Public service in the age of social network media

This chapter addresses how, and to what extent, public service obligations and institutions may be redefined and extended to facilitate information flows and public deliberation using social network media as a remedy for democratic deficiencies of both older mass media and newer forms of network media. I make a case for three public service functions that have particular importance in social network media: curation, moderation, and monitoring. Building on a critique of the individualistic perspective underlying both cyber-optimist and -pessimist accounts of the potentials of social network media, an alternative and institutional perspective based on mediatization theory is introduced. I focus on the ongoing restructuring of societal spheres through which strategic and sociable forms of communication are challenging deliberative forms of communication. Based on recent studies on public service media’s use of social network media in efforts to enhance public deliberation, the chapter examines how networked media can be a focus for intervention in the public interest

Sociable scholarship: The use of social media in the 21st century academy

Social media have broken down the distance between scholars and the larger world, enabling lay people to become active participants in the construction of knowledge, through offering ideas and data, recounting experience, and engaging critically with academic research.  Academics no longer operate from the safety of ivory towers: they are able to engage with a much wider audience, in a conversation rather than a lecture, through the use of Twitter, Tumblr, blogs, discussion forums, etc. These Web 2.0 tools have broadened academic spaces, enabling the participation of different voices, and addressing the academy’s commitment to social justice.  Using the feminist theory of intersectionality, we explore the use of social media in academic collaboration and dissemination, and the tensions that may arise as scholars and the academy are reshaped in the 21st century

How Sociable are women on Social Media? An experiential Study on Nigerian women

This study explores the how women utilize the social media for social engagement and empowerment. Also, this study is anchored on the uses and gratification theory, which stipulates how women use the social media and the gratification they seek and derive from the media. The method adopted was survey and the instrument was a questionnaire. Five research questions were raised and answered in the study. This study found out that the social media empower and encourage women in diverse ways, one of which is that the social media encourage women to engage in economic activities that build networks with colleagues, business partners, workers and clients. This study concludes that women make use of the social media as a veritable source of empowerment in different spheres of life. Keywords: Social media, women, empowerment and Nigeri

Negotiating New Asian American Masculinities: Attitudes and Gender Expectations

The article examines how Asian-American men construct their own masculinities. Changes in Asian-American heterosexual masculinity are of great interest within the Asia-American communities and to the general public. Historically this racialized masculinity was both hypermasculanized and desexualized as a way to limit economic and racial opportunities in the U.S. While these dichotomous ideas about Asian-American masculinities are still pervasive new articulations of what it means to be male, straight, and Asian American are affecting different Asian-American communities and interpersonal relationships at home and in workplaces. Issues of Asian- American masculinities are brought up in relation to interracial dating and marriage, expectations about supporting the family and community, sexual violence within the home and sexual harassment in public spaces, racial violence stemming from economic scapegoating and white supremacist ideology, mass media portrayals of Asian-American men, and complexities about ethnic identity and politics

Social networking through consumer electronics

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-95).This thesis explores how the merging of ubiquitous consumer electronics and the sociable web improve the user experience of these devices, increase the functionality of both, and help distribute content in a more sociable way. The project will consist of one well fleshed out principal application: a digital video recorder (manufactured by Motorola, running OCAP) connected to the Facebook social network. By connecting these two technologies, the user can now automatically watch the shows her friends like and are willing to report to the social network; in return, the user transmits her viewing data back to the social network.Mariana Cristina Baca Del Rosario.S.M

Attracting applicants through the organization’s social media page : signaling employer brand personality

The purpose of this study is to examine how potential applicants’ exposure to an organization’s social media page relates to their subsequent organizational attractiveness perceptions and word-of-mouth intentions. Based on signaling theory and the theory of symbolic attraction, we propose that potential applicants rely on perceived communication characteristics of the social media page (social presence and informativeness) as signals of the organization’s employer brand personality (warmth and competence), which in turn relate to organizational attractiveness and word-of-mouth. Data were gathered in a simulated job search process in which final-year students looked for an actual job posting and later visited an actual organization’s social media page. In line with our hypotheses, results show that the perceived social presence of a social media page was indirectly positively related to attractiveness and word-of-mouth through its positive association with perceived organizational warmth. Perceived informativeness was indirectly positively related to these outcomes through its positive association with perceived organizational competence. In addition, we found that social presence was also directly positively related to organizational attractiveness. These findings suggest that organizations can use social media pages to manage key recruitment outcomes by signaling their employer brand personality

Shy or sociable : introversion/extraversion and message recall

textPersonality research has long been an area of interest in the study of consumer behavior. Currently, common practice is to segment prospective audiences by demographic variables (age, gender, and race) instead of psychographics (values, attitudes, personality). In this research, the author investigates the relationship between personality type (introversion/extraversion) and message recall. Using 122 undergraduate and graduate students, recall was examined across two forms of stimulus (incongruent and congruent messages). Results indicated that while there is no relationship between personality type and message recall, there is a relationship between the frequency of advertising messaging and recall. Results are discussed individually by messaging frequency and personality type with further suggestions for future research.Advertisin

Feature analysis of multidisciplinary scientific collaboration patterns based on PNAS

The features of collaboration patterns are often considered to be different from discipline to discipline. Meanwhile, collaborating among disciplines is an obvious feature emerged in modern scientific research, which incubates several interdisciplines. The features of collaborations in and among the disciplines of biological, physical and social sciences are analyzed based on 52,803 papers published in a multidisciplinary journal PNAS during 1999 to 2013. From those data, we found similar transitivity and assortativity of collaboration patterns as well as the identical distribution type of collaborators per author and that of papers per author, namely a mixture of generalized Poisson and power-law distributions. In addition, we found that interdisciplinary research is undertaken by a considerable fraction of authors, not just those with many collaborators or those with many papers. This case study provides a window for understanding aspects of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration patterns

Designing electronic collaborative learning environments

Electronic collaborative learning environments for learning and working are in vogue. Designers design them according to their own constructivist interpretations of what collaborative learning is and what it should achieve. Educators employ them with different educational approaches and in diverse situations to achieve different ends. Students use them, sometimes very enthusiastically, but often in a perfunctory way. Finally, researchers study them and—as is usually the case when apples and oranges are compared—find no conclusive evidence as to whether or not they work, where they do or do not work, when they do or do not work and, most importantly, why, they do or do not work. This contribution presents an affordance framework for such collaborative learning environments; an interaction design procedure for designing, developing, and implementing them; and an educational affordance approach to the use of tasks in those environments. It also presents the results of three projects dealing with these three issues