Communication Commons^™

Demographics Of News Sharing In The U.S. Twittersphere, Julio C.S. Reis, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Johnnatan Messias, Benevenuto Fabrıcio.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The widespread adoption and dissemination of online news through social media systems have been revolutionizing many segments of our society and ultimately our daily lives. In these systems, users can play a central role as they share content to their friends. Despite that, little is known about news spreaders in social media. In this paper, we provide the first of its kind in-depth characterization of news spreaders in social media. In particular, we investigate their demographics, what kind of content they share, and the audience they reach. Among our main findings, we show that males and white users tend to …

Geekreformation.Com, Jacob Leonhardt

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Several years back, my best friend and I were discussing how there seemed to be no outlets for Christian geeks to enjoy being geeks without having to worry about inappropriate content. As there did not seem to be a place, we thought we should make one. Fast-forward to my senior year at Western Kentucky University, I am an Interactive Design major, and my friend has graduated with a degree in Film and Marketing; and what was once just conversation has now become a reality. This work explains what Geek Reformation is and how we went about branding and designing it. …

#Reviewbowlinggreen: Food And Attractions Guide For International Students, Kanyawee Skulsillapakorn

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Being in a different country, far away from home, surrounded by strangers that speak a different language than your mother tongue is daunting. Most international students often feel out of place when they arrive in America for the first time. What can we do to change international students’ perspective of Bowling Green from one of being a “boring, small town” to a vibrant growing community? This project will use social media platform like Facebook to promote restaurants and other attractions. Users can write reviews of restaurants, shops, and places to visit in Bowling Green. By including the hashtag #ReviewBowlingGreen on …

The Living The Example Social Media Substance Use Prevention Program: A Pilot Evaluation., William Evans, Elizabeth Andrade, Sandra Goldmeer, Michelle Smith, Jeremy Snider, Gunilla Girardo

Prevention and Community Health Faculty Publications

Reproduced with permission of JMIR Publications. JMIR Mental Health

Improving The Cala's Social Media Experience: The First Cala Social Media Survey, Sai Deng, Melody Leung, Anlin Yang, Chenwei Zhao

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA) currently uses three social media channels, CALA Facebook, WeChat, and YouTube. In order to improve their presence and better serve the CALA members, CALA's first social media survey was conducted at the end of 2016 to seek feedback from its members and friends. This poster will present the background information for the survey, its methodology, findings, recommendations and follow-up. 18 questions were compiled, added to LimeSurvey and distributed to the CALA members via its Listserv. These questions attempted to address the users' social media usage, participation level, time spent on the CALA's social media …

What Motivates Young Adults To Talk About Physical Activity On Social Network Sites?, Ni Zhang, Shelly Campo, Jingzhen Yang, Petya Eckler, Linda Snetselaar, Kathleen Janz, Emily Leary

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Background:
Electronic word-of-mouth on social network sites has been used successfully in marketing. In social marketing, electronic word-of-mouth about products as health behaviors has the potential to be more effective and reach more young adults than health education through traditional mass media. However, little is known about what motivates people to actively initiate electronic word-of-mouth about health behaviors on their personal pages or profiles on social network sites, thus potentially reaching all their contacts on those sites.
Objective:
This study filled the gap by applying a marketing theoretical model to explore the factors associated with electronic word-of-mouth on social network …

Culturally-Grounded Analysis Of Everyday Creativity In Social Media: A Case Study In Qatari Context, D. Fox Harrell, Sarah Vieweg, Haewoon Kwak, Chong-U Lim, Sercan Sengun, Ali Jahanian, Pablo. Ortiz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In deploying social media and other information technologies often not designed with MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) cultures in mind, users generate creative approaches to self-representation using virtual identities while preserving their cultural values. To understand and further empower such approaches, we present a mixed-method of computational and qualitative study, focusing on Qatar as a case of such communities in the MENA region. We analyzed a dataset of over 42,000 publicly available social media profiles using computational approaches (archetypal analysis) and qualitatively analyzed a separate set of 255 profiles. We augmented our descriptions with semi-structured interviews. As a …

Tools Of Change: Equipping Nonprofits With The Tools To Inspire Change, Nicole Irons

