'R.I.P. man...u are missed and loved by many': entextualising moments of mourning on a Facebook Rest in Peace group site

Digital media offer new domains for people to articulate aspects of their everyday selves, as well as to share resources, views, attitudes, and emotions on an unprecedented scale (Barton and Lee 2013; Georgakopoulou 2006; Jones and Hafner 2012). The recent emergence of online environments as new sites for the temporal, spatial and social expansion of death and mourning (Brubaker and Hayes 2011; Brubaker, Hayes and Dourish 2013) has attracted scholarly interest in digital post-death rituals of mourning and memorialisation as an important social phenomenon (Walter et al. 2011; de Vries and Roberts 2004). While previous studies have been largely based on content analyses of individual MySpace logs and Facebook or discussion forum posts, the present study approaches digital memorial posts as entextualised moments of mourning shared with and for a networked audience (John 2013; Androutsopoulos 2014). The article analyses a corpus of Facebook memorial posts (N=525) as post sequences, wall events and texts, looking at how content on the site is produced, shared and discursively regimented. Based on the analysis, it is suggested that the intextualisation of moments of mourning on Facebook is participatory: it involves users’ selection of moments for public display relating to offline ceremonies of mourning, calendar-important dates or personal updates and contributing to the production of a textured wall in memory of the dead. The textuality of posts is found to rely on an ad hoc blending of formal genres of mourning and vernacular genres of writing dependent on (i) situational (date of posting activity, position in the post sequence) and (ii) extra-textual parameters (gender of poster, relationship with the deceased). The present socio-discursive investigation contributes to the growing, in-depth understanding of the texture and textuality of Web 2.0 mourning practices

Why Most Facebook Users Get More Than They Give

Analyzes data on Facebook user activity, including patterns in sending friend requests, adding content, and "liking" their friends' content; the interconnectedness of friends; and links between the number of friends, Facebook activity, and social support

How Does Self-Presentation Concern Relate to Language Use in Online Social Networking?

Millions of people worldwide use online social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook and Twitter for interpersonal interaction and self-presentation. Theories of computer-mediated communication suggest that SNSs offer unique affordances and pose complex challenges to self-presentation (particularly in audience management) compared to face-to-face settings. One of the most fundamental ways in which people present themselves to others is through the use of language. The goal of the present work is to better understand language use in online self-presentation by exploring how the degree of concern people have about their self-presentation relates to their word choices in SNS posts (i.e., status updates and tweets). This study addressed three specific research questions. First, do people with greater self-presentation concern (SPC) differ from people with lower SPC in their use of words related to style, affect, and specific topics? Second, how do personality traits (i.e., the Big Five) mediate the relationships between SPC and language? Finally, does reminding people about specific types of audiences in their social networks (i.e., social vs. professional audiences) influence their language use and the amount of time they spend creating a post? To address these questions, I recruited Facebook and Twitter users to complete an online survey where they shared their most recent SNSs posts and wrote a new post under different audience reminder conditions. They also completed measures of SPC and personality. I used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2007) to measure the language in participants\u27 posts along dimensions of style (i.e., pronouns), affect (i.e., emotion words and swear words), and topic (i.e., achievement, money, religion, and sexuality). The results revealed that SPC was not significantly related to language use along these dimensions. Although SPC was related to certain personality traits, these traits did not mediate the relationships between SPC and language use. Finally, reminding participants about social and professional audiences did not affect their language use or the amount of time they spent creating their posts. These results carry important implications for theoretical frameworks of online self-presentation and provide directions for future research on SPC and language use

P.S. I love you : understanding the impact of posthumous digital messages

A number of digital platforms and services have recently emerged that allow users to create posthumous forms of communication, effectively arranging for the delivery of messages from ‘beyond the grave’. Despite some evidence of interest and popularity of these services, little is known about how posthumous messages may impact the people who receive them. We present a qualitative study that explores the type of experiences potentially triggered upon receiving such messages. Our findings firstly suggest that posthumous messaging services have the potential to alter the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased, and secondly provide insight into how users make sense of this altered relationship. Through the inference of a set of design considerations for posthumous communication services, we reveal a number of conflicts that are not easily solvable through technological means alone, and which may serve as starting points for further research. Our work extends the growing body of research that is concerned with digital interactions related to death and dying

