Technology Affordance and Constraint Perspectives on Social Media Use in eParticipation : A Case Study in Indonesia

Paper I-V are not available as a part of the dissertation due to the copyright.This doctoral thesis explains the role of social media within eParticipation from the perspective of politicians in the Indonesian context using the Technology Affordance and Constraints Theory (TACT) as a lens. Previous research findings into citizens’ perceptions of social media in eParticipation have been ambivalent; namely, social media can both encourage and discourage the democratic process depending on where, when, and how it is used. Furthermore, there is little understanding of the role of social media in influencing decision-making in the democratic process from the politicians’ perspective. Thus, my research is focused on gaining a more in-depth understanding of the role of social media in eParticipation from perspective of politicians through three main research questions: (1) How do politicians use social media for eParticipation purposes? (2) What are the constraints of social media use within eParticipation? and (3) What are the conditions needed for social media affordance acutalization to take place?publishedVersio

Understanding, Discovering, and Mitigating Habitual Smartphone Use in Young Adults

People, especially young adults, often use their smartphones out of habit: They compulsively browse social networks, check emails, and play video-games with little or no awareness at all. While previous studies analyzed this phenomena qualitatively, e.g., by showing that users perceive it as meaningless and addictive, yet our understanding of how to discover smartphone habits and mitigate their disruptive effects is limited. Being able to automatically assess habitual smartphone use, in particular, might have different applications, e.g., to design better “digital wellbeing” solutions for mitigating meaningless habitual use. To close this gap, we first define a data analytic methodology based on clustering and association rules mining to automatically discover complex smartphone habits from mobile usage data. We assess the methodology over more than 130,000 phone usage sessions collected from users aged between 16 and 33, and we show evidence that smartphone habits of young adults can be characterized by various types of links between contextual situations and usage sessions, which are highly diversified and differently perceived across users. We then apply the proposed methodology in Socialize, a digital wellbeing app that (i) monitors habitual smartphone behaviors in real time and (ii) uses proactive notifications and just-in-time reminders to encourage users to avoid any identified smartphone habits they consider as meaningless. An in-the-wild study with 20 users (ages 19–31) demonstrates that Socialize can assist young adults in better controlling their smartphone usage with a significant reduction of their unwanted smartphone habits

Privacy in the Sharing Economy

Contemporary C2C platforms, such as Airbnb, have exhibited considerable growth in recent years and are projected to continue doing so in the future. These novel consumer-to-consumer marketplaces have started to obliterate the boundaries between private and economic spheres. Marketing personal resources online is inherently associated with the disclosure of personal and sometimes intimate information. This raises unprecedented questions of privacy. Yet, there is so far little research on the role of privacy considerations in the sharing economy literature. Leveraging the theoretical perspective of privacy calculus, we address this gap by investigating how privacy concerns and economic prospects shape a potential provider’s intentions to share via different communication channels. We relate privacy concerns back to the provider’s perceptions of the audience. We evaluate our research model by means of a scenario-based online survey, providing broad support for our reasoning

Revisão crítica: Uma abordagem aos estudos sobre o uso dos media sociais durante a pandemia Covid-19

Since the coronavirus disease (covid-19) was declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization in January 2020, it has led to the loss of millions of human lives and a global economic recession. Recently, there has been a recognized need for effective health communication via social media to deliver accurate information and promote pertinent behavioral change. Thus, this study provides a systematic review to explore what has been done, what conflicts exist, and what knowledge gap remains in terms of social media use during the covid-19 wave, indicating relevant communication strategies. This research is based on 76 relevant papers taken from searches on the Web of Science and Google Scholar. The analysis revealed that much of the literature confirms the positive effect of social media on information propagation and promotion of precautions in the control of covid-19. The spreading of rumors, especially about government performance, in social media is clearly of increasing concern. Currently, heated debate continues about the association between exposure to social media and public mental health. Another fiercely debated question is whether rumors are shared more widely than fact-checking information. Up to date, far too little attention has been paid to information disparities and vulnerable groups on social media.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Crafting Moral Infrastructures: How Nonprofits Use Facebook to Survive

We present findings from interviews with 23 individuals affiliated with non-profit organizations (NPOs) to understand how they deploy information and communication technologies (ICTs) in civic engagement efforts. Existing research about NPO ICT use is largely critical, but we did not find evidence that NPOs fail to use tools effectively. Rather, we detail how various ICT use on the part of NPOs intersects with unique affordance perceptions and adoption causes. Overall, we find that existing theories about technology choice (e.g., task-technology fit, uses and gratifications) do not explain the assemblages NPOs describe. We argue that NPOs fashion infrastructures in accordance with their moral economy frameworks rather than selecting tools based on utility. Together, the rhetorics of infrastructure and moral economies capture the motivations and constraints our participants expressed and challenge how prevailing theories of ICT usage describe the non-profit landscape

Withdrawal to the shadows: dark social media as opportunity structures for extremism

Dark social media has been described as a home base for extremists and a breeding ground for dark participation. Beyond the description of single cases, it often remains unclear what exactly is meant by dark social media and which opportunity structures for extremism emerge on these applications. The current paper contributes to filling this gap. We present a theoretical framework conceptualizing dark social media as opportunity structures shaped by (a) regulation on the macro-level; (b) different genres and types of (dark) social media as influence factors on the meso level; and (c) individual attitudes, salient norms, and technological affordances on the micro-level. The results of a platform analysis and a scoping review identified meaningful differences between dark social media of different types. Particularly social counter-media and fringe communities positioned themselves as "safe havens" for dark participation, indicating a high tolerance for accordant content. This makes them a fertile ground for those spreading extremist worldviews, consuming such content, or engaging in dark participation. Context-bound alternative social media were comparable to mainstream social media but oriented towards different legal spaces and were more intertwined with governments in China and Russia. Private-first channels such as Instant messengers were rooted in private communication. Yet, particularly Telegram also included far-reaching public communication formats and optimal opportunities for the convergence of mass, group, and interpersonal communication. Overall, we show that a closer examination of different types and genres of social media provides a more nuanced understanding of shifting opportunity structures for extremism in the digital realm