Did Facebook absorb freewill?

Previous studies on social networking sites have failed to address comprehensively the level of efficacy and role of peer influences in the rise in membership levels of this new communication innovation. This study assessed the level of social influences at play in college students` decision to participate on Facebook. Online and postal surveys were sent to undergraduate students of a Northeastern institution of higher education to obtain self-reported of levels of perceived peer pressure influencing their participation on Facebook. The data collected were used to test a new theory of social conformity. No relationship was found between time spent on Facebook in a typical week and peer pressure

Beyond Information: The Role of Territory in Privacy Management Behavior on Social Networking Sites

This study draws on communication privacy management theory to explore aspects of social networking sites (SNSs) that may influence individual privacy management behaviors and conceptualizes two behaviors for managing privacy on SNSs: private disclosure (for managing information privacy) and territory coordination (for managing territory privacy). Evidence from two studies of SNS members indicates that perceptions of trespassing over agreed-upon virtual boundaries within SNSs affects risk beliefs regarding information privacy and territory privacy differently. These distinct privacy risk beliefs, in turn, influence two privacy management behaviors. Theoretically, this study demonstrates that a more complete conceptualization of individual privacy management on SNSs should consider both information privacy and territory privacy; and that territory coordination is a more significant indicator of privacy management behaviors on SNSs than private disclosure. From a practical standpoint, this study provides guidance to SNS platform organizations on how to reduce individuals’ privacy risk beliefs, encourage users to share private information, and potentially build larger online communities

Internet and Smartphone Use-Related Addiction Health Problems: Treatment, Education and Research

This Special Issue presents some of the main emerging research on technological topics of health and education approaches to Internet use-related problems, before and during the beginning of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The objective is to provide an overview to facilitate a comprehensive and practical approach to these new trends to promote research, interventions, education, and prevention. It contains 40 papers, four reviews and thirty-five empirical papers and an editorial introducing everything in a rapid review format. Overall, the empirical ones are of a relational type, associating specific behavioral addictive problems with individual factors, and a few with contextual factors, generally in adult populations. Many have adapted scales to measure these problems, and a few cover experiments and mixed methods studies. The reviews tend to be about the concepts and measures of these problems, intervention options, and prevention. In summary, it seems that these are a global culture trend impacting health and educational domains. Internet use-related addiction problems have emerged in almost all societies, and strategies to cope with them are under development to offer solutions to these contemporary challenges, especially during the pandemic situation that has highlighted the global health problems that we have, and how to holistically tackle them

More or less equal : how digital platforms can help advance communication rights

Today's digital platforms offer the tantalizing possibility of learning and taking into account opinions from the margins that contradict the dominant voices in the public sphere. The concept of citizen journalism has radically altered traditional news and information flows, encouraging greater interaction and interdependence. What challenges does this development pose for societies worldwide? What ethical questions does it raise? This booklet explores these questions against a background of rapid technological change and with the aim of strengthening the communication rights of all people everywhere

Facebook Friendships between College/University Instructors and Students: Deciding Whether or Not to Allow Students as Friends, Communicating with Students, and the Individual Differences that Influence Instructors\u27 Impression Management on Facebook

This research examined Facebook friendships between college/university instructors and students. Based on the development of instructor-student dual relationships, this study described instructors’ Facebook use with students. This included explanations for allowing/not allowing students, communication with students, and ethical concerns. Rooted in the theories of impression management, self-monitoring and role conflict, plus the concept of ambient awareness, hypotheses predicted relationships between instructors’ individual differences and Facebook use: (1) self-monitoring would be positively related to role conflict; and (2) self-monitoring, (3) role conflict, and (4) ambient awareness would be positively related to instructors’ self-presentation, impression management behaviors, and privacy management. Emails were sent to faculty at 270 colleges/universities throughout the U.S. and 331 instructors completed the online survey. Of these, 56.2% allowed students as friends. Open-ended answers revealed that instructors allowed students as friends to communicate, to facilitate learning about each other, and because it was difficult to decline requests. Some instructors did not allow certain students (e.g., problematic students, undergraduates). They communicated by commenting on and liking posts on students’ pages, and had ethical concerns about negative consequences. Open-ended answers revealed that instructors did not allow students as friends to maintain the professional divide and avoid favoritism, which explained their ethical concerns. Hierarchical regression analyses tested the predicted relationships. Results revealed that self-monitoring approached significance as having a positive relationship with role conflict and a negative relationship with privacy management, but was not related to self-presentation or impression management behaviors. Role conflict was not related to impression management. Awareness of students was positively related to self-presentation and impression management behaviors, but unexpectedly, perception of students’ awareness of instructors was negatively related to privacy management. A partial correlation analysis tested high/low self-monitors separately and not only replicated the results, but also revealed that high self-monitors’ perception of students’ awareness was positively correlated with self-presentation and impression management behaviors. These findings indicate that ambient awareness is related to online communication and should be studied further. This is especially intriguing since the two types of ambient awareness related differently to the three types of impression management studied in this research

