2013 International Conference on Social Media and Society

“Going Viral” and the Structure of Online Diffusion

Abstract: New products, ideas, norms and behaviors are often thought to propagate through a person-to-person diffusion process analogous to the spread of an infectious disease. Until recently, however, it has been prohibitively difficult to directly observe this process, and thus to rigorously quantify or characterize the structure of information cascades. In one of the largest studies to date, we describe the diffusion structure of billions of events across several domains. We find that the vast majority of cascades are small, and are described by a handful of simple tree structures that terminate within one degree of an initial adopting “seed.” While large cascades are extremely rare, the scale of our data allows us to investigate even the one-in-a-million events. To study these rare, large cascades, we develop a formal measure of what we label “structural virality” that interpolates between two extremes: content that gains its popularity through a single, large broadcast, and that which grows via a multi-generational cascade where any one individual is directly responsible for only a fraction of the total adoption. We find that the very largest observed events nearly always exhibit high structural virality, providing some of the first direct evidence that many of the most popular products and ideas grow through person-to-person diffusion. However, medium-sized events — having thousands of adopters — exhibit surprising structural diversity, and are seen to grow both through broadcast and viral means. Finally, we show that our empirical results are largely consistent with an SIR model of contagion on a scale-free network, reminiscent of previous work on the long-term persistence of computer viruses. 

Parallel Sessions (15 min presentation + 5 min Q&A per speaker)

“Monetizing the mommy: Community and the commodification of motherhood in blogs”, Andrea Hunter (Concordia University, Canada).

“Detecting and studying networked communities: A qualitative exploration into the potential of big data”, Wifak Gueddana (London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom).

“Working on my online cred: A case study of Quebec women’s blogging”, Laurence Clennett-Sirois (University of Sussex, United Kingdom).

“Canadian military spouses and the virtual frontline: zones of resistance or status quo support networks?”,  Kanina Holmes (Carleton University, Canada).

Parallel Sessions  (15 min presentation + 5 min Q&A per speaker)

“Twitter talk in the U.S. Senate: A network approach”, James Cook (University of Maine, United States).

“Social movements, activism and its impact on deliberative democracy”, Leocadia Diaz Romero (Universidad de Murcia, Spain).

“Political microblogging and elections in Nigeria”, Presley Ifukor (University of Muenster, Germany).

“Social media & trust: Investigating Canadian government use of social media”, Elizabeth Shaffer (University of British Columbia, Canada).

Much of the early theorizing around Web 2.0 technology focused on how it would democratize the media. The barriers to entry were lowered; anyone with an Internet connection, and a desire, could publish (Gillmor 2006). As a journalist in the early to mid 2000’s, I distinctly remember the conversations in the newsroom that blogs were one solution to a problem we wrestled with daily: how to get the voices of ‘real people’ (as opposed to professional media spokespeople) out into the media sphere. 

One of the genres of blogs that quickly rose to prominence was the ‘mommy’ blog. These were women who were blogging about their adventures in childrearing, reporting from the trenches of domestic life. Their critics accused them of glorifying the minutia of daily life. However, their growing numbers of readers celebrated what they were doing as refreshing and empowering – finally women were publishing, en masse, honest accounts of their lives. A sense of community began to develop on these blogs and some bloggers began to attract huge followings. Advertisers began to take notice. In 2005, Heather Armstrong, who writes Dooce, one of the most well-known mommy blogs, announced that she would be accepting advertising on her blog. She assured her readers that she would not tone down her writing; her acerbic tone and frank talk about depression and sexuality being a large part of the appeal. She would not ‘sell out.’ 

Eight years later, the situation is very different. Most bloggers do not feel the need for these types of proclamations. It has become normal for mommy bloggers to court advertisers. Major conferences are organized yearly, which focus largely on how to ‘monetize’ a blog. However, in this paper, I will argue that there is a growing sense that accepting advertising on these types of blogs threatens the foundation of authenticity upon which this genre of social media rests. 

The reason mommy blogs become successful is because readers feel a connection to the blogger and often that they are part of a community. Authenticity and honesty are essential elements of these relationships. Advertising, in particular a new type of advertising that is becoming increasingly popular - the sponsored post - threatens the authenticity of these relationships and communities. 

This paper will examine the dilemma bloggers face when monetizing their blogs using a recent case study: the backlash Heather Armstrong has faced in recent months for writing sponsored posts. Further, I will argue that there should be a shift in how we theorize about mommy blogs and other personal blogging on the Internet. Rather than talk about them as democratizing, community building forms of social media, we should be thinking about them from a political economic perspective, in this case, specifically how ‘mommy’ blogs are commodifying (Mosco 2009) motherhood. How is the experience of motherhood transferred from something that is, arguably, extremely personal and specific to family, into something for sale? What changes in how the experience of motherhood is framed when it is designed to attract an audience? 

Are Twitter accounts of the U.S. Senate used as points of collegial connection, constituent cultivation or coalition construction? Who is connecting with whom? To address these questions, this paper considers three types of social network data for senators collected between January and February of 2013: communication between official Twitter accounts of senators, overlap in mentions of non-Senate accounts, and overlap in mentions by non-Senate accounts. QAP analysis reveals the extent to which Senate social media relations resemble two forms of Senate political action: shared bill cosponsorship and similarity in voting. The impact of homophily, party, region and social media style on the strength of connection and similarity of action shows consistency in some aspects but varies significantly in others. Members of the Senate connect differently in different contexts; to know one form of connection is not to understand them all.

Networked communities are a form of technology- mediated environment that foster a sense of community among users. They often materialise through platforms, such as portals or large websites, enabling members’ participation and collaboration towards certain goals. As an instance of collective action, networked communities are dependent upon the sustainability of their underlying platform. Thus, platforms are only partially designed during initial setup. They are expected to expand and grow organically and through linkages to other websites, following advances in social media and collaborative APIs. In the course of use, such platforms ‘virtually’ connect data repositories from several sources, including social media, blogs, doodles, notepads, news pages, etc. Together, they record and trace members’ daily practices and interactions over time, gradually building a digital memory for their community.

To be able to access such a memory and inform how members perform their identity, define practices, interact and negotiate collective knowledge, researchers must build comprehensive research methodologies, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. Epistemologically, combining methods may raise concerns as to whether quantitative and qualitative assumptions can be integrated meaningfully and how this affects the overall study, in terms of scope, validity and ethics of research. In this regard, this abstract argues that big data can support and extend the scope of a qualitative exploration of networked communities through visualisation techniques, tables and data mining filters. This abstract illustrates such a ‘hybrid’ qualitative approach in the context of an open source (OS) networked community for microfinance NGOs. 

The idea behind OS for microfinance is that powerful institutional actors including civil society, IT partners, consultants and sponsors can cater to the lack of software and IT competences among small microfinance grassroots in developing countries by organising their collective and sustained participation in OS development over time. This vision was exemplified in a case of platform-enabled OS-microfinance community, named Mifos, which I studied. 

The Mifos case study posed a methodological challenge; to study it I had to re-assemble the ‘big forest’ picture of the Mifos networked community, by traversing back and fro such a macro structure over a period of 10 years of activity – that is by linking the Mifos OS code growth with the daily practices of its inhabitants reflected through their 20,000 posts in the community mailing lists. Visualisation in this case was crucial to describe the ‘stuff’ this community was made of. It provided a sense of community and togetherness in the measurable terms of density, materiality, divisions and scope. The visual outputs contributed in identifying certain meaningful data objects, and brought out changes and relevant patterns. Overall, the visualisation provided a framework for exploration that guided in the second stage of the analysis a longitudinal narrative of the Mifos biography and the documenting of some community-enabled mechanisms of knowledge sharing and building among its members.

References
Armendariz, D.A.B. & Morduch, J., 2005. The Economics of Microfinance, MIT Press; Cambridge, Mass.
Hansen, D., Schneiderman, B. & Smith, M., 2011. Analyzing Social Media Networks With Nodexl: Insights From a Connected World, ScienceDirect; Boston.
Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory, Oxford University Press; Oxford.
Mynatt, E.D. et al., 1997. Design for Network Communities. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systems. CHI ’97. New York, NY, USA: ACM, pp. 210–217. 
Ray, D., 2007. Development Economics. New York University Working papers; prepared for The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, edited by Lawrence Blume and Steven Durlauf

New technologies –Internet, mobile phones, tablets- have the capacity to strengthen civic society and consolidate democracy around the world. Civic engagement and activism have adapted to virtual societies maximizing their organizational linkages and networking skills in an attempt, on the one hand, to consolidate democracy in Western civilization; on the other hand, to promote transition processes in autocratic systems. 

Therefore, one of the most innovative effects of digital, transnational activism has been the revitalization of direct, global democracy and deliberative processes. Definitely, the interactive capacities of new technologies have enhanced citizen participation and deliberation creating a sort of virtual agora or digital public sphere where digital citizens discuss worldwide issues of mutual interest. In this discursive space public opinion is formed and exerts influence on political action. 

All in all, activism is evolving in this millennium towards global action or global activism. We assist to the trans-nationalization of activist networks. Inspired by altruistic solidarity, social movements have promoted cooperation, found supporters and organized demonstrations and protests worldwide. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, thousands of people have gathered against austerity measures and social injustice –from Toronto, New York, Madrid, Athens, Lisbon, London, etc.-. New media and communication technologies have galvanized collective action. The potential of global activism and deliberative processes are to be explored and developed throughout the new millennium. 

For Schau and Gilly, ‘[…] personal Web sites allow consumers to self-present 24/7 beyond a regional setting to the virtual world’ (2003: 387); similarly, on the blogosphere, whom a blogger knows may enhance her online visibility and credibility. To paraphrase Walter Rettberg, blogging not only enables a presentation of the self as individuals; it allows for users to ‘publicly proclaim our relationships’ (2008: 75-76). As a recognised form of social media (Page 2012), blogs may serve as a platform on which to display one’s network, which Dominick refers to as ‘social association’ (1999: 655) and thereby express one’s social competence (Bortree 2005; Dominick 1999), possibly producing benefits.

In this paper, I address Quebecoises’ use of blogging as a platform for aiming to build, sustain and display social relationships, either primarily online or offline. My fieldwork interviews, conducted in 2008-2009, as well as data found on participants’ blogs, reveal many reasons for blogging including being able to connect with others who share similar worldviews, experiences or interests. However, in order to connect with others, one has to display her social competence, or online cred, by clearly demonstrating her status as a blogger worthy of one’s attention and words. My own online credibility was assessed by a blogger who, when I requested by email to meet with her for my doctoral research, replied using the following words: ‘Dear Laurence,’ and went on to describe me using information she found online: ‘scholarly, vegetarian, twin sister, feminist and living in the Outaouais region, although soon to return to Sussex, England’. These descriptors revealed that she had looked up my credentials, most of which are mentioned or referenced on my research blog, set up for the purpose of my doctoral degree, and perhaps felt that she knew enough about me to agree to participate in my project. 

Though I first became cognisant of the phenomenon of social association when reading the aforementioned email, its importance in shaping bloggers’ understandings of their own actions and interactions eluded me. However, data collected during my doctoral research compels me to argue that blogging serves to portray one’s existing relationships in an attempt to solidify or to expand one’s social networks and thereby obtain related advantages. Furthermore, I suggest that there is a sense of tension that arises from wanting to present one’s network as it may mean forfeiting online comfort levels by bringing together diverse personal acquaintances. Indeed, presenting one’s network exposes bloggers to audiences that are colliding (Walker Rettberg 2008) like never before in their offline lives, which may have direct negative consequences on their pre-existing social networks. 

References 
• Bortree, Denise Sevick (2005), ‘Presentation of Self on the Web: an ethnographic study of teenage girls’ weblogs’. in Education, Communication & Information, 5 (1), pp. 25-39 
• Dominick, Joseph R. (1999) ‘Who do you think you are? Personal home pages and self- presentation on the World Wide Web’, in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 76(4), pp. 646–658 
• Page, Ruth E. (2012), Stories and Social Media. Identities and Interaction. New York, London: Routledge, 240 p. 
• Schau, Hope Jensen and Mary C. Gilly (2003). ‘We Are What we Post? Self-Presentation in Personal Web Space’. in Journal of Consumer Research 30(3). pp. 385-404. 
• Walker Rettberg, Jill (2008), Blogging. Cambridge: Polity Press, 176 p.

In Nigeria, Twitter has been used for political mobilization, electioneering and citizen engagement (Ifukor, 2010) as well as for electoral judicial correspondence (Ifukor, 2011c). Microblogging was a vital component of social media usage in the Nigerian 2011 elections and this paper is conceived to discursively characterize Nigerian netizens' pragmatic acts of political or civic microblogging in the Nigerian 2007 - 2011 democratization process. The theoretical motivation for the study is an attempt to find out the interplay between microblogging and deliberation vis-à-vis deliberative democracy (Chambers 2003; Elster, 1998). The data for the study is culled from an expanded corpus of Informal Nigerian Electronic Communication (INEC) (cf. Ifukor, 2011b) with emphasis on the Twitter subset. Moreover, I intend to present the results of a questionnaire survey I carried out in 2010 on the use of social media by Nigerians and to use this as a basis for measuring civic engagement among Nigerians.


Selected References
Chambers, Simone (2003). Deliberative Democratic Theory. Annual Review of Political Science 6: 307 – 326.
Dahlgreen, Peter (2005). The Internet, Public Spheres and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation. Political Communication 22: 147 – 162.
Elster, Jon (Ed) (1998). Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ifukor, Presley. 2010. “Elections” or “Selections”? Blogging and Twittering the Nigerian 2007 General Elections. Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 30(6): 398-414. 
Ifukor, Presley. 2011a. Linguistic and Socio-cultural Dynamics in Computer-Mediated Communication: Identity, Intertextuality and Politics in Nigerian Internet and SMS Discourse. PhD Dissertation, University of Osnabrueck, Germany.
Ifukor, Presley. 2011b. Linguistic Marketing in “... a marketplace of ideas”: Language Choice and Intertextuality in a Nigerian Virtual Community. Pragmatics and Society 2(1):110-147.
Ifukor, Presley. 2011c. #EkitiElection: The Acts and Facts of Twittering the Final Judicial Proceedings in Nigeria (on October 15, 2010). Paper presented at General Online Research 11, Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany, March 14-16.

Kanina Holmes, Carleton University 
Abstract submission for Social Media and Society 2013 International Conference 
Canadian military spouses and the virtual frontline: Zones of resistance or status quo support networks? 

