Digital Commons Network^™

Psychophysiological Impacts Associated With Social Media Use, Lindsey Hieber

Theses and Dissertations

Social media has become increasingly relevant to everyday life since its inception, with new social media applications being created regularly. There has been some research regarding social media use and mental health; with studies finding both negative and positive mental health effects possible. TikTok, one of the newest and fastest growing social media applications has not been studied thoroughly to investigate potential mental health effects. The psychophysiological impacts of social media use have not been explored at all. An initial survey was done to investigate personality and mental health effects of social media use as well as if the reasonings …

Dialogic Language As Digital Ethos: An Analysis Of Language Used In The Anti-Vaccine Conversation On Twitter, Jeffery A. Sternstein

Theses and Dissertations

Many scholars attribute social media’s influence with a rise in distrust of expert advice. These scholars have suggested that people are turning to non-experts for advice because those non-experts seem to be more willing to openly discuss medical issues while also providing empathy, as opposed to the experts who have been trained to speak with detached authority. For this dissertation, I have done a study to find evidence supporting these theories. To do this, I looked at the Twitter conversation which has been focusing on anti-vaccination themes. Drawing on tweets from within that conversation, I conducted an inter-rater reliability test …

"We'll Get Through This Together": Fan Cultures And Mediated Social Support On Amc's Talking Dead, Jeremy Vincent Adolphson

Theses and Dissertations

In this rhetorical analysis, the role of fandom through the technological advances in new media communication and its impact on social media are examined. Specifically, I analyze the rhetorical strategies that individuals use online in order to create narratives reaffirming their own conceptualizations of what it means to be a fan. This dissertation explores how changes in our contemporary media landscape has afforded a new space in popular culture, particularly the television genre of the Live After Show, which is specifically geared towards fans gaining public momentum, while highlighting the productive and performative elements of fan labor. The primary texts …

Expanding Composition Pedagogies: A New Rhetoric From Social Media, Ashley Evans

Theses and Dissertations

Traditionally, the field of rhetoric and composition has valued long-form essay writing, which requires students to engage patiently and at length with revision. In contrast, students today spend much time outside of school producing fast-paced and short posts for social media. This dissertation argues that students’ social media interactions provide them nuanced, dialogic, and complex rhetorical understandings about writing—but that students need help developing discursive processes to support transfer of their social media knowledge to other writing contexts, including long-form academic writing. Drawing from two semesters of in-class study, I construct for first-year composition classrooms a pedagogy that embraces and …

Passbook, Mark Robert Brand

Theses and Dissertations

Passbook is a nostalgic novel that considers the meaning of love and family on the edge of a post-mortal near future. As the era of austerity enters its third decade, a social media platform—the eponymous Passbook—allows the living to interact with the dead, and changes the landscape of longevity forever. Wyatt Simmons, a young underemployed college graduate, finds himself locked out of the American Dream by suppressed wages, strangled career opportunities, and overwhelming debt. While coping with the un-deaths of his mother and sister, and estrangement from his financially-comfortable careerist father, Wyatt perseveres in a dissatisfying relationship of necessity with …

Enacting A Path From Despair To Happiness: A Critical Analysis Of The It Gets Betters Project, Lindsey Marie Harness

Theses and Dissertations

Rhetorical agency is critical for addressing perceived community crises, especially for marginalized populations. Rhetorical agency, as it is used in this dissertation, refers to the capacity to act in a way that is recognizable and intelligible within the context in which it is presented (Campbell, 2005; Rand, 2014). Understanding rhetorical agency in this way recognizes that its enactment involves a complex interplay between the rhetor, his/her audience, and the rhetorical conditions characterizing the discursive context. Using a social media movement, the It Gets Better Project, as a case study, I analyze the LGBT population’s strategic response to address the issue …

Hashtagging Your Health: Using Psychosocial Variables And Social Media Use To Understand Impression Management And Exercise Behaviors In Women, Caitlyn Hauff

Theses and Dissertations

Our society has become heavily reliant on social media, especially in the health and exercise domain. Social and environmental factors impact females’ body image perceptions and create body image disturbances, yet little research is dedicated to the exploration of how social media, and social comparisons through social media exposure, impact exercise behaviors and body image perceptions in females. Considering Perloff's (2014) theoretical model, the current study explored how the interaction between individual psychosocial variables and social media use predict exercise behaviors and engagement in impression management in women. Using a mixed methodological approach, the specific aims of this study were …

Young Adult Authors, Readers, And Feminized Social Media, Margaret R. Kohlmann

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis looks at YA literature, a feminized genre that continues to gain momentum in publishing and popular culture. Specifically, I look at YA authors and their readers’ interactions on social media and the manner in which these conversations are gendered. I argue that YA authors are expected to utilize feminized traits on social media with their readers and fellow authors, but they use same traits to create social change in the genre and industry. This project analyzes three different types of readers: Readers, Reader-Creators, and Bloggers and their interactions with YA authors on social media. My interviews with five …

Three Research Essays On Human Behaviors In Social Media, Jiao Wu

Theses and Dissertations

Social Media (SM) has grown to be one of the most popular Internet technologies for individual users and has fostered a global community. For instance, recent statistics reveal that monthly active users of Facebook are almost 1.5 billion by Mar 2015. At the same time, 20% of internet users in the US are expected to have Twitter accounts. This figure has grown from 15.2% in 2012, and is expected to rise to 24.2% by 2018 (Twitter 2015).

