Digitally mediated social ties and achieving recognition in the field of creative and cultural production: unravelling the online social networking mystery

Career paths in the field of cultural and creative production and the attainment of recognition have been associated with networking and point at the relevance of maintaining social relationships. Social capital has been discussed as one key element, given the fact that forming social relations with significant others potentially aids individuals striving for symbolic capital – the precursor to recognition. The emergence of online social networking platforms as a means to amplify opportunities to build social relationships raises questions in regards to its impact on building social capital. The key question that arises is: To what extent can digitally mediated social relationships support creative professionals in attaining recognition for their work by capitalising on digitally mediated social ties? To answer this, it was necessary to uncover the nature of digitally mediated social relatedness in order to understand how and why these relations may be eligible to produce social capital. Tracing this process through drawings of personal networks elicited a wealth of narratives around the influence of digitally mediated social interaction on symbolic capital. This thesis identified that accessing social capital resources via digitally mediated social interaction operates within the context of two prime factors: risk and trust. As such, digitally mediated social ties are useful for building social capital. However, this holds primarily in contexts where risk is relatively low and therefore the required level of trust is marginal. The relevance of digitally mediated social ties in building social capital is thus largely context driven, whereby the individual circumstances of creative professionals are crucial. My findings highlight the ambivalent nature of digitally mediated social ties in terms of their conceptualisation as a form of social relationship. Interestingly, while being highly volatile and fluctuating in nature, these liquid ties, as I have labelled them in my thesis, do afford access to resources such as trust that have hitherto been primarily associated with strong social ties. Essentially, this challenges the prime conceptualisation of social capital as an affordance of strong, established social relationships in the formation of symbolic capital. Therefore, I make a case for a more nuanced approach to (mediated) social capital, which conceptualises the relevance of the social tie in light of its affordance, rather than its formal quality

Money & Trust in Digital Society, Bitcoin and Stablecoins in ML enabled Metaverse Telecollaboration

We present a state of the art and positioning book, about Digital society tools, namely; Web3, Bitcoin, Metaverse, AI/ML, accessibility, safeguarding and telecollaboration. A high level overview of Web3 technologies leads to a description of blockchain, and the Bitcoin network is specifically selected for detailed examination. Suitable components of the extended Bitcoin ecosystem are described in more depth. Other mechanisms for native digital value transfer are described, with a focus on `money'. Metaverse technology is over-viewed, primarily from the perspective of Bitcoin and extended reality. Bitcoin is selected as the best contender for value transfer in metaverses because of it's free and open source nature, and network effect. Challenges and risks of this approach are identified. A cloud deployable virtual machine based technology stack deployment guide with a focus on cybersecurity best practice can be downloaded from GitHub to experiment with the technologies. This deployable lab is designed to inform development of secure value transaction, for small and medium sized companies

Values for a Post-Pandemic Future

This open access book shows how value sensitive design (VSD), responsible innovation, and comprehensive engineering can guide the rapid development of technological responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Responding to the ethical challenges of data-driven technologies and other tools requires thinking about values in the context of a pandemic as well as in a post-COVID world. Instilling values must be prioritized from the beginning, not only in the emergency response to the pandemic, but in how to proceed with new societal precedents materializing, new norms of health surveillance, and new public health requirements. The contributors with expertise in VSD bridge the gap between ethical acceptability and social acceptance. By addressing ethical acceptability and societal acceptance together, VSD guides COVID-technologies in a way that strengthens their ability to fight the virus, and outlines pathways for the resolution of moral dilemmas. This volume provides diachronic reflections on the crisis response to address long-term moral consequences in light of the post-pandemic future. Both contact-tracing apps and immunity passports must work in a multi-system environment, and will be required to succeed alongside institutions, incentive structures, regulatory bodies, and current legislation. This text appeals to students, researchers and importantly, professionals in the field

Social Media and Public Health: Opportunities and Challenges

Social media has the potential to provide rapid insights into unfolding public health emergencies such as infectious disease outbreaks. They can also be drawn upon for rapid, survey-based insights into various health topics. Social media has also been utilised by medical professionals for the purposes of sharing scholarly works, international collaboration, and engaging in policy debates. One benefit of using social media platforms to gain insight into health is that they have the ability to capture unfiltered public opinion in large volumes, avoiding the potential biases introduced by surveys or interviews. Social media platforms can also be utilised to pilot surveys, for instance, though the use of Twitter polls. Social media data have also been drawn upon in medical emergencies and crisis situations as a public health surveillance tool. A number of software and online tools also exist, developed specifically to aide public health research utilising social media data. In recent years, ethical issues regarding the retrieval and analysis of data have also arisen

