Why Do People Stick with a Specific Social Networking Site? An Integrated Relationship and Uses Gratification Perspective

Since their inception, social networking sites (SNSs) have experienced exponential growth. While substantial research has been dedicated to users’ initial adoption of SNSs, the fall of MySpace reminds us that the long-term success of SNSs depends on users’ post adoption staying power. Inspired by this, this work-in-progress investigates users’ “stickiness” with a specific SNS. Based on Li et al. (2006)’s Commitment-Trust Model of Website Stickiness (CTM), this paper focuses on the relationships between SNSs and users. To refine CTM in the new context, we further borrow the Uses and Gratifications Theory from the Communication field to propose an integrated model

Effects of Loneliness and Satisfaction through CMC

This study seeks to investigate whether internet habits such as, instances used a day, time spent per week, and age introduced to the internet, have any effect on how lonely we are and how satisfied we are with our face to face relationships. These findings are important as previous studies have shown that those who are lonely suffer from a wide variety of psychological and self reported behavioral issues such as anxiety, depression, boredom, self-depreciation, and interpersonal hostility. Although the internet is widely used and it would be merely impossible to eliminate this use, the findings from this study will give perspective to the optimal amount of internet use and the optimal age to be introduced to the internet in order to avoid problems of loneliness and assure that our society becomes satisfied with their relationships, whether they are face to face or online relationships

Communities of Empowerment: Exploring the Discourse Practices of Plus-Size Fashion Bloggers

