228,569 research outputs found
Exploring Russian Cyberspace: Digitally-Mediated Collective Action and the Networked Public Sphere
This paper summarizes the major findings of a three-year research project to investigate the Internet's impact on Russian politics, media and society. We employed multiple methods to study online activity: the mapping and study of the structure, communities and content of the blogosphere; an analogous mapping and study of Twitter; content analysis of different media sources using automated and human-based evaluation approaches; and a survey of bloggers; augmented by infrastructure mapping, interviews and background research. We find the emergence of a vibrant and diverse networked public sphere that constitutes an independent alternative to the more tightly controlled offline media and political space, as well as the growing use of digital platforms in social mobilization and civic action. Despite various indirect efforts to shape cyberspace into an environment that is friendlier towards the government, we find that the Russian Internet remains generally open and free, although the current degree of Internet freedom is in no way a prediction of the future of this contested space
On the discovery of social roles in large scale social systems
The social role of a participant in a social system is a label
conceptualizing the circumstances under which she interacts within it. They may
be used as a theoretical tool that explains why and how users participate in an
online social system. Social role analysis also serves practical purposes, such
as reducing the structure of complex systems to rela- tionships among roles
rather than alters, and enabling a comparison of social systems that emerge in
similar contexts. This article presents a data-driven approach for the
discovery of social roles in large scale social systems. Motivated by an
analysis of the present art, the method discovers roles by the conditional
triad censuses of user ego-networks, which is a promising tool because they
capture the degree to which basic social forces push upon a user to interact
with others. Clusters of censuses, inferred from samples of large scale network
carefully chosen to preserve local structural prop- erties, define the social
roles. The promise of the method is demonstrated by discussing and discovering
the roles that emerge in both Facebook and Wikipedia. The article con- cludes
with a discussion of the challenges and future opportunities in the discovery
of social roles in large social systems
Two Types of Social Grooming Methods depending on the Trade-off between the Number and Strength of Social Relationships
Humans use various social bonding methods known as social grooming, e.g. face
to face communication, greetings, phone, and social networking sites (SNS). SNS
have drastically decreased time and distance constraints of social grooming. In
this paper, I show that two types of social grooming (elaborate social grooming
and lightweight social grooming) were discovered in a model constructed by
thirteen communication data-sets including face to face, SNS, and Chacma
baboons. The separation of social grooming methods is caused by a difference in
the trade-off between the number and strength of social relationships. The
trade-off of elaborate social grooming is weaker than the trade-off of
lightweight social grooming. On the other hand, the time and effort of
elaborate methods are higher than lightweight methods. Additionally, my model
connects social grooming behaviour and social relationship forms with these
trade-offs. By analyzing the model, I show that individuals tend to use
elaborate social grooming to reinforce a few close relationships (e.g. face to
face and Chacma baboons). In contrast, people tend to use lightweight social
grooming to maintain many weak relationships (e.g. SNS). Humans with
lightweight methods who live in significantly complex societies use various
social grooming to effectively construct social relationships.Comment: Accepted by Royal Society Open Scienc
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