Social Media Commons^™

Can My Wife Be Virtual-Adulterous? An Experiential Study On Facebook, Emotional Infidelity And Self-Disclosure, Okorie Nelson, Abiodun Salawu

Journal of International Women's Studies

Emotional infidelity is a perennial concern and negatively affects marriages in many modern societies. The advent of social media networks has heightened the alarming rate of emotional infidelity across the globe. This study examines the influence of Facebook on emotional infidelity and self-disclosure among married women. The study uses the media dependency theory, which stipulates that social media platforms, such as Facebook, serve as a potent channel for self-disclosure and emotional infidelity among individuals. The survey method was adopted in the study and a questionnaire used as an instrument to collect data. Two null hypotheses were tested with Pearson product …

The Voices Of Silence In Online Charitable Fundraising: A Focus Group Study In China, Xun Lin, Hua Huang

The Qualitative Report

Charitable fundraising, which often goes viral, has been flourishing on Wechat, the most popular social media site in China. It has given rise to a variety of forms of resistance. Silence among them is particularly evident. This study was conducted on three focus groups to unveil the hidden voices in the silent college students in an online charitable fundraising. Findings show that these voices demonstrate participants’ reclaiming of authorship of private space on Moments, their endeavour to avoid creating stress in vulnerable others, and their questioning of the configuration of responsibility. These voices show negotiation with or resistance against the …

Legal Research In The Age Of Social Media, Endia S. Paige

Continuing Legal Education Presentations

Provides an overview of the most popular social media platforms used by adults i the United States and gives insight into how attorneys can use them to conduct legal and investigative research.

Coping_With_Ptsd: A Textual And Visual Thematic Analysis Of Instagram As Supportive Communication, Catherine Elizabeth Bahn

Student Theses and Dissertations

This textual and visual analysis of the account Coping_with_PTSD found Instagram to be an information-rich platform for supportive communication. Individuals affected by Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) were able to provide and seek supportive communication through text, photos and emojis. Key themes identified for the account and its followers providing supportive communication were posting health information, normalizing PTSD, sharing personal narratives and providing encouragement. Additionally, account followers used tagging and direct messaging as supportive communication. Further, account users sought supportive communication through asking and disclosing personal narratives. Three themes were found for emojis: reinforcement, emotional insight and “emoji speak” as supportive …

How Many Likes Did It Get? Using Social Media Metrics To Establish Trademark Rights, Caroline Mrohs

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

This comment asserts that there is a need for an update to the multifactor test considered by courts in determining the strength of a trademark. Traditional factors include the expenses an entity can afford to pay in advertising, but do not give any weight to the presence of the entity on social media to reach its target consumer group.

Using Instagram For Shopping In Saudi Arabia, Manasar Awadh Alharethi

Student Theses and Dissertations

Instagram has become one of the most important destinations for shopping between individuals in Saudi society, especially among the younger generations, who use it on a daily basis. This study was designed to examine how Saudis employed Instagram as a marketing channel and why they preferred using Instagram for shopping over other social media platforms. The Uses and Gratification Theory was employed to gain an in-depth understanding of the reasons behind Saudis using Instagram to shop and the way this activity affected their lives. This study surveyed 2,117 Saudis who use Instagram in order to explore potential correlations with website …

Communication Through Social Technologies: A Study Of Israeli Women, Jeretta Horn Nord 405-747-0320, Dafni Biran Achituv, Joanna Paliszkiewicz

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Social technologies have changed the way we communicate allowing users to interact, share knowledge, reach out to friends and family, keep up with the news, and even promote and support a business. A study of Israeli women was conducted to determine how social technologies platforms — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+ — are used and the benefits realized. Women worldwide face challenges including economic, educational, health, and political. Israel women, like women in every other country in the world, are challenged with gender inequity. Do women who use social technologies believe that these platforms provide empowerment leading to greater …

Hate Speech On The Internet: Crime Or Free Speech?, Grace Udoh-Oshin

Undergraduate Honors College Theses 2016-

The Internet has a lot of positive features. It gives users fast access to information, allows for communication with others who might otherwise be out of reach, and much more; however, the Internet allows for a lot of negativity as well. There has been an increase in hate based activity on social media, and the anonymity and flexibility afforded by the Internet has made harassment and expressions of hate easy, thus making it much harder to implement traditional law enforcement. This paper gives a history of hate speech in America, and examines the difficulties of regulating hate speech on the …

