Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Video Games As Meaningful Entertainment Experiences, Mary Beth Oliver, Nicholas David Bowman, Julia K. Woolley, Ryan Rogers, Brett I. Sherrick, Mun-Youn Chung

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

We conducted an experiment to examine individuals’ perceptions of enjoyable and meaningful video games and the game characteristics and dimensions of need satisfaction associated with enjoyment and appreciation. Participants (N = 512) were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups that asked them to recall a game that they found either particularly fun or particularly meaningful, and to then rate their perceptions of the game that they recalled. Enjoyment was high for both groups, though appreciation was higher in the meaningful- than fun-game condition. Further, enjoyment was most strongly associated with gameplay characteristics and satisfaction of needs related to competency …

Tolerance On Facebook: Exploring Network Diversity And Social Distance, Lee Farquhar, Theresa Davidson

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

This study examines Facebook usage, network composition, and desired social distance from groups often perceived as the “other”. Specifically, we examine attitudes toward Atheists, Muslims, and Gays. Findings indicate that social network composition (ie - network diversity, number of unique groups, number of Facebook friends) plays a significant role in participants’ desired social distance from said groups. Generally, these findings suggest that increasing diversity in a Facebook network may lead to a decrease in prejudice.

Bloggers And Their Impact On Contemporary Social Movements: A Phenomenological Examination Of The Role Of Blogs And Their Creators In The Lgbt Social Movements In Modern United States, Bobby K. Huen

Department of Conflict Resolution Studies Theses and Dissertations

The Internet is a ubiquitous feature in everyday life, but its application to social movements has yet to be completely understood. This phenomenological study examines the lived experiences of bloggers who focused on the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement in the United States to understand the impact bloggers and their work as online activists have on existing LGBT social movement organization and operation. Data collection is gathered from semi-structured and open-ended interviews with four social movement bloggers using web-conference software over the course of three months. The results of this study indicated that internet has empowered individual activists, …

Bridging The Divide: Using Utaut To Predict Multigenerational Tablet Adoption Practices, Kate Magsamen-Conrad

School of Media and Communication Faculty Publications

This study examined the “Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology” (UTAUT) in the context of tablet devices across multiple generations. We tested the four UTAUT determinants, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions, to determine their contributions for predicting behavioral intention to use tablets with age, gender, and user experience as moderators. 899 respondents aged 19-99 completed the survey. We found consistent generational differences in UTAUT determinants, most frequently between the oldest and youngest generations. Effort expectancy and facilitating conditions were the only determinants that positively predicted tablet use intentions after controlling for age, gender, and …

Where We Have Been And Where We Can Go From Here: Looking To The Future In Research On Media, Race And Ethnicity, Riva Tukachinsky

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

This special issue illuminates the ways in which media portrayals and practices, together, create barriers to inclusion for diverse groups and normalize existing patterns of relegation on and off the screen. Media representations of race and ethnicity have critical consequences for intergroup relationships and for marginalized group members’ self-concept. A synthesis of the research included in this volume demonstrates the significance of these questions across media outlets, their relevancy despite the rise of new technologies, and their application to social contexts outside the U.S.. Finally, this concluding article suggests directions for future research and offers implications for policies that can …

Who’S Following Twitter? Coverage Of The Microblogging Phenomenon By U.S. Cable News Networks, Deborah S. Chung, Mina Tsay-Vogel, Yung Soo Kim

Journalism and Media Faculty Publications

Through data captured in a digital content analysis (DCA) lab, we examine coverage of Twitter across three 24-hour U.S. cable news channels: CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. This investigation tracked Twitter coverage from its initial stage, followed by its rise to a massively used tool and its subsequent diffusion into society, evident through its plateauing coverage. News stories covering Twitter, as it penetrated into society, were more likely to use benefit/gain frames when discussing the technology, highlighting its positive social, communicative, political, and participatory impact. Benefit frames were also likely to associate Twitter with journalism. Patterns …

