Communication Commons^™

What Do We Expect From Our Friends?, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do

Research Collection School Of Economics

We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. Although recipients’ beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e., directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity toward named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no …

Intimate Strangers And Estranged Intimates: An Investigation Of The Impact Of Instant Messaging And Short Message Service On The Size And Strength Of Social Networks In Kuwait, Bashaiar Al-Sanaa

Dissertations

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have revolutionized how people experience spatial proximity, reality, and connectivity. These technologies provide inexpensive access to anything and anyone in the world. They also replicate face-to-face interaction in cyber-space and allow for participation in numerous modes of social exchange.

People use Information and communication technologies to write web logs (blogs), send electronic mail (email), socialize through networking sites (such as Facebook and MySpace), text each other through mobile phone Short Message Service (SMS) and chat via online instant messaging (IM).With all these applications, a debate has ignited that actual physical communication is decreasing in favor …

Vodcasting, Itunes U, And Faculty Collaboration, Jason Paul Michel, Susan Hurst, Andrew Revelle

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Introduction

In the summer of 2008, the Miami University Libraries began a pilot project to integrate Web video tutorials (vodcasts) into a multiplicity of access points to enhance and extend library services. By the end of the project, Web video tutorials had been embedded in specific course sites in the course management system Blackboard, as well as in our institution's iTunes U site. The libraries were, in fact, the first entity on campus to feature publicly-available content on iTunes U. This brief article will delineate the project and explain why we believe this effort has helped position the library within …

Patrons Cataloging? The Role And Quality Of Patron Tagging In Item Description, William Lund, Allyson Washburn

Faculty Publications

With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, user participation in the description and evaluation of content has come to the library. User tagging is almost a given in applications such as Del.icio.us, Flickr, and LibraryThing. The question is whether tagging provided by users with their own motivations is better in some sense then descriptions provided by professionals. Is the tagging provided by the wisdom of the crowd a better description of an item?

Facebook : Friend Or Foe, Angela Draeger

Graduate Research Papers

Facebook is an online social networking site that is growing with popularity daily. Due to the current lack of research on this social network the researcher has proposed the following study. This study would survey three populations: high school students, college students, and community members. Areas of interest are: communication, miscommunication, self-esteem, introversion, extroversion, friendships, long distance relationships, and closure.

Consumer Generated Media: Evolving Marketing Opportunity For Consumer Engagement, Irene J. Dickey, William F. Lewis

Management and Marketing Faculty Publications

This paper examines consumer-generated media (CGM), also called user-generated Web sites or social media, and the evolving and broad consumer behaviors associated with it. CGM websites have evolved rapidly during the last few years, but so have consumer behaviors and subsequently marketing tactics and future potential opportunities. Marketers should be aware of the characteristics of this type of website and understand how they are being used by consumers and other practitioners. CGM sites are primarily used by consumers to connect with others for many reasons. This connectivity, also called engagement, appears to be an opportunity for marketers to connect with …

Take Two Tablets And Do Not Call For Judicial Review Until Our Heads Clear: The Supreme Court Prepares To Demolish The 'Wall Of Separation' Between Church And State, Terence Lau, William Wines

Management and Marketing Faculty Publications

In this article, we examine the issues that bring First Amendment jurisprudence to the grant of certiorari in Pleasant Grove v. Summum, scheduled for oral argument in the Supreme Court of the United States in November. We examine the historical basis for America’s religious heritage, the historical judicial treatment of the religious clauses, and the erosion of the wall of separation between church and state. We examine the Ten Commandments, finding inherent discrimination present in modern-day attempts to advance a particular version of the Ten Commandments as secular. By drawing upon Rousseau’s civic religion, we suggest alternative routes for the …

Cyberbullying, Phyllis I. Schoenholz, Deborah J. Weitzenkamp, Jennifer S. Nixon

Kimmel Education and Research Center: Faculty and Staff Publications

Technology now allows people — often children — to bully online. Social messaging sites can open up the user to a variety of bullying techniques outside of the playground. How parents and other adults can help reduce bullying over the Internet is examined in this NebGuide. ...