Many of us spend a lot of time online. We are digitally plugged in at home, at work, during our workouts, commutes, errands, classes, meetings, dates, debates. Due to the almost seamless ability to connect wherever we are and whenever we want, we take much of our online access and use for granted. Much goes unasked. Why do we go online and what do we do there? What do our online actions and communications reveal about our lives? What kinds of environments are we operating in? How do those spaces influence us? How do they make some things seem knowable or possible? How do they rule out or promote certain actions, shape ways we portray ourselves and also the ways others perceive us as we virtually collide? Equally important to consider is what we bring to online spaces and how we perpetuate or change these environments. These are big issues and they raise equally extensive questions that, if asked, could contribute to existing scholarship on virtual space and virtual communities and also help gain a more sophisticated and useful understanding of internet-driven digital platforms and their effects, especially as they evolve. 

As a human geographer, my research addresses the following question: What opportunities and what limits do the social media spaces visited by Canadian military spouses create and impose vis a vis community or network formation, identity, social and political transformation? Essentially I am seeking to understand how military spouses use social media, how they interpret and interact with a range of online spaces. 

The overall aim of this larger project, (a PhD dissertation), is to generate insights about the nature of online spaces, how these spaces are gendered and potentially impact gender relations, including the delineation of public and private boundaries. I will also explore how some members of a marginalized community may employ social networking spaces to initiate social and political change or re-enforce the status quo at various scales or frontlines. 
My initial research (the beginning of my fieldwork), to be presented at this conference, will tackle a small slice of this much larger inquiry. I will focus and ground this early work in the everyday experiences of Canadian military spouses as demonstrated in their online interactions and narratives presented on a military spouse blog, a non-moderated Facebook group for Canadian military spouses and a moderated chatroom/online support group. Through content analysis, my paper will identify common themes raised on these social media platforms and will start analyzing what these interactions, in turn, reveal about the nature of these particular online spaces. 

Human geographies of the internet have made important contributions in terms of conceptualizing places that encompass both the real and virtual and also opening up the potential for new hybrid spaces (Zook 2006). I will be exploring some of the theoretical literature on third spaces (Oldenburg & Brissett 1982; Oldenburg 1991; Robinson & Deshano, 2011) and the property of insideness (Relph 1976, Seamon & Sowers 2008) to search for conceptualizations, properties and uses of online environments that best correspond and most accurately reflect everyday experiences of military spouses. When exploring online social networks and communities (to whom geographers owe considerable credit to thinkers such as Rheingold, sociologists Castells, Wellman and information and communications scholars including Haythornthwaite and Baym), I also find Massey’s earlier notions of places as more than physical areas with boundaries to include “articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings (quoted in Zook 2006: 66) to be especially helpful because it is sufficiently dynamic to encompass fleeting and often elusive online encounters and exchanges and also capture the idea of online environments as social places. 
  
References 
Baym, Nancy K. 2010. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. 
Castells, Manuel. 2002. “The Internet and the Network Society.” In The Internet in Everyday Life, edited by B Wellman. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. 
Haythornthwaite, C, and B Wellman. 2002. The Internet in Everyday Life. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. 
Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. 
Oldenburg, Ramon. 1991. The Great Good Place. New York: Paragon House. 
Oldenburg, Ramon, and Dennis Brissett. 1982. “The Third Place.” Qualitative Sociology 5 (4): 265–284. 
Relph, Edward C. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. 
Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. 
Robinson, Sue, and Cathy Deshano. 2011. “Citizen Journalists and Their Third Places.” Journalism Studies 12 (5) (October): 642–657. 
Seamon, David, and Jacob Sowers. 2008. “Place and Placelessness (1976): Edward Relph.” In Key Texts in Human Geography, edited by Phil
Wellman, Barry, and M Gulia. “Virtual Communities as Communities: Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone.” In Communities in Cyberspace, edited by M Smith and P Pollock. London: Routledge. 
Zook, Matthew. 2006. “The Geographies of the Internet.” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 40 (1): 53–78. 

Social media are being used to support a range of organizational and government activities, often involving shifts in public policy to engender greater openness, transparency and accountability. Governments and organizations are adopting new ways of engaging with citizens and increasing the accessibility and usability of public and private sector information fundamentally altering how organizations and governments create, (re) use, manage and eventually preserve information as records. “Government professionals are excited by the prospects of increased citizen engagement but concerned by what that engagement may mean for their control over the flow of information and their obligations to protect privacy, avoid censorship while preventing libel, and other inappropriate uses of government information technology resources” (Hansen & Shneiderman, 2011).

In 2008, the government of Canada (GOC) made a commitment to “build a comprehensive system to develop online collaborations and social networking projects” (Lux Wigand, 2010) and has subsequently pushed to make social networking services such as Twitter a larger part of their communication strategy for interaction with citizens. As government agencies and departments such as these move to using social media for communication processes they are generating a substantial number of new information artefacts. Interactions and decisions made through social media are documented, either purposefully or passively, and the resulting information artefacts become potential records of government. However, these records are difficult to identify, manage, and preserve (NARA, 2010).

This increasing government use of social media represents a challenge for both the short-term management of this information, and the archival mission of long-term, authentic preservation. To adequately address this growing trend, and its archival implementations, it is necessary to examine the practices and affordances of these technologies, and the nature of the information products generated through social and technical practices. One key challenge is that these technologies facilitate a complex, dynamic ecology of information enabling rapid organizational and relational changes. Moreover, the scope and dynamic structure of social media technologies are continuously evolving, with each new combination of tools and data creating new forms of information and documents. Consequently, the information and records created, and the information practices supported, are equally rapidly changing, challenging record keeping systems to keep up with a changing technological and user base. Current record keeping systems designed for static information practices must change to accommodate these dynamic processes. 

This paper examines government social media use and its implications for information policy and recordkeeping, utilizing three sources of data. The paper reports first on results of a content analysis of GOC Twitter accounts designed to understand the characteristics of the information artefacts generated. Next Interviews with federal government social media users are analyzed to give insight into how government agencies are incorporating Twitter into their information practices. Finally, relevant government policies and legislation are analyzed to identify potential impediments and omissions that prevent the effective collection, management and preservation of these potential government records. 

This research will provide evidence based findings to support theory building and policy development in the use, management and preservation of social media records generated through interactions between government and citizens.

Self-Paid: See The Enclosed List Of Suggested Eateries Nearby. Please Budget Enough Time To Return By 13:30

Parallel Sessions (15 min presentation + 5 min Q&A per speaker)

“Tweeting to learn: An exploration of Twitter-based learning during conferences”, Sarah Gilbert and Drew Paulin (University of British Columbia, Canada).

“A Comparison on using social media in a professional experience course”, Xiao Hu and Samuel K.W. Chu (University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong).

“Social media use during study from a distance: Integral experiences that counter a trend to digital dualism”, Jeffrey Keefer (New York University/Visiting Nurse Service of New York, United States).

 

Parallel Sessions (15 min presentation + 5 min Q&A per speaker)

“A study of social media user characteristics and usage”, Ramesh Venkat (St. Mary’s University, Canada).

“Rotten to the core: A case study of Applebee’s PR meltdown on Facebook”, Desirae Johnson (Kennesaw State University, United States).

“Connecting theory to social technology platforms: A framework for measuring influence in context”, Sean Goggins (University of Missouri, United States).

Twitter is an integral part of conference activities, acting as a communication backchannel for attendees and non-attendees (Ross, Terras, Warwick & Welsh, 2011) and is often promoted by organizers before a conference begins through the creation of official conference hashtags. But why is Twitter used at conferences? This paper examines learning as a potential purpose for Twitter use and explores how Twitter might facilitate overall conference learning experiences. 

Various aspects of Twitter use by conference attendees have been explored in the literature. Ross, et al. (2011) found that conference attendees tweeted to discuss conference-related topics, share information, and build a community; through discontinuous conversations, Twitter users were able expand communication networks. Ebner, Mühlburger, Schaffert, Schiefner, Reinhardt, and Wheeler (2010) examined tweet contents to determine the usefulness of tweets to non-attendees and found that many tweets would not be helpful due to a lack of context; rather, the Twitter backchannel provided an opportunity to establish an online presence for conference attendees. Chen (2011) conducted a network analysis to identify four types of conference tweeters. 

While these studies provide a descriptive analysis of Twitter use at conferences, they provide only an introduction to potential benefits of Twitter. Gao, Luo, and Zhang’s (2012) review of microblogging in education literature provides an outline of the ways students learn using Twitter in a classroom setting, but do not extend this analysis to Twitter-based learning at academic conferences. Since one of the primary motivations for attending a conference is to learn through presentations and interactions with colleagues, the proposed study will use theories of social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978) and connectivism (Siemens, 2005) as a basis to examine how Twitter use at conferences can promote learning through sharing information, encouraging informal learning, and establishing networks of interactive co-learners. This study seeks to respond to the question “Can, and how does tweeting facilitate learning during conferences?” 

To map learning through Tweeting, we will examine changes of three indicators of learning over the duration of a conference. We will conduct a quantitative analysis of hashtags to examine changing themes discussed by Twitter attendees; we will conduct a content analysis to examine the development of concepts learned over time and connect these concepts to conference themes; finally, we will conduct a social network analysis, mapping re-Tweets and @replies to explore the development of relationships throughout the conference—are conference attendees broadening their networks or are attendees reinforcing established cliques? (Ross et al., 2011). Data will be collected from the 2013 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences through the use of a Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet (Hawksey, 2013). This conference represents a wide variety of perspectives and scholarly interests and is particularly well suited to this analysis as our conclusions will not be limited by the behavior of members of a specific discipline. 

Through the exploration and examination of Twitter-based learning exhibited in tweets associated with the 2013 Congress conference, this project will shed light on whether, and how, Twitter use can facilitate or extend learning experiences at academic conferences. 

References 

Chen, B. (April 2011). Is the backchannel enabled? Using Twitter at academic 
conferences. Paper presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Retrieved from: http://www.bodongchen.com/file/Chen_AERA2011_Twitter_backchannel.pdf

Ebner, M., Mühlburger, H., Schaffert, S., Schiefner, M., Reinhardt, W., & Wheeler, S. 
(2010). Getting granular on twitter: tweets from a conference and their limited usefulness for non-participants. In Key Competencies in the Knowledge Society (pp. 102-113). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. 

Gao, F., Luo, T., & Zhang, K. (2012). Tweeting for learning: A critical analysis of research on microblogging in education published in 2008-2011. British Journal of Educational Technology, 43(5), 783–801. 

Hawksey, M. (2013). Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet TAGS v5. In Jisc CETIS MASHe, retrieved from: http://mashe.hawksey.info/2013/02/twitter-archive-tagsv5/ 

Reinhardt, W., Ebner, M., Beham, G., & Costa, C. (2009). How people are using 
Twitter during conferences. In Proceedings of 5. Edumedia Conference (pp.145-156). Retrieved from http://elearningblog.tugraz.at/scms/data/alt/publication/09_edumedia.pdf 

Ross, C., Terras, M., Warwick, C., & Welsh, A. (2011). Enabled backchannel: 
Conference Twitter use by digital humanists. Journal of Documentation, 67(2), 214-237. doi: 10.1108/00220411111109449 

Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: a learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2 (1). Retrieved from http://itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/ article01.htm

Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological 
Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

There is a growing literature in areas such as social influence (e.g., Kumar, Bhaskaran and Mirchandani 2013) ,and impact of social media on brands and brand equity (e.g., Bergh et al. 2011; Foster et al. 2011; Kim and Ko, 2010; Singh and Sonnenburg). Many studies use data from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to analyze influence, among other variables.

We wanted to look at individual characteristics that may impact use of social media. While social media usage has become mainstream, and no longer limited to urban, young or elite, not everyone uses social media in the same way. Usage patterns are different. Underlying drivers could be different. We believe that by understanding user characteristics and how they affect usage, marketers can get a better sense of their online market segments. Two surveys were conducted.

The first survey focused on general social media users. The purpose of this study was to understand how individual difference variables such as extraversion, openness to new experiences and homophily affect social media usage. Online ads and ads in social media sites were used to recruit consumers presently using social media. The sample size was 210, which was obtained from six different Canadian provinces. We measured Social Media Engagement/Enjoyment, Extraversion, Openness to New Experiences, Online Self-Perception, Homophily, Online Participation and Demographics. All measures were on 5-point scales. Cronbach’s alpha scores ranged from 0.73 to 0.87.

We used regression and PLS to analyze the data (using SmartPLS). The results provided support to some of the hypotheses. Specifically, it was found that openness to new ideas, extraversion and homophily (which is the tendency to associate with similar others) and online self-perception impacted the level of engagement that participants experienced in social media. Engagement, in turn, was a significant predictor of how rewarding and satisfying the social media experience was. Figure 1 shows the results from the PLS analysis.

The second survey focused on a group of highly educated professionals, who were all in the same profession. We recruited participants via email. In this national survey, we obtained a sample size of 468 responses out of which 372 were usable. The purpose of this study was to understand characteristics that would lead members or an elite profession to adopt a social network site. Only part of the analysis from this survey is reported here. Of specific interest was the relationship between perceived opinion leadership (based on a self-rating scale) and its relationship to social media usage.

We found that those who perceive themselves as opinion leaders (about 27% of the sample) are more drawn to social media than others. In addition, we found that the social network size is more related to the number of social media sites that a person belonged to rather than their perceived opinion leadership. Those who perceive themselves to be opinion leaders may not necessarily have the largest social network size.

The two studies together shed light on how specific user characteristics and individual difference variable affect usage, engagement and satisfaction with social media. The results have implications for marketers who wish to target opinion leaders or those who wish to create engaging and rewarding experiences in their branded social media sites.

The Internet and social media are changing the ways in which companies communicate with key audiences (Tinker, Fouse, & Currie, 2009; Veil, Buehner, & Palenchar, 2011; Young & Flowers, 2012). Because of 24-hour access, communication happens even faster than ever (Bridgeman, 2008; Young & Flowers, 2012), and public relations professionals are struggling to keep up with the accelerated pace (Young & Flowers 2012). Because of this, social media sites often set the stage for public relations meltdowns (Young & Flowers, 2012). 

The Applebee’s case is a prime example of an organization that failed to communicate effectively on social media during a crisis. The restaurant recently made headlines after it fired a waitress for posting a customer receipt on Reddit. (Payne, 2013; Porter, 2013). This led to a two-day fiasco where the Applebee’s communication team struggled to quell concerns from stakeholders who bombarded the restaurant’s Facebook page with angry comments (Stoller, 2013). The purpose of this case study is to examine Applebee’s use of Facebook to respond to negative feedback from social media users. 

A review of the literature revealed a lack of research on the ethical concerns that arise when communicating crisis messages on social media. Therefore, this study sought to answer the following research question: Did Applebee’s demonstrate ethical behavior when responding to user complaints on Facebook? 

A case study approach was used to determine if Applebee’s demonstrated ethical communication to relay crisis messages on Facebook. The study examined company Facebook messages posted on January 31, 2013 and February 1, 2013. Analysis included both textual (the typed messages that Applebee’s posted to its Facebook page) and nonverbal messages (the implied communication messages that Applebee’s sent by deleting comments, blocking users, and hiding company Facebook posts). This research utilized Barker and Martinson’s (2001) TARES Test for ethical persuasion that includes five principles: Truthfulness, Authenticity, Respect, Equity, and Social Responsibility (Baker & Martinson, 2001). 