Extracting City Traffic Events From Social Streams, Pramod Anantharam, Payam Barnaghi, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Cities are composed of complex systems with physical, cyber, and social components. Current works on extracting and understanding city events mainly rely on technology enabled infrastructure to observe and record events. In this work, we propose an approach to leverage citizen observations of various city systems and services such as traffic, public transport, water supply, weather, sewage, and public safety as a source of city events. We investigate the feasibility of using such textual streams for extracting city events from annotated text. We formalize the problem of annotating social streams such as microblogs as a sequence labeling problem. We present …

Understanding Social Effects In Online Networks, Huda Alhazmi, Swapna S. Gokhale, Derek Doran

Kno.e.sis Publications

Understanding the motives behind people’s interactions online can offer sound bases to predict how a social network may evolve and also support a host of applications. We hypothesize that three offline social factors, namely, stature, relationship strength, and egocentricity may also play an important role in driving users’ interactions online. Therefore, we study the influence of these three social factors in online interactions by analyzing the transitivity in triads or three-way relationships among users. Analyzing transitivity through the lens of triad census for four popular social networks, namely, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Slashdot, we find that: (i) users’ interactions are …

Semantic Gateway As A Service Architecture For Iot Interoperability, Pratikkumar Desai, Amit P. Sheth, Pramod Anantharam

Kno.e.sis Publications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is set to occupy a substantial component of future Internet. The IoT connects sensors and devices that record physical observations to applications and services of the Internet. As a successor to technologies such as RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the IoT has stumbled into vertical silos of proprietary systems, providing little or no interoperability with similar systems. As the IoT represents future state of the Internet, an intelligent and scalable architecture is required to provide connectivity between these silos, enabling discovery of physical sensors and interpretation of messages between things. This paper proposes a …

From The Desk Of The Editor

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

No abstract provided.

College Students’ Use Of Social Media To Communicate About Alcohol And Drinking Behaviors, Jenna E. Reno

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

Social networking sites (SNSs) are an increasingly popular channel for communication among college students. Often students disclose more freely via social networking sites than they would in other situations. These disclosures commonly include information about engaging in risky health behaviors (e.g., binge drinking). Study 1 examined students’ impression management goals and self-presentation tactics specifically related to self-disclosures of drinking behavior on SNSs. Findings suggest that students use differing self-presentation tactics across various SNSs in order to achieve their impression management goals and to avoid consequences associated with disclosing about risky health behaviors to certain audiences. Study 2 sought to develop …

Social Media And Symbolic Action: Exploring Participation In The Facebook Red Equal Sign Profile Picture Campaign, Joel Penney

College of Communication and Media Scholarship and Creative Works

This study investigates symbolic action on popular social media platforms by empirically exploring the subjective experiences and motivations of participants in an exemplary campaign. Previous debates regarding the relationship between symbolic action and more traditional forms of political participation suggest a binary between up‐the‐ladder “civic culture” engagement and down‐the‐ladder “slacktivism.” Interviews with participants in the Facebook red equal sign profile picture campaign for marriage equality provide some evidence to support the former (particularly in terms of building an identity‐focused political movement), and comparatively little to support the latter. However, a third model suggests how sympathetic citizens who would not otherwise …

International Management: Strategic Opportunities And Cultural Challenges, Paul B. Sweeney, Dean B. Mcfarlin

Management and Marketing Faculty Publications

As the economies of many countries become more interrelated, international managers are facing huge challenges and unique opportunities associated with their roles. Now in its fifth edition, Sweeney and McFarlin's International Management embodies a balanced and integrated approach to the subject, emphasizing the strategic opportunities available to firms on a global playing field, as well as exploring the challenges of managing an international workforce.

Integrating theory and practice across all chapter topics, this book helps students to learn, grasp, and apply the underlying principles of successful international management:

• Understanding the broad context of international business, including the critical trends impacting …

Ecological Perspectives And Children’S Use Of The Internet: Exploring Micro To Macro Level Analysis, Brian O'Neill

Articles

Age-old debates on children’s encounters with media technologies reveal a long, fractured and contentious tradition within communication and media studies. Despite the fact there have been studies of e ects of media use by children since the earliest days of broadcasting, the subject remains under-theorised, poorly represented in the literature and not widely understood in media policy debates. Old debates have intensi ed in relation to the study of children and the internet. Pitted between alarmist accounts of risks, excessive use and harmful e ects on the one hand and the many accounts about „digital natives” and the transformational power …

