used to empower laypersons, the profiles of each account retweeted and replied to were retrieved and analyzed using natural language processing to identify whether an account is from a political figure, member of the media, or some other public figure. In addition, tweets and retweets are compared with respect to the manner key election issues are discussed. The findings indicate that empowering uses of Twitter are fairly marginal, and retweets use almost identical policy language as the original campaign tweets.

Designing privacy controls that are intuitive for end users involves several challenges. Graphic representations could certainly contribute to tackle such challenges, however, a visual vocabulary for privacy solutions is currently lacking. To contribute to that end, in this paper we report a review of online images related to privacy. We identify graphic representations that illustrate privacy objects, mechanisms and actions, and categorize them according to the concepts covered. Seeking to develop a set of icons to illustrate privacy concepts, we analyze online contents publicly available from social media and extract representations that commonly refer to privacy concepts. The contributions of this paper include: (1) a set of graphics that represent privacy mechanisms, objects and actions; and (2) a vocabulary for such graphic representation. The evidence is drawn from the analysis and discussion of 241 images selected by the authors from ten online image repositories.

Aims and objectives: This paper explores one dimension of language maintenance among college-aged heritage speakers of Spanish (HSS) in three communities of the U.S. Midwest. The aim was to understand whether Spanish was relevant at a point in life in which they were developing their own networks away from their families. Research questions: Were reading and writing in Spanish relevant for the participants? Did they use Spanish when on social media? Did they text in Spanish? Was Spanish relevant for them when consuming content on electronic media? Methodology: This analysis is part of a larger study on HSS in communities of recent Latino settlement. Respondents participated in an oral interview and responded to an online survey. Data and analysis: Results presented here come from a study designed to gather data on reported interlocutors, reading and writing, electronic media consumption, and social media use. Respondents were 71 HSS between the ages of 19 and 29. Results were compared with two control groups: 23 L2 speakers and 24 native speakers attending the same schools. Higher relevance was assumed when an event was reported closest to the moment of response. Reading and writing were classified as school, personal interest, employment, other. Relevance as related to social media, music, and internet use was determined by reported frequency. Findings: Highest relevance was reported for texting and listening to music; lowest was reported for consumption of internet content. Results for texting, social media and personal interest reading/writing suggest that for these speakers Spanish was viable for accrual of bonding social capital. Reading/writing reports suggest that for many, Spanish was also viable to attain specific academic goals. Environmental pressures to shift are evidenced in the uses not (or barely) reported: reading/writing related to work, religion and daily living, and consumption of internet content. Originality: This paper focuses on maintenance of relevance of a heritage language in the first stage of adult life. Implications: Results suggest that in using Spanish, respondents were not bound by physical context or immediate availability of interlocutors, but by their perceptions of viability.

The rapid proliferation and ongoing transformation of digital technologies and social media platforms have had a substantial influence on the participatory cultures of young people and their associated social connections. This social/digital nexus raises important questions of social cohesion, with digital technologies at once augmenting social interaction whilst simultaneously creating an uneven landscape of access for participation. To address this interface of the digital and the social, this paper presents a qualitative study of 24 tertiary students from ethnic minority backgrounds living in Auckland, New Zealand, who use social media. Incorporating a pre-screening questionnaire, a one-week social media diary and semi-structured interviews, this study presents the ways in which digital belongings influence participants' practices of friendship and family. The ways that connective media influence, and even constrain interaction alongside the politics of belongings, are theorised to further examine the meanings and experiences behind participants' social media usage and social contact. By integrating these ideas, this paper presents the ways in which young university students use social media and the extent to which digital interaction and networking influence social participation and social cohesion.

The article explores progress made in LGBTQ provision in UK secondary school libraries since Section 28 was repealed in 2003. Little research has been conducted on LGBTQ provision in UK school libraries. This paper aims to fill a research gap in this field. Data was gathered from two qualitative surveys conducted in 2013. The first survey was aimed at LGBTQ people who had been pupils of a UK secondary school at some point during the period 2003–2013. The second was aimed at librarians currently working in UK secondary schools. The surveys were disseminated using targeted mailing lists and social media. A four-staged thematic analysis of the data was undertaken. The research found that school library use among LGBTQ teens is low due to LGBTQ invisibility and fear experienced by young LGBTQ people. LGBTQ school library provision would be highly valued by most LGBTQ pupils. Librarians are generally positive about LGBTQ provision, although they respond differently to diversity. Some adopt a neutral approach to inclusion; others offer more targeted and active support. Librarians’ knowledge and confidence regarding LGBTQ provision also varies. The paper provides increased insight into LGBTQ school library provision in the UK and provides recommendations to improve practice.

This paper reports on a qualitative study regarding electronic citizen participation. The study assessed how government agencies based in South Africa used social media applications within the government to citizen (G2C) relationship for electronic participation. Textual data was sampled from provincial and municipal government department’s social media accounts and analysed thematically. The study found that there is a discrepancy in the adoption of social media in metropolitan municipalities and provincial government departments. Contrastingly, citizens were shown to have increasing access to social media, which have become essential components of their daily lives. Furthermore citizens were willing to use the applications to engage with government departments, which were found to be responding sporadically. The paper argues that there is an opportunity for the public sector to include social media in their e-participation endeavours. Several guiding principles are also offered.

Smartphones are finding their way into our daily lives. This paper examines the domestication of smartphones by looking at how the way we use mobile applications affects our everyday routines. Data is collected through an innovative quantitative mixed-method approach, combining log data from smartphones and survey (perception) data. We find that there are dimensions of domestication that explain how the use of smartphones affects our daily routines. Contributions are stronger for downloaded applications than for native applications. Especially applications that require interaction with others, such as social media and instant messaging, have a serious impact on our day-to-day routines. As a result, appropriation is core in incorporating smartphones in daily life routines. However, frequency of use and the total number of minutes spent on a given type of application per day affect our everyday routines in different ways. This paper is the first quantitative domestication study that focuses on smartphones rather than feature phones. The theoretical contribution and practical implications are outlined.