People like spending their time on SM to track the latest news, seek knowledge, update personal status, and connect with friends. It is …

Three Essays On Retransmission Of Brand Messages In Social Media, Nima Yahyapour Jalali

Theses and Dissertations

Social networks have emerged as an important channel for brands to communicate with customers both directly as well as secondarily through customers who share the communications with others. A value of this channel to brands, therefore, depends on how effective they are in increasing the retransmission of their messages by customers. This is the issue that we investigate through three essays using the social media site Twitter as our research setting. Our investigation is based on the theory that retweeting is a choice made by consumers who rely on constructive preferences (Bettman, Luce and Payne 1998) while seeking three intangible …

Informational Power On Twitter: A Mixed-Methods Exploration Of User Knowledge And Technological Discourse About Information Flows, Nicholas John Proferes

Theses and Dissertations

Following a number of recent examples where social media users have been confronted by information flows that did not match their understandings of the platforms, there is a pressing need to examine public knowledge of information flows on these systems, to map how this knowledge lines up against the extant flows of these systems, and to explore the factors that contribute to the construction of knowledge about these systems. There is an immediacy to this issue because as social media sites become further entrenched as dominant vehicles for communication, knowledge about these technologies will play an ever increasing role in …

Three Essays On Opinion Mining Of Social Media Texts, Shuyuan Deng

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation research is a collection of three essays on opinion mining of social media texts. I explore different theoretical and methodological perspectives in this inquiry. The first essay focuses on improving lexicon-based sentiment classification. I propose a method to automatically generate a sentiment lexicon that incorporates knowledge from both the language domain and the content domain. This method learns word associations from a large unannotated corpus. These associations are used to identify new sentiment words. Using a Twitter data set containing 743,069 tweets related to the stock market, I show that the sentiment lexicons generated using the proposed method …

Why Do People Give? Similarity Based Persuasion On Charitable Appeals And Self-Presentation On Social Media, Jihye Lee

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the sizable donations and the variety of views to research an individual's charitable motivations, the individual's charitable giving has remained somewhat stagnant. Ever since the economic crisis of 2008, contributions to charities have decreased. Therefore, garnering donations is a significant challenge for charitable organizations. Moreover, for individuals who have decided to make voluntary contributions, determining which of the over 800,000 nonprofit organizations to contribute to can be a challenging task, as well. The question of how nonprofit organizations should foster awareness and receive donations is of critical importance, yet the answer is not quite clear. In the current fierce …

Marketing Post-Feminism Through Social Media: Fan Identification And Fashion On Pretty Little Liars, Anna Donatelle

Theses and Dissertations

Television shows targeted to a young, female audience often depict post-feminist themes such as self-sexualization, self-branding, consumerism, female empowerment through the body, and the "good" girl. This thesis focuses on the ABC Family hit series Pretty Little Liars as an example of the ways in which television shows promote these post-feminist ideologies. I argue that as the network has branded itself as the place for millennial programming; it has used digital platforms to make Pretty Little Liars a one-stop-shop for young women to learn about beauty and femininity. Relatedly, this project analyzes the ways in which young women construct their …

Understanding Wisconsin Legislators' Use Of Social Media, Christian T. Moran

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis used quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the use of social media by legislative offices of the Wisconsin State Assembly. A survey of legislators and their staff documented the extent to which each office uses Facebook or Twitter. In addition, multivariate analysis of the survey data provided an understanding of which kinds of legislators are more likely to use Facebook or Twitter. There were three important findings. First, most Wisconsin legislators whose offices use Facebook or Twitter do not seem to be doing so to reach the news media. Second, overall, the characteristics of a Wisconsin legislator are …

Examining The Efficacy Of A Facebook-Mediated Intervention To Increase Steps Per Day In College Freshmen, Aubrianne Elise Rote

Theses and Dissertations

During the transition from high school to college, physical activity levels tend to decrease. Given the numerous benefits of regular physical activity, it is essential to encourage college students to develop the habit of being regularly active. The internet is one tool that has been used to deliver physical activity interventions to this population but is hindered by low participant engagement and high monetary cost of development. Social media is an internet entity that can be used to deliver a physical activity intervention that facilitates higher participant engagement and reduces cost. The purpose of this study was to compare the …