Masters Theses

Whether I am working for a small nonprofit in Indiana or at an elephant sanctuary in Cambodia I have seen consistent areas of struggle and shortcomings in nonprofit organizations. After years of working in different organizations the struggles nonprofits consistently face are a lack of resources in three main areas. These main areas of struggle are: visibility, funding, and people. The idea then occurred to me of why? And while these resources seem to appear unconnected, what if they all stem from one problem? Could we create a tool (or set of tools) to help alleviate these main struggles? Is …

The Retransmission Of Rumor And Rumor Correction Messages On Twitter, Alton Y. K. Chua, Cheng-Ying Tee, Augustine Pang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article seeks to examine the relationships among source credibility, message plausibility, message type (rumor or rumor correction) and retransmission of tweets in a rumoring situation. From a total of 5,885 tweets related to the rumored death of the founding father of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew, 357 original tweets without an “RT” prefix were selected and analyzed using negative binomial regression analysis. The results show that source credibility and message plausibility are correlated with retransmission. Also, rumor correction tweets are retweeted more than rumor tweets. Moreover, message type moderates the relationship between source credibility and retransmission as well as that …

Understanding Music Track Popularity In A Social Network, Jing Ren, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Thousands of music tracks are uploaded to the Internet every day through websites and social networks that focus on music. While some content has been popular for decades, some tracks that have just been released have been ignored. What makes a music track popular? Can the duration of a music track’s popularity be explained and predicted? By analysing data on the performance of a music track on the ranking charts, coupled with the creation of machine-generated music semantics constructs and a variety of other track, artist and market descriptors, this research tests a model to assess how track popularity and …

Snapshots Of The Self: Exploring The Role Of Online Mobile Photo Sharing In Identity Development Among Adolescent Girls, Jenna M. Drenten

School of Business: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A chapter written by Jenna Drenten for Online Consumer Behavior: Theory and Research in Social Media, Advertising and E-tail (2017).

Inferring Personal Economic Status From Social Network Location, Shaojun Luo, Flaviano Morone, Carlos Sarraute, Matias Travizano, Hernan A. Makse

Publications and Research

It is commonly believed that patterns of social ties affect individuals’ economic status. Here we translate this concept into an operational definition at the network level, which allows us to infer the economic well-being of individuals through a measure of their location and influence in the social network.We analyse two large-scale sources: telecommunications and financial data of a whole country’s population. Our results show that an individual’s location, measured as the optimal collective influence to the structural integrity of the social network, is highly correlated with personal economic status. The observed social network patterns of influence mimic the patterns of …

Can Tweets Predict Intraday Stock Price Movements?, Diwas Puri

Honors Projects in Finance

Twitter is a microblogging platform where over 320 million people post about things that matter to them in less than 140 characters. People post about their happiness, sadness, pride, disappointments, love, hate, expectations and other feelings. Nowadays, a popular trend has come up in which data from Twitter, can be gathered and analyzed in real time to see how people react to a particular situation including changes in stock markets. This research focuses on looking into the relationship, if any, between public mood from Twitter and the stock market returns by analyzing the Tweets about four major companies in consumer …

In A World Where We Are Constantly Connected, How Connected Are We?, Samantha Valenza

Senior Honors Projects

Social media in today’s world is common amongst millennials (trend-setting young adults born 1980-2002) as a source of news and networking. Social media has yielded benefits, including the ability to connect with geographically dispersed, like-minded individuals for entertainment, employment opportunities, or to engage in activism. However, the popularity of social media, as well as the frequency of its use, raises questions about its effects on our lifestyles, habits, and interpersonal relationships. Despite its benefits, social media usage may have a darker side. Extreme cases involving addiction, fake news, identity theft, cyber-bullying, and other criminal activities have received some attention. Less …

What’S Your Brand? Teaching Students To Leverage Social Media To Launch Their Careers, Alexandra Gomes, Gisela Butera, Anne Linton