Tämä väitöskirja tarkastelee pluskokoisten (engl. plus-size) muotibloggaajien verkkoyhteisössä tapahtuvaa vuorovaikutusta. Tutkimuksen fokuksessa ovat ne kielelliset ja diskursiiviset käytännöt, joita blogiyhteisön sisällä käytetään yhteisöllisyyden, identiteettien ja voimaantumisen kokemuksen rakentamiseen. Tutkimuksen kohteena on kahdestakymmenestä naisesta koostuva ryhmä, jonka kaikki jäsenet identifioituvat pluskokoisiksi, kirjoittavat muotiblogeja ja asuvat Iso-Britanniassa. Menetelmällisesti väitöskirja yhdistää blogitekstien ja -kommenttien laadullisen diskurssianalyysin määrälliseen, korpuslingvistiseen lähestymistapaan. Blogeista kerättiin tutkimusta varten noin 4,2 miljoonan sanan korpus. Blogitekstien tarkastelun lisäksi analysoin bloggaajien vastauksia kahteen kyselytutkimukseen, jotka lähetettiin heille vuosina 2015 ja 2017. Kyselyvastauksia tutkin temaattisen analyysin keinoin. Pluskokoiset naiset ovat olleet marginalisoituja muodin kentällä useiden vuosikymmenten ajan. Valtavirtamuodin kuvastossa he ovat näkymättömiä, eikä vaateteollisuus tarjoa heille samaa vaihtoehtojen kirjoa kuin pienempikokoisille naisille. Muotiblogien kautta valtavirtamuodin ulkopuolelle jääneet ryhmät, kuten juuri pluskokoiset naiset, ovat kuitenkin päässeet ilmaisemaan itseään ja tyylitajuaan uusin tavoin, muodostaen samalla sosiaalisia suhteita muiden samassa tilanteessa olevien ihmisten kanssa. Väitöstutkimukseni tarjoaa tähän mennessä puuttuneen kielitieteellisen näkökulman tähän ajankohtaiseen ilmiöön. Tutkimustulokseni osoittavat, että pluskokoisten muotiblogien genren sisällä on enemmän vaihtelua kuin aiemmat tutkimukset aiheesta ovat esittäneet. Siinä missä aiempi tutkimus on korostanut pluskokoisten naisten muotiblogien ja lihavuusaktivismin suhdetta, omissa tutkimustuloksissani korostuu yhteisön sisäinen monipuolisuus. Toisille bloggaajille aktivismi on blogin keskiössä, kun taas toiset identifioituvat ennen kaikkea muotibloggaajiksi ja haluavat tulla nähdyksi samassa valossa, kuin ne hoikat naiset, jotka kirjoittavat samankaltaisia blogeja. Joissakin blogeissa aiheiden kirjo on myös hyvin laaja, eivätkä vartalon kokoon ja siihen perustuvaan syrjintään liittyvät kysymykset näin ollen nouse yhtä keskeisiksi teemoiksi, kuin aktivismifokusoituneissa blogeissa. Yhteisön sisäisistä eroavaisuuksista huolimatta sen sisälle on muodostunut normatiivisia käytäntöjä, jotka ilmenevät myös ryhmän jäsenten käyttämässä kielessä. Esimerkiksi ryhmän sisäistä, sosiaalista identiteettiä rakennetaan käyttämällä tiettyä sanastoa pluskokoisten naisten vartaloiden kuvaamiseen. Ryhmäspesifejä kielellisiä ja diskursiivisia käytäntöjä hyödynnetään myös yhteisön rajojen määrittelyyn ja ryhmään kuulumattomien rajaamiseen sen ulkopuolelle. Yhden blogiyhteisön syvällisen tarkastelun lisäksi tähän väitöskirjaan sisällytetyt neljä tutkimusartikkelia muodostavat pohjan uudelle teoreettiselle ja menetelmälliselle mallille, jota voidaan tulevaisuudessa käyttää muiden verkkoviestintään pohjautuvien yhteisöjen tutkimiseen. Erityisesti väitöstutkimukseni tuloksia voidaan hyödyntää sosiaalisesti marginalisoitujen ryhmien yhteisöllisyyden tutkimuksessa. Tutkimustulokseni osoittavat, että kyseisten yhteisöjen kohdalla erilaisten aineistojen ja menetelmien yhdistäminen on erityisen tärkeää kokonaiskuvan muodostamiseksi tutkimuksen kohteena olevasta yhteisöstä. Väitöskirjani toimii myös esimerkkinä siitä, että marginalisoitujen ryhmien tutkimuksen ei tulisi keskittyä ainoastaan marginalisoidun ryhmän ja valtavirran välisiin suhteisiin, vaan kiinnittää erityistä huomiota myös ryhmän sisäisiin eroavaisuuksiin ja hierarkioihin. Koska digitaalinen viestintä on nykyään osa jokapäiväistä elämäämme, verkossa muodostuneet yhteisöt eivät välttämättä enää pysy erillään internetin ulkopuolisista suhteista. Tämä väitöstutkimus osoittaa, kuinka blogien kirjoittamisesta alkunsa saanut yhteisö voi kehittyä moniulotteiseksi verkostoksi, joka hyödyntää useita viestinnän kanavia ja jaettuja resursseja. Erityisesti marginalisoiduille yksilöille tämänkaltainen verkostoituminen voi olla voimavara sekä internetissä että sen ulkopuolella. Useille tutkimukseni kohteena olleille pluskokoisille naisille blogin kirjoittaminen toimi eräänlaisena ponnahduslautana psykologiseen, sosiaaliseen ja taloudelliseen voimaantumiseen.This doctoral dissertation explores the interactions that take place within an online community of plus-size fashion bloggers. Specifically, it focuses on the linguistic and discursive practices that these bloggers use to build community, to construct identities and to establish a sense of empowerment. The group of bloggers under investigation in the dissertation consists of 20 UK-based women who identify as plus-size and author fashion-focused blogs. Methodologically, the dissertation combines the qualitative discourse analysis of blog texts and comments with a quantitative, corpus-based investigation of a larger blog corpus of roughly 4.2 million words. In addition to textual blog material, questionnaire responses collected from the bloggers on two occasions (in 2015 and 2017) were studied using methods of thematic analysis. Plus-size women have been marginalized in the field of fashion for several decades. They are offered less clothing options than smaller women and ostracized in fashion imagery. Fashion blogs, however, have enabled people who have not had a voice in traditional fashion media to express their sense of fashion and to build relationships with similar others. This dissertation adds an important linguistic perspective to the existing literature on plus-size fashion blogging by addressing the variation within this sub-genre of fashion blogs through detailed linguistic and discursive analyses. The results reveal that there is more variation within the plus-size fashion blogging genre than previous studies have indicated. While earlier research has highlighted the activist aspects of plus-size fashion blogging, the results of this dissertation show that even though some bloggers identify strongly with the fat acceptance movement and have adopted a fat-activism-driven approach to blogging, others focus on more general fashion-related content, or blog about a wider variety of topics. However, despite these in-group differences, normative practices and behaviors can be observed within the community of plus-size fashion bloggers, and these practices are constructed through and reflected in the language the bloggers use. For example, using specific terms to describe plus-size women’s bodies functions as a way of constructing social identity within the blogging x community. At the same time, linguistic and discursive means are also used for maintaining the boundaries of the community by highlighting the differences between group members and outsiders. In addition to an in-depth investigation of one specific community of bloggers, the four articles included in this dissertation contribute to building a theoretical and methodological model for studying online interaction within other groups. In particular, the dissertation provides a new framework for studying the online interaction of groups that are marginalized in the mainstream media and society. The results show that when it comes to the study of such communities, combinations of different types of data (qualitative and quantitative), as well as several methodological approaches, are needed. This dissertation also illustrates that when researching marginalized groups, researchers should not focus merely on the relationship between a specific group and the societal structures and hierarchies that marginalize this group – the inner dynamics of the community of marginalized people also need to be investigated in detail. As digital communication has become a part of modern everyday life, communities that are formed on the internet no longer necessarily stay within the online realm, separate from our offline relationships. The findings presented in this dissertation illustrate how a community that starts out as an aggregate of people interacting on a particular digital platform can evolve into a complex, layered and multi-faceted network where individuals communicate through a variety of media, using a variety of shared resources. This type of community development may benefit marginalized individuals both online and offline. For many of the plus-size women investigated in this dissertation, blogging has functioned as a steppingstone to psychological, societal and financial empowerment

United States media portrayals of the developing world: A semiotic analysis of the One campaign\u27s internet web site