What can a parent do about cyberbullying? First, it’s important that parents and youth not reply or respond in any way to cyberbullies. Research indicates that being responsive may, in fact, escalate the activity. Instead, parents will need to think like a detective or lawyer. Document the activity with dates and times and …

You Can Take It With You? Student Library Employees, Eportfolios, And “Edentity” Construction, Gabriella Reznowski, Brian Mcmanus

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

ePortfolios have become an important tool for assessing and tracking employee development. In 2008, the Washington State University Libraries became involved in the institution’s ePortfolio initiative. Library supervisors hoped that as a dynamic online tool, the ePortfolio concept would provide an effective method for assessing the library’s body of student employees. Collaborating with the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTLT), the Center for Advising & Career Development (CACD), and Student Computing Services (SCS), the WSU Libraries explored the possibility of using ePortfolios to drive employee assessment. The Access Services unit, with the assistance of the Library Instruction, Library Systems, …

The Purpose Of Facebook: The Value Of Facebook Friends In Increasing Self-Perceived Popularity, Michael J. Cronin

Honors Program Theses

A survey of 407 students was conducted at a medium-sized Midwestern university to examine what motivates college students to have friends on Facebook. The goal of the study was to see if people interact with more Facebook friends than they do offline friends on a regular basis and to see if the primary reason students become friends with others on Facebook is to increase their popularity. The results suggest that students do not become Facebook friends with others to increase their popularity, which is in contrast to previous research. Results were inconclusive in determining if people regularly interact with more …

Social Software Programs: Student Preferences Of Librarian Use, Annie Epperson, Jennifer Leffler

University Libraries Publications

PURPOSE: The purpose of this paper is to present findings of an electronic survey to determine the extent of use of social software programs.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The study was conducted to discover the extent to which students use social software programs, namely Facebook, MySpace, Instant Messaging and Second Life, and to determine their level of desire for having a librarian or library presence within those settings. A web survey was developed and distributed using convenience sampling. The survey was distributed to students at two college campuses located in the state of Colorado in the USA.

FINDINGS: The majority of respondents use …

The Impact Of Mobile Phones On A Student’S Life In Various Cities Of Pakistan, Khair-Uz Zaman, M. Imran Khan

Business Review

This paper examines the impact of mobile phone on the personal, financial, psychological, physical, educational and also the social life of a student. We have taken a sample of hundred students from the various cities of Pakistan, such as, Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, and Dera Ismail Khan. Mostly their educational level is from Matric to PhD, considering both males and females equally and their age group is from teenager to adulthood. The results of this study show that 65% students have their own mobile phones, while 35% do not have their own. Mostly 28% students are using U-fone, while 23% …

What Do We Expect From Our Friends?, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do

Research Collection School Of Economics

We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. While recipients’ beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e. directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity towards named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no …

Leveraging Social Context For Searching Social Media, Marc Smith, Vladimir Barash, Lise Getoor, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The ability to utilize and benefit from today's explosion of social media sites depends on providing tools that allow users to productively participate. In order to participate, users must be able to find resources (both people and information) that they find valuable. Here, we argue that in order to do this effectively, we should make use of a user's "social context". A user's social context includes both their personal social context (their friends and the communities to which they belong) and their community social context (their role and identity in different communities).

Do Online Reviews Affect Product Sales? The Role Of Reviewer Characteristics And Temporal Effects, Nan Hu, Ling Liu, Jennifer Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online product reviews provided by consumers who previously purchased products have become a major information source for consumers and marketers regarding product quality. This study extends previous research by conducting a more compelling test of the effect of online reviews on sales. In particular, we consider both quantitative and qualitative aspects of online reviews, such as reviewer quality, reviewer exposure, product coverage, and temporal effects. Using transaction cost economics and uncertainty reduction theories, this study adopts a portfolio approach to assess the effectiveness of the online review market. We show that consumers understand the value difference between favorable news and …

Protecting Children Online, Deborah J. Weitzenkamp Dr.