Life-Logging Data Aggregation Solution for Interdisciplinary Healthcare Research and Collaboration

The wide-spread use of wearable devices and mobile apps in the Internet of Things (IoT) environments makes effectively capture of life-logging personal health data come true. A long-term collection of these health data will benefit to interdisciplinary healthcare research and collaboration. But most wearable devices and mobile apps in the market focus on personal fitness plan and lack of compatibility and extensibility to each other. Existing IoT based platforms rarely achieve a successful heterogeneous life-logging data aggregation. Also, the demand on high security increases difficulties of designing reliable platform for integrating and managing multi-resource life-logging health data. This paper investigates the possibility of collecting and aggregating life-logging data with the use of wearable devices, mobile apps and social media. It compares existing personal health data collection solutions and identifies essential needs of designing a life-logging data aggregator in the IoT environments. An integrated data collection solution with high secure standard is proposed and deployed on a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary healthcare platform: MHA [15] by integrating five life-logging resources: Fitbit, Moves, Facbook, Twitter, etc. The preliminary experiment demonstrates that it successfully record, store and reuse the unified and structured personal health information in a long term, including activities, location, exercise, sleep, food, heat rate and mood

Languages, Code-Switching Practice and Primary Functions of Facebook among University Students

The purpose of this study was to determine the languages used in Facebook wall posts and comments, code-switching practice of these multilingual university students and functional orientation of their Facebook wall posts and comments. This study was mainly based on the investigation of the latest 50 Facebook comments of 100 Malay public university students in Malaysia. The first language of these university students is Bahasa Malaysia and English is their second language. The content analysis of wall posts was used to analyze the code-switching language used in the Facebook and the primary functions of the Facebook comments by categorizing them using Thurlow’s (2003) SMS categories that contain nine orientations. The findings indicate that majority of the Facebook users comments are categorized under friendship maintenance orientation to maintain existing relationships and create new friendships. The findings indicate heavily abbreviated languages in English and Bahasa Malaysia. It is found that situational code-switching between English and Bahasa Malaysia is heavily utilized by multi-lingual Facebook users. The research is significant in a number of ways as it offers the communication culture of Facebook among public university students in Malaysia. In addition, the study indicates that Social Network Sites can also be a potential teaching and learning tool to teach English since learners nowadays are members of various Social Network Sites

A study of non-profit social media engagement

As more nonprofit organizations increase their usage of social media to reach new audiences, audience research is needed to help practitioners formulate strategic communications plans that reach the goals of the organization. Too often nonprofit communicators drive top-down communication strategies using social media that have very little audience engagement. This study looked at the user interactions with nonprofit organizations on Facebook and attempted to categorize user-generated content based on the AEIO model (attention, emotion, information, opinion). The goal of this study was to determine the most common types of interaction Facebook users have with nonprofit organizations as well as the types of content users create to initiate engagement with a nonprofit organization via Facebook. This study found that the most common type of engagement with a nonprofit organization was a user reacting (i.e., using Facebook's like, love, anger, or wow reactions) to an organization's post, with sharing an organization's post a distant second, followed by commenting on the organization's post and a user creating their own message. To the extent they existed, messages seeking the attention of the users' friends to highlight the users' involvement with the organization were the most common overall user-generated content.Includes bibliographical reference

Lisbon Emoji and Emoticon Database (LEED): norms for emoji and emoticons in seven evaluative dimensions

