Digital Commons Network^™

Where Will Technology Lead Us?, Jerry Kennelly

Irish Business Journal

Artificial intelligence is a misnomer in my opinion. You get out what you put in. AI seeks to simulate intelligent human behaviour in software and computers. If you consider AI software like a big database and learns along the way. It is programmed by clever humans who create algorithms which use all of the data available and process it to give a calculated result. For example, my IPhone will tell me that it’s going to take me ten minutes to drive home when I walk onto the street from my office in Killorglin. It doesn’t know I’m going home, but …

2018 Constitution Day Essay Contest 2nd Place, Courtney Vice

Constitution Day Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

Utilising Social Media To Improve Relationship Quality: The Case Of The University Library, Melissa N. Clark, Scott Bacon

Library Faculty Publications

As the centre of academic life at a university, the university library plays an important role in how students perceive their relationship with the university. This study analyses the effect that participation in library social media has on student perception of relationship quality with the university. The hypotheses proposed in this study were found to be substantiated: following the library on social media is positively related to a student's perception of their relationship quality with the university; students interested in multiple library services are likely to report the perception of a higher quality relationship with the university.

Building Relationships Through Dialogic Communication: Organizations, Stakeholders, And Computer-Mediated Communication, Augustine Pang, Wonsun Shin, Zijian Lew, Joseph B. Walther

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Online media are integral to daily life, and while many organizations use them to reach broad audiences, others still appear to be uncomfortable with online media because they do not understand how to maximize their potential to interact effectively with stakeholders. Numerous organizations use online media for one-way communication to disseminate information, despite the affordances of the media platforms for two-way, dialogic communication. This article draws on two dominant interpersonal theories of computer-mediated communication—social information processing theory and the hyperpersonal model—to propose dialogic strategies that organizations can use to improve their online communication with their stakeholders. We illustrate the application …

Customer Relationship Management In The E-Retailing Environment, Nikki R. Hicks

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Small business enterprise (SBE) managers often lack resources, expertise, and impact when selling in an online environment. SBEs can overcome increased competition by adopting customer relationship management (CRM) into their business model for survival and longevity. Using the conceptual framework technology, organization, environment (TOE), this multiple case study explored effective marketing strategies that small store retail managers use to successfully sell apparel and accessories in online markets. The study population included leaders from independent small online retail enterprises with brick-and-mortar stores located in the Central, Tri-Cities, or Southside areas in Virginia. The data collection process included semistructured, on-site interviews of …

Social Media Use By College Students And Teachers: An Application Of Utaut2, Xiangyun Huang

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Social media has been increasingly used in education to facilitate innovative instruction. Mainland Chinese people could not use popular social media platforms such as FacebookTM because the government blocked them. Little research studied social media use by Mainland Chinese students and teachers in the isolated network environment. This quantitative study utilized social constructivism, connectivism, and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) as the theoretical base. Research questions explored the influence of 6 UTAUT2 predictors on social media use intention and the influence of social media use intention on social media use behavior. The study used a …

Extremist Speech, Compelled Conformity, And Censorship Creep, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

Silicon Valley has long been viewed as a full-throated champion of First Amendment values. The dominant online platforms, however, have recently adopted speech policies and processes that depart from the U.S. model. In an agreement with the European Commission, tech companies have pledged to respond to reports of hate speech within twenty-four hours, a hasty process that may trade valuable expression for speedy results. Plans have been announced for an industry database that will allow the same companies to share hashed images of banned extremist content for review and removal elsewhere.

These changes are less the result of voluntary market …

The Potential Electoral Influence Of Internet Memes, Sierra K. Hatfield

Oswald Research and Creativity Competition

The rising popularity of social media has affected the communication methods of political candidates within the United States. Given the online presence of candidates in recent years, this paper argues that it’s time to consider internet memes – one of the many facets most commonly found on social media – as political rhetoric. This paper seeks to discern which components of an internet meme are most effective in persuading a young voter, using a visually rhetorical approach to understand which characteristics make it most effective. The study also seeks to find which demographics are most likely to be influenced, using …

Death In Life And Life In Death: Forms And Fates Of The Human, Connor Graham, Alfred Montoya

Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Research

This chapter traces the origins, meanings and characteristics of “the human” in recent time – its forms. The chapter contends that, instead of being immutable, “the human” has taken different forms, been ascribed different meanings, and exhibited different characteristics over time. Our approach to “the human” contributes to this volume on digital existence, which confronts existential questions centered on being and technology, with historical and anthropological awareness. We aim to show, through Foucault’s (1971 ) insistence upon the forms of subjectivity as opposed to its substance, how understandings of “the human” are subject to change and transformation. Exploring these diverse …

Involvement Of Social Media Profiles In The Hiring Process, Theresa Lant, Ashley Mejias

Student and Faculty Research Days

In recent years, social media has become a popular tool in the recruitment and selection process for employers. Many companies see it as a more cost efficient screening process than traditional background checks and interviews. However, its’ use comes with a greater risk for the company and potential applicants in terms of privacy violation and discrimination. This article will examine the rising popularity of the use of social media in the recruitment and selection process. In addition, it will explore the role social media plays in the hiring process from the viewpoint of employees in their respective companies versus undergraduate …

Finding Companionship On The Road Less Travelled: A Netnography Of The Whole Food Plant-Based Aussies Facebook Group, Robyn Chuter

Theses : Honours

Chronic conditions are now the leading contributors to the burden of disease and associated healthcare expenditure in Australia. Wholefood plant-based diets are an evidence-based approach to the prevention, management and even reversal of many types of chronic disease. However, numerous practical, cognitive, social and intrapersonal barriers inhibit the ‘mainstreaming’ of plant-based diets (PBDs). Online communities may provide the informational, emotional and social support to help members overcome these barriers. However, there is a paucity of research on both the support needs of people attempting to follow PBDs in Australia, and the role that online community membership plays in providing this …

Academic Twitter And Professional Learning: Myths And Realities, Muireann Okeeffe

Articles

Social networking sites provide opportunities for informal and social learning of academic practices in higher education, yet not all academics engage in these spaces. This qualitative study suggests that while Twitter offers informal opportunities for academi development, inhibiting factors prevent staff from establishing their social presence and participating in conversations on academic Twitter.

Fresh Out, Antoinette Viola

Student Projects

Fresh Out explores the infinite and indefinable world of femininity. Portraits, still lifes, and installation materials work together to investigate gender performance, power structures, and pleasure paradoxes. Within staged scenes of domestic arrangements and female bodies, a synchronicity between disturbance and enchantment is created. I define pleasure paradoxes in accordance to this synchronicity; an interest that both repulses, embarrasses, or disturbs you, while also excites and intrigues. When I think of these guilty pleasures, I immediately think of gender. I explore objectification, control, and sex positivity through my portraits of females; but there is a push and pull between silliness …

Racial Identities On Social Media: Projecting Racial Identities On Facebook, Instagram, And Twitter, Nolan Brinkman

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Because social networks are an important aspect of the lived realities of those who participate in them, this study examined the way racial identity was signified, indicated, or displayed on social networks. A survey was distributed to 347 college students from a medium sized Midwestern university to assess ways in which participants depicted their racial identity on social media. The study looked at the use of photos, textual communication, concealment of racial identity, and interactions with race related content to assess how participants projected racial identity on social networks. Results suggested that racial identity is not intentionally projected on social …

The Art Of The Tweet: How To Change Political Rhetoric In 140 Characters Or Less, Alice Byrd

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Excerpt from Literature Review

The Internet age has seen a huge shift in the way that candidates communicate their political rhetoric, because there has been a huge shift in how voters consume that rhetoric. Twitter and Facebook are now some of the vehicles by which voters consume political rhetoric. Twitter and Facebook are home to lots of non-political content, but many members of the politically engaged community have flocked to both social networking sites to create politically engaged social networks. The emergence of social media as an important information source within the electorate has fundamentally changed not only the way …

Social Media Usage And Romantic Development: Testing Attachment Anxiety And Avoidance As Moderators, Molly D. Moeller