Negative Affects That Social Media Causes On Body Imaging, Katelyn J. Gaffney

Undergraduate Honors College Theses 2016-

The main purpose of this thesis is to present, discuss and criticize the effect of negative body imagining caused by social media. This will be achieved in part by explaining the history of women and the change of their appearances and Body Mass Index during different times in history. It will also discuss the historical differences of what was considered attractive during those times based on different forms of social media and how it changed from time period to period. Later on in the thesis I will discuss the strong negative influences caused by social media and in the fashion …

Successful Implementation Of Pharmacy Retail Store Loyalty Reward Programs, Cristina D. Reinert, Jill A. Murray

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

Loyalty reward programs are utilized within various industries as a key marketing strategy. A successfully implemented loyalty reward program benefits both the consumer and the company. The purpose of this multicase study was to explore strategies that pharmacy retail managers use to deliver loyalty reward programs. The theory of planned behavior was used as the conceptual framework to guide the study. Mobile technology, customer involvement, brand management, and tier-based rewards were the themes that emerged during data analysis. The findings are of interest to pharmacy retail managers and marketers because they are instrumental in implementing a successful loyalty reward program.

Adelante Ambassadors: Using Digital Media To Facilitate Community Engagement And Risk-Prevention For Latino Youth, Nicole Barrett, Ricardo Villalba, Elizabeth L. Andrade, Alison Beltran, W. Douglas Evans

Prevention and Community Health Faculty Publications

Digital and social media are now widely used to promote engagement in health programs and improve health behaviors across a variety of age groups and domains. However, limited research exists on applying culturally relevant, new media interventions specific to Latino immigrant youth. This paper describes the pilot Adelante Youth Ambassador program for Latino immigrant youth, which used digital media and community-based participatory research to build positive youth development (PYD) assets as a prevention mechanism to reduce co-occurring health risks of substance use, sexual risk, and interpersonal violence. We worked collaboratively with adolescents to create video content as a conduit for …

Social Media And Sexual Behavior Among Adolescents: Is There A Link?, Megan Landry, Monique M. Turner, Amita N. Vyas, Susan Wood

Prevention and Community Health Faculty Publications

Background: Adolescent sexual risk taking and its consequences remain a global public health concern. Empirical evidence on the impact that social media has on sexual health behaviors among youth is sparse.

Objective: The study aimed to examine the relationship between social media and the change in sexual risk over time and whether parental monitoring moderates this relationship.

Methods: This study comprised a sample of 555 Latino youth aged 13-19 years from Maryland, United States completing baseline and follow-up surveys. Mixed-effects linear regression was used to examine the relationship between social media and the change in sexual risk over time and …

Youth And Social Media: Power To Empower?, Sujith Kumar Prankumar

Social Space

Much has been written on social media and how it has positively revolutionised communication and information transmission. The infl uence of social media is indubitable—it reaches anyone with an Internet connection, no matter their geographic location or socioeconomic status. This means information that was previously out of reach for isolated and less well-off communities is now accessible by more people than ever before. For example, University College London’s “Why We Post” social media anthropology project—conducted by nine researchers in nine different communities over 15 months—found that communities that have traditionally received comparatively lower levels of schooling now have access to …

The Responsible Project, Shannon N. Jackson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this thesis is to create a public relations campaign consisting of a series of promotional videos filmed specifically for Patagonia, the outdoors sportswear company, emphasizing their corporate social responsibility for viewing on their social media and web-based platforms. The commercials will feature three Colorado non-profit organizations tied to Patagonia through Patagonia's Growing Grassroots Grant program.