The use of emoticons and emoji is increasingly popular across a variety of new platforms of online communication. They have also become popular as stimulus materials in scientific research. However, the assumption that emoji/emoticon users’ interpretations always correspond to the developers’/researchers’ intended meanings might be misleading. This article presents subjective norms of emoji and emoticons provided by everyday users. The Lisbon Emoji and Emoticon Database (LEED) comprises 238 stimuli: 85 emoticons and 153 emoji (collected from iOS, Android, Facebook, and Emojipedia). The sample included 505 Portuguese participants recruited online. Each participant evaluated a random subset of 20 stimuli for seven dimensions: aesthetic appeal, familiarity, visual complexity, concreteness, valence, arousal, and meaningfulness. Participants were additionally asked to attribute a meaning to each stimulus. The norms obtained include quantitative descriptive results (means, standard deviations, and confidence intervals) and a meaning analysis for each stimulus. We also examined the correlations between the dimensions and tested for differences between emoticons and emoji, as well as between the two major operating systems—Android and iOS. The LEED constitutes a readily available normative database (available at www.osf.io/nua4x) with potential applications to different research domains.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Computing tie strength

Relationships make social media social. But, not all relationships are created equal. We have colleagues with whom we correspond intensely, but not deeply; we have childhood friends we consider close, even if we fell out of touch. Social media, however, treats everybody the same: someone is either a completely trusted friend or a total stranger, with little or nothing in between. In reality, relationships fall everywhere along this spectrum, a topic social science has investigated for decades under the name tie strength, a term for the strength of a relationship between two people. Despite many compelling findings along this line of research, social media does not incorporate tie strength or its lessons. Neither does most research on large-scale social phenomena. In social network analyses, a link either exists or not. Relationships have few properties of their own. Simply put, we do not understand a basic property of relationships expressed online. This dissertation addresses this problem, merging the theories behind tie strength with the data from social media. I show how to reconstruct tie strength from digital traces in online social media, and how to apply it as a tool in design and analysis. Specifically, this dissertation makes three contributions. First, it offers a rich, high-accuracy and general way to reconstruct tie strength from digital traces, traces like recency and a message???s emotional content. For example, the model can split users into strong and weak ties with nearly 89% accuracy. I argue that it also offers us a chance to rethink many of social media???s most fundamental design elements. Next, I showcase an example of how we can redesign social media using tie strength: a Twitter application open to anyone on the internet which puts tie strength at the heart of its design. Through this application, called We Meddle, I show that the tie strength model generalizes to a new online community, and that it can solve real people???s practical problems with social media. Finally, I demonstrate that modeling tie strength is an important new tool for analyzing large-scale social phenomena. Specifically, I show that real-life diffusion in online networks depends on tie strength (i.e., it depends on social relationships). As a body of work, diffusion studies make a big simplifying assumption: simple stochastic rules govern person-to-person transmission. How does a disease spread? With constant probability. How does a chain letter diffuse? As a branching process. I present a case where this simplifying assumption does not hold. The results challenge the macroscopic diffusion properties in today???s literature, and they hint at a nest of complexity below a placid stochastic surface. It may be fair to see this dissertation as linking the online to the offline; that is, it connects the traces we leave in social media to how we feel about relationships in real life

The Relationship between Social Media and Empathy

The relationship between social media and empathy has not been explored extensively. Research on the expression of emotion and the association with empathy displayed on social media websites have been minimally explored. This study sought to support findings that chatting online leads to expressions of empathy (Rosen, 2012) and a positive relationship exists between conversing with others online and empathic expression (Ivcevic & Ambady, 2012. Empathic concern was hypothesized to show a positive relationship with one’s likelihood to chat, time on Facebook, and emotional connection to Facebook or Facebook usage. Empathic concern also was predicted to be greater among computer users, relative to tablet or mobile phone users. Finally, it was predicted that the extent to which one uses Facebook would be associated with greater expression of empathic concern. Pearson\u27s r was calculated to assess the correlation of empathic concern with the variables likelihood to chat, time on Facebook, and Facebook usage, and an independent samples t-test was conducted in order to compare concern by device type. Analyses confirmed the positive correlation of empathic concern with likelihood to chat, time on Facebook, and Facebook usage, but did not find that empathy varied by device type. A regression analysis revealed that Facebook usage did not improve predictions of empathic concern beyond that of the control variables. Strengths, limitations and implications for future research were discussed