Social Media Commons^™

Snapshots Of The Self: Exploring The Role Of Online Mobile Photo Sharing In Identity Development Among Adolescent Girls, Jenna M. Drenten

School of Business: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A chapter written by Jenna Drenten for Online Consumer Behavior: Theory and Research in Social Media, Advertising and E-tail (2017).

Digital Mindfulness: An Emerging Field Of Inquiry And Practice, Sherri Henderson

Mindfulness Studies Theses

This two-part paper explores digital mindfulness as an emerging field of inquiry and practice into the integration of technology and contemplative practices. The first part surveys the growing research on the effects of technology on health and well-being. Investigating Buddhist teachings leads to a more balanced and aware approach towards integrating mindfulness with the digital world. Digital mindfulness encourages meaningful engagement while online. It also encourages thoughtfulness, awareness and intention. Digital mindfulness also reshapes and encourages conversations in our homes, schools, and proposes digital responsibility and digital citizenship. The second part of the paper proposes a framework for a workshop …

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 …

Clicks, Likes, And Shares: Using The Theory Of Planned Behavior, Self-Efficacy, And Impression Management To Predict Digital Activism Activities, Aaron Noland

Dissertations, 2014-2019

Social media has evolved as a space for connection, advocacy, and commerce in recent years. Nonprofit organizations have been called to engage stakeholders on the Internet generally, and social media specifically as the pervasiveness of online presence has increased. In addition, nonprofit organizations have struggled to sustain engagement with the millennial population over the same time. Millennials have been termed digital natives and use social media proficiently. The convergence of these two mandates for nonprofit organizations – to engage via social media and to engage millennials – represents the importance of this study. To begin to help nonprofit organizations develop …

My Black Is Radical And Sensual: White Privilege And The Policing Of Black Women’S Body On Instagram, Alexis M. Franklin

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project argues that the overarching idea of white supremacy as well as Black pleasure politics disportionately alienates Black women from having the same freedom online as white women. In particular, this project analyzes the public commentary on two parallel sets of Instagram images, one of Beyonce and another of Kim Kardashian, as well as those of white women using the slutwalk hashtag and images of Black women who do not use the hashtag.

Project Anonymous: When Anonymity Meets Artwork, Robert J. Riglietti

Senior Honors Projects

In an attempt to build a new type of even playing field for artists, Kira Wencek and I developed an anonymous art sharing web app under the moniker of Project Anonymous. In an attempt to mitigate the drawbacks of current online avenues for creative content sharing, the app addresses privacy issues, visibility issues, and external artist influence. As the theorist of the group, using research from Manuel Castelles, Danah Boyd, and Jaron Lanier, I assisted in shaping the functionality and oversaw the general direction of the application. This assisted me in theorizing the hypothetical outcomes and social impacts that the …

Can Tweets Predict Intraday Stock Price Movements?, Diwas Puri

Honors Projects in Finance

Twitter is a microblogging platform where over 320 million people post about things that matter to them in less than 140 characters. People post about their happiness, sadness, pride, disappointments, love, hate, expectations and other feelings. Nowadays, a popular trend has come up in which data from Twitter, can be gathered and analyzed in real time to see how people react to a particular situation including changes in stock markets. This research focuses on looking into the relationship, if any, between public mood from Twitter and the stock market returns by analyzing the Tweets about four major companies in consumer …

Umass Memorial Healthcare Information System Job Ladder, Matthew Simoncini, Vamsi Kavuru, Antariksh Nanda, Tahaseen Mahaboob Basha, Vikram Patil

School of Professional Studies

The capstone project report emphasizes the importance of a job ladder and the need of an hour to implement it at UMASS Memorial health care. The scope of this project is to create a well-established job ladder at UMASS with pre-defined standards on job levels related to Information Technology department that would facilitate in hiring, developing and promoting employees at various stages.

A Learning Framework For The Ywca Central Massachusetts, Dayna Ankermann, Manjushree Burdekar, Priyanka Joshi, Ying Song, Yumeng Chen, Xing Xie

School of Professional Studies

After meeting with the Director of Wellness and Health Equity at the YWCA Central Massachusetts (which will be referred to as the YWCA from here on out), we learned that as a non-profit gym and health center, it is heavily underfunded. The main focus of the project was to determine how to upkeep the facility while bringing in new customers with limited resources and budget. Due to the needs of the YWCA, our group focused on six aspects: revenue stream, donor retention, increasing membership, customer experience, social media marketing, and membership fee structure. After completing extensive research, we were able …

Human Services Management (Hsm) Certificate Program Expansion To Western Massachusetts Feasibility Study, Paul Campbell, Patrick Deschenes, Maria Pacheco, Bradley Paul, Elizabeth Vittum, Jing Zhang

School of Professional Studies

One of the most popular cost-savings programs that the Providers’ Council currently offers its members is a Certificate in Nonprofit Human Service Management (HSM) provided in partnership with Clark University and Suffolk University. As human services providers are struggling to hire and retain qualified staff, the need to provide professional development opportunities to help grow and expand a skilled health and human services workforce is a critical issue facing nonprofit organizations and communities in Massachusetts. This feasibility study examines the viability of Providers’ Council and Clark University expanding its HSM Certificate Program to organizations and staff located in western Massachusetts. …

Somali National University, Sharmarke Abdulla, Nikala Pieroni, Jenna Caskie, Sergii Odnodvorets, Tanyue Gong, Lahari Dasari

School of Professional Studies

The executive summary presents an overview of the principal conclusions and recommendations for Somali National University Faculty of Education (FoEd) regarding the following concerns: Difficulty with recruiting high quality prospects to the FoEd; Ineffective and counterintuitive use of social media as a tool to improve brand equity, as well as as a tool to attract and communicate with prospective and current students; Unbalanced gender ratio of current student body; Absence of student services and student supports; Low student retention rate; Limited resources for academic advising; This document is the result of a Clark University School of Professional Studies Capstone Project.