Analysis revealed that Applebee’s did not meet the requirements for ethical persuasion set forth by the TARES test. First, the restaurant did not demonstrate Truthfulness of the Message because it concealed information about its previous actions in its messages to audiences. Second, Applebee’s did not meet the requirements for Authenticity of the Persuader because it did not demonstrate a balance of loyalties between the company and key stakeholders. Third, Respect for the Persuadee requires that a company does not promote raw self-interest. By deleting Facebook comments, blocking users, and denying its actions, Applebee’s did not meet this requirement. Fourth, to exhibit Equity of the Appeal, persuaders must allow time for reflection and counterargument. Applebee’s deleted comments, therefore it did not demonstrate this requirement. Finally, the restaurant did not meet the requirements for Social Responsibility for the Common good because Applebee’s communication efforts displayed disregard for the wider public interest. 

References 

Applebee’s. (2013a, January 31). We wish this situation hadn’t happened. [Facebook update]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/applebees 

Applebee’s. (2013b, February 1). We appreciate the chance to explain our franchisee’s action in this unfortunate situation. [Facebook update]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/ 
applebees 

Baker, S., & Martinson, D. L. (2001). The TARES test: Five principles for ethical persuasion. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 16, 148-175. doi: 10.1080/08900523.2001.9679610 

Bridgeman, R. (2008). Crisis communication and the net: Is it just about responding faster…or do we need to learn a new game?. In P. F. Anthonissen (Eds.), Crisis communication: Practical PR strategies for reputation management and company survival (pp.169-177). London: Kogan Page. 

Coombs, W. T., & Holladay, J. S. (2012). The paracrisis: The challenges created by publically managing crisis prevention. Public Relations Review, 38, 408-415. doi: 10.1016/j.pubrev. 
2012.04.004 

Macnamara, J., & Zerfass, A. (2012). Social media communication in organizations: The challenges of balancing openness, strategy, and management. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 6, 287-308. doi: 101.1080/1553118X.2012.711402 

Payne, J. (2013, February 1). Applebee’s taking heat on social media for firing waitress. Yahoo! Small Business Advisor. Retrieved from http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ 

Porter, C. (2013, February 5). US restaurant Applebee’s commits ‘social media suicide.’ Herald Sun. Retrieved from http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ 

Sloin, H. Seivold, G., & Prescott, J. (Eds.). (2009). How social media are changing crisis communication—For better and worse. Security Director’s Report, 9, 2-5. Retrieved from http://www.ioma.com/secure 

Stoller, R. L. (2013, February 2). Appblebee’s overnight social media meltdown: A photo essay. R. L. Stoller, Journalist: Thoughts and Provocations. Retrieved from http://rlstollar.wordpress.com/ 

Tinker, T. L., Dumlao, M., & McLaughlin, G. (2009). Effective social media strategies during times of crisis: Learning from the CDC, HHS, FEMA, the American Red Cross and NPR. The Strategist, 15, 25-39. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org 

Tinker, T., Fouse, D. (Eds.), & Currie, D. (Writer). (2009). Expert round table on social media and risk communication during times of crisis: Strategic challenges and opportunities [Report]. Washington, DC: American Public Health Association. Retrieved February 26, 2013, from http://www.apha.org/NR/rdonlyres/47910BED-3371-46B3-85C2-67EFB80D88F8/0/socialmedreport.pdf 

Veil, S. R., Beuhner, T. & Palenchar, M. J. (2011). A work-in-process literature review: Incorporating social media in risk and crisis communication. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 19, 110-122. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-5973.2011.00639.x 

Young, C. L., & Flowers, A. (2012). Fight viral with viral: A case study of Domino’s Pizza’s crisis communication strategies. Case Studies in Strategic Communication, 1, 93-106. Retrieved from http://cssc.web.unc.edu/ 

Social Media tools such as blogs and Facebook have been recognized as effective in facilitatingteaching and learning in higher education (Maloney, 2007). This study applies social networkanalysis and text mining to comparing the effects of using blogs and Facebook in a ProfessionalExperience course at the undergraduate level. The results indicate blogs were better forjournalizing while Facebook was more effective in facilitating communications and interactionsamong students. The results are not only consistent with students’ perceptions collected frompost-course interviews, but also provide analytic evidences in the micro-level.

Professional Experience is a core course in a Bachelor Program in Information Management(IM). It requires students to work full-time for at least 6 weeks in organizations in the IM sector.A major assessment of this course is a reflective journal written by each student during thecourse. One of the two student groups considered in this study used YouBlog in 2008 forjournalizing (n=16) and the other group used Facebook (private group function) in 2011 (n=20).Besides writing journals, students were required to comment on others’ posts as well. Byanalyzing the patterns and content of students’ posts and comments, this study aims to comparestudents’ behaviors in using the two social media tools in a course focusing on experientiallearning.

730 messages (433 original posts and 297 comments) and 504 messages (181 original posts and423 comments) were collected from YouBlogs and Facebook respectively. Social networkanalysis (Borgatti et al., 2002; Gruzd, 2009) revealed that students using Facebook were moreconnected than those using YouBlog, as indicated by lower network fragmentation, higher totaldegree centrality and higher betweenness centrality (Table 1).

Text mining was applied to identify patterns in the messages. Figure 1 shows the most frequentwords contained in messages posted to the two social media tools. While most of the words werein common and related to the students’ subject of study, the top word, “today” among YouBlogmessages suggests an evidence of the journalizing function supported by this tool.

The distributions of frequent words across timeline disclose that both groups of students talkedmore about “working” and “work” at early stages of the course, indicating a possible excitementabout experiencing real-world professional environments. Facebook users talked more about“experience” and “knowledge” at late stages of the course, while YouBlog users only used thesewords infrequently. This evidences that Facebook was probably more effective in facilitatingexperience and knowledge sharing, especially when the course approached to its end.

Both groups of students were interviewed after the course and YouBlog users reportedly postedentries more often than Facebook users (p=0.02) while Facebook users perceived higher level ofsupports from peers (p=0.03) (Chu, 2013). This is consistent with the above results from socialnetwork analysis and text mining.

This study provides empirical evidence that social media can be effectively used in facilitatingdeep reflections and collaborative learning. Both blogs and Facebook have their own advantagesand it is therefore suggested that future social media tools should combine the strengths of blogs(organization of content) and Facebook (collaborative features).

References:
Borgatti, S.P., Everett, M.G. and Freeman, L.C. 2002. Ucinet for Windows: Software for SocialNetwork Analysis. Harvard, MA: Analytic Technologies.
Chu, S.K.W. (2013). The Application of Blogs and Facebook in Scaffolding the InternshipLearning Process. Center for Information and Technology Studies Research Symposium,May 2013, Hong Kong.
Gruzd, A. (2009). Studying Collaborative Learning Using Name Networks. Journal forEducation in Library and Information Science 50(4).
Maloney, E. (2007).What Web 2.0 can teach us about learning. Chronicle of Higher Education,vol. 53, no. 18, p. 1, 2007.

This work expounds on findings from a doctoral thesis that examined the experiences of doctoral students who studied at a distance and who passed through troublesome or problematic liminal periods during the course of their studies. It was a qualitative design using narrative inquiry and informed by an actor-network theory analysis of the twenty-three interdisciplinary, international doctoral researchers and graduates. As participants detailed their pain prior to the transformative thresholds and aha! moments during their studies, they all experienced some support or encouragement from human and non-human actors while overcoming their struggles. While distance was found to be a contentious term amongst the participants, it was their use of social media and technology, and how they were seamlessly integrated into their studies, that became striking. 

Counter to the perspective of Turkle (2011), who seems to lament a lessening of our “real” offline lives while we increasingly navigate online personas and relationships, the participants in this research echo the recent work of Jurgenson (2011; 2012), who propose a challenge to a digital dualism that posits online and offline aspects of our lives as separate, and not quite equal, parts of ourselves. Social media such as Twitter or Facebook for conversations and encouragement, blogs for developing thoughts and getting feedback, Skype for video or audio connections, the internet itself as the gateway to the possibilities of distant presence, and even humble and ubiquitous communication via email—all were used as seamless resources to facilitate support and community during the dark periods over doctoral study. 

Participants did not seem to consciously reach out to social media to connect with others in a somehow less-than-real way, but rather used them as any other tools to meet their academic, professional, and personal needs. These were not online or offline needs, nor needs that came simply as a result of eLearning, physical, or psychological distance, even through the myriad of ways distance was used or considered by the participants. Social media and technology aided the learners in communicating and encountering support through their academic work, and while none of them at the time actively discussed the aspects of their experiences that they later classified as liminal ones, they did not characterize or differentiate their experiences as being online or offline ones. Rather, they were digital monists (Vial, 2013) in that they simply had experiences. Very difficult and troubling ones that needed support to face, but experiences equal to any other ones they lived through, regardless of the technologies they used to facilitate them (Oliver, 2012). The online or offline did not matter insofar as the needs were met, due in part to the integration of social media and its connections as another aspect of their lives, just as real as anything, or anybody, supportive of their work. 

References 
Jurgenson, N. (2011). Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality. Cyborgology. Retrieved from http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/ 
Jurgenson, N. (2012). The IRL Fetish. The New Inquiry. Retrieved from http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/ 
Oliver, M. (2012). Learning technology: Theorising the tools we study. British Journal of Educational Technology. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2011.01283.x 
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together. New York: Basic Books. 
Vial, S. (2013). Digital Dualism and Lived Experience: Everyday Ontology Produces Everyday Ethics. Cyborgology. Retrieved from http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/04/09/digital-dualism-and-lived-experience-everyday-ontology-produces-everyday-ethics/#more-15140 

In this article we distill three years of social technologies research, includingstudies of Facebook, Twitter and Github, to present a synthesized theoretical frameworkfor operationalizing influence in social technologies. The construct of influence isdemonstrated to be munificent in its variation and interpreted according to the specificconstructs and theories used in research, and connected to levels of analysis derived fromempirical study of influence and analysis of electronic trace data. Specifically, weoutline a relationship between social media technology platform, individual goals forparticipation and emergent small groups to help inform future research on influence insocial technologies. We draw on theories from the small group literature, communitiesand networks of practice, and media theory to explicate a framework for measuringinfluence in context. In our discussion we propose three categories of social technology:Social media, distributed work and participatory mass media, suggesting that Facebook,GitHub and Twitter as exemplars of each respective category.

Visit the Dalhousie Social Media Lab and learn more about our research!
Please RSVP via this website. Space is limited!

The research poster session provides an interactive forum for authors to discuss their research.

Note to Presenters:  Posters should be no larger than 4 ft wide by 3 ft high. Poster boards and push pins will be supplied.

“The rise of social media, in specific, Twitter in terms of setting the narrative both during and post-debates. Of essentially, allowing us to develop a Twitter narrative that will assist in raising funds. It fundamentally reshaped how people talked about the debates. In a process that has implications for the future and as we go forward in 2015 and it will probably provide a whole new way in which debates are discussed.” 

Stuart Stevens, Senior Strategist for the 2012 Mitt Romney Presidential Campaign- The 2012 Harvard Campaign Decision Makers Conference 

The above quote was in response to the question, what was a major take away for you after the 2012 Presidential campaign? This somewhat innocuous quote highlights how contemporary political campaigns must, with the rise of social networking sites and other Web 2.0 tools, reconsider their ability to control political narratives within social networking sites (Gueorguieva, 2008). Benoit’s Functional theory of political campaign discourse has provided researchers a robust lens in which to examine the rhetorical function of communication mediums and message sources (Benoit, 1995). Functional Theory possesses a complex system of axioms and predictions explaining campaign use of different media platforms including but not limited to television, radio, and direct mail advertising, in addition to debates and campaign websites (Benoit 2006). However, scholars have yet to apply Functional Theory to analyze political campaign usage of social networking sites (SNS), an increasingly important tool for political campaigns’ engagement with the public. 

Electoral candidates bring their own strategic agenda to the use of social networking sites, but the various agendas of opposing candidates, advocacy groups, the press and the public at-large work to insure that candidates must execute more than their agenda (Grant, Moon, & Busby Grant, 2010). This proposal seeks to continue this vein of inquiry by examining the structural affordances that exist within the Twitter platform that may constrain, in particular, presidential campaign use. A content analysis was conducted to test Functional Theory’s central axioms and messaging predictions as it pertains to the 2012 Obama for America campaign’s use of the Twitter social networking site.

Understanding how individuals make information disclosure decisions in online social networks has received much academic attention particularly in light of an observed privacy paradox (Acquisti and Gross 2006; Norberg, Horne and Horne 2007) wherein people share more information than their stated privacy concerns suggest they ought. Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory (Petronio 2002) is a psychological boundary theory that has recently been used to explain personal information disclosures in online environments (Metzger 2007; Child, Pearson and Petronio 2009; Waters and Akerman 2011; Xu et al 2011). Essentially, this theory elucidates how people make decisions about their information in order to strike a balance between disclosure and privacy in the context of relationships. 

Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory is based on the idea that individuals erect boundaries around their personal information and either metaphorically open the boundary to permit information disclosure or close the boundary to restrict information flow. There are three rule management processes within CPM theory: boundary rule formation, boundary coordination and boundary turbulence (Petronio 2002). The formation of boundary rules is based upon five criteria: 1) cost-benefit ratio, 2) context, 3) motivations, 4) gender and 5) culture. Boundary coordination processes refers to the control that individuals exert over their information sharing behaviour. Specifically, individuals’ coordination processes involve complex mental calculations to determine the breadth and depth of personal information to share (boundary permeability, BP), with whom to share their personal information (boundary linkages, BL) and who maintains ownership over their information (boundary ownership, BO). Finally, boundary turbulence occurs when boundary coordination fails (i.e. privacy breach). 

Despite researchers’ interest in explaining the privacy paradox, application of CPM theory in online social networks is in a nascent stage. CPM theory has been used as an organizing theoretical framework (Metzger 2007; Waters and Akerman 2011; Xu et al 2011), the five criteria of privacy rule development were observed in Facebook disclosures, and each of the three boundary coordination processes were empirically confirmed (Child, Pearson, and Petronio 2009), but the empirical confirmation remains the only test of its kind and it was developed specifically in the context of bloggers. Thus, the objective of this research was to test the factor structure of the boundary coordination processes of CPM in the context of online social networks. 

An online survey of 835 online social network users was administered to assess boundary coordination processes of these individuals using 36 manifest variables (12 per latent construct). Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the three latent dimensions and corresponding 36 manifest variables of OSN CPM was conducted using Amos 19. Results showed that only two of the three latent boundary coordination constructs had sufficient factor loadings to be retained. The two remaining latent boundary coordination constructs were shown to be distinct yet correlated constructs. The research concluded parsimonious measurement scales for the remaining latent boundary coordination processes that can be used in subsequent online social network investigations. 
  