Kimmel Education and Research Center: Faculty and Staff Publications

This publication explains potential Internet hazards and how to protect children from them.

In an age where children are using the Internet on a daily basis, parents need to be aware of how children use it, potential online hazards, how to recognize signs that their children might be at risk, and steps that they can take to safeguard their children. While it is important that parents be proactive regarding their children’s use of the Internet, it also is important that parents not overreact to potential threats. Instead, parents need to take a proactive approach toward protecting their children in a …

Library 2.0 And The Problem Of Hate Speech, Margaret Brown-Sica, Jeffrey Beall

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

[First paragraph]

Library 2.0 applications benefit library users by providing rich, peer-generated content that adds value to online library databases and systems. However, not all of this shared content is beneficial, for it’s possible for library users to abuse library 2.0 applications by uploading words, pictures, or other content that constitutes hate speech. Internet lawyer Christopher Wolf warns of, “ … the sudden and rapidly increasing deployment of Web 2.0 technologies to spread messages, sounds and images of hate across the Internet and around the world” [1]. As academic libraries make available Web 2.0 systems that allow user-generated content, they …

On Profiling Blogs With Representative Entries, Jinfeng Zhuang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Aixin Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With an explosive growth of blogs, information seeking in blogosphere becomes more and more challenging. One example task is to find the most relevant topical blogs against a given query or an existing blog. Such a task requires concise representation of blogs for effective and efficient searching and matching. In this paper, we investigate a new problem of profiling a blog by choosing a set of m most representative entries from the blog, where m is a predefined number that is application-dependent. With the set of selected representative entries, applications on blogs avoid handling hundreds or even thousands of entries …

Uses And Gratifications Of Webloggers In Egypt, Mona Munir El-Hefnawi

Archived Theses and Dissertations

Since its entrance in Egypt, blogs have had a powerful effect on the political, social, and economic aspects in Egypt. To be able to measure those effects, it is important to know the intentions of those Egyptian bloggers. This study applies the uses and gratifications theoretical framework to this notion of blogging. As it is based on a survey which attempts to examine and explore the different uses and gratifications of blogging in Egypt. This involves why different people with different demographic characteristics actually decide to blog and what needs they seek to gratify. Independent variables studied were age, gender, …

Online Forums As An Arena For Political Discussions: What Politicians And Activists Can Learn From Teachers, Kevin Y. Wang

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

This paper discusses the use of online discussion forums in various “e-democratic” practices in light of the lessons learned from the field of education. Informed by a conceptual framework drawn from the role of public sphere in electronic democracy and the ideal learning conditions of a computer-mediated communication environment, the author analyzed two discussion forums maintained by a government and a civil society group. Results suggest that, in both cases, online discussion forums only reflect a few elements of effective online learning and therefore, have yet to reach their full potentials. Implications for future research are discussed.

Photography After The Incidents: We're Not Afraid, Panizza Allmark

Research outputs pre 2011

This article will look at the use of personal photographs that attempt to convey a sense of social activism as a reaction against global terrorism. Moreover, I argue that the photographs uploaded to the site “We’re Not Afraid”, which began after the London bombings in 2005, presents a forum to promote the pleasures of western cultural values as a defence against the anxiety of terror. What is compelling are the ways in which the Website promotes, seemingly, everyday modalities through what may be deemed as the domestic snapshot. Nevertheless, the aura from the context of these images operates to arouse …

About Facebook - Change At The Social-Networking Juggernaut Creates New Opportunities For Law Library Outreach, Jennifer L. Behrens

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Analysis Of Mobile Voice Service And Sms: A Structural Model, Youngsoo Kim, William B. Vogt, Ramayya Krishnan, Rahul Telang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In addition to the wireless telephony boom, a similar exponential increasing trend in wireless data service - short message service (SMS) - is visible as technology advances. We develop a structural model to understand how mobile users behave, especially how they consume voice, and services. Specifically, we measure the own- and the cross-price elasticities of these services. The cross-price elasticity is of significant importance because marketing activities are critically influenced by whether the goods are substitutes or complements. The research context poses significant econometric challenges due to three-part tariff, sequential discrete plan choice and continuous quantity choices. Using detailed individual …

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 83, No. 16, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

WKU campus newspaper reporting campus, athletic and Bowling Green, Kentucky news.