Undergraduate Research Journal

Social media use is linked with the development and maintenance of romantic relationships, exhibiting both positive and negative effects on relationship quality depending on the social media behavior. However, many of these studies focus on a singular social media platform rather than multiple social media platforms. Also, studies on Facebook have linked anxious attachment to more surveillance and Facebook-induced jealousy (Marshall, Benjanyan, Di Castro, & Lee, 2013). Thus, the impact of social media behaviors for relationship quality may depend on attachment behaviors. Therefore, the goal of the current study is to examine how attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety predict relationship …

Hashmoney: Exploring Twitter Hashtag Use As A Secondary Ticket Market Price Determinant, Brendan O'Hallarn, Stephen L. Shapiro, Ann Pegoraro

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

The growth and prevalence of sport event ticket transactions on secondary ticket market platforms such as StubHub has led to the creation of a body of academic research studying this new phenomenon. Factors such as team performance and perceptions of fairness have been explored for their relationship with the price of secondary market tickets. This exploratory study introduces a new potential price determinant – social media activity – itself a popular online phenomenon that has inspired considerable academic research. This exploratory study of prices for eight National Football League games adds use of official team hashtags on Twitter to a …

Examining Student Perceptions Of Their Knowledge, Roles, And Power In The Information Cycle, Lucinda Rush

Libraries Faculty & Staff Publications

This project report describes a collaborative effort between librarians, staff, local journalists and students at Old Dominion University (Norfolk, VA) to provide a venue for a discussion about ‘fake news’. Post-event questionnaire results are analysed to explore what students learned as a result of attending the event as well as student perceptions of their own understanding and ownership of the roles that they can play in the information cycle.

The Use Of Social Media And Mema Technology In Comparing Compliance Rate Among Users, Reimund Serafica, Nada Lukkahatai, Brendan Tran Morris, Kelly Webber

Nursing Faculty Research

Compliance can be defined as the extent to which a person’s behavior corresponds with agreed recommendations. Within the context of lifestyle intervention, this may refer to physical activity, diet modifications, or lifestyle intervention program attendance or attrition. For lifestyle intervention programs to be successful (as measured against a variety of health and lifestyle markers), it is crucial for individuals to comply as best they can to the recommendations or instructions provided by the researchers. Those who disengage prematurely are likely to have poorer treatment outcomes. Hence, a better understanding and an added component, such as engagement, is vital to the …

Accommodating Grief On Twitter: An Analysis Of Expressions Of Grief Among Gang Involved Youth On Twitter Using Qualitative Analysis And Natural Language Processing, Desmond Upton Patton, Jamie C. Macbeth, Sarita Schoenebeck, Katherine Shear, Kathleen Mckeown

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

There is a dearth of research investigating youths’ experience of grief and mourning after the death of close friends or family. Even less research has explored the question of how youth use social media sites to engage in the grieving process. This study employs qualitative analysis and natural language processing to examine tweets that follow 2 deaths. First, we conducted a close textual read on a sample of tweets by Gakirah Barnes, a gang-involved teenaged girl in Chicago, and members of her Twitter network, over a 19-day period in 2014 during which 2 significant deaths occurred: that of Raason “Lil …

Anatomy Of Online Hate: Developing A Taxonomy And Machine Learning Models For Identifying And Classifying Hate In Online News Media, Joni Salminen, Hind Almerekhi, Milica Milenkovic, Soon-Gyu Jung, Haewoon Kwak, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online social media platforms generally attempt to mitigate hateful expressions, as these comments can be detrimental to the health of the community. However, automatically identifying hateful comments can be challenging. We manually label 5,143 hateful expressions posted to YouTube and Facebook videos among a dataset of 137,098 comments from an online news media. We then create a granular taxonomy of different types and targets of online hate and train machine learning models to automatically detect and classify the hateful comments in the full dataset. Our contribution is twofold: 1) creating a granular taxonomy for hateful online comments that includes both …

Saving Face On Facebook: Privacy Concerns, Social Benefits, And Impression Management, Jeffrey G. Proudfoot, David W. Wilson, Joseph S. Valacich, Michael D. Byrd

