Social Media Commons^™

The Promise Of Happy Cows: How American Milk Brands Persuade Consumers Regarding Farm Animal Welfare Conditions And How Consumers Respond To Incidents Of Being Misled, Chelsea Newson

Student Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to examine how American dairy companies employ language and imagery in brand communications (marketing, advertising, and public relations) to persuade consumers regarding farm animal welfare (FAW) conditions on supplier farms, and to examine how consumers respond in instances in which conditions on supplier farms are shown to be counter to what is depicted in brand communications. In other words, it examines how the dairy industry communicates its FAW-related values and promises to consumers and investigates consumer tolerance for being misled regarding FAW conditions. This project is thus intended as an exploration of the intersection …

I Love Fashion Influencing And I Hate It At The Same Time, Nicolette Muro

Capstones

When I started my blog and my social media accounts at the end of 2016, I never thought I would have any success with them or any intentions of turning them into a business. Flash forward to present day October 2019, and I have over 11,000 followers on Instagram, I receive over 46,000 views on Pinterest and 3,000 monthly views on my blog. I’ve worked on sponsored posts with well-known brands such as KIND and Who What Wear and I make enough monthly revenue that I no longer have to work a retail job as an additional source of income. …

Reading Mediations: Modeling Online Critical Literacy Strategies, Lisa Hirschfield

Open Educational Resources

Reading Mediations is an interactive, web-based guide for teaching and learning critical online reading skills. Best used with high school or college students, it includes a selection of critical reading tools and verification resources, guided readings, and structured learning activities. It also presents opportunities for independent exploration and critique of the online news and information ecosystem, with live content provided through Twitter and several news websites.

The guiding principle of Reading Mediations is that the epidemic of misinformation, propaganda, and poor journalism online cannot be eradicated by fact-checking tools alone. It must begin with us, the readers. Learning first about …

A Study Of Factors Affecting The Credibility Of Sponsored Posts Created By Instagram Influencers, Nakyung Lee

Student Theses and Dissertations

This study examined how source expertise, objective information about product ingredients and benefits, review length, and the use of promotional language influence the perceived credibility of a sponsored review post for skincare products. This study carried out 4 in-depth interviews and online survey to 106 millennials living in the U.S. Results indicated that subjective comments about a reviewer’s personal experiences had a higher level of perceived credibility of a review post than objective information about product ingredients and benefits. With regard to source expertise, a sponsored review post written by an influencer with higher expertise was perceived as more reliable …

Works In Process - Scholar Edition, Pablo Galindo Aragon, George Garrastegui Jr.

Publications and Research

The creative field revolves around many professions. Creatives share a lot of common themes that are part of their process. It is with these themes that we establish a more impact way to listen to a podcast. Reviewing and breaking episodes up into chapters can effectively guide a student, aka a Scholar, in their path to establishing a creative career.Some of the most powerful ways to get ahead in the creative field is by networking, and obtaining valuable knowledge from other creatives. Gathering this information and making these connections can be quite the task. Not all young creatives are aware …

Resisting Industrial Food Systems On The Web: How Non-Profit Organizations Use Digital Technology For Sustainability Education, Aleksandr Segal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the link between how community-based organizations use digital tools with the fundamentally resistance-based philosophy that these organizations have at the core of their mission. It aims to uncover how non-profit organizations (NPOs) that work in community development through food and agriculture use digital tools, and how their digital communication strategies relate to issues of resistance to neoliberalism and industrialization in the food and agriculture sectors.

Using a foundation of existing literature on food and agriculture, climate change and waste management, critical theory, and technology in pedagogy, this thesis will contextualize how non-profits resist neoliberal regimes of de-traditionalization …

Youth Study Recruitment Using Paid Advertising On Instagram, Snapchat, And Facebook: Cross-Sectional Survey Study, Kelsey Lynett Ford, Tashuna Albritton, Tara A. Dunn, Kacy Crawford, Jessica Neuwirth, Sheana Bull

Publications and Research

Background:The use of paid social media advertising for targeted study recruitment is an effective strategy in health research and evaluation, specifically to reach diverse youth participants. Although the literature adequately describes the utility of Facebook in recruitment, limited information exists for social media platforms that are more popular with youth, specifically Instagram and Snapchat.