References 

Acquisti, A. and Gross, R. 2006 Imagined communities: Awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the Facebook, PET 2006, Accessed from: <http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/dataprivacy/projects/facebook/facebook2.pdf>

Child, J., Pearson, J.C. and Petronio, S., 2009. Blogging, communication, and privacy management: Development of the blogging privacy management measure, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(10), pp.2079-2094. 

Metzger, M. J. 2007. Communication privacy management in electronic commerce. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, [online] 12(2), article 1. Accessed from: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue2/metzger.html 

Norberg, P.A., Horne, D. R., and Horne, D.A., 2007. The Privacy Paradox: Personal Information Disclosure Intentions Versus Behaviors, Journal of Consumer Affairs, 41(1), pp.100-126. 

Petronio, S. S., 2002. Boundaries of privacy: dialectics of disclosure. Albany: State University of New York Press. 

Waters, S. and Ackerman, J., 2011. Exploring Privacy Management on Facebook: Motivations and Perceived Consequences of Voluntary Disclosure, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 17, pp.101–115. 

Xu, H., Dinev, T. Smith, H.J. Hart, P., 2011. Information privacy concerns: Linking individual perception with institutional privacy assurances, Journal of the Association of Information Systems, 12(12), pp.798-824. 

Over the past three decades, we’ve witnessed the formation of globalized computer-mediated communities of interest (Fischer, 2001) that transcend traditional imaginings of community (Anderson, 1991). Social media allows individuals to form virtual communities (Rhingold, 1993) centered on shared interests and the exchange of information. One area of particular growth is the formation of social media and social networking sites focused on preserving and sharing experiences of health and illness. Several social networking sites (like PatientsLikeMe.com) and cloud-based personal health archiving services (i.e. Google Health Vault) have emerged to support biosocial (Rabinow and Rose, 2006) community formation among patient groups and capitalize on the self-preservation and exchange of personal health information through data-mining research. These sites offer both patients and researchers with unique opportunities to explore meanings and lived-experiences of “illness” and patienthood in a networked society. These websites represent emergent modes of relating to the self and to others through the language of patienthood, and frequently science, in increasingly public and collaborative computing contexts. The secondary use of user-generated content from a consumer-oriented health social networking site has ethical implications that reconfigure notions of privacy, property, and the notion of work centered upon practices of social computing. 

This poster visualizes divergent user responses to a real privacy violation. It reports on a content analysis of data collected as part of 8 months of ethnographic participant-observation within the Mood Disorders Community on the patient-social networking site PatientsLikeMe.com. Responses to the privacy violation illustrate several ways in which the social networking of personal health information management and research participation subverts traditional notions of research ethics, privacy, and ownership of personal health information from academia. During the observation period, the website’s administrators detected an unauthorized data-mining bot in violation of the site’s user agreement. When news of the intrusion was made public, discussion erupted within the Mood Disorder Community contemplating the impact of data-mining on site users and the meaning of continued participation in social networking and personal health record keeping online. Participation within patient-orient social networks is a negotiated and calculated practice. Control over representation of identity and informatic commodities is achieved through the regulation of presence and participation in online locales; that is, through personal health information management practices. Thus, this poster aims to provide its audience with a set of best practices for social media research that preserves privacy and agency through ethical information management. Analysis of the data demonstrates ways in which social media locales can subvert conventional norms and expectations concerning research demonstrate how agency-preserving conventions (such as anonymity and the ability withdrawal from a study with one’s data) can also facilitate the appropriation of user-generated content by website owners and transform collaborative computing into uncompensated labor. 

Works Cited 

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso Books 

Fischer, G. (2001, August). Communities of interest: Learning through the interaction of multiple knowledge systems. In Proceedings of the 24th IRIS Conference (pp. 1-14). Department of Information Science, Bergen. 

Rabinow, P., & Rose, N. (2006). Biopower today. BioSocieties, 1(2), 195.

Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Addison Wesley Publishing Company.

Today, the growing evolution and use of social media is incredible. There are 955 million active users on Facebook who spend 10.5 billion minutes online on the website (Pring, 2012); however the use of social media is not limited to personal purposes. Businesses are increasingly getting engaged in social media; 80% of businesses use social media sites to monitor or extract information relating to competitors (Pring, 2012). The subject of social media is increasingly drawing attention of academic and industry researchers. The research literature on social media is still limited; however there is a trend towards rapid increase in the number of papers and the amount of materials that have been published (Alexander, 2012).

With the rise of social media, a new paradigm has emerged for public and organizations. The drastic change that comes with the advent of social media is mostly due to tremendous and fast spread of information. Public are aware of the power of social media and they take advantage of this new paradigm in which –for instance- an unhappy customer doesn’t call the company’s direct line anymore; instead, he posts a comment on company’s Facebook page on his disappointment (Lampe et al., 2008). Public are more likely to speak out via social media, which are a louder, more visible method of expressing their dissatisfaction and criticism. 

In recent years, we have witnessed organizations facing crisis by information circulation in social media in less than hours, as what happened to Lassonde Industries on April 2012. The story began on 2005, when Lassonde - a Canadian food manufacturing company- sued a small Quebec-based soap company - Olivia’s Oasis - for using the word “Oasis” as one of their product line’s brand name. For 7 years, Olivia’s Oasis encountered problems over this battle, until finally on April 7, 2012 public used social media against Lassonde to support Olivia's Oasis; this brought a 7 yearlong conflict to an end within days (Agnes, 2012). This case study exemplifies the point that public appreciate the power of social media and they know how to employ it in order to drive organizations for a quick reaction. Organizations must know that the expanding role of social media has changed the way in which they need to respond to crises and protect their reputation. 

Refer to this real world case study, in this research we review the public acts in social media context in order to persuade Lassonde for changing its strategy and answering to their demand. We also study Lassonde strategies and the way it communicated with customers and managed the crisis. This study allows us to find out more about organizations’ applicable strategies in managing crises in social media environment. We conclude by exploring the implications for organizations facing similar crises in the future. 

References:
Agnes, M. (2012). One Brand’s Social Media Crisis is Another Brand’s Social Media Salvation. Retrieved from: http://www.melissaagnescrisismanagement.com/one-brands-social-media-crisis-is-another-brands-social-media-salvation/. Last accessed: April 11, 2013.
Alexander, D.E. (2012). Two Squawks about Twitter: The Use of Social Media in Disaster Risk Reduction and Crisis Management. Retrieved from http://emergencyplanning.blogspot.com/. Last accessed: April 16, 2013.
Lampe, C. Ellison, N.B., Steinfield, Ch. (2008). Changes in use and perception of Facebook. CSCW`08, November 8-12, San Diego, California, USA.
Pring, C. (2012). 216 Social Media and Internet Statistics (September 2012). Retrieved from http://thesocialskinny.com/216-social-media-and-internet-statistics-september-2012/. Last accessed: May 5, 2013.

The use of Twitter tweets that are geotagged to monitor aspects of the natural world, such as disease diffusion and phenology has been demonstrated to have potential to serve as alternative data sources. Estimates of geotagged percentage of tweets is as high as five percent, providing an interesting sample of data to monitor the diffusion perceptions. There exist several issues to address, such as the use of terminology that may not be relevant to the exact topic (e.g. the term drought being used to describe a slump in a baseball player's performance) and the quality of geotagged data for location analysis purposes. In this poster, we examine the how perceptions of drought are communicated via Twitter feeds and compare this to actual temperature and climatic data and maps. Specifically, using key words that relate to drought-influenced actions, we will map and produce a form of location-quotient to explore areas where drought-related posts are above or below a calculated mean, and then compare this to actual temperature data to understand the spatial and temporal patterns of perceptions of extreme heat and drought and what actions are being taken in response. 

With over 1 billion of worldwide users, Facebook stands as a pervasive and cross-cutting social environment, the place in which we build and store part of our culture, biography and social relations, and also the mean by which we obtain information, communicate and get in touch with the institutions. Moreover, while SNS enable individuals to communicate and socialize the present, at the same time they allow for its online storage,  providing it permanently available online. 

Nowadays, a great attention in terms of research has been payed to the use of these environments in the present: many studies have been undertaken to investigate how practices of on line sharing are reconfiguring models of identity and representation (Papacharissi 2011),  media consumption practices (Jenkins 2006), relationships between on line communities and territory (Hampton & Wellman 2003; Parks 2009), political engagement repertoires (Postelnicu & Cozma 2008), emergent business and work models (Tapscott and Williams, 2006; Bruns 2008). 
Furthermore, web 2.0 has started to be studied also according to a critical approach: focusing on new forms of cyber-surveillance (Fuchs, 2011), copyright and privacy issues (Livingstone 2008), the often wild process of cultural disintermediation (Van Dijk & Nieborg, 2009) and, finally, focusing on the economic exploitation of a new "digital proletariat" (Terranova 2004).
However, their role as repositories of an individual and collective history and as tools for a new, mediated, evanescent and negotiable memory is yet largely unexplored.

The paper deals with the SNS as emergent biographical archives, making individuals build and continuously revise in a meta-reflective way not only their present but also their past. 
Four different social network interfaces will be analysed and compared: Facebook, Linkedin, Path and Nextdoor. These SNS will be explored according to a desk analysis aimed to highlight the socio-technical affordances (Resnick 2001) related to the biographical memory.

In particular, the online social media memories will be explored along several dimensions:
-the ephemeral and volatile nature of digital contents (Ferraris 2012) and, at the same time, their replicable, permanent, and spreadable shape (boyd & Ellison 2007);
-the relationship between public and private dimensions of these archives and their long term implications for privacy, storage, accessibility and reuse;
-the socio-technical affordances and constraints of such digital environments in relation to biographical memory;
-the meta-reflective and discursive practices on the past that actually the above mentioned interfaces enable;
Finally, aim of the paper is to discuss different epistemological ideas of memory that emerges from such interfaces: depending on the type of SNS environment and on the ties (Wellman at al. 2001) enabled and stimulated by each digital environment, also the socio-technical image of the past is different, opening to different cultural roles and interpretations of memory. 

REFERENCES

boyd D. M., & Ellison N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13, article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.
Bruns A. (2008), Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, Peter Lang, New York.
Hampton K., & Wellman, B. (2003), Neighboring in Netville: how the internet supports community and social capital in a wired suburb. City & Community, 2 (4), 277-311.
Ferraris M. (2012) Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces, Oxford University Press, Oxford USA. 
Fuchs C. (2011), New media, web 2.0 and Surveilance, Sociology Compass, 5, pp.134–147.
Jenkins H. (2006), Convergence culture: where old and new media collide, New York University Press, New York.
Livingstone S. (2008), Taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers’ use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and self-expression, New Media & society 10 pp. 393-411.
Papacharissi Z. (ed.) 2011, A networked self. Identity, Community and culture on Social Network Sites, Routledge, NY. 
Parks M. (2009), Explicating and applying boundary conditions of online social network theories in Myspace, International Communication Association, Chicago.
Postelnicu M. & Cozma R. (2008), Befriending the candidate: uses and gratification of candidate profiles on MySpace. Paper presented to the National Communication Association annual meeting, San Diego, CA. 
Resnick, P. (2001), Beyond bowling together: socio-technical capital. In Carroll J (ed.). HCI in the new millenium, pp.647-672, Addison Wesley, New York.
Tapscott D. & Williams A.D. (2006), Wikinomics. How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Penguin, New York.
Terranova T. (2004), Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, Pluto Press, Ann Arbor.
Van Dijk J., Nieborg D., (2009) Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of web 2.0 business manifestos, New Media and Society, 11, 5. pp. 855-874.
Wellman, B., Haase, A. Q., Witte, J., & Hampton, K. (2001). Does the Internet increase, decrease, or supplement social capital? Social networks, participation, and community commitment. American Behavioral Scientist, 45, 436-456.

Modern social interaction is rapidly moving towards the virtual social networks. Computerized networking infrastructure enables us to monitor and analyze information spreading, innovation diffusion and opinion formation in social networks. This stimulates attempts for a deep understanding and modeling of networked social process. 

There are two main approaches for modeling idea spreading. The infection approach assumes that in each contact between actors with some probability the opinion will spared on. The threshold approach assumes that the probability of opinion spreading dramatically increases when is reached a certain fraction of opinioned neighbors. 

In both approaches mentioned above, there isn't a significant difference in the opinion spreading time by different actors as a starting point, which contradicts sociology theories according to which there are key actors in social environments, called influencers. For this reason we proposed a new model, which capture the main difference between information and opinion spreading. 

In information spreading additional exposure to certain information has a small effect. Contrary, when an actor is exposed to 2 opinioned actors the probability to adopt the opinion is significant higher than in the case of contact with one such actor (called by J. Kleinberg "the 0-1-2 effect"). In each time step for each actor that does not have an opinion, we randomly choose 2 of his network neighbors. If one of them has an opinion, the actor obtains opinion with some low probability, if two – with a higher probability. 

Opinion spreading was simulated on different real world social networks (network of e-mail contacts, network of scientific citation) and similar random scale-free networks. In each simulation we defined a starting actor (whom which will influence the network) and the number of actors with opinion by time line was measured. 
The behavior of the spreading is characterized by a slow incline, until reaching a critical point (or tipping point on time line, tp) after that the spreading speed is dramatically increasing. The simulation results show that after reaching tp the spreading in the network is independent on the starting actor, but the value of tp is strongly dependent on starting actor. The best influencer actor has a significant number of friends, however not all actors with large number of friends are good influencers.

Known characteristics of an actor in a network can not indicate if he is a potential influencer. It's clear that an influencer must not have a low degree and must have a high clustering coefficient value. To be an influencer a special position of actor in the network is needed and this position is not a local property of the actor. Further investigations will be concentrated on accurate definition of this position together with introducing of new topological metrics of a network. 

Organizational storytelling has recently been described as an effective way to communicate an organization’s overall brand and goals. Successful storytelling helps to address a long-standing organizational problem – the need to create connections with publics to build resilience and brand trust. As a persuasive mechanism, storytelling helps to connect the organization and its publics with emotional connectivity through existing narratives. In the digital age, organizational storytelling takes on an adapted form, whereby narratives continue to be harvested but allow for publics to engage in the narrative process, allowing for the co-creation of narratives. This paper explores the use of organizational storytelling in the digital age through the famous Canadian coffee chain, Tim Horton’s. By examining Tim Horton’s YouTube channel videos, the authors analyzed the persuasiveness of individual video stories to determine the effectiveness of organizational storytelling through a chosen social media platform. Robert Cialdini’s ‘Weapons of Influence’ were used to determine the video stories’ persuasiveness, and ultimately, whether organizational storytelling in the digital age is a successful strategy. Findings deduce that Tim Horton’s engages in the effective use of persuasive storytelling through its YouTube videos, as the weapons of influence used were pervasive. Additionally, the authors noted that multiple persuasive techniques do not need to be used in storytelling, as long as one mode of persuasion is executed effectively. Such successful storytelling has helped Tim Horton’s to develop strong relationships with its publics, allowing for the creation of brand loyalty with longevity.