The goal of this research was to examine how the One organization\u27s web site either supports or rejects established literature that concludes that U.S. media contains negative representations of the developing world

The Use of the Internet for Alternative Views on Health

Today, the majority of American adults uses the internet and looks for health information online. Of interest in this dissertation are people who do not subscribe to mainstream views of health, and may use the internet to discover, bolster, or share their alternative views. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have named fluoridated drinking water and vaccination as two of the top ten public health achievements of the 20th century, there is a significant minority of people who has concerns about the safety and effectiveness of these practices. There are two essential purposes for this dissertation. First, it describes the nature of internet use among people who hold nonmainstream views of health issues. Second, it tests the hypotheses that the extent of people\u27s internet use is a reflection of two classes of influence: 1) individual traits, such as demographic characteristics, feelings of estrangement, and need for cognition, and 2) their inability to find support from other sources, specifically mainstream media and their face-to-face social network. These analyses are informed by three sets of data: interviews with people who have varying views on fluoridation, a pair of nationally representative surveys (one on the MMR vaccine, and one on fluoridated water), and a corresponding pair of purposive surveys. The interview results identified important themes and issues surrounding nonmainstream health beliefs, especially their connection to personal experience and perceived credibility of information sources. The representative surveys found that approximately 10% of Americans believe that the MMR vaccine and fluoridated water are unsafe, with the rest of the population about evenly divided between being uncertain and believing that the health measures are safe. Notably, believing that these measures were unsafe was unrelated to any demographic characteristics, but internet use on those topics was strongly related. Internet use on those topics was associated with youth and college education, as well as perceiving the news media as having a different view from their own. The lack of social network support for one\u27s views on these topics, however, was unrelated to internet use. The implications of these findings and future research directions are discussed

Forms and Fragments: Enactment of Cultural Identification in an Online Community of Chinese Living Overseas

This research is an interpretive study of the dynamics of cultural identification as enacted by Chinese individuals living overseas who participate in a virtual online community known as Wenxuecity.com. The study draws on intercultural communication theories of identity proposed by Carbaugh, Collier, and Hecht, as well as on my own integrative framework for the analysis of cultural identity, to explore the self-other interaction in identity enactment, the multidimensionality of identity, and the centrality of communication in processes of identification. Through the application of a qualitative analysis of online discourse, I found three primary forms of cultural identification-- perceptual, strategic, and positional cultural identification -- that reveal how online commentators make sense of their individual and group identities. Through online discussion of a variety of topics -- from China\u27s history, East-West tensions, to academic power structures and racial hierarchies in host cultures or media stereotyping and global hegemonic relations -- and using communicative strategies like self-other comparison, advice, and ideological debate, commentators enact both a sense of group cohesiveness as well as their internal, conflictive heterogeneity. Their discourse allows for the exploration of how multiple dimensions of identity -- individuality, sociality, materiality, and spirituality -- intersect to shape the fragmentary character of cultural identification. In the particular case of the group under study, the dominant trends observed reveal that cultural identification is a process characterized by the enactment of a sense of marginalization in host societies, heightened individuality, strategic attachment to or distancing from Chinese cultural membership, and ideological divisions

To investigate relative effectiveness of the dimensions of interactivity

This thesis is about interactivity. It is about the dimensions of interactive communication which have become a major element of contemporary marketing practice. The concept of interactivity has been explored in the fields of advertising research, and communication and media studies. However, there is an overall absence of any published work concerning research into the dimensions of interactivity, in the marketing domain. This thesis seeks to correct this situation and investigates the relative effectiveness of the dimensions of interactivity, set in the context of travel weblogs. The aim is to determine how three principal dimensions of interactivity namely, active control, two-way communication, and real-time communication, affects users‟ attitudes and usage intentions. This thesis also examines the effect of motive factors, such as social interaction, information of travel weblogs, and enjoyment, upon a user‟s attitudes and usage intentions. The relationships among these variables are examined within a research framework provided by this study. Data was collected through an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The findings verify that the dimensions of interactivity and motivation factors can have positive influence upon users‟ attitudes and usage intentions.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

To investigate relative effectiveness of the dimensions of interactivity

This thesis is about interactivity. It is about the dimensions of interactive communication which have become a major element of contemporary marketing practice. The concept of interactivity has been explored in the fields of advertising research, and communication and media studies. However, there is an overall absence of any published work concerning research into the dimensions of interactivity, in the marketing domain. This thesis seeks to correct this situation and investigates the relative effectiveness of the dimensions of interactivity, set in the context of travel weblogs. The aim is to determine how three principal dimensions of interactivity namely, active control, two-way communication, and real-time communication, affects users‟ attitudes and usage intentions. This thesis also examines the effect of motive factors, such as social interaction, information of travel weblogs, and enjoyment, upon a user‟s attitudes and usage intentions. The relationships among these variables are examined within a research framework provided by this study. Data was collected through an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The findings verify that the dimensions of interactivity and motivation factors can have positive influence upon users‟ attitudes and usage intentions.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo