Ethics and social networking sites: A disclosive analysis of Facebook

Paper has been accepted for publication in Information, Technology and People.Purpose: This paper provides insights into the moral values embodied by a popular social networking site (SNS), Facebook. We adopt the position that technology as well as humans has a moral character in order to disclose ethical concerns that are not transparent to users of the site. Design/methodology/approach: This study is based upon qualitative field work, involving participant observation, conducted over a two year period. Findings: Much research on the ethics of information systems has focused on the way that people deploy particular technologies, and the consequences arising, with a view to making policy recommendations and ethical interventions. By focusing on technology as a moral actor with reach across and beyond the Internet, we reveal the complex and diffuse nature of ethical responsibility in our case and the consequent implications for governance of SNS. Research limitations/implications: We situate our research in a body of work known as disclosive ethics and argue for an ongoing process of evaluating SNS to reveal their moral importance. Along with other authors in the genre, our work is largely descriptive, but we engage with prior research by Brey and Introna to highlight the scope for theory development. Practical implications: Governance measures that require the developers of social networking sites to revise their designs fail to address the diffuse nature of ethical responsibility in this case. Such technologies need to be opened up to scrutiny on a regular basis to increase public awareness of the issues and thereby disclose concerns to a wider audience. We suggest that there is value in studying the development and use of these technologies in their infancy, or if established, in the experiences of novice users. Furthermore, flash points in technological trajectories can prove useful sites of investigation. Originality/value: Existing research on social networking sites either fails to address ethical concerns head on or adopts a tool view of the technologies so that the focus is on the ethical behaviour of users. We focus upon the agency, and hence the moral character, of technology to show both the possibilities for, and limitations of, ethical interventions in such cases

Exploratory Analysis of Pairwise Interactions in Online Social Networks

In the last few decades sociologists were trying to explain human behaviour by analysing social networks, which requires access to data about interpersonal relationships. This represented a big obstacle in this research field until the emergence of online social networks (OSNs), which vastly facilitated the process of collecting such data. Nowadays, by crawling public profiles on OSNs, it is possible to build a social graph where "friends" on OSN become represented as connected nodes. OSN connection does not necessarily indicate a close real-life relationship, but using OSN interaction records may reveal real-life relationship intensities, a topic which inspired a number of recent researches. Still, published research currently lacks an extensive exploratory analysis of OSN interaction records, i.e. a comprehensive overview of users' interaction via different ways of OSN interaction. In this paper we provide such an overview by leveraging results of conducted extensive social experiment which managed to collect records for over 3,200 Facebook users interacting with over 1,400,000 of their friends. Our exploratory analysis focuses on extracting population distributions and correlation parameters for 13 interaction parameters, providing valuable insight in online social network interaction for future researches aimed at this field of study.Comment: Journal Article published 2 Oct 2017 in Automatika volume 58 issue 4 on pages 422 to 42

Students and instant messaging: a survey of current use and demands for higher education

Instant messaging (IM) is the term used to describe the technology through which ‘users can set up a list of partners who will be able to receive notes that pop up on their screens the moment one of them writes and hits the send button’. While early use could be described as mainly for fun, IM today is a serious communication medium. Remarkably, it seems that educational institutions have been doing very little with it, while several studies indicate that it could indeed be a valuable tool in education. As a first step towards a better understanding of the educational use of IM, we want to gain insights in how students currently use IM and what opportunities they themselves see for the medium. To that end we conducted a survey among students of the Fontys University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands. A large majority of the participating students indicated using IM for their studies. Also, when asked about their demands for a possible educational implementation, the majority were positive

Object-oriented cohesion as a surrogate of software comprehension: An empirical study

The concept of software cohesion in both the procedural and object-oriented paradigm is well known and documented. What is not so well known or documented is the perception of what empirically constitutes a cohesive 'unit' by software engineers. In this paper, we describe an empirical investigation using object-oriented (OO) classes as a basis. Twenty-four subjects (drawn from IT experienced and IT inexperienced groups) were asked to rate ten classes sampled from two industrial systems in terms of their overall cohesiveness; a class environment was used to carry out the study. Four key results were observed. Firstly, class size (when expressed in terms of number of methods) did not tend to influence the perception of cohesion by any subjects. Secondly, well-commented classes were rated most highly amongst both IT experienced and inexperienced subjects. Thirdly, the empirical study suggests that cohesion comprises a combination of various class factors including low coupling, small numbers of attributes and well-commented methods, rather than any single, individual class feature per se. Finally, the research supports the view that cohesion is a subjective concept reflecting a cognitive combination of class features; as such it is a surrogate for class comprehension