Under the topic of research methods, this poster proposes to present phenomenology as a favored approach to understanding the experience when using social media. The iterative process designed by Clark Mouskas lends itself to capturing the subcultures formed online as well as designing a better user experience. The methodology can be used to study the people using social media and user acceptance testing for software firms developing new social media application. The poster will present and explain the steps with clearly defined processes and benefits. I will demonstrate how phenomenology was used in my study of global virtual teams. This will include lessons learned and modifications to the process to support a virtual environment. Demonstration will include indexing of key words from research and presenting as word clouds.

The nature of the Canadian music industry has changed significantly in recent years due to the demise of the traditional music distribution system. Digital technologies have afforded musicians the ability to write, record, and distribute their music without assistance from intermediary companies, by using easily accessible digital technologies. Furthermore, digital technologies, in combination with mass production of cheaply produced CD’s, have reduced the profit margin of album sales to the extent that they are no longer a profitable commodity. Consequently, the Canadian music industry is in a state of flux and has yet to stabilize in the digitized world. 

In the past, musicians have relied predominantly on professional record labels to record, produce, and market their work. In the age where nearly anyone can produce creative works without the assistance of traditional gatekeepers, musicians are less reliant on major record labels to facilitate their success. Given the fact that artists are increasingly choosing to produce and distribute their own work, they also must find ways to market their product independently. 

In addition to changing marketing practices, globalization is changing our perception of local practices, and the music industry has been no exception. For this reason, consideration of cultural, social, and economic context should be considered in order to understand how marketing practices are evolving in the music industry. This is especially true across Canada, due to the cultural diversity from region to region. 

The aim of this study is to identify the ways in which independent musicians in Edmonton are marketing their music in the face of an evolving industry. The study will also attempt to reveal any cultural, economic, or geographical phenomena in Edmonton that have impacted the local music industry. To this end, a minimum of 10 unstructured, in-depth interviews will be conducted using a combination of snowball and judgment sampling of professional musicians working in the Edmonton region. Results from the interviews will be collated in order to identify commonalities and associations within the context of the Edmonton music scene, in order to gain insight into the relationship between independent music, local culture, and emergent marketing practices. The results will be beneficial to the Edmonton community by affording insight into the local music culture, while also building upon the growing body of market research on the Canadian independent music industry. 

Kenyans have had tremendous success in changing their representation by international news agencies. In the recent 2013 election cycle, they succeeded in developing and sustaining two trending topics (#kenyadecides and #someonetellcnn) that dominated international news reports and prevailed over reports of sporadic election violence. This study both investigates the discursive tools that participants on social media use to frame emerging news on social media sources and the mechanisms behind their social media successes. I conducted a microanalysis of the commentary following a post on the public Al Jazeera English Facebook that discussed the ICC indictment of their newly elected leader Uhuru Kenyatta. The microanalysis reveals the powerful influence that framing has on the evaluation of local events and the tools with which these frames are indexed in this particular social media context. I also investigated the emerging journalist practices on social media and the ways in which Kenyans were able to catch the attention of journalists and amplify their voice. This study provides a window into the power of social media savvy and the influence of journalist methods of social media sensemaking within the networked news cycle. Through this window we can better understand the successes and failures of many networks within our global digital democracy.

Social media has had a profound effect on the academic enterprise, providing scholarswith opportunities to connect with likeminded colleagues down the hallway or around theglobe. These technologies also provide opportunities for academics to promote their workby bringing attention to their publications and other research products. While traditionalresearch impact measures such as citation counts and the h-index are commonly used inacademic tenure and promotion decisions, to date social media presence plays little or norole in assessing scholarly impact. Nevertheless, some scholars entrepreneurially andactively promote themselves and their work via social media; others pay little heed tothese forms of communication for professional purposes. Some universities are beginningto expand their social media focus from a limited view of these technologies ascommunications and marketing tools, to consider the value of scholars’ contributions inthe social media sphere.

“Altmetrics” is the term applied to measures of impact or influence beyond thetraditional. Rousseau and Ye (2013) note that “altmetrics…has not (yet) a precisedefinition, but refers to the use of social media, particularly Web 2.0 media, in assessingthe influence of researchers on all type of users.” However, they argue that “mentions” onthe internet amount to popularity measures…hence altmetrics data must be approachedwith caution, and in the context of multi-dimensional evaluation exercises…“likes” or“shares” lack authority and scientific credibility so that the use of altmetrics may still besomewhat premature.”


Diffusion of Innovations theory (Rogers, 2003) provides a lens to examine the spread ofnew ideas through cultures. Altmetrics is an innovative scholarly evaluation process thatdrives the research questions addressed in this study:

1. What key factors do heads of LIS academic units consider when making thedecision to adopt altmetrics for inclusion in promotion and tenure policy andpractice?

 2. How have Rogers’ 5 Factors (relative advantage, compatibility,complexity/simplicity, trialability, observability) influenced the diffusion processof altmetrics in LIS academic units’ scholarly productivity evaluation?

Through a survey of LIS program chairs, directors, and deans in the U.S. and Canada, theresearchers will seek to determine adopter categories for respondents, identify opinionleaders who are informing leaders’ decisions, and analyze key elements drivinginnovation-decisions for diffusion, including communication channels, time, and socialsystems.

The answers to these questions will expand and update an earlier interview study (Gruzdet al., 2011). The data will also inform decisions about adopting appropriate impactmetrics in our field. Priem and Hemminger (2010) suggest that analyzing impact via web presence could focus on “seven categories of Web 2.0 tools that might be productivelymined: bookmarking, reference managers, recommendation services, comments onarticles, microblogging, Wikipedia, and blogging.” Outcomes of this research will beanalyzed in light of Priem and Hemminger’s recommendations. Findings will determinethe rate of adoption by LIS program administrators to predict the probability of diffusion.Results will inform administrators who are contemplating the use of altmetrics as well astenure-track faculty and faculty slated for promotion to full professor status.

References
Gruzd, A., Staves, K., & Wilk, A. (2011). Tenure and promotion in the age of onlinesocial media. Proceedings of the annual conference of the American Association forInformation Science. New Orleans, October 9-13.
Priem, J., & Hemminger, B.M. (2010). Scientometrics 2.0: Toward new metrics ofscholarly impact on the social Web. First Monday, Volume 15, Number 7 - 5 July 2010.http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2874/2570
Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). New York, NY: Free Press.
Rousseau, R. and Ye, F.Y. (2013). A multi-metric approach for research evaluations.Chinese Science Bulletin, 2013(http://users.telenet.be/ronald.rousseau/altmetrics___influmetrics.pdf).

Social networks in which interactions with other people lead to new insights or discoveries have long been associated with serendipity (Fine & Deegan, 1996). Yahoo’s recent ban on employees working from home was presented in the press as a move to re-inject serendipity into the company by ensuring more informal interactions between colleagues (e.g., Lindsay, 2013). However, while face-to-face time may be important to maintain a serendipity ecosystem, people do perceive their interactions with other people in digital environments as opportunities for serendipity (Dantonio, Makri, & Blandford, 2012). 

A web-based survey of 286 academics, professionals, and graduate students was designed to explore relationships between work-related serendipity, environment, and individual differences. Participants were first asked to select a specific digital environment of their choice in which they find information, ideas, or resources that are useful to their work or academic studies (e.g., PubMed, work intranet, Twitter, Google Scholar). Participants then responded to questionnaires relating to their experience in that particular digital environment, how frequently they experience serendipity in that digital environment and in general, and several self-report questionnaires relating individual differences and their broader work environment. This poster focuses on the portion of the study that explored the relationships between serendipity and digital environments. 

Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook were selected by 69 (24.1%) of the participants – second only to databases (N=73, 25.5%). A MANOVA revealed a significant multivariate effect for digital environment (database, social media, website, search engine, or intranet). The frequency of serendipity was significantly affected by the type of digital environment, Wilk’s λ, F[44, 904.83) = 3.55, p<.001, partial =.14. The reported frequency of serendipity was highest in social media sites and post hoc analyses indicate that the perceived frequency of serendipity in social media (M=3.61, SD=.81) is significantly higher than in databases (M = 2.87, SD = .80), search engines (M = 3.16, SD = .80), or intranets (M = 2.62, SD = .63). 

Results suggest that there may be common features or functions that underlie digital environments and make some more conducive to serendipity than others. More specifically, this study found that digital environments that contain useful and interesting information, enable connections, and lead to the unexpected had a significant relationship to the perception of serendipity. These findings give credence to the belief that while we cannot make serendipity happen, it may be possible to design digital environments conducive to serendipity. Future research will explore what specific features, functions, and experiences within digital environments such as social media sites influence perceptions of serendipity. 


Dantonio, L, Makri, S., & Blandford, A. (2013). Coming across academic social media content serendipitously. Paper presented at ASIST 2012, Baltimore, MD. Retrieved from https://www.asis.org/asist2012/proceedings/ 

Fine, G. A., & Deegan, J. G. (1996). Three principles of serendip: Insight, chance, and discovery in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 9(4), 434-447. 

Lindsay, G. (2013, April 5). Engineering serendipity. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/opinion/sunday/engineering-serendipity.html 

This research studies the influence that social media sites have on the behavior of online customers (e.g., Facebook, Twitter). This research combines information from three different approaches that were used to study how social media sites are used by online stores to help increase their sales: 1) Google Analytics 2) Crazy Egg, and 3) an online Survey. 

Google Analytics was used to collect data from three online stores (e.g., two apparel stores and an educational store). The data was used to determine the path that customers used to arrive at the online stores. Using data only from those customers who completed a transaction, we compared the revenue generated by traffic from Twitter and Facebook to the revenue generated from other traffic (e.g., search engines, online ads, customer typed URLs and other sources). While we found that revenue generated from search engines was approximately four times higher than typed URLs, online ads, Twitter and Facebook, we also found that revenue generated from Twitter traffic was increasing. On the other hand, our findings also showed that traffic from search engines and Facebook seems to have plateaued. 

In addition to using Google Analytics to understand customer traffic, we also used Crazy Egg to collect event-actions (e.g., button presses) for more webpage specific details. In particular, we were interested in knowing how often customers clicked on an online stores’ social media buttons (e.g., for Facebook and Twitter). Crazy Egg and Google Analytics were enabled on the same online stores, with overlapping time frames. The Crazy Egg data indicated that customers only used the online store’s social media buttons (i.e., Facebook and Twitter) about 1% of the time. This may be due to the presence of competing features such as, the “contact us” and “about us” on-site links, and live Twitter and Facebook feeds which provide similar information to the stores’ actual Twitter and Facebook sites. As well, we found that the Twitter and Facebook buttons were used less often than the “contact us” and “about us” buttons at 2%. 
In addition, we conducted an online survey in order to capture the opinions and attitudes of customers on social media use (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram), their tendencies to follow stores online, and their tendencies to visit the online store’s social media sites. We had 189 participants complete the survey. We found that all participants personally used at least one social media site, approximately 69% of the participants followed stores online using social media (Facebook and Twitter being the most common) and used these sites to look for offers, product information, and read reviews from other customers and the online store’s owner. The survey also showed that 47% of participants reported they had used social buttons while on an online store, which was much higher than the results found from Crazy Egg. 

In this paper, we will present the results of these three approaches in more detail and discuss the implications of these results. Finally, we will provide some suggestions on how online stores can enhance their social media presence to improve their online transactions. 

Research connecting the role of media framing and risk perceptions is sparse and controversial; very little has delved into the role of new media specifically. This term paper is a hypothetical research proposal written for a Masters degree Communications methodology course. The aim of the proposal is to brings new media and geolocation into the fold of risk communication analysis by using the timely example of the Northern Gateway Pipeline project as it evolves into an election platform for the Province of British Columbia. Drawing on the framework of Kasperon and Kasperson’s (1996) theory of risk amplification and attenuation, and referencing state-of-the-art studies in correlating new media activity to public opinion using geolocation and surveying techniques, I argue the case for a triangulation of mixed methodologies that would allow researchers to make strong, compelling inferences about the role of media framing on risk perception, and further on risk perceptions and voting preferences as a form of risk mitigation. By first conducting a computer mediated discourse analysis on text-based new media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, followed with a matched critical discourse analysis of local, provincial, and national media coverage of the Northern Gateway Pipeline it is possible to determine the location and type of risk framing produced in specific regions around the province by both media outlets and members of the public. By polling citizens in these regions, specifically those who reside near the proposed pipeline route and those who do not, media consumption, voting preferences, and risk perceptions can also be observed. Finally, the three layers of analyses can be mapped to determine if risk perceptions match the framing style of media produced in the Province, as well as to specific types of media consumed. Following the election, voting preferences and risk perceptions can be matched to actual candidate selections by location to verify the consistency of the results. I conclude by arguing that a hybridized approach geolocating new and traditional media with participant self-reporting can provide insight into the functioning of Beck’s (1994) risk society in situ, and that the more forms of research that contribute to this paradigm the better the academic community can trace and understand the genealogy of risk, allowing access to the ideological premises that politicize risk today.

My paper discuses the different modes of seeing the physical world, which shape our cognitive, emotional and spiritual practices. Particularly, I take a phenomenological approach in analyzing works of art to understand how seeing objects and places in linear perspective influences our behavior in socially/aesthetically-constructed environments. 

Considering that the act of seeing in contemporary visual culture is increasingly experienced through televisual/digital screens, we might be incited to reflect upon the nature of our own relationship to images. For the French Catholic theologian Jean-Luc Marion, today’s proliferation of technological images replaces reality, as the original source of visual representation, with an antiworld—a virtual space of idolic images that have effaced the real to act as a mirror in reflecting humans’ desires. 

Marion’s solution to ‘the contemporary disaster of the image’ is to reconsider religious icons as a type of representation that erases its visibility in order for the invisible to intersect with the visible. By comparing Marion’s theological approach of image to the work of the contemporary artist Stephen Antonakos, we can reflect on the theoretical, spiritual, and physical aspects of idolic and iconic images. I particularly focus on how Antonakos interprets the Orthodox icon, Saints Peter and Paul Holding the Church (c.1600), to highlight the power of iconic images in overcoming the postmodern spectacle of idols that obliterates the real. 

In using Marion’s concepts of icon and idol, this paper brings a new interpretive approach to artworks (and image in general) as creating sacred spaces to disrupt the dominance of the antiworld over human perception of reality. 