Himmelfarb Library Faculty Posters and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Fusing Social Media And Mobile Analytics For Urban Sense-Making, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The project was motivated by the observation that urban environments are increasingly characterized by a variety of non-traditional “sensors”, whose data streams can be harnessed to infer a variety of latent events and urban context. For example, users spontaneously generate huge amounts of content (text, images and video) on social network channels, whereas GPS & other sensors on taxis and buses increasingly provide near-real time traces of their movement throughout the city. Similarly, advances in Wi-Fi based sensing allow us to passively capture the individual and collective movement of visitors across various public spaces, such as college campuses, museums and …

Discovering Your Selling Points: Personalized Social Influential Tags Exploration, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan, Ju Fan, Dongxiang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social influence has attracted significant attention owing to the prevalence of social networks (SNs). In this paper, we study a new social influence problem, called personalized social influential tags exploration (PITEX), to help any user in the SN explore how she influences the network. Given a target user, it finds a size-k tag set that maximizes this user’s social influence. We prove the problem is NP-hard to be approximated within any constant ratio. To solve it, we introduce a sampling-based framework, which has an approximation ratio of 1−ǫ 1+ǫ with high probabilistic guarantee. To speedup the computation, we devise more …

Can Public Diplomacy Survive The Internet? Bots, Echo Chambers, And Disinformation, Shawn Powers, Markos Kounalakis

US Department of Energy Publications

Report from a meeting held on the topic of disinformation, the Internet, and public diplomacy held at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in 2017.

Executive Summary

Scientific progress continues to accelerate, and while we’ve witnessed a revolution in communication technologies in the past ten years, what proceeds in the next ten years may be far more transformative. It may also be extremely disruptive, challenging long held conventions behind public diplomacy (PD) programs and strategies. In order to think carefully about PD in this ever and rapidly changing communications space, the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD) convened a group of …

Messaging Without A Message: Executive Value And Social Media Activity, Ru Gao, Gilles Hilary, Rencheng Wang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We show that executives who start tweeting benefit from better career options. We motivate this finding using the well-established theory of limited attention. Consistent with this explanation, we find that content is irrelevant. Comparative statics are also consistent with our framework. In particular, the effect of Twitter is greater for executives who were largely unrecognized and who were underpaid before they started tweeting, who garner greater public attention from their social media activity, who enjoy higher professional mobility, and who operate in environments where compensation setting is less structured.

Project Anonymous: When Anonymity Meets Artwork, Robert J. Riglietti

Senior Honors Projects

In an attempt to build a new type of even playing field for artists, Kira Wencek and I developed an anonymous art sharing web app under the moniker of Project Anonymous. In an attempt to mitigate the drawbacks of current online avenues for creative content sharing, the app addresses privacy issues, visibility issues, and external artist influence. As the theorist of the group, using research from Manuel Castelles, Danah Boyd, and Jaron Lanier, I assisted in shaping the functionality and oversaw the general direction of the application. This assisted me in theorizing the hypothetical outcomes and social impacts that the …

“We Were Not Prepared To Tell People Yet”: Confidentiality Breaches And Boundary Turbulence On Facebook, Jocelyn M. Degroot, Tennley A. Vik

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Communication Privacy Management theory provides a framework for investigating confidentiality breaches that occur on Facebook. Open-ended online questionnaires served as mechanism for collecting data about privacy violations and the resulting boundary turbulence. Privacy violations validated three a priori categories (Petronio & Reierson, 2009) of confidentiality breaches (privacy ownership violations, discrepancy breaches of privacy, and pre-emptive privacy control). Findings indicated that the lack of established explicit privacy rules led to privacy violations and boundary turbulence. Results also provided insight regarding motivations of privacy violations, reactions to privacy violations, and the role of privacy rules in the violation.