Reaching Students With Facebook: Data And Best Practices, Daniel Mack, Anne Behler, Beth Roberts, Emily Rimland

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Abstract

This paper presents data on Facebook inquiries one librarian received over the course of a semester at Pennsylvania State University and discusses best practices for Facebook use as an outreach tool. We discuss ways to reach out to our users through this Social Networking Community and encourage reference questions and requests for research consultations. We recommend that library professionals whose positions require them to interact with undergraduates seriously consider making use of Facebook.

Consumer-Generated Media (Cgm): An Exploratory Study Of Various Forms, Value To Consumers, And Marketing Practitioners, And Global Implications, Irene J. Dickey, William F. Lewis

Management and Marketing Faculty Publications

This paper examines consumer-generated media (CGM), also called user-generated Web sites or social media. The Internet is clearly dynamic in nature, and CGM will be of interest to marketers as e-commerce races ahead. The basis for the growth and the importance of such sites will be explored to improve our understanding of their development and use by marketers. Our research will consider the domestic and global behaviors, and findings will be useful for both researchers and marketing practitioners who seek to understand issues relevant to CGM and associated marketing tactics and their ability to accomplish marketing objectives, particularly related to …

Perceived Importance And Future Use Of Online Channels Of Distribution By Small Businesses In The United States And Australia: An Exploratory Study, Irene J. Dickey, William F. Lewis, John Vanbeveren

Management and Marketing Faculty Publications

Online marketing is important to small-business owners and operators because they are typically faced with limited budgets to design and implement traditional marketing programs. This paper compares the perceived importance of specific online marketing tactics and their anticipated future use of online marketing tactics by small businesses in the United States and Australia. Results of the study reveal that both in the United States and in Australia, there is a growing use of online marketing tactics to accomplish marketing objectives. While most online marketing tactics were effective in both the United States and Australia, there were some statistically significant differences.

National Culture And Its Effects On Knowledge Communication In Online Virtual Communities, Keng Siau, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Min Ling

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online virtual communities provide a powerful means of knowledge sharing. Despite the prevalence of online virtual communities, there is a paucity of research to investigate the effect of national culture differences on knowledge sharing in online virtual communities. Are there differences between online virtual communities from different national cultures? This research studies the differences in knowledge-sharing activities between US-based and China-based online virtual communities. Hofstede's dimensions of national culture serve as the theoretical foundation for this research.

A Blogger's Blog: Exploring The Definition Of A Medium, Danah Boyd

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Introduction]

While blogging is piquing the interest of mainstream media, youth, academic researchers, and entrepreneurial Silicon Valley, only a fraction of Internet users read blogs and many do not even know what the term means. Reports on how many people read blogs vary (Rainie 2005, Comscore 2005), but even in the United States, less than 50% of Internet users read blogs and many do not even know when they do (Buchwalter 2005). Numerous tools have been built to support blogging and people have extended those tools to do a wide variety of things that may or may …

Thoughts On Blogging By A Poorly Masked Academic, Michael Benton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

My first attempt at blogging was the creation of Dialogic. I was working as an adjunct in 2004 at the University of Kentucky and developing original media literacy projects and assignments online. I had heard reports that universities might start claiming that course work developed on their servers would be technically the property of the university that owned the server. The precarious nature of adjunct life makes us susceptible to rumor, so I began to search for a new, cheap, relatively unmonitored forum to develop course work and to archive the wealth of information I was finding online. …