Headspace for parents: Using a mindfulness app to manage parenting stress

Parenting stress can influence children’s psychological adjustment. Some evidence suggests parenting stress is associated with, and ameliorated by, parental mindfulness. This thesis aimed to determine the magnitude and meaning of associations between parenting stress, parental mindfulness, and children’s adjustment outcomes. It is proposed child outcomes may improve following improvements in parental wellbeing by practising mindfulness. To test this, the effectiveness of a self-directed mindfulness app (Headspace—the collaborative partner) was evaluated with parents of children aged 2-5. Three projects addressed these aims. Project 1 scoped research investigating mindfulness and parenting, identifying gaps for digital, self-directed mindfulness interventions for parents of typically developing children. Project 2 aimed to address these gaps using a mixed methods approach to investigate the initial effectiveness of Headspace, aiming to understand the app’s acceptability and feasibility in parents’ daily lives. The qualitative results of Project 2 were preliminarily published in BJPsych Open, and are expanded on in Chapter 4. Due to confounding by COVID-19 (see review, Appendix O), the quantitative results of this project were not published but are described here in Chapter 5. Project 3 was intended to determine the feasibility of a more robust study testing Headspace, using an internal pilot randomised controlled trial design (see Chapter 6). Overall, this thesis suggests parents generally found Headspace feasible and acceptable, and some improvements were noted for wellbeing in both Projects 2 and 3. Qualitative reports indicated improvements in parental sleep and ability to manage stress, and—with caution—some quantitative support was found for improvements in sleep post-intervention in Project 3. Limited evidence for improvements in children’s adjustment were found, however, this thesis demonstrates the potential of Headspace for parent wellbeing. Future research might benefit from investigating relationships between parental mindfulness and sleep, particularly its potential to improve parents’ stress perceptions, in more diverse samples

The Effects of Day-to-Day Interaction via Social Network Sites on Interpersonal Relationships

The current research identifies the impact of sharing day-to-day information in social network sites (SNS) on the relationships we hold within and outside of them. Stemming from the literature on self-disclosure, uncertainty reduction, personal relationships, privacy and computer-mediated communication (CMC), a concurrent triangulation research strategy is adopted to identify the patterns of relationship development and interaction in SNS. Using a mixed methods approach, five studies were conducted to determine how young adults interact via SNS. Empirical findings suggest SNS users are driven by the need to reduce uncertainty and gather information about their interaction partners. An interaction between several factors was found to impact on relationships between communication partners: the frequency of information sharing; the content of the shared information; the type of relationship held between the sender and recipient; the stage of relationship development; the medium of communication, and; an expected social contract. A conceptual model of interpersonal interaction within SNS environments is proposed, identifying the links between sharing, certainty and relationship quality, and manifested communication behaviour throughout relationship development. Implications for the fields of communication science, CMC, and social and behavioural psychology are discussed.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy

There is no doubt that we live in exciting times: Ours is the age of many ‘silent revolutions’ triggered by startups and research labs of big IT companies; revolutions that quietly and profoundly alter the world we live in. Another ten or five years, and self-tracking will be as normal and inevitable as having a Facebook account or a mobile phone. Our bodies, hooked to wearable devices sitting directly at or beneath the skin, will constantly transmit data to the big aggregation in the cloud. Permanent recording and automatic sharing will provide unabridged memory, both shareable and analyzable. The digitization of everything will allow for comprehensive quantification; predictive analytics and algorithmic regulation will prove themselves effective and indispensable ways to govern modern mass society. Given such prospects, it is neither too early to speculate on the possible futures of digital media nor too soon to remember how we expected it to develop ten, or twenty years ago. The observations shared in this book take the form of conversations about digital media and culture centered around four distinct thematic fields: politics and government, algorithm and censorship, art and aesthetics, as well as media literacy and education. Among the keywords discussed are: data mining, algorithmic regulation, sharing culture, filter bubble, distant reading, power browsing, deep attention, transparent reader, interactive art, participatory culture. The interviewees (mostly from the US, but also from France, Brazil, and Denmark) were given a set of common questions as well specific inquiries tailored to their individual areas of interest and expertise. As a result, the book both identifies different takes on the same issues and enables a diversity of perspectives when it comes to the interviewees’ particular concerns. Among the questions offered to everybody were: What is your favored neologism of digital media culture? If you could go back in history of new media and digital culture in order to prevent something from happening or somebody from doing something, what or who would it be? If you were a minister of education, what would you do about media literacy? What is the economic and political force of personalization and transparency in digital media and what is its personal and cultural cost? Other recurrent questions address the relationship between cyberspace and government, the Googlization, quantification and customization of everything, and the culture of sharing and transparency. The section on art and aesthetics evaluates the former hopes for hypertext and hyperfiction, the political facet of digital art, the transition from the “passive” to “active” and from “social” to “transparent reading”; the section on media literacy discusses the loss of deep reading, the prospect of “distant reading” and “algorithmic criticism” as well as the response of the university to the upheaval of new media and the expectations or misgivings towards the rise of the Digital Humanities

Towards Our Common Digital Future. Flagship Report.

In the report “Towards Our Common Digital Future”, the WBGU makes it clear that sustainability strategies and concepts need to be fundamentally further developed in the age of digitalization. Only if digital change and the Transformation towards Sustainability are synchronized can we succeed in advancing climate and Earth-system protection and in making social progress in human development. Without formative political action, digital change will further accelerate resource and energy consumption, and exacerbate damage to the environment and the climate. It is therefore an urgent political task to create the conditions needed to place digitalization at the service of sustainable development