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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
"It Is In Our Dna": Athlete Activism And Social Media Discourse During The 2020 Wnba Season, Kendra Gilbertson
"It Is In Our Dna": Athlete Activism And Social Media Discourse During The 2020 Wnba Season, Kendra Gilbertson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
This dissertation analyzes the athlete activism in the WNBA, the use of social media for activism, and the social media discourse during the 2020 basketball season. I applied Critical Discourse Analysis to a defined set of texts including social media posts from Instagram and Twitter, user comments on social media, news articles from sports and non-sports publications, and a documentary, all related to the activism of the WNBA athletes. I chose the 2020 season because it is an exceptional case study of athlete activism and the use of social media for activism because the season was played in a single …
Learning And Decision Making In Social Media Networks, Zhecheng Qiang
Learning And Decision Making In Social Media Networks, Zhecheng Qiang
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
Social media is a virtual community where users share news, ideas, interests, and information. Learning the information diffusion dynamics and making decisions correspondingly, e.g., selecting the seed nodes to maximize the influence, have been widely applied to the areas of viral marketing and cyber security. In this dissertation, we study the problem of learning diffusion process, i.e., infection prediction, in social media networks utilizing both feature-based machine learning methods and mathematical model-based methods. For feature-based machine learning methods, the neighborhood information is treated as an important feature together with user profile and content similarity features. For model-based methods, two distinctive …
Investigating The Effects Of Negative Influence Gradients And Emotion Contagion On The Information Processing Capacity Of Social Media Users: Information Diffusion Modeling Approach, Nisha Baral
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
With the growing use of Online social media (OSM), users are observing a substantial amount of information in their social feeds. Moreover, people often use multiple OSM platforms because of each platform's unique features. Because of the huge volume of information present in social feeds, it restricts a user's ability to process the relevant information since the most important information may be overwhelmed by unimportant information. For information to diffuse in OSM, the receiver's attention is the most important condition. Cognition plays an important role in determining a user's attention/responsiveness. If OSM users receive the information above their cognition limits …
A Human-Centered Approach To Improving Adolescent Online Sexual Risk Detection Algorithms, Afsaneh Razi
A Human-Centered Approach To Improving Adolescent Online Sexual Risk Detection Algorithms, Afsaneh Razi
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
Computational risk detection has the potential to protect especially vulnerable populations from online victimization. Conducting a comprehensive literature review on computational approaches for online sexual risk detection led to the identification that the majority of this work has focused on identifying sexual predators after-the-fact. Also, many studies rely on public datasets and third-party annotators to establish ground truth and train their algorithms, which do not accurately represent young social media users and their perspectives to prevent victimization. To address these gaps, this dissertation integrated human-centered approaches to both creating representative datasets and developing sexual risk detection machine learning models to …
Not All Influence Is Born Equal: On The Effects Of Various Types Of Behavioral Influence Relationships On Social Media, Chathurani Senevirathna
Not All Influence Is Born Equal: On The Effects Of Various Types Of Behavioral Influence Relationships On Social Media, Chathurani Senevirathna
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
Typically, online social influence is analyzed using a single metric approach. However, social influence is not monolithic; different users exercise different influences in different ways, and influence is correlated with the user and content-specific attributes. One such attribute could be whether the action is an initiation of a new post, a contribution to a post, or a sharing of an existing post. Thus, this dissertation uses this platform-independent action classification and models the influence as multiple entities and examines social networks through the perspective of behavioral influence propagation. Two empirical studies are present in this dissertation. The first study presents …
Identifying Challenges And Opportunities For Designing Social Media Nudges For Adolescents, Oluwatomisin Obajemu
Identifying Challenges And Opportunities For Designing Social Media Nudges For Adolescents, Oluwatomisin Obajemu
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
With the prevalence of online risks encountered by youth online, strength-based approaches such as nudges have been recommended as a potential solution to subtly guide teens toward safer decisions. However, most nudging interventions to date have not been designed to cater to teens’ unique needs and online safety concerns. To address this gap, this study aimed to better understand adolescents’ perceptions and feedback on online safety nudges to inform the design of more effective online safety interventions. We conducted 12 semi-structured interviews and 3 focus group sessions with 21 teens (13 – 17 years old) to get their feedback on …
Studying Users Interactions And Behavior In Social Media Using Natural Language Processing, Sultan Alshamrani
Studying Users Interactions And Behavior In Social Media Using Natural Language Processing, Sultan Alshamrani
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
