Networked Individualism of Urban Residents: Discovering the Communicative Ecology in Inner-City Apartment Buildings

Certain patterns of interaction between people point to networks as an adequate conceptual model to characterise some aspects of social relationships mediated or facilitated by information and communication technology. Wellman proposes a shift from groups to networks and describes the ambivalent nature inherent in an ego-centric yet still well-connected portfolio of sociability with the term ‘networked individualism’. In this paper we use qualitative data from an action research study of social networks of residents in three inner-city apartment buildings in Australia to provide empirical grounding for the theoretical concept of networked individualism. However, this model focuses on network interaction rather than collective interaction. We propose ‘communicative ecology’ as a concept which integrates the three dimensions of "online and offline", "global and local" as well as "collective and networked". We present our research on three layers of interpretation (technical, social and discursive) to deliver a rich description of the communicative ecology we found, that is, the way residents negotiate membership, trust, privacy, reciprocity, permeability and social roles in person-to-person mediated and direct relationships. We find that residents seamlessly traverse between online and offline communication; local communication and interaction maintains a more prominent position than global or geographically dispersed communication; and residents follow a dual approach which allows them to switch between collective and networked interaction depending on purpose and context

Social Competence of Digital Natives: Impact of Social Networking Sites (SNS) Use

The digital natives of today are the first generation to grow up immersed in information and communication technologies and in particular social networking sites (SNSs). There is much hype in the media about the negative effects of SNSs, at the same time there are concerted efforts to reach these digital natives through social media by politicians, advertisers, organisations, and agencies. There is much isolated research on social media, digital natives, youth well-being, etc. But there is very little research that brings these diverse disciplinary threads together in a holistic manner. The purpose of our research is to address this lacuna by exploring the impact of social networking sites on digital native well-being in particular social competence. In this paper we explore this area and come up with three propositions that could become the foundation for future research

Bringing Social Computing to Secondary School Classrooms

Social computing is the study of how technology shapes human social interactions. This topic has become increasingly relevant to secondary school students (ages 11--18) as more of young people's everyday social experiences take place online, particularly with the continuing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, social computing topics are rarely touched upon in existing middle and high school curricula. We seek to introduce concepts from social computing to secondary school students so they can understand how computing has wide-ranging social implications that touch upon their everyday lives, as well as think critically about both the positive and negative sides of different social technology designs. In this report, we present a series of six lessons combining presentations and hands-on activities covering topics within social computing and detail our experience teaching these lessons to approximately 1,405 students across 13 middle and high schools in our local school district. We developed lessons covering how social computing relates to the topics of Data Management, Encrypted Messaging, Human-Computer Interaction Careers, Machine Learning and Bias, Misinformation, and Online Behavior. We found that 81.13% of students expressed greater interest in the content of our lessons compared to their interest in STEM overall. We also found from pre- and post-lesson comprehension questions that 63.65% learned new concepts from the main activity. We release all lesson materials on a website for public use. From our experience, we observed that students were engaged in these topics and found enjoyment in finding connections between computing and their own lives

Assessing Undergraduates Social competence on Social Media in Nigeria

Undergraduates are known to be early adopters and users of social media and are socially competent online as against offline. The study sought to determine the social competence of students as exhibited on social media against the background of a growing decline in undergraduates’ offline social relevance. Using survey research design of correlative type, 850 undergraduates in similar faculties in two selected Universities in South west Nigeria were selected using multi-stage sampling. Questionnaire was used to collect data; reliability score of (α = 0.82) was derived for social competence on social media and (α = 0.88) for students’ use of social media. Eight hundred questionnaires (94%) were found usable. Findings revealed students are active on popular social media sites; social competence of undergraduates on social media was high ( = 64.19) and frequently use of social media. Social competence of undergraduates was positively related to social media use (r = .771, p = \u3c 0.01); social competence of undergraduates on social media was different based on gender (t = 4.02; p = \u3c 0.05), there was a significant difference in student’s use of social media based on gender (t = 5.064; p = \u3c 0.05). Social competence of the students is exhibited on social media and there is a continued adherence of the young population of Nigerians to online platforms for social interactions and relevance at the expense of natural physical dialogues. The study recommends complementary role for online media, encouraging undergraduates to build offline, natural social interactions and relationships