Assessing The Applicability Of Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions For Global 500 Corporations' Facebook Profiles And Content, Kevin D. Lo, Richard D. Waters, N. Christensen

Organization, Leadership, and Communication

This research examines how Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions are reflected on the official corporate Facebook pages from 259 organizations on Fortune magazine’s Global 500 list. This research is grounded in original indices to measure the six dimensions across Facebook’s “About Us” section, the textual updates provided by the companies, as well as the media that they share (photographs and videos). This is the first attempt to create a conceptualization of Hofstede’s dimensions for organizational social media use. The results paint a mixed picture indicating that the global nature of these corporations is echoed in a somewhat similar overall presence on …

More Power To Youth: 6 Ted Talks To Empower Young Minds, Jay Boolkin

Social Space

Youth empowerment refers to young people embodying their agency and capacity to make decisions and implement changes in their own lives and in wider society. At its core, it is rooted in the attitudes, cultures and structures that young people participate in within society. When youth acquire the authority and ability to envision, map, execute, critique and challenge their reality, it opens up opportunities to change the world as we know it. The materialisation of youth empowerment can lead to unparalleled social benefi ts, including reduced unemployment, poverty eradication, THE SHORT LIST More Power To Youth 6 TED Talks to …

Electronic Media Production Curriculum, Communication Studies

Curriculum Programs

This concentration is designed to provide the knowledge, values, perspectives, and skills necessary to understand the roles, functions, and operations of various electronic media. This program of study is focused on balancing theoretical issues with practical experience.

A Retrospective On State Of The Art Social Media Research Methods: Ethical Decisions, Big-Small Data Rivalries And The Spectre Of The 6vs, Anabel Quan-Haase, Luke Sloan

FIMS Publications

This concluding chapter offers critical reflections on some of the key themes covered in the Handbook. Ethics emerged as a concern for many scholars, both for those engaging in quantitative and qualitative approaches. Scholars agree in that there is no overarching set of rules that can be applied to all projects blindly, rather they see ethical decisions as being grounded in the specifics of the data being collected, the social group under study, and the potential repercussions for subjects. A second central theme was the value of qualitative approaches for understanding ‘anomalies’ within larger data sets. Qualitative approaches are seen …

Theatre Marketing: Using Websites To Attract Young Target Audience, Mirna Leko Šimić, Dr. Antun Biloš

Irish Business Journal

Classic theatres worldwide are faced with the trend of aging of loyal audiences and general decrease of the audience size. It indicates that attracting young audiences to classic theatre is the key issue of its existence. Since the quality of communication is one of the major elements of marketing efficiency, the aim of this research is to identify Croatian classic theatre website characteristics and usability elements which are connected with website experience of young target audiences. Altogether 7 Croatian national theatres and three commercial theatres’ official websites were tested. The in-depth analysis of websites of sample theatres implies that website …

Snapping Live: Exploring The Effects Of Ephemerality Nature Of Messaging In Social Media Settings, Dania Aljouhi

ETD Archive

Ephemeral messaging apps such as Snapchat has become a very popular app with young adults. The Snapchat application defined as an instant messaging app that allows its users to take pictures, videos, add a captions, doodles and send the content to a friend or add it to the user’s story. Importantly, “the snaps” will self-destruct after a specified period of time. Further investigation regarding the effects of using ephemeral nature of messaging in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is explored in the theoretical framework of Hyperpersonal. This study was designed to examine the role of ephemeral nature of messaging in social media …

Internal Strategies For Assessing Organizational Communication Channel Effectiveness, Melvin E. Murphy, Douglas G. Campbell

International Journal of Applied Management and Technology

Evolving communication technology, the increased volume of information needed by businesses and the intensified competitive environment have made internal company communication more critical to business success. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies for assessing the effectiveness of internal communication channels used by managers and leaders of three law firms in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The participating firms were recognized by their peers as being exceptionally well managed. Data from interviews and company documents were analyzed through the conceptual lens of channel expansion theory and the use of software coding to identify patterns and themes. Three …

Engaging The Public Through Social Media, Christina Anne Cummings

Online Theses and Dissertations

The use of social media by government agencies to spur civic engagement is still a rather new concept, one whose purpose seems to have gotten lost in the excitement of the use of new technology. As a result, there is not an abundance of research into how social media can be used to promote civic engagement.