Social media platforms have been growing at a rapid pace, attracting users' engagement with the online content due to their convenience facilitated by many useful features. Such platforms provide users with interactive options such as likes, dislikes as well as a way of expressing their opinions in the form of text (i.e., comments). As more people engage in different social media platforms, such platforms will increase in both size and importance. This growth in social media data is becoming a vital new area for scholars and researchers to explore this new form of communication. The huge data from social media …
Bringing Instagram Posts Into Being: A Study Of Fyc Students' Self-Sponsored Posting Practices And Transfer Opportunities, Jessica Kester
Bringing Instagram Posts Into Being: A Study Of Fyc Students' Self-Sponsored Posting Practices And Transfer Opportunities, Jessica Kester
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
Social media platforms have offered students—and all of us—more opportunities for self-sponsored writing. In response to calls from researchers to explore students' 21st-century writing practices and their relevance to college writing instruction, this dissertation articulated and applied a feminist teacher research methodology and a mixed-methods research design to explore first-year composition (FYC) students' self-sponsored writing practices, attitudes, and transfer opportunities on a popular, albeit under-examined, social media application: Instagram. This study found that students have developed elaborate, rhetorical, multimodal composing processes that include planning, drafting, evaluating, selecting, and styling images as well as planning, drafting/revising, and styling captions. Additionally, though …
Communities Of Play And Practice: Collaborating With Audiences And Coworkers In Performative Online Spaces, Paul Oppold
Communities Of Play And Practice: Collaborating With Audiences And Coworkers In Performative Online Spaces, Paul Oppold
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
This study describes an ethnographic investigation of Communities of Play within Communities of Practice. As professional 'content creators', whose 'work' is 'play', are increasingly interacting with non-professional content consumers, whose 'play' is a kind of 'work', the barriers between 'work' and 'play' are increasingly dissolving. The purpose of this study was to examine the nature and frequency of the professionals' interactions with coworkers in an office and with the content consumers while working from home. Data were collected in the form of gameplay videos uploaded by the professional streamers from January of 2017 to March of 2018, downloaded by the …
How Twitter Exposes Daily Whiteness Practices In Mexico And Argentina, Erika Maribel Heredia
How Twitter Exposes Daily Whiteness Practices In Mexico And Argentina, Erika Maribel Heredia
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
This dissertation questions: How is the social imaginary about the meaning of being white in Mexico produced, reproduced, and problematized in Twitter Discourse? How is the social imaginary about the meaning of being white in Argentina produced, reproduced, and problematized in Twitter Discourse? How are the social imaginaries in Twitter Discourse in Mexico and Argentina related to the cultural and symbolic power exercised by the United States, and does US power influence the structure of privileges built around Whiteness? For doing that, I collected up to 10K tweets using two keywords to identify discourses surrounding Whiteness in tweets from users …
From Screen To Shining Screen: Representations Of Youtube As A Democratic Platform For A Community Of Authentic Creators, Emily Tarvin
From Screen To Shining Screen: Representations Of Youtube As A Democratic Platform For A Community Of Authentic Creators, Emily Tarvin
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
This dissertation analyzes representations of the social media platform YouTube, as described by its community and the company, in order to understand how the platform fits within American narratives of democratic technology. I argue that throughout different descriptions of YouTube, such as the corporate branding of the platform as democratic and the communal understanding of YouTube as outside of mainstream media, the language of democracy functions as a balancing act. The YouTube company, content creators, and regular viewers use democratic rhetoric to negotiate the ideals of community on the platform and capitalist endeavors, such as advertising and brand deals. I …
The Level Of Creative Thinking Of Stem-Oriented Middle And High School Children Associated With The Level Of Self-Motivated Play And Success Within A Builder Game And Engagement In Builder Gaming Communities' Social Media Culture, John Aedo
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
Literature indicates that the United States has fallen behind other countries in the world in terms of creativity. At the same, children's self-motivated gaming and involvement in gaming communities have grown as a major pass time. The literature is inconsistent on the relationship between games and creativity with some indicating benefit while others indicate harm. Might the observed level of creative thinking among children be associated with the level of a priori self-motivated engagement with creative games and associated social media? Given the wide spectrum of the kinds of games, this research considers the "builder" (e.g. Minecraft) genre and related …
Long Distance Relationship Partners' Relationship Maintenance Behavior And Relationship Uncertainty Reduction, My Bui
Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-
Social networking sites have become popular communication tools to make connections and maintain interpersonal relationships, especially for long-disance romantic relationship. Given the popularity of this new communicative platform, this study aims at updating their pattern in terms of their benefits in maintenance romantic relationships among college students. 133 students were recruited to assess their maintenance behaviors through their uses of computer-mediated communication and some traditional communicative channels as well as their uncertainty level. This results reveal that long-distance romantic relationship partners use computer-mediated communication tools such as texting, direct messaging, Snapchat, and others more frequently than partners in geographically close …