Faculty Publications

The nearly ubiquitous use of online social networks generally entails substantial personal disclosure and elicits significant privacy concerns. This research uses Social Exchange Theory and the impression management (IM) literature to examine how privacy concerns can be counterbalanced by the perceived social benefits afforded by a social network’s ability to support IM. We frame social network use as an attempt to engage in IM, and we highlight the importance of a social network’s IM affordances in predicting social benefits from, and disclosure through, a social network. We test our model with a sample of 244 Facebook users, finding support for …

Small Business Marketing Strategies For Physical Therapy Practice Owners, Matthew Lane Daugherty

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The United States economy depends on small businesses, which represent 99% of all businesses in the United States, yet approximately 50% of small businesses cease operations in the first 5 years. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the marketing strategies used by owners of small businesses to develop and maintain their organization through the initial 5 years of business operation. The population included 5 physical therapy business owners in northeastern Florida who had sustained their business for a minimum of 5 years. The conceptual framework for this study was the brand equity model, and data were …

Social Media And The Government: Why It May Be Unconstitutional For Government Officials To Moderate Their Social Media, Alex Hadjian

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

No abstract provided.

Beyond Big Bird, Binders, And Bayonets: Humor And Visibility Among Connected Viewers Of The 2012 Us Presidential Debates, Kevin Driscoll, Alex Leavitt, Kristen L. Guth, François Bar, Aalok Mehta

Communication Faculty Publications

During the 2012 US presidential debates, more than five million connected viewers turned to social media to respond to the broadcast and talk politics with one another. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study examines the prevalence of humor and its relationship to visibility among connected viewers live-tweeting the debates. Based on a content analysis of tweets and accounts, we estimate that approximately one-fifth of the messages sent during the debates consisted of strictly humorous content. Using retweet frequency as a proxy for visibility, we found a positive relationship between the use of humor and the visibility of individual tweets. Not …

"Participant" Perceptions Of Twitter Research Ethics, Casey Fiesler, Nicholas Proferes

Information Science Faculty Publications

Social computing systems such as Twitter present new research sites that have provided billions of data points to researchers. However, the availability of public social media data has also presented ethical challenges. As the research community works to create ethical norms, we should be considering users’ concerns as well. With this in mind, we report on an exploratory survey of Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research. Within our survey sample, few users were previously aware that their public tweets could be used by researchers, and the majority felt that researchers should not be able to use …

Understanding News Media Viewing And Selection Patterns: Fomo And User Consumption Of News Content On Social Media Interfaces, Nicolette D. Christopher

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The current study employs a regional sample in order to investigate the phenomenon of fear-of-missing-out (FoMO), the awareness associated with the fear that other individuals are having a more pleasurable experience that one is not a part of. The current study uniquely examines the role that FoMO plays in viewing patterns associated with news content on social media interfaces. The 10-item scale created by Przybylski, Myrayama, DeHaan, and Gladwell in 2013 was used as a basis to discover the degree of FoMO participants experience while online, while other questions of the survey serve to collect data about participants sociodemographic's, engagement …

Set Your Settings On Private? Copyright In Era Of Social Media Usage, Maddie Wagner

Cybaris®

No abstract provided.

Modeling And Mapping Location-Dependent Human Appearance, Zachary Bessinger

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Human appearance is highly variable and depends on individual preferences, such as fashion, facial expression, and makeup. These preferences depend on many factors including a person's sense of style, what they are doing, and the weather. These factors, in turn, are dependent upon geographic location and time. In our work, we build computational models to learn the relationship between human appearance, geographic location, and time. The primary contributions are a framework for collecting and processing geotagged imagery of people, a large dataset collected by our framework, and several generative and discriminative models that use our dataset to learn the relationship …

Social Media Usages In Small Not-For-Profit Organizations, Sarah Nolan

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

Effective social media management takes time, effort, and intentionality. Small not-for-profit organizations would benefit from doing this, but often have difficulty with being able to do so. In order to find out how small not-for-profit organizations use their social media and how social media could best be used to accomplish their mission, the following research questions were asked: What communications policies and procedures are followed by small not-for-profits organizations? Are the current social media practices of these organizations effective? What are the primary needs of these organizations in terms of social media and how can they be addressed?

In order …