Reputation Management and Social Media: How People Monitor Their Identity and Search for Others Online

Based on a survey, analyzes trends in how adults maintain online reputations, including monitoring via search engines and customizing privacy settings on profiles by age group. Examines the role of online information in employment and social interactions

Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Network Sites

Analyzes survey findings about how teenagers navigate the world of "digital citizenship," including experiences of, reactions to, and sources of advice about online cruelty; privacy controls and practices; and levels of parental regulation

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

Gender Differences and Emotional Expressiveness on Facebook: An Analysis of Prosodic Features among Jordanian Facebookers

Despite seemingly countless studies addressing emotional expressiveness, most of these studies were focused on western communities, neglecting the Arab community in general, and the Jordanian discourse in particular. The purpose of this paper is to examine how paralinguistic features of emotional expression are used by male and female Jordanian Facebookers. A total of 100 participants, 50 males and 50 females, took part in this study, all of whom were native Jordanians. The current study was conducted by utilizing the “Web for corpus building” approach, as the data has been extracted manually from Facebook status updates, comments on other users’ status updates, photos, wall posts and so on. The findings revealed that women experience and express emotions more often than men in general. More studies with different contextual factors (e.g., age, social status, and ethnicity) and a different sources of data collection (e.g., face-to-face interaction, role plays, and observation) are recommended for future studies

Me, Myself, & Identity Online: Identity Salience on Facebook vs Non-Virtual Identity

Many Social Networking Sites have come and gone over the past decade, but Facebook continues to grow in popularity. Facebook is designed to connect people to one another through virtual networks of “friends” where members participate in the presentation of self virtually- through profile creation, maintenance, and exchanges of content. Social Networking Sites create a location for identity formation and projection that is similar, yet distinct, from face-to-face interactions. Facebook offers a unique avenue for people to control their presentation of self, while maintaining reflexive features. This study this study explores the notion of a particular “Facebook role” while specifically addressing front stage projections in relation to backstage information and the resulting differences in identity. In effect, people are “themselves” on Facebook, just a consistently “good” version of themselves

Personality traits and their effect on Facebook user habits

2016 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.A survey, conducted in cooperation with faculty and staff at Colorado State University, was conducted with CSU undergraduates (n = 125) to explore how personality traits affect Facebook use and levels of self-disclosure among users. The intent was to explain why individuals partake in certain activities, and at what levels they engage in self-disclosure on Facebook based on their personality traits and gender. This study employed the Big Five Personality Test and the Narcissistic Personality Inventory in the first part of a survey to test the levels of the personality traits narcissism, extroversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The second half of the survey asked a variety of questions listed as scaled items concerning Facebook activities having to do with self-disclosure, and at what levels the participants engage in each activity. While the personality traits observed were unable to predict the participants’ motivations for Facebook use and levels of self-disclosure in a statistically significant manner, this study confirmed that gender was a significant predictor of whether females or males engage in a certain activity more often, and at what level. These results were used to re-examine recommendations from past theoretical literature about how to predict Facebook behavior based on personality traits

The Prevalence of Gender Communication in Social Media

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between online self-disclosure and perceived appeal and define characteristics that individuals find appealing and unappealing in online self-disclosure. The findings from this study reveal significant differences in gender communication that distinctly affect the perceptions of online social media profiles. Using Deborah Tannen’s Genderlect theory, these gender differences are explained

Do men post and women view? The role of gender, personality and emotions in online social activity

According to Nadkarni and Hofmann’s model (2012), a major motivator of social networking sites (SNS) use is the need to belong, i.e., the basic drive to form and maintain relationships. This need can be fulfilled through two kinds of belongingness-related behaviours: information-seeking (using SNS to learn about others) and communication (using SNS to communicate with others). The present study aimed at examining the role of gender, personality traits and emotional competence on each of these two belongingness-related behaviours. A total of 995 self-selected Italian Internet users (67.1% women; age range: 18-56) participated in the study. Results showed that the two online behaviours are influenced by different variables. Among them, the most relevant appear to be emotional competences, as managing emotions reduces both behaviours, using emotions fosters communication, and understanding emotions decreases information-seeking. Extraversion plays a key role as well, promoting both behaviours in women and information-seeking in men, whereas openness to experiences is positively linked to viewing others’ profiles. Finally, men use social networking sites to communicate and express their opinions more often than women. Implications are discussed

An exploratory investigation on the effects of online social networking sites on college students

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects online social networking sites have on college students, mainly the effects on their communication. A study at Rowan University was conducted using a random selection of undergraduate students. The Rowan Subject pool was used to recruit students. Although each student was in different majors, all of the students were in an introduction to psychology course. To examine the effects online social networking sites have on college students, there were two separate groups of students designed to interact with one another in two different ways. A group was instructed to communicate face-to-face on a topic and the group were audio and visually recorded. The other group was instructed to communicate through a Facebook page created by the researcher. A status was posted on the main page and the subjects were instructed to communication via Facebook. To examine communication, the number of words was counted. I hypothesized due to the increased use of online social networking sites; the group communicating through Facebook would have a higher word count than the group communicating face-to-face