Whether you tweet for business, research, or pleasure, there are legal implications even in those 140 characters. Gathering social media analytics and data mining may have privacy implications whether in a business or research setting. Using Twitter in an educational setting may also have privacy implications. If Twitter is a part of your business, who “owns” your followers? Engaging in debate on Twitter or following celebrities may have legal ramifications from libel to stalking. Good intentions are not a solid legal defense, so it is important for all users of social media to be aware of these legal ramifications. Just some of the legal ramifications for businesses include defamation, wrongful termination, contracts, exposing company secrets, and trademark infringement. Researchers need to be aware that ethical codes of conduct apply even on Twitter. Personal data of subjects needs to be carefully monitored. Copyright of one’s research and the careful use of others’ copyrighted material need to be insured. 

According to a BBC article, “46% of 18- to 24-year-olds are unaware they can be sued for defamation if they tweet an unsubstantiated rumour about someone” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20782257). A social medium like Twitter takes place across the global landscape of the Internet, but the company itself is based in California. Even if a user brings a successful suit against someone on Twitter in another country, the decision may be unenforceable. This poster will examine some of the recent cases involving Twitter and some of the recent legislation that has been implemented to regulate this social medium in the media, educational and business sectors, focusing on Canada, Britain, and the United States. California has law that protects the privacy of employees and students by restricting employer and administration from having access to passwords or private accounts. Maryland and Illinois protect just workers, and Delaware protects only students. Most of the high profile legal cases involving Twitter in Britain revolve around defamation and libel, such as McAlpine v Bercow ([2013] EWHC 1342 (QB) (24 May 2013)). In Canada, Crookes v. Newton (2011 SCC 47, [2011] 3 SCR 269) is a libel case and examines whether hyperlinks can be considered publishing, but the court also cautioned that “New activities on the Internet [such as Twitter] and the greater potential for anonymity amplify even further the ease with which a reputation can be harmed online” (para. 38). There is European legislation pending that would ensure everyone’s “right to be forgotten,” essentially putting control over private information back in users’ hands rather than letting social media control its storage. In addition to examining these recent cases and legislation, this poster will provide a brief best practices guideline for researchers, educators, and business. 

In 2008, the Library of Congress (LC) posted a collection of historical photographs on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/), a photo sharing and social tagging service, with an intention of engaging the Web 2.0 community. Our project investigates a sample of 4500 records from the LC Flickr project with the purpose of understanding how Web 2.0 communities interact with the collections on Flickr. The goal is to develop a holistic picture of these interactions and analyse them from multiple perspectives: spatial, social, and semantic. The initial exploratory findings reveal that collections of photographs are enhanced by communities of taggers and commenters. These communities contribute different kinds of knowledge to image collections. Taggers add tags; commenters contribute local knowledge, opinions, and sentiments. In anthropology, local knowledge is defined as knowledge strongly rooted in particular places and reflects personal and emotional awareness of an area (Geertz, 1983).

In this project we are closely investigating these communities with the purpose of determining who plays the key role in knowledge creation, and what collections benefit from such knowledge enhancements the most. To achieve this objective, we are planning to examine collections, users, and their contributions by means of social network, geographic, and semantic analysis. The application of SNA in this scenario is somewhat unusual. Commonly, SNA is used for analysis of communities of people. Recent studies, however, have used SNA for analysis of other objects, namely: diseases (Goh et al., 2007), recipes (Teng, Lin, & Adamic, 2012), and images (Cha, Mislove, & Gummadi, 2009). Therefore, we assume that application of SNA to user interactions with images is justified. For SNA we mapped image-tagger and image-commenter relationships. To differentiate comments, we semantically analyzed and then categorized comments by content: local knowledge (that includes stories, opinions, questions, and corrections), and sentiments. This allowed us to see the differences in the structure of interactions in different communities. Our initial findings demonstrate that user comments include more local knowledge statements than sentiments; there are more local knowledge commenters than taggers, but fewer than those who write sentiments. User nodes in the local knowledge community are larger than in the sentiment community. By size, nodes differ significantly: in the local knowledge community, the most prolific user has 330 relationships with images, but the most prolific user in the sentiment community has only 70 relationships. The overlap between local knowledge and sentiment communities is not large: those who provide local knowledge hardly provide any sentiments.


With geographic analysis, we intend to infer users’ expertise in local knowledge of places and people shown in images. To carry out such analysis, we will map locations featured in images and locations of contributors. The distances between images and contributors may provide clues to the degree of users’ expertise in the knowledge of a place or an event featured on a photograph.

References:

Cha, M., Mislove, A., & Gummadi, K. P. (2009). A measurement-driven analysis of information propagation in the flickr social network. In Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web (pp. 721-730). ACM.

Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Goh, K. I., Cusick, M. E., Valle, D., Childs, B., Vidal, M., & Barabasi, A. L. (2007). The human disease network. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(21), 8685-8690.

Teng, C. Y., Lin, Y. R., & Adamic, L. A. (2012, June). Recipe recommendation using ingredient networks. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual ACM Web Science Conference (pp. 298-307). ACM.

• Join the #SMSociety13 Social at the Red Stag Tavern 
• Where to meet: At the Tavern, 2nd floor (http://goo.gl/maps/Xbu4x)
• Event type: Music/Food/Drinks
• Cost: Self-paid

Parallel Sessions 3 (15 min presentation + 5 min Q&A per speaker)

“Motley Crue’s online autobiographical project”, Helene Laurin (University of Ottawa, Canada).

“Socially quantified self: Networked branded identity”, Jenna Jacobson (University of Toronto, Canada).

“Facebook as a decontextualized environment: Young people’s experiences of navigating LGBTQ identity on a social networking site”, Stefanie Duguay (University of Oxford, United Kingdom).

“Networked identities vs. institutional identities”, Bonnie Stewart (University of Prince Edward Island, Canada).

Parallel Sessions  (15 min presentation + 5 min Q&A per speaker)

“Online community building in an academic context: A university library case study”, Scott Young and Doralyn Rossmann (Montana State University, United States).

“Strengthening offline ties online: Social media, games & family bonding”, Kelly Boudreau and Mia Consalvo (Concordia University, Canada).

“Characterizing two Twitter smoking cessation groups using semantic network analysis”, Ashley Sanders-Jackson (University of California San Francisco, United States), Judith Prochaska (Stanford University, United States) and Connie Pechmann (University of California Irvine, United States).

“Girls and their social media practices: Critical readings on sexual health and policy making from the ground up” Claudia Mitchell (McGill University), John Murray (Youth, the Arts, HIV & AIDS Network)

Mötley Crüe is a hair metal music group that was popular during the 1980s. In 2001, the band members collectively wrote their first autobiography, The Dirt: Confessions of The World's Most Notorious Rock Band. Five other autobiographies followed during the next ten years: Tommy Lee's Tommyland in 2004, Vince Neil's Tattoos & Tequila in 2010, the group's A Visual History 1983-2003 in 2009, Nikki Sixx's The Heroin Diaries and This is Gonna Hurt, respectively in 2007 and 2011. They thus wrote a dense and rich autobiographical project, "promising to reveal everything" about many famous stories, including Tommy Lee's sex tape with then-wife Pamela Anderson, or Nikki Sixx's nearly fatal heroin overdose in 1987. In my Ph.D. dissertation, I conclude that Mötley Crüe's autobiographical project made them relevant in rock culture; strangely, their validation is linked to their life stories, and not particularly to their musical output. 

In this paper, I want to look more closely at Mötley Crüe's presence on social networks. In particular, I want to examine how Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, Tommy Lee and Mick Mars tell their life stories, day to day, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and such. These various publications take on a special function, as they are "ongoing autobiographies", adding to the more official, published autobiographies. As such, issues of identity are crucial to the ways Mötley Crüe members publish their lives on social media. I approach autobiographical discourses as performative, meaning they do things. By constructing a life as a composite of many identities, through words and scripts common to one's culture, autobiographical discourses reveal different, sometimes contradictory positions. However, this composite is glued together by a sense of self articulated by the autobiographer, a self-consciousness at work. In this way, the autobiographer displays the person that s/he is, or perhaps, how the person wants to be perceived. This is how another issue, celebrity, becomes very important. It is through this constant self-consciousness that the (supposed) "real" star persona can be deciphered (or rather, the persona the star shapes in his/her autobiography). 

Thus, focusing on online publications from different social media platforms and passages from their (published) autobiographies, I intend to analyse Mötley Crüe's star personas as shaped by the members' online publications. I wish to see how the particular elements of social media, such as immediacy and constant interaction with fans, come together in the shaping of these new, yet durable, star personas. The aim of this paper is twofold: I want to question the evolution of Mötley Crüe members' life story production, while exploring the confluence of social media and celebrity.

In recent years libraries have begun to recognize and embrace social media as a valuable form of communication, and a new area of examination has subsequently developed that attempts to qualify that value.* Many of these studies represent a preliminary examination of social networking and social media within the context of the academic library, though few studies move beyond practical descriptions of social media as a tool for marketing and promoting library collections and services. The present paper extends recent research related to social media usage in academic libraries by offering a deeper focus on the nature and value of converting members of online communities into active library users. By using and analyzing social media services as more than broadcast platforms for promotion, social media offers a value for libraries and higher education in the form of online community conversions. 

In examining social media data and activity, the authors discuss the strongest indicators of library user conversion behavior and present findings related to the conversion value of online community engagement. Discussion involves relevant tools and strategies for building online communities via social media, with a central analysis of the effects and value of community growth and engagement for the Montana State University library. Over the previous 12-month period the library at Montana State University has dedicated resources to building, engaging, and measuring community through the application of social media, namely Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, and Instagram. In this paper, the analysis of quantitative data from web analytics and social media management tools is combined with the analysis of qualitative data from undergraduate student focus groups to explore online communities in an academic context. 

Online communities can be developed, tracked, and analyzed through analytics and insight tools such as ThinkUp and Google Analytics, and contextualized with focus groups and social media content analysis. The authors examine quantitative and qualitative data to identify a three-stage conversion process that tracks users first from online community activity, then to online and offline library usage, and finally to library and university championing. This research represents a new perspective on the value of social networks formed through social media, and offers an instructive case study for academic and non-academic libraries, organizations of higher education, and other cultural institutions. 



* 
Noa Aharony (2010): "Twitter Use in Libraries: An Exploratory Analysis", Journal of Web Librarianship, 4:4, 333-350. DOI: 10.1080/19322909.2010.487766 

Sue Bennett, Andrea Bishop, Barney Dalgarno, Jenny Waycott, Gregor Kennedy (2012): "Implementing Web 2.0 technologies in higher education: A collective case study", Computers & Education, 59, 524-534. DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2011.12.022 

Jonathan Bodnar & Ameet Doshi (2011): "Asking the Right Questions: A Critique of Facebook, Social Media, and Libraries", Public Services Quarterly, 7:3-4, 102-110. DOI: 10.1080/15228959.2011.623594 

Christopher Chan (2012),"Marketing the academic library with online social network advertising", Library Management, 33:8, 479 - 489. DOI: 10.1108/01435121211279849 

Nancy Davis Kho (2011): "Social Media in Libraries: Keys to Deeper Engagement", Information Today, 28:6, 1-32. 

Seungahn Nah & Gregory D Saxton (2013): "Modeling the adoption and use of social media by nonprofit organizations", New Media & Society, 15:2, 294-313. DOI:10.1177/1461444812452411 

Nancy Kim Phillips (2011): "Academic Library Use of Facebook: Building Relationships with Students", The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 37:6, 512–522. DOI:10.1016/j.acalib.2011.07.008. 

Manorama Tripathi & Sunil Kumar (2010): "Use of Web 2.0 tools in academic libraries: A reconnaissance of the international landscape", The International Information & Library Review, 42, 195-207. DOI: 10.1016/j.iilr.2010.07.005 

Social media have become a new arena for identity creation, performance, and management. In a shift from traditional media to social media, people moved from being consumers to producers of information (Bruns, 2008; & Gauntlett, 2011). Currently, there is shift towards becoming managers of personal networks and identity. 

The quantification and promotion of one's online identity represents a trend towards identity branding and management (Hearn, 2008; Marwick, 2010; & Senft, 2008). Identity branding involves developing, harnessing, and classifying personal information to promote a marketable identity to others. 

Identity branding has changed shape most significantly due to the introduction of social media. Today, identity branding relies on a combination of the presentation of self offline, as well as, the presentation of self in online environments. Part of the branding process involves a commodification of the self to position oneself as a commodity in consumer capitalism. 

A new locale for identity branding has emerged with the introduction of social media analytics. Social influence platforms utilize complex social media analytics to simplify and quantify an individual's online activities to a numeric score. The score identifies online influence by measuring one's ability to drive the actions of others. Klout is widely recognized as the most prominent social influence platform. A detailed algorithm calculates influence and outreach whereby online activities are associated with different point values. A quantified social influence score acts as a reputation badge that represents and quantifies one's social value. 

In order to improve one's social influence score, people are encouraged to sync their various social networking sites to the social influence platform. Syncing online identities on a social influence platform forces various parts of a person's identity to be masked in favour of singular and stable identity (Donath & boyd, 2004). 

Social influence scores can create anxieties or shame as the social influence score can be used to evaluate a person's identity. People have pursued instrumental action in order to increase their social influence score and their perceived branded identity. Accordingly, if an individual does not labour at connecting one's social networking sites, then negative consequences can occur. This paper analyzes the intersection of identity branding and social influence scores to develop an understanding of the emergence of the "socially quantified self." 


References 
Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From production to produsage. New York, NY: Peter Lang. 
Donath, J., & boyd, d. (2004). Public displays of connection. BT Technology Journal, 22(4), 71–82. 
Gauntlett, D. (2011). Making is connecting: The social meaning of creativity from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. 
Hearn, A. (2008). ‘Meat, mask, burden’: Probing the contours of the ‘branded self’. Journal of Consumer Culture, 8(2), 197–217. 
Marwick, A., & boyd, d. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133. 
Senft, T. (2008). Camgirls: Celebrity & community in the age of social networks. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishers. 

Strengthening Offline Ties Online: Social Media, Games & Family BondingDr. Kelly BoudreauTechnoculture, Arts & Games Research CenterConcordia University, Montreal, CanadaDr. Mia Consalvo,Communication StudiesConcordia University, Montreal, CanadaAs families extend across the globe, social media sites have become a staple in maintainingfamilial bonds (Urista, Dong and Day, 2009; Vitak, Ellison and Steinfeld, 2011). Sites such asFacebook allow users to post status updates, upload pictures,and share online content. Forgeographically dispersed family members, this enables them to actively maintain social andfamilial ties from a distance. But family ties are developed through more than just the exchangeof personal information. Families bond through mundane activities on a daily basis; doing thedishes together, watching television or reading in the same room can strengthen a familial bond itenables them to ‘be’ together without having to exchange meaningful information. The meaningof the interaction does not necessarily stem from the action itself, but from the act of engagingwith each other (Orthner and Mancini, 1990). When families are geographically dispersed, theopportunity for this type of interaction is practically non-existent.

