Adolescents’ perceptions of digital media’s potential to elicit jealousy, conflict and monitoring behaviors within romantic relationships

Understanding the role of digital media in adolescents’ romantic relationships is essential to the prevention of digital dating violence. This study focuses on adolescents’ perceptions of the impact of digital media on jealousy, conflict, and control within their romantic relationships. Twelve focus group interviews were conducted, among 55 secondary school students (ngirls = 28; 51% girls) between the ages of 15 and 18 years (Mage = 16.60 years; SD age = 1.21), in the Dutch-speaking community of Belgium. The respondents identified several sources of jealousy within their romantic relationships, such as online pictures of the romantic partner with others and online messaging with others. Adolescents identified several ways in which romantic partners would react when experiencing feelings of jealousy, such as contacting the person they saw as a threat or looking up the other person’s social media profiles. Along with feelings of jealousy, respondents described several monitoring behaviors, such as reading each other’s e-mails or accessing each other’s social media accounts. Adolescents also articulated several ways that they curated their social media to avoid conflict and jealousy within their romantic relationships. For instance, they adapted their social media behavior by avoiding the posting of certain pictures, or by ceasing to comment on certain content of others. The discussion section includes suggestions for future research and implications for practice, such as the need to incorporate information about e-safety into sexual and relational education and the need to have discussions with adolescents, about healthy boundaries for communication within their friendships and romantic relationships.</jats:p

Exploring the Effects of Japanese Font Designs on Impression Formation and Decision-Making in Text-Based Communication

Text-based communication, such as text chat, is commonly employed in various contexts, both professional and personal. However, it lacks the rich emotional cues present in verbal and visual forms of communication, such as facial expressions and tone of voice, making it more challenging to convey emotions and increasing the likelihood of misunderstandings. In this study, we focused on typefaces as emotional cues employed in text-based communication and investigated the influence of font design on impression formation and decision-making through two experiments. The results of the experiments revealed the relationship between Japanese typeface design and impression formation, and indicated that advice presented in a font evoking an impression of high confidence was more likely to be accepted than advice presented in a font evoking an impression of low confidence.Comment: 8 page

The Pragmatics of Arabic Religious Posts on Facebook: A Relevance-Theoretic Account

Despite growing interest in the impact of computer-mediated communication on our lives, linguistic studies on such communication conducted in the Arabic language are scarce. Grounded in Relevance Theory, this paper seeks to fill this void by analysing the linguistic structure of Arabic religious posts on Facebook. First, I discuss communication on Facebook, treating it as a relevance-seeking process of writing or sharing posts, with the functions of ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ seen as cues for communicating propositional attitude. Second, I analyse a corpus of around 80 posts, revealing an interesting use of imperatives, interrogatives and conditionals which manipulate the interpretation of such posts between descriptive and interpretive readings. I also argue that a rigorous system of incentives is employed in such posts in order to boost their relevance. Positive, negative and challenging incentives link the textual to the visual message in an attempt to raise more cognitive effects for the readers

Players' Motivations to Participate the Mobile Game Design with the Game Creator

The thesis investigates the players' motivations to participate in the innovation process of mobile game design. The topics of the thesis are mobile game, online community, and user-centered innovation. Although many researchers have studied the fields, there is not enough research looking into the practice of user-centered innovation and the role of online community in the mobile game industry. Meanwhile, mobile game creators seek for players' feedback and ideas to improve games and, further, players' loyalty. Thus, the thesis attempts to present a new model to demonstrate the motivations. The model provides the insights to explore the factors of a successful innovation community. It also displays the determinants of an attractive environment for users to share ideas. The thesis uses content analysis. The data is from "Ideas & Feature Requests" of Clash Royale online community, a mobile game produced by Supercell. The thesis concentrates on card idea threads. Total 2198 threads are analyzed. A research model is built based on the previous research. "Enjoyment", "Feedback", and "Leadership" (with "Lead Member" and "Moderator") are the motivations in the research model. The analysis results affirm the motivations and give more insights. The results find that "praise" and "advice" are the essential types of feedbacks. And feedbacks could increase enjoyment. The final model consists of "Enjoyment", "Feedback" (with "Praise" and "Advice"), and "Leadership" (with "Lead Member" and "Moderator"). It indicates the influence of feedback on enjoyment as well. In conclusion, enjoyment encourages players to participate innovation; feedback and leadership draw them to share the ideas

THE PERSUASIVE IMPACT OF EMOTICONS IN ONLINE WORD-OF-MOUTH COMMUNICATION

The present research proposes a conceptual framework to examine the effect of emoticons on online WOM persuasion. Using a laboratory experiment, we demonstrate that emoticons enhance recipients’ empathy for the communicator, and this effect is moderated by message valence. Enhanced empathy heightens perceived trustworthiness of the communicator and perceived quality of the message, both of which lead to an increase in the persuasiveness of the WOM message. We conclude by discussing the contributions of this research and identifying the directions for future research

Structuring Language and Community in an Online Space

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) present an interesting area for linguistic and social research, being a setting for of computer-mediated communication (CMC) that is task-oriented in nature and often requires high level of cooperation between players. This study investigates how Spanish-speaking players of the MMO Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn use the linguistic phenomena of discourse markers, laughter and politeness to structure their communication and their community. Through analysis of in-game conversations gathered from a community of said players, this study demonstrates how each of these phenomena work together to build a community based on inclusive language and positive reinforcement

Computer-mediated conferencing

This section addresses issues of Computer-Mediated Conferencing (CMC) as a teaching and learning resource, concentrating upon skills development within that context. The materials are appropriate for different experience levels of learners and provide a range of pathways to the materials and resources as appropriate for any individual learner or learner group

Crowd Culture & Community Interaction on Twitch.tv

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and e-sports have exploded in popularity in recent years. At the forefront of this growth is the live streaming website Twitch.tv, now one of the most popular websites in the world. Though live streaming has existed before Twitch, the website has proven to be the dominant name amongst its competitors. From this popularity has arisen a distinctive Twitch culture, complete with its own language, customs, norms, and values. This study aims to decipher and understand Twitch’s behavior through Uses & Gratifications theory as well as previous research on Collective Behavior. Specifically, the thesis addresses the following research questions: How is the interaction of chat on Twitch.tv structured? What are motivators for communication on Twitch.tv? How is the Twitch community unique to other web-based communities? All streams were selected from channels for the popular game Dota 2. Dota 2 was selected due to its popularity, well-established culture, and author familiarity. The streams of both competitive tournaments and private streamers were examined, with over 12 hours of chat logs being examined. Comments were divided into categories and the use of language on the medium was dissected. Though hypothesized to mirror other online communities, Twitch users’ behavior was found to be far closer to that of a crowd; something unique to the subcultures preceding it. The implications of this are explored, investigating the altered norms and social atmosphere which contribute to Twitch’s seemingly erratic behavior. The Contagion, Convergence, Emergent Norm, and Value-Added models are consulted in order to catalogue and understand the collective behavior that occurs in the chat. Twitch is a new type of gathering place on the Internet; one which does not follow the rules of traditional Internet communities, and offers a completely different experience to users in contrast to traditional media.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format