This paper will attempt to reveal how agencies are using social media as well as try to pinpoint what agencies should be doing. As an example of current procedures in our area this paper will highlight some local government entities in Boyle County, Kentucky …

Emergent Ai, Social Robots And The Law: Security, Privacy And Policy Issues, Ramesh Subramanian

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

The rapid growth of AI systems has implications on a wide variety of fields. It can prove to be a boon to disparate fields such as healthcare, education, global logistics and transportation, to name a few. However, these systems will also bring forth far-reaching changes in employment, economy and security. As AI systems gain acceptance and become more commonplace, certain critical questions arise: What are the legal and security ramifications of the use of these new technologies? Who can use them, and under what circumstances? What is the safety of these systems? Should their commercialization be regulated? What are the …

Speaking The "Millingo": Decoding The Lingo Of Millennials, Pingxuan Chye

Social Space

Does “Squad’s OOTD on fleek, seriously goals!” have you straining your eyes and stifling a groan as you try to decipher millennials’ penchant for strange, new words? Alongside a host of creative new vocabulary, millennials— generally referring to those born between the early 1980s and early 2000s—are an assortment of unique traits such as progressiveness, empathy and increasing awareness of social issues that plague not just the community around them, but also the world they live in. Inadvertently, these characteristics are reflected in the popular terms they use. However, this can seem like endless pit of lingo for the uninitiated …

Citizens On Twitter: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Emerging Political Satire, Kathryn Miller

Masters Theses

This thesis provides an overview of the history of satire, its rhetorical structure, and my interpretation of its historically culminated five fundamental characteristics. I also introduce that the rise in popularity of American political satire through various media has inspired a new wave of American satirists who project their own political satirical messages through social media platforms and how Twitter, in particular, has provided those "average" individuals with the opportunity to more actively, directly, and satirically take part in political discussions. With a collection of two data sets of tweets—one larger live tweet sweep during the first 2016 presidential debate …

Of Music And Media: A Producer Study Of Promotional Encoding On Social Media Through The Lenses Of Paratext And Medium Theory, Connor D. Wilcox

Masters Theses

While music promotion has been important aspect for musicians, bands, and musical organizations for well over a century, the rise of social media in the digital era has profoundly changed the way these promoters perceived of and practice their commercial task of selling music. Paratexts (Gray, 2010a) offer an effective lens for focusing on these promotions while encoding/decoding (Hall, 1980) justifies producer studies to examine and uncover vital aspects of production shape the text and medium theory adds further focus by recentering the medium as being distinctly influential. Existing research on music promotion highlights the uniqueness and evocativeness of the …

New Year, New Look: Communicating An Organizational Identity For The Eiu Women's Basketball Team, Nathan Bryant

Masters Theses

The attempt to increase and maintain stakeholder engagement and interaction is one of the main pursuits for public relations practitioners today. With new and changing ways to reach and engage stakeholders through various social media outlets public relations professionals now more than ever have to find a way to make their products stand out among the multiple messages a person views in a given day. This public relations campaign attempted to increase engagement and interaction with the Eastern Illinois University's women's basketball team by giving the team a new organizational identity. This identity was conveyed through the team's social media …

A True Fairytale “Happily Ever After”: An In-Depth Communication Analysis, Courtney E. Dempsey

Senior Honors Projects

Walter Fischer’s Narrative Paradigm states that people are natural born storytellers, they will convey thoughts and feelings through creating a story. These stories must adhere to two principles, fidelity and coherence. While coherence addresses the structure of the narrative, if this story has any resemblance to an archetype, fidelity deals with the story’s rationality, does it make sense? Fischer’s narrative can be applied across many different disciplines.

For this particular analysis I chose to apply Fischer’s Narrative Paradigm to different bridal narratives. While being a bride is an archetype itself, within that narrative there are distinct themed narratives that have …

The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks …

On Making A Difference: How Photography And Narrative Produce The Short-Term Missions Experience, Joshua Kerby Jennings

Theses and Dissertations--Community & Leadership Development

Short-term missions participants encounter difference in purportedly captivating ways. Current research, however, indicates the practice does not lead to long-lasting, positive change. Brian M. Howell (2012) argues the short-term missions experience is confined to the limitations of the short-term missions narrative. People who engage in short-term missions build assumptions, seek experiences, understand difference, and convey meaning, as a result of this narrative. The process of telling and retelling travel stories is integral to the short-term missions experience. Drawing upon literature on tourism, narrative, development, and photography, this study intends to evaluate the inefficacy of short-term missions through the stories which …