Social Media Commons^™

"Hands Up, Don't Shoot": College Students, Social Media And The #Blacklivesmatter Movement, Spencer Hall, Sam Baucham, Tim Harris

Concordia Journal of Communication Research

This study focused on how college students are using social media in the #Blacklivesmatter movement. There have been several socially galvanizing events surrounding the #Blacklivesmatter movement that have led to many people to turn to social media to voice their opinions, share information and debate different ideas. This study specifically focused on college student’s involvement on social media surrounding these events. The data suggests that Facebook was overwhelmingly the main choice for participants to gather information about this movement. While college students are gathering information about the #Blacklivesmatter movement on social media, the data suggests that participants rarely posted or …

Adolescent Self Esteem And Instagram: An Examination Of Posting Behavior, Anna Hill, Lamaja Denman

Concordia Journal of Communication Research

Social media is a way that people can communicate and share parts of their lives through the internet ("Social Media", n.d.). Being that the media tends to have an influence on the general public, it has an influence on adolescents as well. Sometimes this influence can be quite negative (Sanders, 2015). Because of this, exploring their connection would be insightful. This study explores how a specific social media site, Instagram, may affect adolescent girls and their self-esteem. The researchers issued a self-esteem questionnaire to a gorup of girls on their self-esteem and compared it to their Instagram profiles. In this …

A Rhetorical Criticism Of Blackfish: Making Waves In Orca Activism, Lindsay Beisheim

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

Lust For Lulu: An Examination Of Lululemon Athletica's Marketing Authenticity And Branding, Sara Sousa

Communication Studies

Lululemon Athletica, a brand built upon the values of balance, harmony, and culture, has one of the most unique and modern methods of advertising of any retailer today, but sometimes being unique can either elevate a brand or bring it down in flames. The brand has experimented with many different advertisement campaigns as a way to engage consumers and promote a lifestyle; some have proven successful while others have stirred up controversy and turmoil for the brand. Honesty and authenticity are not only traits valued as human characteristics, they are also highly valued in the marketing and advertising realm. Marketing …

Broadband And Mobile Internet Services In Nonmetropolitan Nebraska: 2016 Nebraska Rural Poll Results, Rebecca Vogt, Cheryl Burkhart-Kriesel, Randolph Cantrell, Bradley Lubben, Larry J. Mcelravy Jr.

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

A recent Pew Research Center survey revealed that home broadband adoption has plateaued in the United States. In addition, there has been an increase in adults who use a smartphone to access the Internet but do not have traditional broadband service in their home. Given these national trends, how do rural Nebraskans access the Internet? Are they accessing the Internet from their cell phones? Are they subscribing to high-speed Internet services at home? How satisfied are they with their Internet services? How important do they feel Internet access is for various items? This paper provides a detailed analysis of these …

Mcv Wines Social Media Marketing Campaign: Successfully Marketing Wine To Millennials, Dillon Payne

Journalism

The following study investigates how to develop a commercial on a social media platform in order to advertise a product to millennials – in this study, wine is the product. The number of consumers is increasing as each year more and more millennials become 21 years old, thus being able to be the next and newest consumer of the wine industry. The campaign’s focus was to create a wine commercial for a tasting room called MCV Wines and market it on social media to see if millennials would be interested in purchasing wine after seeing the commercial. Withscholarly research, the …

Officer On Duty: How An Image Can Change In An Instant, Derrick Battle

Masters Theses

The deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice sparked an uproar in many communities across the United States. These incidents brought to light that there is an issue that remains prevalent between citizen and police officers. The New York Police Department, Ferguson Police Department, and the Cleveland Department of Police have all dealt with tension involving the communities they serve. Since these incidents changes have been made within each department. Some had the help of the Department of Justice to reform old polices. While law enforcement does what they believe it is necessary to protect the public, sometimes …

User Behavior Mining In Microblogging, Tuan Anh Hoang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation addresses the modeling of factors concerning microblogging users' content and behavior. We focus on two sets of factors. The first set includes behavioral factors of users and content items driving content propagation in microblogging. The second set consists of latent topics and communities of users as the users are engaged in content generation and behavior adoptions. These two sets of factors are extremely important in many applications, e.g., network monitoring and recommender systems. In the first part of this dissertation, we identify user virality, user susceptibility, and content virality as three behavioral factors that affect users' behaviors in …