Relational Maintenance Strategies on Facebook

This study explored how college students utilize the social networking site Facebook to maintain relationships. Focus group data was analyzed to develop a list of 58 Facebook relational maintenance strategies. Canary, Stafford, Hause, and Wallace’s (1993) relational maintenance typology was used to organize Facebook relational maintenance strategies. A new category was created to represent a popular relational maintenance strategy on Facebook: surveillance. This study also examined how maintenance strategies vary in different Facebook relationships; close friends, casual friends, acquaintances, romantic partners, and outsiders (e.g. parents, bosses, teachers). Participants suggested Facebook is an adequate stand-alone tool to maintain casual or acquaintance relationships, yet cannot convey enough intimacy to maintain close relationships. Participants expected close friends and romantic partners to put forth extra effort to maintain relationships through additional communication media such as text messaging, phone calls, and face-to-face interaction

Statistically Significant Detection of Linguistic Change

We propose a new computational approach for tracking and detecting statistically significant linguistic shifts in the meaning and usage of words. Such linguistic shifts are especially prevalent on the Internet, where the rapid exchange of ideas can quickly change a word's meaning. Our meta-analysis approach constructs property time series of word usage, and then uses statistically sound change point detection algorithms to identify significant linguistic shifts. We consider and analyze three approaches of increasing complexity to generate such linguistic property time series, the culmination of which uses distributional characteristics inferred from word co-occurrences. Using recently proposed deep neural language models, we first train vector representations of words for each time period. Second, we warp the vector spaces into one unified coordinate system. Finally, we construct a distance-based distributional time series for each word to track it's linguistic displacement over time. We demonstrate that our approach is scalable by tracking linguistic change across years of micro-blogging using Twitter, a decade of product reviews using a corpus of movie reviews from Amazon, and a century of written books using the Google Book-ngrams. Our analysis reveals interesting patterns of language usage change commensurate with each medium.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 4 table

Putting their Best Foot Forward: Emotional Disclosure on Facebook

Facebook has become a widely used online self-representation and communication platform. In this research, we focus on emotional disclosure on Facebook. We conducted two studies, and results from both self-report and observer rating show that individuals are more likely to express positive relative to negative emotions and present better emotional well-being on Facebook than in real life. Our study is the first to demonstrate impression management on Facebook through emotional disclosure. We discuss important theoretical and practical implications of our study.Published Versio

Millennial Media: A Fantasy Theme Analysis of the Short Film Narrow Roads

As we move into the future of , society has become more involved with the media they consume. Younger generations in the past generations have been effected and have affected media development in various ways. The Millennial generation of today is no exception. This thesis discusses the effects of media on the millennial generation through fantasy theme chains of an original video narrative. Millennial students will watch the narrative and discuss with other Millennials the themes presented and perceived from the video. The results from this study will give a look into how millennial interaction about visual media makes a difference in the area of media

Patterns of multi-channel communication among older teens

"Based on a study of 1440 Swiss teenagers in 2003, higly complementary (instead of substitutive) relationships are found between the usage of various technical communication media as well as between media usage and face-to-face interactions. Males seem particularly prone to use all media channels in a complementary fashion. Among both genders, there is a particularly strong complementarity between the fixed and the mobile phone. When partners meet rarely, the communicate more by written than by oral media, particularly by SMS. By comparing older acquaintances with more recently created interpersonal relationships, it is found that the mix of media channels doesn't change significantly over time, except that the exchange of Short Text Messages declines. While to closeness of a relationship seems to be positively affected by the frequency of meetings and fixed phone calls, mobile contacts and Emails don't seem to make any consistent contribution." (author's abstract). Contents 1.Introduction; 2. Exploring the factors of individual and collective media choice; 3. Research Questions and Research Design; 4. Total amount of communicative relations; 5. Relationships between the Five Channels: Intercorrelations and Factor Structures; 6. On the Relationship between Mobile Calls and Fixed Phone Calls; 7. Relationships between Physical Meetings and Technically Mediated Communications; 8. Older and more recent acquaintances; 9. Impacts on the closeness of relationship; 10. Conclusions; References