Traditionally, interactions across geographical distance occurred through phone calls usuallywith the intent to "catch up" or share news from each other’s lives. Skype and other visual onlinechat systems may have added the visual dynamic that contribute to family members feelingcloser to each other, but families do not typically "hang out" on the phone or on Skype withoutthe purpose to engage in conversation. With the increase popularity of online social networkgames, families that are separated by distance now have a space to engage in ‘low-impact’leisure interactions that have the ability to bring family members together yet does not rely on a‘meaningful’ exchange of information. Social network sites, and social network games morespecifically, provide families with a space of leisure where they can engage with each other in away that allows them to feel connected without the same level of purpose nor require the sametype of instantaneous interaction (Wen, Kow and Chen, 2011). Due to the asynchronous natureof social network sites (and games), when playing a social network game, players do not interactwith each other directly, in ‘real-time’. There is no need for conversation or direct interaction,yet, logging in to play with a family member has the potential to strengthen ties in much of thesame was as going over to an aunt’s house to tend to her garden, or taking care of a pet while ashe is away.

Our research on families and Facebook games has found that fundamentally, social networkgameplay for many family members is not so much about the game itself as it is aboutinteracting with each other in a less purposive way, allowing them to feel connected withoutnecessarily being actively engaged with each other. Social network games can also bridge thegap between generations, as grandparents and grandchildren play the same games, creating acommon interest for more direct interactions such as family visits and phone conversations.

This paper will present our findings from a qualitative study performed in 2012, which furthersupports and expands on these claims that online social network games offer family members anew space to bridge generation gaps, engage with each other across geography, and strengthenfamilial bonds.

References:
Orthner, D. K., & Mancini, J. A. (1990). Leisure impacts on family interaction andcohesion. Journal of Leisure Research, 22(2), 125-137.

Ulicsak, M., Wright, M., & Cranmer, S. (2011). Gaming in families: A literature review. Journalof Distance Education, 3, 026.

Urista, M. A., Dong, Q., & Day, K. D. (2009). Explaining why young adults use MySpace andFacebook through uses and gratifications theory. Human Communication, 12(2), 215-229.

Vitak, J., Ellison, N. B., & Steinfield, C. (2011, January). The ties that bond: Re-examining therelationship between Facebook use and bonding social capital. In System Sciences (HICSS), 201144th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 1-10). IEEE.

Wen, J., Kow, Y. M., & Chen, Y. (2011). Online games and family ties: Influences of socialnetworking game on family relationship. In P. Campos et al. (Eds.) INTERACT 2011, Part III,LCNS 6948. 250-264.

Wohn, D. Y., Lampe, C., Wash, R., Ellison, N., &. Vitak, J. (2011). The “S” in social networkgames: Initiating, maintaining, and enhancing relationships. Proceedings of the 44th HawaiiInternational Conference on Systems Science.

Having grown up with Facebook, today’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth use this social media platform when making life-changing decisions, such as whether or not to come out, and when engaging in everyday identity-shaping activities (Cooper & Dzara, 2010). This study, which will be completed in early summer, investigates online identity performance over time through twenty biographical interviews with young people ages 16-18 and analysis of their Facebook profiles. Having used social network analysis to identify the most connected LGBTQ youth organisations in the UK that also use social media in their outreach, participants were recruited in collaboration with these organisations in order to provide young people with a voice regarding their experiences. Their accounts include the benefits, challenges, strategies, and risks involved in using social networking sites (SNSs) to establish and express a LGBTQ identity. 

Focusing on this subset of the population for whom impression management is often intensified creates a lens through which previous studies of affordances of SNSs (Hogan, 2010; Marwick & Boyd, 2011) can be extended. Certain features of SNSs lead to the convergence of social, temporal, and spatial contexts (boyd, 2011). The resulting context collapse, where unintended audiences are privy to untailored performances, complicates identity display as family, friends, co-workers, and acquaintances all receive the same performance. This lack of boundaries presents a new kind of social environment necessitating a transformation of Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgy as it is applied in understanding social interactions on SNSs. Preliminary work indicates that individual agency in identity-shaping practices is complicated by Facebook’s structure in combination with the actions of one’s online network. Despite individuals’ efforts to wipe their profile of identifying information, contacts draw conclusions from the myriad of information available, only some of which can be controlled, and even form inferences from missing information, such as a blank interested in section. Even individuals who have disclosed their LGBTQ identity to all contacts still have difficulty tailoring performances of ‘being out’ and experience misinterpretation of their identity. Although context collapse appears to occur most severely for those who have differentially disclosed their gender or sexual orientation across online audiences, it affects many individuals with different approaches to identity display. 

These challenges, when contrasted with opportunities SNSs present for developing and communicating identity, provide a deeper understanding of the experience of navigating the social landscape of Facebook than that of mainstream media discourses, which portray coming out online as easy, simple, and instantaneous. Instead, individuals’ unique social networks combine with the structure of SNSs and the complexities of impression management to create an on-going process of applying strategies and techniques to express a desired self. This research intersects with broader issues including online privacy, bullying, and youth outreach strategies employing SNSs. The findings also have implications for all Facebook users, as the site’s decontextualized environment becomes part of their biography and life-defining moments while posing on-going challenges for everyday impression management. 


References 

boyd, d. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (pp. 39–58). New York and London: Routledge. 

Cooper, M., & Dzara, K. (2010). The Facebook revolution: LGBT identity and activism. In C. Pullen & M. Cooper (Eds.), LGBT Identity and Online New Media (pp. 100–112). New York: Routledge. 

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, AT: Doubleday. 

Hogan, B. (2010). The presentation of self in the age of social media: Distinguishing performances and exhibitions online. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 30(6), 377–386. doi:10.1177/0270467610385893

Marwick, A., & boyd, d. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133. 

Introduction: This paper describes the relationship between the language people use in tweets in a Twitter smoking cessation group and being successfully quit (abstinent) for 60 days. This paper uses a semantic network methodology by comparing the semantic network of tweets of abstinent individuals to the semantic network of non-abstinent individuals. The method presented here may be used for sentiment or content analysis in other online conversations, including contexts with large textual datasets. 

Sample: Adults in the United States who smoked at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetime and who smoked 5 or more cigarettes per day were included. Participants averaged 20 cigarettes/day (SD=9) and 18 years of smoking (SD=10). Participants were recruited online through Google AdWords, were asked to participate in one of two 12-week online Twitter support groups and were provided nicotine replacement therapy as an incentive for their participation (Ngroup1=20 with Ntweetsgroup1=1,125, Ngroup2=20 with Ntweetsgroup2=1,782). 

Methods: Two basic analyses were completed comparing the semantic network of tweets produced by 60-day abstinent participants and non-abstinent participants: 1) analyses comparing the actual terms used (frequency and betweenness centrality) and 2) descriptive analyses comparing the underlying network structure. Stopwords (e.g. the, at) were removed and a synonym set was created to match roughly equivalent words (e.g. lol and lolol). Further, a unique category was created for a number of concepts including: group member names, number of days of successful quitting and number of puffs. Thus, when a person posted the number of days smoke-free (days_free), this was treated as equivalent in the semantic network analysis to any other post about days smoke-free. Automap (Carley & Diesner, 2005) was used to create the semantic network data, which were then converted into adjacency matrices and analyzed using UCINet (Borgatti, Everett, & Freeman, 2002). 

Results: All networks were sparse (density=0.04-0.06). All networks contained discrete clusters with one primary cluster containing most nodes. Emotional terms were typically supportive (lol, great, good) and were frequent across all networks. Participant name (PN) was most frequent across three of the four semantic networks (except in group 2 among those abstinent, where PN was ranked 6). PN also tended to have the high-normalized Freeman's betweenness centrality (NBet) (which is a measure of the shortest path between terms) (group1abstinent=18.01, group2abstinent=3.86, group1nonabstinent=16.16, group2nonabstinent=6.99). The messages sent by participants who reported a 60-day successful quit attempt contained proportionately more terms about the 1) number of days smoke-free (NBetgroup1=8.63 and NBetgroup2=3.43) and quitting related words, e.g. quit (NBetgroup1=7.52 and NBetgroup2=5.96). The messages sent by participants who did not have a successful 60-day quit attempt were more likely to include smoking words like smoking (NBetgroup1=7.19 and NBetgroup2=7.43) and smoke (NBetgroup1=5.82 and NBetgroup2=5.94). 

Discussion: Results suggested a relationship between how people talk about smoking cessation in an online forum and successful 60-day abstinence. Future analyses should test the relationship between early use of these terms and 60-day abstinence. Further, results suggest that this type of semantic network analysis may be a viable method for analyzing content or sentiment in Twitter data. 

Borgatti, S. P., Everett, M. G., & Freeman, L. C. (2002). Ucinet for Windows: Software for Social Network Analysis. Harvard, MA:: Analytic Technologies. 
Carley, K. M., & Diesner, J. (2005). AutoMap: Software for Network Text Analysis. 

Who are we when we’re online? How are networked practices of the self different from traditional institutional academic identities? This paper outlines an ongoing ethnographic exploration of identity practices in social media, and the implications of these practices for higher education. It will explore key aspects of social media identity within networked publics (boyd, 2011), including performativity, asynchronicity, quantification, and participation, and the ways in which these are fostered by the affordances of digital media (Stewart, 2012). 

This paper focuses on the ways people signal identity, credibility, and legitimacy in social media spaces: it then frames these emergent practices of produsage (Bruns, 2008) against the conventional hierarchies of identity roles and status on which academia operates. 

Both academia and social media can be said to be ‘reputational economies,’ (Willinksy, 2010; Hearn, 2010) but the terms and values by which reputations are built within the two environments are not identical. In online networks, roles and hierarchies tend to be more fluid than in institutional settings, and the division between personal and professional selves less rigid. Key distinctions include concepts of presence, privacy, time, and audience, as well as social cues governing the manner in which it is acceptable to talk about self and identity. 

Networked practices can create new opportunities for public engagement with ideas (Weller, 2011), but they demand the construction, performance and curation of intelligible public identities as a price of admission. The signals by which this construction and curation are shared and taken up, however, may not be visible to individuals not acculturated to these practices: they require, in effect, a form of immersive literacy (Savin-Badin, Gourlay Tombs, Steils, Tombs, & Mawer, 2010). This paper will outline common practices and literacies enacted within spheres of networked self-presentation. It will identify strategies utilized by networked identities to signal legitimacy and credibility, and compare these with parallel practices within academia. Distinctions will be framed both in terms of the differing affordances of online and offline interactions and between neoliberal and institutional ideals of the self. 

Stewart is a Ph.D candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of Prince Edward Island: her research draws on more than seven years in blogging and Twitter communities, as well as other networked publics. 

References: 
boyd, d. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.). A networked self: Identity, community, and culture, pp. 39-58. New York, NY: Routledge. 

Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From production to produsage. New York, NY: Peter Lang. 

Hearn, A. (2010). Structuring feeling: Web 2.0, online ranking and rating, and the digital reputation economy. ephemera, 10 (3/4), pp. 421-438. 

Savin-Badin, M., Gourlay, L., Tombs, C. , Steils, N., Tombs, G., & Mawer, M. (2010). Situating pedagogies, positions, and practices in immersive virtual worlds. Educational Research, 52 (2), pp. 123-133. 

Stewart, B. (2012). Digital identities: Six key selves of networked publics. Blog post, retrieved from http://theory.cribchronicles.com/2012/05/06/digital-identities-six-key-selves/. 

Weller, M. (2011). The digital scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice. Bloomsbury. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781849666275 

Willinsky, J. (2010). Open access and academic reputation. Annals of Library & Information Studies, vol. 57, pp. 296-302. 

More and more young people around the world are using social media services, mobile apps, and other digital communication technologies to produce, share, and comment on videos, photos, podcasts, and text-based resources in order to effect change in a collaborative community capacity. While the meanings of their productions often seem to drown 'in a sea of moral panic', in this chapter we start with the premise that social media trends and the sheer volume of data produced by youth-driven online activity are compelling reasons for researchers to tap into what young people are saying about their own well-being through social media. We are particularly interested in the ways in which social media practices might link to sexual health and policy dialogue. In this paper we focus on ways of studying the social networking practices of girls and young women between the ages of 15 and 18 specifically in relation to their sexual health, and in so doing, we work with one key question: What methodologies are appropriate for exploring these practices and to what extent can girls and young women themselves lead the process? While there are many social networking sites and organizations addressing the sexual health and well-being of adolescent girls, we are particularly interested in the ways in which an analysis of girls' participation on arts-focused sites can deepen an understanding of critical issues linked to reproductive health. 

Responding to our main question by looking at a case study of an arts-based advocacy platform Youth, the Arts, HIV & AIDS Network (YAHAnet.org), we examine how this online platform is being accessed and used, how it generates engagement — especially the engagement of girls and young women. In our roles as founder (Claudia) and coordinator (John) of YAHAnet, we offer a gender analysis of the site, looking in particular at the relationship between its online and on-site activities, and what implications exist for expanding our repertoire of methodologies for shedding new light on how girls and young women can be meaningfully engaged in policy dialogue about sexual health through social media.

Select Bibliography

Mitchell, C. (in press). Girls’ texts, visual culture and shifting the boundaries of knowledge in social justice research. In C. Bradford and M. Reimer (Eds.), Girls, cultures, texts. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press. 

Mitchell, C., Low, B., & Hoechsmann, M. (2008). Social networks for social change: YAHAnet goes live. South Africa Gender and Media Diversity Journal, 4, 118-124.

Mitchell, C. & Murray, J. (2012). Social networking practices and youth advocacy efforts in HIV awareness and prevention: What does methodology have to do with it?. Educational Research and Social Change. 1(2), 26-40.

Mitchell, C., Pascarella, J., De Lange, N., & Stuart, J. (2010). “We wanted other people to learn from us”: Girls blogging in rural South Africa in the age of AIDS. In S. Mazzarella (Ed.), Girl wide web 2.0: Revising girls, the internet and the negotiation of identity (pp. 161-182). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Mitchell, C., Reid-Walsh, J., & Pithouse, K. (2004). “And what are you reading, Miss? Oh, it is only a website”. Digital technology as a South African teen’s guide to HIV/AIDS. Convergence, 10(1), 191-202.

Murray, J. (2013, April). Finding the right storyline: Creative sexual health awareness and behaviour change through a collaborative youth platform. Presentation at YTHLive Conference, San Francisco, CA.

Stuart, J., & Mitchell, C. (2013). Media and Social Change: working within a “Youth as Knowledge Producers” framework. In D. Lemish (Ed.), Handbook on children, adolescents and media studies. London, England: Routledge.