Collective Rumor Correction On The Death Hoax Of A Political Figure In Social Media, Alton Y. K. Chua, Sin-Mei Cheah, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conversations on social media networks that discuss a crisis incident as it unfolds have become a norm in recent years. Left to its own devices, such conversations could quickly degenerate into rumor mills. Little research has thus far examined the correction of rumors on social media. Using the third person effect as a theoretical underpinning, we developed a model of collective rumor correction on social media based on an incident surrounding the death hoax of a political figure. Tweets from Twitter were collected and analyzed for the period when a spike of circulating rumors speculating the demise of Singapore's first …

The Importance Of Online Peer Relationships During The Transition To Motherhood: Do They Decrease Stress, Alleviate Depression And Increase Parenting Competence?, Bobbie Sue Arias

Dissertations and Theses

This research addressed the challenges faced by women in today's society during the transition to motherhood, and explored the possible benefits of an online natural helping network of blogging peers. Given the content of the literature describing the transition to motherhood and the many hardships that pose possible obstacles for an ideal transition, this research attempted to uncover the reasons why mothers blog and what benefit, if any, they experience as a result of blogging. This study explored the following questions: Why do women blog during the transition to motherhood? What is the relationship among the seven identified variables: blogging …

Social Media's Impact On Compassion, Courtney L. Tulipani

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The purpose of this paper is to understand whether individuals are losing their sense of compassion through the use of using social media. I will be examining the social media sites Facebook and YouTube, and I will provide examples as to how people are losing their compassion through use of these sites in order to victimize and bully others.

I will be discussing cyberbullying within this essay and how it is an example of how individuals are losing their compassion online. My primary source will be the case of Amanda Todd, who was a severely bullied fifteen year-old girl who …

Padded Assumptions: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Patriarchal Menstruation Discourse, Kathryn M. Lese

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

In 2015, Rupi Kaur’s photography project featuring a menstruating woman was censored on Instagram, a photo sharing social media platform. The menstruation censorship created a surge in public media discourse about what is and is not appropriate to discuss about menstruation. Menstruation communication is often discrete or invisible in dominant discourse and focuses of medicalization rather than the social norms of “performing menstruation”. This thesis explores menstruation communication in public media discourse and examines how it empowers and disempowers the menstruating female body. Themes including the everyday language of menstruation, patriarchal censorship of women’s bodies, shame and stigma in menstruation …

Advocacy Campaign For Women's Reproductive Health And Access On Social Media, Rachel Crist, Jules Montes, Lauren Frank

Student Research Symposium

Advocacy organizations increasingly rely on social media (e.g. Twitter hashtags) to foster issue awareness. Social media platforms can be promising communication channels to reach diverse audiences; however, it is unclear how effective these campaigns are at reaching audience members whose views do not align with the campaign. Using diffusion of innovations as a theoretical framework, this study examines the #BirthControlHelpedMe campaign to better understand the response to an advocacy campaign promoted via Twitter. Focus groups were conducted separately for men and women. The moderator led participants in a semi-structured discussion of perceptions of birth control. Participants were then shown example …

Information Seeking Behavior Of Expats In Asia On Facebook Open Groups, Priyanka Sharma, Sumita Govindan

Research Collection Library

With the rise of the global economy and an increasingly mobile global workforce, expat communities are commonplace the world over. Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) play an increasingly important role in keeping people connected, facilitating the formation of virtual communities based on interest, stage of life, profession and other commonalities. These virtual communities, much in the same way as traditional communities, feature social transactions of different kinds, including information seeking. Using content analysis, our study seeks to delineate patterns of information seeking on three Facebook groups for expats in terms of the categories of information sought and shared, speed of responses …

Charlton Fire Department Resident Expectations: Survey And Analysis, Natalie Omary, Jingxin Wen, Junchen Chen, Denis Kornev

School of Professional Studies

The Town of Charlton is located in the heart of the Massachusetts with a resident population of just under 14,000 people. The Charlton Fire Department serves the town for needs related to fire fighting, fire prevention, burning permits and inspection services along with emergency medical services. The Department has requested the assistance of the Clark University COPACE Capstone students in creating and conducting survey in order to get a sense of what the resident of the town know about the fire department and to better gauge their expectations about what the department can provide for them. The survey was formulated …

Information Technology Proposal For The Town Of Spencer, Vijay Basava, Corey Kenyon, Mahdi Soltani

School of Professional Studies

The Town of Spencer came to us looking for a plan to build and maintain their own personal fiber network for connection between departments and to improve data security for important information. After assessing the existing landscape and determining the various paths forward, we created network diagrams and plans for the movement forward of this project.

After assessing a variety of plans, we found that a full single-mode fiber network would be the best system for the implementation in Spencer. While it was the highest cost, it also scored the highest in our assessment.

Developing An Online Database Of Experts For The Worcester Regional Chamber Of Commerce, Zikan Chen, Douglas Grey, Pranjal Shah

School of Professional Studies

The Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce as part of their mission to attract business to the Worcester area, want to create an online searchable database of industry experts made up of faculty members of the Colleges and Universities in the Worcester area. This online database will be placed on the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce Higher Education – Business Partnership page on their website. The limitations placed on this request are that the Regional Chamber as of this moment have no monetary or Information Technologies resources to provide for the realization of this request.

The proliferation of as A Service …

Cybersecurity Awareness Shrewsbury Public Schools, Brittany Crompton, David Thompson, Manuel Reyes, Xueyan Zhao, Xueke Zou

School of Professional Studies

In the 21st Century, technology reaches every aspect of our lives. As “digital citizens” we must be aware of the dangers both to our technological equipment and our personal information stored, transmitted, and processed on this equipment. The Cybersecurity Awareness curriculum developed for the Shrewsbury Public School district is designed to meet this need, as well as foster an interest in technology and ethical computer use.

Analysis Of The Point Of Sales System At Tower Hill Botanical Garden And Suggested Courses Of Action, Brian Dunn, Keerthi Bandi, Chantal Kopwa Epse Kassa, F.N.U Shelly

School of Professional Studies

As Tower Hill Botanic Garden continues to improve on its operations and enhance the experience of its visitors and members, they are on a quest for a new Point-Of-Sale (POS) system that not only works with its existing hardware and interface with Raiser’s Edge, a smartcloud fundraising and relationship management software central to the garden’s operations but also, have a restaurant module and the capability of operating both in a wireless and hard-wired environment.

The Effects Of Social Media On Music Sharing, Rachel Zucker

Senior Theses

Studying music and its evolution in a society can give researchers a clue about the culture of a group of people as a whole. I believe that studying the way that music is shared is an integral part of this. In my research, I explored the historical roots of the digitization of music, while simultaneously examining the evolution of social media networks and their role in music sharing. Through my research, I gained an understanding of the flow of music exchange in today’s society by identifying the current, dominant social media and music streaming platforms and examining how each platform …

Why Do People Continue Using Facebook: An Empirical Study From The Perspectives Of Technology Adoption And Social Contract, Chen-Wei Chang

Dissertations

Online stalking, identity theft, and other privacy-related issues have become the major reasons that impede users from continuously using their Facebook accounts. To better understand how privacy risks, among other factors, have come into play, in terms of affecting users’ intention to continue using social networking sites, the present study applies three theories (i.e., the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2, social contract theory, and technology continuance theory) to develop a new model for Facebook use continuance. An online survey (N = 450) was performed by administrating a random sampling method in January and February of 2014. …

We’Ll Want It When We Say We Want It: How The Market Speaks To The Publishing Industry Via Crowdfunding, And Why Publishers Should Listen, Alan Scott Holley

Book Publishing Final Research Papers

With its utilization of an environment as fluid and innovative as the internet, it’s no wonder that the digital revolution is an ongoing phenomenon that is reinvigorated time and time again with no signs of slowing down. As advanced digital technologies and practices are rolled out by developers and embraced by consumers, commercial companies are thrust headlong into a necessitated showing of adaptability, progressiveness, and up-to-the-minute technological fluency. For the publishing industry, these expectations have been met with a slow yet relatively steady adherence—an understandable reaction considering how so many digital innovations appeared at the time to have the express …

Cest: City Event Summarization Using Twitter, Deepa Mallela

Computer Science Graduate Projects and Theses

Twitter, with 288 million active users, has become the most popular platform for continuous real-time discussions. This leads to huge amounts of information related to the real-world, which has attracted researchers from both academia and industry. Event detection on Twitter has gained attention as one of the most popular domains of interest within the research community. Unfortunately, existing event detection methodologies have yet to fully explore Twitter metadata and instead rely solely on identifying events based on prior information or focus on events that belong to specific categories. Given the heavy volume of tweets that discuss events, summarization techniques can …