Values for a Post-Pandemic Future

This open access book shows how value sensitive design (VSD), responsible innovation, and comprehensive engineering can guide the rapid development of technological responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Responding to the ethical challenges of data-driven technologies and other tools requires thinking about values in the context of a pandemic as well as in a post-COVID world. Instilling values must be prioritized from the beginning, not only in the emergency response to the pandemic, but in how to proceed with new societal precedents materializing, new norms of health surveillance, and new public health requirements. The contributors with expertise in VSD bridge the gap between ethical acceptability and social acceptance. By addressing ethical acceptability and societal acceptance together, VSD guides COVID-technologies in a way that strengthens their ability to fight the virus, and outlines pathways for the resolution of moral dilemmas. This volume provides diachronic reflections on the crisis response to address long-term moral consequences in light of the post-pandemic future. Both contact-tracing apps and immunity passports must work in a multi-system environment, and will be required to succeed alongside institutions, incentive structures, regulatory bodies, and current legislation. This text appeals to students, researchers and importantly, professionals in the field

What is, and what might be, learned from images shared during Twitter conversations among professionals?

This thesis explores the pedagogical potential of images shared during intra-professional conversations held on the social media platform, Twitter. Twitter chats are loosely synchronous exchanges of tweets sharing a unique, identifying keyword or hashtag. They are increasingly being used among professionals to create professional networks in which practice-knowledge and opinion might be shared and where communal connections may be created. As such, they may serve as sites in which professional learning unfolds, both in relation to workplace practices and in relation to the development of new forms of professional practice around social media use. Because the exchanges and broadcasts on Twitter are, for the most part, public, and the conversations are ongoing, they also provide open, freely-accessible, and constantly renewing resources for use in pre-service learning contexts. The research focused on two example chats, one held among midwives and the other among teachers. Inspired by the increasing use of images in new forms of digital communication, the research used images tweeted during the chats as starting points from which to explore flows of knowledge and affect. Data were generated from observations of the two Twitter chats over extended periods, together with interviews with practising professionals, student professionals and their educators in which images were used as elicitation devices. The research combined an approach to reading and “being with” data inspired by ideas drawn from the work of Deleuze (1994; Williams 2013) and Deleuze and Guattari (1988; Massumi 1992), with approaches to reading images drawn from visual social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). The findings suggest that Twitter chats such as those studied here can provide rich opportunities for professional learning. Practice knowledge can flow from one participant to many others, and flows of affect can be used to remoralize individuals and communities. Both chats seemed to serve as sites in which professionals could experience a positivity and affirmation that was not always available in the workplace. However, the forces and intensities at play in these spaces influence both what is said and what is not said, creating new norms of online interaction that generally seemed to avoid negative comments or open disagreement. Educators saw potential to use images such as those shared in the chats in a variety of ways. For example, images could be used as prompts for examination and critique of practices. The educators I interviewed also suggested that the images could be used to help student professionals develop their sensitivity to the forces and intensities that produce particular practices. Group interviews with student professionals suggested that the former happened spontaneously when students encountered and discussed such images, but that the latter might need deliberate facilitation or prompting. The thesis concludes with some recommendations for: (i) educators considering using such images in pre-service professional learning; (ii) professional developers considering using Twitter chats; and (iii) policy-makers involved in drafting guidelines for professionals’ use of social media

5th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2023)

Research methods in economics and social sciences are evolving with the increasing availability of Internet and Big Data sources of information. As these sources, methods, and applications become more interdisciplinary, the 5th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA) is a forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and advances on how emerging research methods and sources are applied to different fields of social sciences as well as to discuss current and future challenges.Martínez Torres, MDR.; Toral Marín, S. (2023). 5th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2023). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2023.2023.1700

Understanding the Deeply Engaged Mindset Among Active Bucknell Students

This thesis reports on a qualitative phenomenological investigation of the personal experiences of nine undergraduate students who attended Bucknell University, chosen on the basis of their shared experiences of deep immersion in social networking platforms; all had attained values of 40 or above on their Klout Scores, which measure social influence. Thematic analysis of interview transcripts and social analytic metrics, was used to identify the unique ways in which student engagement occurs online. Based on a review of the data, it appears that traditional principles of social influence are applicable to online interactions. The social engagement cycle and its collaborative loop are helpful in describing the phenomenon of social student engagement. Three categories of online student thought leaders emerged from this research: collaborators, connectors, and contributors. Interview data revealed that the participants valued connectedness, sought acceptance and gratification from online listeners, displayed skills in filtering through dense information, used social media as their primary source of news, and gravitated to others online who had interests similar to theirs. Also, findings suggest that social media use enhances student collaboration, which encompasses salient academic and non-academic aspects of the student experience