Self-paid: see the enclosed list of suggested eateries nearby. Please budget enough time to return by 13:30

Parallel Sessions 4 (15 min presentation + 5 min Q&A per speaker)

“Are we there yet? A comparison of micro-blogging activities in public organizations from a community engagement perspective”, Mary Cavanagh (University of Ottawa, Canada) and Luanne Freund (University of British Columbia, Canada).

“Followers, users and friends: Social media hype and reality within the Google, Facebook, and Twitter blogs 2006-2011”, Jaigris Hodson (Ryerson University, Canada).

“The practice of network journalism by “less ‘elite’” newsprint outlets”, David Montez (Florida State University, United States).

 

Parallel Sessions (15 min presentation + 5 min Q&A per speaker)

“Selfies and Avatars for Change”, Mona Kasra (University of Texas at Dallas, United States).

“An ethnographic study of the re-conceptualization of opinion leadership via Twitter amongst Egyptian revolutionaries in the post-Jan25 revolution era” Hend Abd Almotagally (Cairo University, Egypt).

“Identifying the opinion leader: Influence, Twitter, and Canadian politics”, Elizabeth Dubois (University of Oxford, United Kingdom) and Devin Gaffney (Little Bird, United States).

 

The purpose of this research is to examine the move towards social media as a platform for engagement between government agencies at the national and local levels and their publics, addressing a gap in micro-blogging research (Chun and Reyes, 2012; Medaglia, 2012; Sandoval-Almazan and Gil-Garcia, 2012). Overly complex social media policies, bureaucratic control processes (Marlin-Bennett and Thornton, 2012), and legislative protections of user privacy (Fyfe and Crookall, 2010; Klang and Nolin, 2011) constrain many government initiated online engagement efforts (Mergel, 2013; Nam, 2012). 

We report on preliminary findings of a comparative content analysis into how federal government departments and municipally funded local public libraries use Twitter to inform, interact with and engage with their citizen-publics. From the government and public library perspectives, community engagement has been represented along a hypothetical spectrum of participation (Sheedy, 2008). Critical activities range from communicating to consulting, engaging and partnering. Social media participation across citizen-institution boundaries can also be characterized with this framework. We address the following research questions: What kinds of communicative acts are taking place via Twitter, and where do they sit on the continuum of community engagement? Is Twitter used differently by national and municipal public organizations? 

Twitter samples were collected for a two week period in May 2012 from two sources. The federal government sample (G1) was collected using the Twitter API through the DiscoverText system. All outgoing English language tweets from 10 federal departments and all tweets that mentioned those departments using @username were collected using scheduled feeds, resulting in a dataset of 2604 tweets. The municipal public library sample (G2) was collected using the Twitter API through Social-Biblio.ca an online open archive of Twitter feeds of 133 (21%) Canadian public libraries. G2 (N=1290) represents all tweet and mentions from the top 10 most frequently tweeting public libraries during this two-week period. Data analysis consisted of manual content analysis using a coding scheme adapted from Lovejoy & Saxton (2012). Tweets from each data set were coded by multiple coders according to a framework organized along three dimensions: a) information; b) interaction and c) action. 

Data analysis is still in progress and full results will be available at the time of the symposium. Preliminary analysis indicates that the majority of organizational tweets are informational in nature, focused on sharing and broadcasting information about current and ongoing activities of the organizations. Department followers are frequently retweeting this information, but a wider range of motivations can be found in the public tweets. Library tweets show more frequent occurrence of 'interaction' and 'action'-oriented tweets than federal government departments. Findings suggest Twitter is being used primarily to reinforce traditional modes of communication. Until institutional 'voices' that reach beyond traditional public relations and marketing styles of communication and information can be developed, the broadcast mode of interaction will continue to dominate these types of interactions. Informing citizens does not, by itself, constitute civic engagement. Questions about how to more rigorously theorize the study of these information behaviours are also invited by this work. 

References 

Chun, S. A. and L. F. Luna Reyes (2012). "Social media in government." Government Information Quarterly 29(4): 441-445. 

Fyfe, T. and P. Crookall (2010). Social media and public sector policy dilemmas. Toronto ON, Institute of Public Administration of Canada. 

Klang, M. and J. Nolin, (2011). "Disciplining social media: An analysis of social media policies in 26 Swedish municipalities." First Monday 16(8) Retrieved on 29 January 2012 and available at http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3490/3027

Lovejoy, K. and G. D. Saxton (2012). "Information, community, and action: How nonprofit organizations use social media." Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 17: 337-353. 

Marlin-Bennett, R. and E. N. Thornton (2012). "Governance within social media websites: Ruling new frontiers." Telecommunications Policy 36(6): 493-501. 

Medaglia, R. (2012). "eParticipation research: Moving characterization forward (2006–2011)." Government Information Quarterly 29(3): 346-360. 

Mergel, I. (2013). Social Media in the Public Sector: A Guide to Participation, Collaboration and Transparency. San Francisco CA, Jossey-Bass. 

Nam, T. (2012). “Suggesting Frameworks of Citizen Sourcing via Government 2.0.” Government Information Quarterly 29(1):12–20. 

Sandoval-Almazan, R. and J. R. Gil-Garcia (2012). "Are government internet portals evolving towards more interaction, participation, and collaboration? Revisiting the rhetoric of e-government among municipalities." Government Information Quarterly 29, Supplement 1(0): S72-S81 

Sheedy, A. (2008). Handbook on Citizen Engagement: Beyond Consultation. Ottawa, ON, Canadian Policy Research Networks. 

In recent years, the near-ubiquitous connectivity of social networks and the latest portable and internet-enabled technological systems that store, organize, and share information have provided global citizens with tools that allow visual recording, remixing, and sharing of personal and collective experiences. These tools also facilitate instant interaction and interconnection with others across the globe. As the participatory and instantaneous qualities of these new technologies are expediting the process of documentation and dissemination of observations and thoughts, citizens are turning into what new media theorist Howard Rheingold refers to as “smart mobs” composed of people who quickly communicate, organize, and mobilize in relation to the events surrounding them. 

Given the visibility, popularity, and the exchange volume of eyewitness mobile photographs, selfies, and political Internet memes, it appears that digital images, coupled with social media technologies, are reconstructing the extent of public awareness and action against sociopolitical affairs worldwide. Media studies scholars have extensively written about the impact of media and communication technologies on human consciousness and culture. For instance, analyzing the change of scale and pace that print and electronic media introduced into human affairs, Marshall McLuhan suggests that every medium restructures society not by virtue of the content it transmits, but by the degree to which it carries that content across time and space (McLuhan 2003). As social media technology fosters an instantaneous image-base communication among the public, the sociopolitical restructuring of our time seems to be happening at a larger scale and a faster momentum.

The new paradigm in our visual culture, saturated with digital, networked images, perhaps best represented itself during the major social uprisings of the twenty-first century including the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement. Images of police officer John Pike casually shooting a pepper spray onto a group of seated student protesters or images of Neda Agha-Soltan brutally murdered on the sidewalks in the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election in 2009 impacted public conversations and collective actions around such important sociopolitical events. By registering, reordering, and instantly revealing personal observations and opinions, digital images continue to reconfigure the viewers’ personal and collective reactions to the events depicted. Similarly, the proliferation and near-instantaneity of image-based “I am X” campaigns are offering global citizens with the opportunity to react and intervene with global affairs as they happen. 

As images are gradually advancing beyond testimonial documentation and into tools for visual, political expression, the function, impact, and politics of the twenty-first century image, particularly its effects on social and political matters, need to be explored further. Thus this paper examines recent mage-based online campaigns for social change to shed light on the power of the digital networked image on human affairs.

Jane Singer’s foundational study (2005) examining the use of blogs among political journalists in mainstream media outlets found that journalists largely sought to maintain established norms and rules within the profession, while also limiting the participatory potential of the blogging platform. The emergence of new ‘nonmarket actors’ (Benkler, 2006) utilizing low-cost communication technologies to gather, produce and disseminate information is challenging the gatekeeper role of professional journalism. The quandary for journalists and media outlets is how to negotiate the now scattered traditional and alternative information nodes in the production of news. This study will examine, through content analysis, how individual journalists and media outlets are navigating this changing market of information exchange. Heinrich’s (2011) ‘network journalism’ model will provide the framework for examining the research subjects’ behavior within the Twitter social network platform. 

Recent research has shown that journalists affiliated with "less 'elite'" or state-level media outlets were more likely to interact with other tweeters and refer to the work of other media outlets compared to those working for national mainstream media outlets (Lasora et al, 2012). This study will seek to test this finding by examining the behavior of the official Twitter accounts of the top three newsprint outlets and top five most followed journalists of these outlets within three major media markets in the state of Florida (Orlando, Tampa-St. Petersburg, and Miami-South Florida). Gathering information about how news media outlets and journalists are adapting to interactive digital media allows us to evaluate their prospective ability to respond to public needs and tap into the power of the crowd. The conference presentation will report whether Lasora et al’s finding holds true, with a specific interest in how journalists may be using Twitter to gather critical information. 

The 25th of January Egyptian revolution provides a culture-in-the-making context. The incomplete moment is worth documentation. As the whole Egyptian society's constant concepts are challenged, media studies are facing the challenge of dealing with the sophisticated sphere of communication; the empowered fragmented audience, new media tools including the social networks, and most importantly updating media-audience relationship theories. Among the cultural changes is the appearance of the so-called, the "Global Generation;" as stated by Addel A. Shah and Sheheryar T. Sardar. Segment of the Egyptian population belong to this generation. They left Tahrir Square (and its counterparts all over Egypt) packed with the Tahririan spirit and style of communication which is based on equality, freedom of expression, objectivity, transparency, and the collective actions. As Tweeps, those users challenged the old perceptions about media means audience/users. 

This study applies the two-step-flow-of-information model within an ethnographic approach (Being There) to explore the two-step-flow of information model for reconceptualizing opinion leadership via Twitter in the post-Jan25 revolution era. The study is inspired by the 25th of January revolution that shacked many of the taken-forgranted theories and concepts. As an Egyptian researcher, conducting this paper aims at providing an academic paper representing a closer look, more real at the doers of the so-called Arab Spring. 

The study belongs to the new trend in media-audience studies claiming that with media convergence, 'the user is the tool,' and 'the sender becomes the message.' The data collection tools are (a) seven months of participant-observation conducted on a purposive sample of approximately 400 Egyptian tweeps, (b) online semi-structured interviews conducted with a purposive sub-sample of eighteen tweeps, and (c) seventy online questionnaires. 

Four major concepts were domestically examined; opinion leaders, leaders-followers relationship, linear versus circular flow-of-information, and the role of Twitter in the flow-of-information in post-Jan25 revolution era. 

Studies have attempted to identify influential users on Twitter and within givenTwitter communities. Studies tend to identify influentials as those users who are themost popular (Cha & Gummadi, 2010), the most talked about (Bakshy, Hofman,Watts, & Mason, 2011), or, the instigators of the longest cascades of information(Lerman & Ghosh, 2010). While this has proven effective for identifying what Rogers(2010) would call “influentials” in the diffusion of innovations process, and may sufficefor market researchers looking to send a message to the widest possible public (Watts& Dodds, 2007; Hill, Provost, & Volinsky, 2006), these techniques do little to identifyinfluence on a more local/personal level.

Katz and Lazarsfeld (2006) describe the “opinion leader” as a person able tochange the opinions, attitudes, and/or behaviors of their “everyday associates” (Katz,1957). Opinion leaders use social pressure and social support to exert personal in-fluence. These locally influential individuals are important because they help guidepolitical discussion, integral to the strength of democracy (Dillard, Segrin, & Harden,1989; Mutz, 2006). Further, from word-of-mouth advertising (Li & Du, 2011; Bakshyet al., 2011) to get-out-the-vote campaigns (Middleton, 2006), it has been shown thatpersonal connection increases the chances of a target buying a product or going tovote.

Given the importance of these opinion leaders and relative lack of literature onthe topic this study aims to answer two main questions:

Who are the “opinion leaders” within two Canadian political Twitter communi-ties?Which methods most effectively identify and distinguish users from being either“influentials”, “opinion leaders”, or “followers”?

Responding to these questions, we collected all tweets containing the hashtags#CPC (Conservative Party of Canada, Government) and #NDP (New DemocraticParty of Canada, Official Opposition) over a two week period. From this set, weemployed a qualitative analysis to eliminate users not discussing Canadian politics. We selected the Canadian political Twittersphere given the lack of current researchon influencers within this community, and because, while active, the community issmall enough to conduct meaningful qualitative analysis which serves as our baselinefor comparison.


In order to identify opinion leaders, we first classify users as “influentials,” “opin-ion leaders,” “followers,” or “not political” based on their profiles and most recenttweets. We then use other methods of identifying opinion leaders in order to illustratesimilarities and differences and to assess which methods are most effective.

Self-identification is the traditional mode of identifying opinion leaders (Katz &Lazarsfeld, 2006), and continues to be used in recent work (Norris & Curtice, 2008).We implement this by sending links to a short online survey to all users withinthe network. Measures of indegree (Cha & Gummadi, 2010; Java, Song, Finin, &Tseng, 2007; Romero & Kleinberg, 2010), eigenvector centrality (Weitzel, Quaresma,& Oliveira, 2012; Bigonha, Cardoso, Moro, Almeida, & Gon¸calves, 2010) (socialnetwork analysis), user interaction, and user information sharing with others (Lotanet al., 2011)(content analysis) are methods adapted from studies of network wideinfluential identification. Finally, the clustering coefficient (Lerman & Ghosh, 2010;Java et al., 2007) (social network analysis) is used as an operationalization of thenotion of being socially embedded in ones local community.


We find that each measure has its strengths and weaknesses both in terms ofaccuracy and practical feasibility. Our findings suggest that there are multiple kindsof opinion leaders.

References

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Bigonha, C., Cardoso, T. N., Moro, M. M., Almeida, V. A., & Gon¸calves, M. A. (2010).Detecting evangelists and detractors on twitter. In 18th brazilian symposium onmultimedia and the web (pp. 107–114).
Cha, M., & Gummadi, K. P. (2010). Measuring User Influence in Twitter : The MillionFollower Fallacy. , 10–17.
Dillard, J., Segrin, C., & Harden, J. (1989). Primary and secondary goals in the productionof interpersonal influence messages. Communication Monographs, 56 , 19–38.
Hill, S., Provost, F., & Volinsky, C. (2006). Network-based marketing: Identifying likelyadopters via consumer networks. Statistical Science, 21 (2), 256–276.
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Katz, E., & Lazarsfeld, P. F. (2006). Personal Influence: The Part Played by People inthe Flow of Mass Communications. Transaction Publishers.
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Visit the Dalhousie Social Media Lab and learn more about our research!
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Visit the Dalhousie Social Media Lab and learn more about our research!
Please RSVP via this website. Space is limited!