Can Public Diplomacy Survive The Internet? Bots, Echo Chambers, And Disinformation, Shawn Powers, Markos Kounalakis

United States Department of Energy: Publications

Report from a meeting held on the topic of disinformation, the Internet, and public diplomacy held at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in 2017.

Executive Summary

Scientific progress continues to accelerate, and while we’ve witnessed a revolution in communication technologies in the past ten years, what proceeds in the next ten years may be far more transformative. It may also be extremely disruptive, challenging long held conventions behind public diplomacy (PD) programs and strategies. In order to think carefully about PD in this ever and rapidly changing communications space, the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD) convened a group of …

Examining Snapchat: Narcissistic Tendencies Of Core Users, Austin Philpott, Susan Waters

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study aims to establish current levels of narcissistic tendencies among the major Snapchat demographic, 18 to 34-year-olds in the United States. Like the Raskin and Terry 40-item Narcissistic Personality Inventory, commonly referred to as NPI-40, the present survey utilized a smaller variant with 16 items, known as NPI-16, for participants. This study may provide indications for further research and advertising techniques using social media, specifically Snapchat.

Persona Generation From Aggregated Social Media Data, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Moeed Ahmad, Lene Nielsen, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We develop a methodology for persona generation using real time social media data for the distribution of products via online platforms. From a large social media account containing more than 30 million interactions from users from 181 countries engaging with more than 4,200 digital products produced by a global media corporation, we demonstrate that our methodology can first identify both distinct and impactful user segments and then create persona descriptions by automatically adding pertinent features, such as names, photos, and personal attributes. We validate our approach by implementing the methodology into an actual working system that leverages large scale online …

In A World Where We Are Constantly Connected, How Connected Are We?, Samantha Valenza

Senior Honors Projects

Social media in today’s world is common amongst millennials (trend-setting young adults born 1980-2002) as a source of news and networking. Social media has yielded benefits, including the ability to connect with geographically dispersed, like-minded individuals for entertainment, employment opportunities, or to engage in activism. However, the popularity of social media, as well as the frequency of its use, raises questions about its effects on our lifestyles, habits, and interpersonal relationships. Despite its benefits, social media usage may have a darker side. Extreme cases involving addiction, fake news, identity theft, cyber-bullying, and other criminal activities have received some attention. Less …

Journalism In The Digital Age: The Adaptation Of Facebook Live In News Organizations, Brittany Stephanis

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Given the prevalence of technology and the ability to go live on mobile phones, journalists and news organizations alike are learning why Facebook Live is such an important tool. As part of my research, I found online articles explaining the impact Facebook Live has had on the journalism industry and interviewed three different experts on the subject. In doing so, I was able to demonstrate the perspectives of someone from network news, a print and online publication, as well as a well-versed academic. My short documentary covers the rise of “fake news” and citizen journalism on the social media platform. …

A Content Analysis Of The 2014 Immigration Crisis Media Coverage: An Intergroup Threat Theory Approach On The Age Of Immigrants, Carolee Lantigua

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The purpose of this research is to understand, through the intergroup threat theory, how the national and local press perceive unaccompanied minors through their media coverage. Using the 2014 immigration crisis, during which an exodus of unaccompanied minors crossed into the United States beginning in 2013, this paper investigates two central ideas: first, how does media coverage of young unaccompanied immigrants differ from the media coverage of non-minor immigrants? Second, how does spatial proximity to the American-Mexican border affect the tone of the media coverage young unaccompanied immigrants receive? I sampled two national newspapers and two local newspapers to interpret, …

What’S Your Brand? Teaching Students To Leverage Social Media To Launch Their Careers, Alexandra Gomes, Gisela Butera, Anne Linton

Himmelfarb Library Faculty Posters and Presentations

No abstract provided.

“We Were Not Prepared To Tell People Yet”: Confidentiality Breaches And Boundary Turbulence On Facebook, Jocelyn M. Degroot, Tennley A. Vik

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Communication Privacy Management theory provides a framework for investigating confidentiality breaches that occur on Facebook. Open-ended online questionnaires served as mechanism for collecting data about privacy violations and the resulting boundary turbulence. Privacy violations validated three a priori categories (Petronio & Reierson, 2009) of confidentiality breaches (privacy ownership violations, discrepancy breaches of privacy, and pre-emptive privacy control). Findings indicated that the lack of established explicit privacy rules led to privacy violations and boundary turbulence. Results also provided insight regarding motivations of privacy violations, reactions to privacy violations, and the role of privacy rules in the violation.

Student Attitudes On Social Media And Perception Of Instructor Social Media Use., Abi Mathew John

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to understand what student attitudes are toward using social media in the classroom and if those attitudes influenced how they perceive instructors using social media in the classroom. Implementing a mixed method approach, this study conducted focus groups to gain an in-depth understanding of what student attitudes were and why they held those ideas. A survey was then distributed to the students’ in a Midwestern University to see if there was a relationship between students attitudes and their perceptions of instructors who use social media. Results showed that students do hold a positive attitude …