Knowledge-Driven Personalized Contextual Mhealth Service For Asthma Management In Children, Pramod Anantharam, Tanvi Banerjee, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Surendra Marupudi, Vaikunth Sridharan

Kno.e.sis Publications

Wide adoption of smartphones and availability of low-cost sensors has resulted in seamless and continuous monitoring of physiology, environment, and public health notifications. However, personalized digital health and patient empowerment can become a reality only if the complex multisensory and multimodal data is processed within the patient context. Contextual processing of patient data along with personalized medical knowledge can lead to actionable information for better and timely decisions. We present a system called kHealth capable of aggregating multisensory and multimodal data from sensors (passive sensing) and answers to questionnaire (active sensing) from patients with asthma. We present our preliminary data …

Using Ehrs For Heart Failure Therapy Recommendation Using Multidimensional Patient Similarity Analytics, Maryam Panahiazar, Vahid Taslimitehrani, Naveen L. Pereira, Jyotishman Pathak

Kno.e.sis Publications

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain a wealth of information about an individual patient’s diagnosis, treatment and health outcomes. This information can be leveraged effectively to identify patients who are similar to each for disease diagnosis and prognosis. In recent years, several machine learning methods 1 have been proposed to assessing patient similarity, although the techniques have primarily focused on the use of patient diagnoses data from EHRs for the learning task. In this study, we develop a multidimensional patient similarity assessment technique that leverages multiple types of information from the EHR and predicts a medication plan for each new patient …

Copyright Trolling, An Empirical Study, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

This Article proceeds as follows: Part II locates MDJD suits within the broader context of the IP troll debate. It explains why attempts to define copyright trolls in terms of status—i.e., in terms of the plaintiff’s relationship to the underlying IP—are ultimately flawed and suggests a conduct-focused approach based on identifying systematic opportunism. Part II explains why MDJD lawsuits have all of the hallmarks of copyright trolling, and it explores the basic economics of MDJD litigation. It then presents empirical data documenting the astonishing rise of MDJD lawsuits over the past decade. Part III explores the role of statutory damages …

Criminal Innovation And The Warrant Requirement: Reconsidering The Rights-Police Efficiency Trade-Off, Tonja Jacobi, Jonah Kind

Faculty Articles

It is routinely assumed that there is a trade-off between police efficiency and the warrant requirement. But existing analysis ignores the interaction between law-enforcement investigative practices and criminal innovation. Narrowing the definition of a search or otherwise limiting the requirement for a warrant gives criminals greater incentive to innovate to avoid detection. With limited resources to develop countermeasures, law enforcement officers will often be just as effective at capturing criminals when facing higher Fourth Amendment hurdles. We provide a game-theoretic model that shows that when law-enforcement investigation and criminal innovation are considered in a dynamic context, the police efficiency rationale …

Twitter Use And Its Effects On Student Perception Of Instructor Credibility, Jocelyn M. Degroot, Valerie J. Young, Sarah H. Vanslette

Applied Communication Studies Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

This study investigates college student perceptions of instructor credibility based on the content of an instructor’s Twitterfeed and student beliefs about Twitter as a communication tool. Quantitative and qualitative methods were utilized to explore the effects of three manipulated Twitter feeds (e.g., tweeting social topics, professional topics, or a blend) on student perceptions of instructor credibility and examine how students perceive Twitter as a teaching tool. Quantitative results suggest that the profile with professional content was most credible. Credibility ratings were also associated with other Twitter use variables, including positive student attitudes about instructors who use Twitter and Tweet frequency. …

An Analysis Of Tools For Online Anonymity, Stephanie Winkler, Sherali Zeadally

Information Science Faculty Publications

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the possible explanations for the slow adoption and development of online anonymity technology. The ability to remain anonymous while engaging in different activities, online is increasingly sought after by consumers with privacy concerns. Currently, the only way to maintain online anonymity is through the use of technology. This paper reviews and analyzes the tools currently available to consumers to maintain online anonymity. There are only four tools available to consumers to ensure online anonymity: anonymous remailers, rewebbers, The Onion Router (Tor) and the Invisible Internet Project (I2P). These tools provide the …