Modelling Requirements for Content Recommendation Systems

This paper addresses the modelling of requirements for a content Recommendation System (RS) for Online Social Networks (OSNs). On OSNs, a user switches roles constantly between content generator and content receiver. The goals and softgoals are different when the user is generating a post, as opposed as replying to a post. In other words, the user is generating instances of different entities, depending on the role she has: a generator generates instances of a "post", while the receiver generates instances of a "reply". Therefore, we believe that when addressing Requirements Engineering (RE) for RS, it is necessary to distinguish these roles clearly. We aim to model an essential dynamic on OSN, namely that when a user creates (posts) content, other users can ignore that content, or themselves start generating new content in reply, or react to the initial posting. This dynamic is key to designing OSNs, because it influences how active users are, and how attractive the OSN is for existing, and to new users. We apply a well-known Goal Oriented RE (GORE) technique, namely i-star, and show that this language fails to capture this dynamic, and thus cannot be used alone to model the problem domain. Hence, in order to represent this dynamic, its relationships to other OSNs' requirements, and to capture all relevant information, we suggest using another modelling language, namely Petri Nets, on top of i-star for the modelling of the problem domain. We use Petri Nets because it is a tool that is used to simulate the dynamic and concurrent activities of a system and can be used by both practitioners and theoreticians.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure

Evaluating Security and Usability of Profile Based Challenge Questions Authentication in Online Examinations

© 2014 Ullah et al.; licensee Springer. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.Student authentication in online learning environments is an increasingly challenging issue due to the inherent absence of physical interaction with online users and potential security threats to online examinations. This study is part of ongoing research on student authentication in online examinations evaluating the potential benefits of using challenge questions. The authors developed a Profile Based Authentication Framework (PBAF), which utilises challenge questions for students’ authentication in online examinations. This paper examines the findings of an empirical study in which 23 participants used the PBAF including an abuse case security analysis of the PBAF approach. The overall usability analysis suggests that the PBAF is efficient, effective and usable. However, specific questions need replacement with suitable alternatives due to usability challenges. The results of the current research study suggest that memorability, clarity of questions, syntactic variation and question relevance can cause usability issues leading to authentication failure. A configurable traffic light system was designed and implemented to improve the usability of challenge questions. The security analysis indicates that the PBAF is resistant to informed guessing in general, however, specific questions were identified with security issues. The security analysis identifies challenge questions with potential risks of informed guessing by friends and colleagues. The study was performed with a small number of participants in a simulation online course and the results need to be verified in a real educational context on a larger sample sizePeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Marketing in Online Businesses:The Case of Migrant Entrepreneurial Businesses in the UK

The study presents an empirical investigation of the marketing activities undertaken by online businesses owned by migrant entrepreneurs and is framed by the theoretical lens of entrepreneurial marketing. Key informant interviews are undertaken with 22 entrepreneurs operating online businesses in the UK and augmented by other sources of data. The study finds that the resources available to the entrepreneurs are shaped by their migrant heritage and that they draw on these resources to market their online businesses. The study also finds that, consistent with notions from entrepreneurial marketing, the online nature of their businesses allow the entrepreneurs to meet their own needs and preferences, which are also shaped by their migrant heritage. The study is important since it provides empirical evidence and a theoretically grounded understanding of how online businesses offer migrant entrepreneurs the opportunity to break out of the low growth, low margin, vacancy chain openings and enter high growth, high margin, post-industrial sectors

The urban screen as a socialising platform: exploring the role of place within the urban space

In this paper we explore shared encounters mediated by technologies in the urban space. We investigate aspects that influence the interactions between people and people and people and their surroundings when technology is introduced in the urban space. We highlight the importance of space and the role of place in providing temporal and spatial mechanisms facilitating different types of social interactions and shared encounters. An emperical experiment was condeucted with a prototype that was implemented in the form of a digital screen, embeded in the physical surrounding in selected locations with low, medium and high pedestrian flows in the heritage City of Bath, UK. The aim is to create a novel urban experience that triggers shared encounters among friends, observers or strangers. Using the body as an interaface, the screen acted as a non-traditional interface and a facilitator between people and people and people and their surrounding environment. Here we outline early findings from deploying the digital screen as a socialiasing platform in a city context. We describe the user experience and demonstrate how people move, congregate and socialize around the digital surface. We illustrate the impact of the spatial and syntactical properties on the type of shared interactions in and highlight related issues. The initial findings indicated that introducing a digital platform as a public interactive installation in the urban space may provide a stage for emergent social interactions among various people and motivate users to actively and collaboratively play with the media. However, situating the digital platform in various locations, and depending on the context, might generate diverse and unpredicted social behaviours designers might be unaware of. In this respect we believe that the final experience is shaped by interconnection of structural, social, cultural, temporal and perhaps personal elements. We conclude by mentioning briefly our on going work