Exploiting Contextual Information For Fine-Grained Tweet Geolocation, Wen Haw Chong, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The problem of fine-grained tweet geolocation is to link tweets to their posting venues. We solve this in a learning to rank framework by ranking candidate venues given a test tweet. The problem is challenging as tweets are short and the vast majority are non-geocoded, meaning information is sparse for building models. Nonetheless, although only a small fraction of tweets are geocoded, we find that they are posted by a substantial proportion of users. Essentially, such users have location history data. Along with tweet posting time, these serve as additional contextual information for geolocation. In designing our geolocation models, we …

Persona Generation From Aggregated Social Media Data, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Moeed Ahmad, Lene Nielsen, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We develop a methodology for persona generation using real time social media data for the distribution of products via online platforms. From a large social media account containing more than 30 million interactions from users from 181 countries engaging with more than 4,200 digital products produced by a global media corporation, we demonstrate that our methodology can first identify both distinct and impactful user segments and then create persona descriptions by automatically adding pertinent features, such as names, photos, and personal attributes. We validate our approach by implementing the methodology into an actual working system that leverages large scale online …

Ways To Market Without Social Media: Where Are They When They Aren’T Online?, April Miller

Faculty Articles & Research

Workshop presentation by SWOSU Librarian April Miller.

How Facebook Has Transformed Journalism, Sarah E. Rodriguez

Senior Honors Theses

Journalists use Facebook as a tool to distribute information to the public. Over recent years, Facebook with its updated features has changed the way journalists interact with readers and sources. Facebook Live and Instant Articles have increased reader engagement. Journalists use crowdsourcing and conversationally-toned posts to gather information and connect with readers on a personal level. The journalistic process has accelerated since the addition of Facebook because news is disseminated almost instantaneously. Yet the rise in fake news challenges journalists to effectively use Facebook as a platform for news dissemination. Facebook is using fact checkers and increased awareness to fight …

Composing Focus: Shaping Temporal, Social, Media, Social Media, And Attentional Environments, Jane Fife

English Faculty Publications

Writers must learn to control factors that influence the ability to focus, especially in what some call a culture of distraction. In our efforts to promote metacognition and flexible writing processes, writing teachers need to engage students in study and discussion of factors in our temporal, social, media, social media, and attentional environments that influence focus while composing. This article examines these facets of our contemporary scenes of writing by reviewing recent research in composition studies and psychology about writing and attention, discussing the results of a survey of undergraduate writers’ composing practices, and sharing insights from assignments that help …

Self-Presentation Of Male And Female Athletes On Instagram: A Continuation Of Gender Roles Found In Advertisements?, Kelsey Gainor

Honors Projects in Communication

Social media has brought with it a closing of the relational distance between players and fans; athletes have an important decision to make about the way they want to be viewed, not only as athletes, but also in the many other facets of their lives, such as being a parent, friend or role model. By applying the differing gender expectations for males versus females to an athletic context, this research study aims to gain a better understanding of how these gender expectations for male versus female professional athletes are exhibited through self-presentation on social media, specifically Instagram. The athletes’ own …

Challenging The Stereotype – Greek Life In The Media, Briana Trifiro

Honors Projects in Communication

Stereotypes are an undeniable aspect of today’s society. As demonstrated through a variety of mass communication theories, stereotypes are often formed as a result of exposure to mass media images. This concept is especially important today, as media messages permeate daily life in a variety of ways. From the news, to social media, to movies and television – media messaging is everywhere and impacts people on a daily basis. The purpose of this study is to produce a documentary video which demonstrates how negative media portrayals of Greek life lead to the formulation of stereotypes about college students affiliated with …

Social Media Influence: Metrics Matter, Juliana Houldcroft

Honors Projects in Marketing

It is imperative for companies to engage in social media marketing as consumers are often dependent on online information and electronic word-of-mouth. Past literature claims that consumers evaluate the influence of communications differently on social media than they would in a traditional environment because of the nature of the internet. This study aims to analyze user’s perceptions of social media marketing influence and determines if user’s perception of influence changes based on the number of social media metrics (likes, comments, and shares) that accompany a Facebook post. The study also investigates if perceptions of influence vary depending on a user’s …

Behind Valencia: A Contemporary Play, Emily Charbonneau

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

SYNOPSIS The purpose of this play is to highlight the length that modern females go to in order to maintain a desired appearance, especially across social media. These desired appearances are influenced by the glamorous and unrealistic looks and physiques that are prevalent in the media. Essentially, the primary goal of these characters is to attract the attention of their male counterparts because of the gender roles society promotes. This shallow lifestyle can be completely consuming for impressionable, young females.