Daily Eastern News: March 15, 1994

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/den_1994_mar/1010/thumbnail.jp

YouTube Vloggers as Brand Influencers on Consumer Purchase Behaviour

Objective: The increasing influence of YouTube vloggers on consumer purchase behaviour and the specificity of the vloggers _ viewers/subscribers relationship are under-researched. Addressing this gap in knowledge, this paper explores the role of vloggers as brand influencers on consumer (their viewers) purchase behaviour. It aims to investigate the interaction between vloggers and viewers/subscribers in terms of brand awareness and consumers’ purchase behaviour. Methodology: A mixed-method approach (often connected with netnography) incorporated non-participant observation of vloggers’ activities and vloggers-viewers interactions within selected popular vlogs, supported by an online survey with both vloggers and viewers. Findings: We have observed specific brand endorsements and experiences, depending on the vloggers’ context, leading to both positive and negative feedback. This interaction and the consistently positive perception of reasons behind the vloggers’ choice of the endorsed brands underpin the credibility of the vloggers – viewers/subscribers relationship. Value added: Our results show not only the significance of vloggers as brand influencers, providing their audiences information perceived as trustworthy and convincing in terms of purchase recommendations but also explore the factors affecting this process. Recommendations: This research directed our attention into the viewer-viewer interaction on the vlogs platforms. It is a very dynamic and challenging (difficult to control) part of vlog marketing activities (including various eWOM aspects) which can be very influential in the analysed context and stays a task for the future research

The internet of ontological things: On symmetries between ubiquitous problems and their computational solutions in the age of smart objects

This dissertation is about an abstract form of computer network that has recently earned a new physical incarnation called “the Internet of Things.” It surveys the ontological transformations that have occurred over recent decades to the computational components of this network, objects—initially designed as abstract algorithmic agents in a source code of computer programming but now transplanted into real-world objects. Embodying the ideal of modularity, objects have provided computer programmers with more intuitive means to construct a software application with lots of simple and reusable functional building blocks. Their capability of being reassembled into many different networks for a variety of applications has also embodied another ideal of computing machines, namely general-purposiveness. In the algorithmic cultures of the past century, these objects existed as mere abstractions to help humans to understand electromagnetic signals that had infiltrated every corner of automatized spaces from private to public. As an instrumental means to domesticate these elusive signals into programmable architectures according to the goals imposed by professional programmers and amateur end-users, objects promised a universal language for any computable human activities. This utopian vision for the object-oriented domestication of the digital has had enough traction for the growth of the software industry as it has provided an alibi to hide another process of colonization occurring on the flipside of their interfacing between humans and machines: making programmable the highest number of online and offline human activities possible. A more recent media age, which this dissertation calls the age of the Internet of Things, refers to the second phase of this colonization of human cultures by the algorithmic objects, no longer trapped in the hard-wired circuit boards of personal computer, but now residing in real-life objects with new wireless communicability. Chapters of this dissertation examine each different computer application—a navigation system in a smart car, smart home, open-world video games, and neuro-prosthetics—as each particular case of this object-oriented redefinition of human cultures