Objective:This paper outlines a paid advertising approach using Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook to evaluate a statewide youth marijuana prevention campaign. The objective of this study was to compare recruitment metrics across Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook for two surveys documenting youth knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to …

Empowering With Prep (E-Prep), A Peer-Led Social Media–Based Intervention To Facilitate Hiv Preexposure Prophylaxis Adoption Among Young Black And Latinx Gay And Bisexual Men: Protocol For A Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial, Viraj V. Patel, Zoë Ginsburg, Sarit A. Golub, Keith J. Horvath, Nataly Rios, Kenneth H. Mayer, Ryunh S. Kim, Julia H. Arnsten

Publications and Research

Background: Young black and Latinx, gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (YBLGBM, aged 18-29 years) have among the highest rates of new HIV infections in the United States and are not consistently reached by existing prevention interventions. Preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP), an oral antiretroviral regimen taken daily by HIV-uninfected individuals to prevent HIV acquisition, is highly efficacious in reducing HIV acquisition and could help stop the HIV epidemic in YBLGBM. Use of social media (eg, Facebook, Twitter, online dating sites) is ubiquitous among young people, providing an efficient avenue to engage YBLGBM to facilitate PrEP adoption.

Objective: …

Explaining Animosity Towards The Roma: A Case Study Of Twitter Communication In Italy During The Refugee Crisis, Mayuko Nakatsuka

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Italy is known for hostile treatment of the Roma, one of the largest ethnic minority groups in Europe. This paper seeks to understand what is causing Italians to talk negatively about the Roma on Twitter. Statistical analysis is performed utilizing the data mined from Twitter along with other variables. The study finds that Roma population, foreign population, and number of refugees all have significant effects on the total number of tweets or the average negative sentiment of tweets. The results indicate that native Italians may group minority groups all together and regard them as “others”. Although the research design has …

Who Posts Selfies And Why?: Personality, Attachment Style, And Mentalization As Predictors Of Selfie Posting On Social Media, Nancy Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the phenomenon of selfie posting on social media and its relationship to narcissism, the Dark Triad, impulsivity, attachment style, rejection sensitivity, and reflective functioning. The sample was made up of 499 participants who completed an online survey consisting of personality measures and open- and closed-ended questions about selfie posting behavior. Data were analyzed using a negative binomial regression model.

Results: The study found that individuals with high levels of the Dark Triad trait of psychopathy post more selfies on social media than do individuals with low levels of the trait. The Dark Triad trait of narcissism was …

The Queer Allure Of Digital Sociality, Benjamin Parrish Haber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the resonance between queer sociality and emergent forms of digital communication. Drawing from queer theory and LGBTQ social histories, this dissertation charts the convergence of digital social modulation with the polyvalence, promiscuity, and mutability of queer sociality. A close analysis of the infrastructure and design of Facebook, Snapchat, Grindr, and other queered social media platforms demonstrates how digital capitalism’s desire for lifelong compulsive engagement is in part facilitated by an appropriation of the ongoingness of queer sexuality and relationality. In highlighting the key role of temporality, aesthetic, and affect in regulating the creation and circulation of digital …

Blogs As Channels For Disseminating Health Technology Innovations, Ashish Joshi, Rinzin Wangmo, Chioma Amadi

Publications and Research

Objectives: The objective of this study was to describe the features of health informatics blogs on the Internet.

Methods: A search was conducted in August, 2016 using the search engine, Google, and key words: ‘mobile health blog,’ ‘telehealth/telemedicine blog,’ ‘Electronic Health Record blog,’ ‘personalized health record blog,’ ‘population health decision support system blog,’ and ‘public/population health dashboard blog.’ The first 24 blogs resulting from each key word search were recorded, generating 144 blogs. A total of 109 unique blogs resulted after removing duplicates and non-functional sites.

Results: Blogs with ‘.com’ extensions were most prevalent (72%, n = 79). More than …

A Political Ecology Of Information: Media And The Dilemma Of State Power In China, Michael L. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I employ a Weberian concept of social power in order to theorize the challenges posed by, and the varieties of state response to, the dilemma of state power: the need of all states to empower societies with social capacities that may, in turn, threaten state interests. Through a comparison of traditional and new forms of media in China, I show that rather than posing qualitatively new types of challenges to authoritarian states, new media exacerbate the dilemma of state power. They do so because along each of three dimensions of social control, new media shift the relationship …

Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …

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 …

The Limits Of Transparency: Data Brokers And Commodification, Matthew Crain

Publications and Research

In the United States the prevailing public policy approach to mitigating the harms of internet surveillance is grounded in the liberal democratic value of transparency. While a laudable goal, transparency runs up against insurmountable structural constraints within the political economy of commercial surveillance. A case study of the data broker industry reveals the limits of transparency and shows that commodification of personal information is at the root of the power imbalances that transparency-based strategies of consumer empowerment seek to rectify. Despite significant challenges, privacy policy must be more centrally informed by a critical political economy of commercial surveillance.

Collective Influence Of Multiple Spreaders Evaluated By Tracing Real Information Flow In Large- Scale Social Networks, Xian Teng, Sen Pei, Flaviano Morone, Hernán A. Makse

Publications and Research

Identifying the most influential spreaders that maximize information flow is a central question in network theory. Recently, a scalable method called “Collective Influence (CI)” has been put forward through collective influence maximization. In contrast to heuristic methods evaluating nodes’ significance separately, CI method inspects the collective influence of multiple spreaders. Despite that CI applies to the influence maximization problem in percolation model, it is still important to examine its efficacy in realistic information spreading. Here, we examine real-world information flow in various social and scientific platforms including American Physical Society, Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal. Since empirical data cannot be directly …

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …

Thiscollegestory.Com: How Interactive Writing Media Influenced The Way First-Year Students Made Sense Of Their College Transition, Philip Kreniske

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on insights from Bakhtin (1986) that demonstrated the significance of writing as an interaction, and building on recent developments in narrative analysis that offer insights into narrator’s sense making processes (Daiute, 2014; Lucic, 2013); this research explores how freshmen in an educational opportunity program used interactive writing media to make sense of their transition to college. The exploration involved three main questions and each question concerns students’ development over time:

• First, did college students’ writing in two different media (blogs and word-processed text) differ and did these differences change over time?
• Second, how did the narrators and audience interact …

Collective Influence Algorithm To Find Influencers Via Optimal Percolation In Massively Large Social Media, Flaviano Morone, Byungjoon Min, Lin Bo, Romain Mari, Hernán A. Makse

Publications and Research

We elaborate on a linear-time implementation of Collective-Influence (CI) algorithm introduced by Morone, Makse, Nature 524, 65 (2015) to find the minimal set of influencers in networks via optimal percolation. The computational complexity of CI is O(N log N) when removing nodes one-by-one, made possible through an appropriate data structure to process CI. We introduce two Belief-Propagation (BP) variants of CI that consider global optimization via message-passing: CI propagation (CIP) and Collective- Immunization-Belief-Propagation algorithm (CIBP) based on optimal immunization. Both identify a slightly smaller fraction of influencers than CI and, remarkably, reproduce the exact analytical optimal percolation threshold obtained in …

Make A Twitter Bot In Python: Iterative Code Examples, Robin Camille Davis, Mark E. Eaton

Publications and Research

A tutorial based upon the LACUNY Emerging Technologies Committee’s “Build Your Own Twitter Bot” day in December 2015, which was billed as a gentle introduction to programming in Python.

Layer-Switching Cost And Optimality In Information Spreading On Multiplex Networks, Byungjoon Min, Sang-Hwan Gwak, Nanoom Lee, K. I. Goh

Publications and Research

We study a model of information spreading on multiplex networks, in which agents interact through multiple interaction channels (layers), say online vs. offline communication layers, subject to layerswitching cost for transmissions across different interaction layers. The model is characterized by the layer-wise path-dependent transmissibility over a contact, that is dynamically determined dependently on both incoming and outgoing transmission layers. We formulate an analytical framework to deal with such path-dependent transmissibility and demonstrate the nontrivial interplay between the multiplexity and spreading dynamics, including optimality. It is shown that the epidemic threshold and prevalence respond to the layer-switching cost non-monotonically and that …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Exploring Social Networking Technologies As Tools For Hiv Prevention For Men Who Have Sex With Men, Jorge Ramallo, Thomas Kidder, Tashuna Albritton, Gary Blick, John Pachankis, Valen Grandeleski, Trace Kershaw

Publications and Research

Social networking technologies are influential among men who have sex with men (MSM) and may be an important strategy for HIV prevention. We conducted focus groups with HIV positive and negative participants. Almost all participants used social networking sites to meet new friends and sexual partners. The main obstacle to effective HIV prevention campaigns in social networking platforms was stigmatization based on homosexuality as well as HIV status. Persistent stigma associated with HIV status and disclosure was cited as a top reason for avoiding HIV-related conversations while meeting new partners using social technologies. Further, social networking sites have different social …

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity; an ominous mystique – that many writers and artists have exploited to generate striking science-fictional effects in texts with little or no connection to North Korean reality. (The 2002 Bond film Die another Day, for example, draws from North Korea’s science-fictional aura to animate North Korean super-villains who …

Technology Innovations In Publishing: New Directions In Academic And Cultural Communication., Elisabeth Tappeiner, Kate Lyons

Publications and Research

Over time, publishing technologies have not only influenced how people read, but also how knowledge is evaluated and authority is established. Social and mobile technologies represent relatively recent developments that have transformed the trade publishing world, but the extent to which they have affected academic publishing remains an open question. This article examines the rapid and disruptive transformations in the trade and digital publishing world, discusses how these developments have already intersected with the work of academics and considers how these changes might continue to transform the dissemination of academic research in the future.

Digital Video: Engaging Students In Critical Media Literacy And Community Activism, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

This article presents a strategy for teaching health communication that fosters critical media literacy through the strategic combination of digital video, documentary film, video worksheets, and peer-reviewed journal articles. Given the media-saturated environment in which notions of health are shaped, critical media literacy skills are crucial to students in health-related fields. Cases of key concepts illustrated through documentary films and the peer-reviewed literature are presented. The article then explores how one class took the lead in designing a community event that critically engaged both a YouTube video and a documentary film about police brutality as a public health issue.

Librarianship Presence In Virtual Worlds, Jenny M. Baum, Kate Lyons

Publications and Research

Librarianship has stereotypically been about books, communities, and the connection between the two. With the emergence of new media and technology, the concept of books has expanded to include information of all types and in multiple formats: eBooks, DVDs, videogames, electronic databases, et cetera. Meanwhile, the idea of community has stayed the same. For example, public libraries primarily serve communities defined by geographic lines; academic libraries serve their campus communities. In non-profit, medical or corporate libraries, communities are defined by their organization’s particular mission. However, now that virtual worlds are becoming mainstream, librarians are redefining community, just as they redefined …

Predicting The Success Of Commercial Aska Services, In The United States And Abroad, Kate Lyons, Jenny M. Baum

Publications and Research

This article discusses the quality of commercial and library-sponsored AskA services and uses this as a prediction for the success of the programs. The authors also explore the idea of the commoditization of information and its acceptance rates in different countries, and use these to predict the success of commercial and library-sponsored AskA services both in the United States and abroad.