#Greysanatomy Vs. #Yankees: Demographics And Hashtag Use On Twitter, Jisun An, Ingmar Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Demographics, in particular, gender, age, and race, are a key predictor of human behavior. Despite the significant effect that demographics plays, most scientific studies using online social media do not consider this factor, mainly due to the lack of such information. In this work, we use state-of-the-art face analysis software to infer gender, age, and race from profile images of 350K Twitter users from New York. For the period from November 1, 2014 to October 31, 2015, we study which hashtags are used by different demographic groups. Though we find considerable overlap for the most popular hashtags, there are also …

On Unravelling Opinions Of Issue Specific-Silent Users In Social Media, Wei Gong, Ee-Peng Lim, Feida Zhu, Pei Hua Cher

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media has become a popular platform for people toshare opinions. Among the social media mining researchprojects that study user opinions and issues, most focus onanalyzing posted and shared content. They could run into thedanger of non-representative findings as the opinions of userswho do not post content are overlooked, which often happensin today’s marketing, recommendation, and social sensing research.For a more complete and representative profiling ofuser opinions on various topical issues, we need to investigatethe opinions of the users even when they stay silent onthese issues. We call these users the issue specific-silent users(i-silent users). To study them and their …

Corporate Social Responsibility On Twitter, Rachel E. Deems

Journalism Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through content analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on Twitter, this study examines how the country’s top and largest corporations in each of the main industries portray CSR on Twitter. The study investigates the agenda-setting potential of the CSR tweets based upon the variables examined, including (a) CSR dimension, (b) CSR topic, (c) tone, (d) stakeholders, (e) Twitter attributes, and (f) Twitter interactivity. The results indicate that CSR tweets predominantly portray the discretionary level of CSR, regardless of industry, predominantly include topics of public philanthropy, especially service-producing industries, and positive tone was used most frequently across industries. The community was …

Understanding How The Southeastern Conference Football Teams Use Twitter Through A Content Analysis, Kristin Elise Pearson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The influence of Social media on intercollegiate athletic departments has been prominent in the past few years. With tight budgets, the departments are forced to find different means of marketing and promoting their brand – through embracing Social media platforms. Research on Social media and intercollegiate athletics is limited; therefore, it is necessary to research how the departments are utilizing Social media. With the agenda setting theory as a foundation, this study explores how the 14 SEC football teams are utilizing Twitter. A total of 3,176 tweets were collected from two constructed weeks. Overall, the findings show that the information …

Social Media As A Tool To Effectively Communicate With Stakeholders: School Administrators And Superintendents' Perceptions, Steven Coleman Hampton

Dissertations

This quantitative research study analyzed the perceptions of school administrators on the effectiveness of using social media outlets to communicate with stakeholders. School administrators throughout the State of Mississippi completed an online survey developed by the researcher identifying the social media outlets they use to communicate with their stakeholders and the effectiveness of using social media outlets. Superintendents, Assistant Superintendents, Principals, Assistant Principals, and Public Relations Directors with various years of experience completed the survey. The study revealed there was a statistical significant difference between age groups of the school administrators with the concerns of using social media outlets as …

Are You Charlie Or Ahmed? Cultural Pluralism In Charlie Hebdo Response On Twitter, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Yelena Mejova, Sonia Alonso Saenz De Oger, Braulio Gomez Fortes

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings of January 7, 2015 on Twitter across the globe. We ask whether the stances on the issue of freedom of speech can be modeled using established sociological theories, including Huntington’s culturalist Clash of Civilizations, and those taking into consideration social context, including Density and Interdependence theories. We find support for Huntington’s culturalist explanation, in that the established traditions and norms of one’s “civilization” predetermine some of one’s opinion. However, at an individual level, we also find social context to play a significant role, with non-Arabs living in Arab countries using #JeSuisAhmed …

Adapting Nonverbal Coding Theory To Mobile Mediated Communication: An Analysis Of Emoji And Other Digital Nonverbals, Carley Durante

Masters Theses

Nonverbal communication has been an area of communication theory studied for decades. Despite more daily communication occurring over mediated communication, there is a lack of research surrounding digital communication, specifically mobile-mediated communication (MMC). While there has been research conducted regarding computer-mediated communication (CMC), specifically studies examining email communication and instant messaging (IM), the mobile conversation is relatively untouched by current scholarship. This paper will streamline nonverbal coding research to set the groundwork for application and translation of nonverbal coding elements to mobile-mediated communication and the text message conversation. Even more specifically, the elements of kinesics, vocalics, and chronemics will be …