An overview study of twitter in the UK local government

Copyright @ 2012 Brunel UniversityMicroblogging applications are becoming a momentous element of the public sector social media agenda. The potential of Twitter to update the public with frequent, concise and real-time content has motivated many pubic authorities to create their accounts, thus generating an interesting topic for research. This paper seeks to make an empirical and methodological contribution to this new body of knowledge by presenting an overview study of general Twitter accounts maintained by UK local government authorities. Over 296,000 tweets were collected from the 187officially listed local government accounts. The analysis was conducted in two stages: an examination of the Twitter networks developed by the accounts was followed by a structural analysis of the tweets. The combination of online research and social media analytics techniques enabled us to reach important conclusions about the use of Twitter by those authorities. The findings indicate high level of maturity of Twitter in the UK local government and point to several directions for further increasing the impact and visibility of those accounts within a social media strategy

Do social networking groups support online petitions?

This article is the post-print version of the final paper that has been accepted for publication and is forthcoming in Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy. Copyright @ Emerald Group Publishing LimitedEPetitioning has been emerging as arguably the most important eParticipation institutional activity. This paper aims to provide some insights into how ePetitions are perceived and supported by social networking sites. The connection between the UK government’s ePetitioning system and social networking groups linking to governmental petitions was investigated. Online data from Facebook were collected and analysed with respect to numbers of supporters compared to official signatures. The results indicate that although the process of signing an official petition is not more complex than joining a Facebook group, the membership of respective Facebook groups can be much higher. In particular, certain topics experienced very high support on Facebook which did not convert to signatures. The paper raises interesting questions about the potential uptake of citizen-government interactions in policy making mechanisms.The online research tool used for data collection in this paper was developed by Steven Sams who acknowledges support by the World Class University (WCU) program through the National Research Foundation of Korea. The program is funded by the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (No. 515-82-06574

Engaging with citizens online: Understanding the role of ePetitioning in local government democracy

This article can be accessed from the link below.According to the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act introduced in 2009, UK local authorities are expected to implement ―a facility for making petitions in electronic form to the authority‖. Motivated by this arrangement, this paper reflects on the findings of a case study investigation conducted with the Royal Borough of Kingston (one of the first local authorities to implement such a service since 2004). Lessons learnt from the case suggest that ePetitions reveal increased potential to enhance local government democracy, but are also shaped by challenging open implementation issues which can highly influence the initiative’s impact. Our conclusions are developed within the general debate about online public participation or eParticipation and particularly examine the implications for policy makers

When Technology Makes Headlines: The Media's Double Vision About the Digital Age

Analyzes technology-related news items appearing in lead sections of mainstream media for trends in popular topics, companies, and messages about technology's influence and its risks. Compares findings with trends in new media such as blogs and Twitter

Social innovation and Higher Education landscape in East Asia: Comparative study

Social innovation has seen rapid growth in the last decade globally, with increasing numbers of social innovators developing new ideas, the emergence of government policy to support social innovation, and enhanced interest in the concept and practice by academics. Universities play a key role in developing responses to complex problems and social innovation is seen to offer critical tools for them to achieve this. This research comprises a comparative study and five in-depth country reports on social innovation and social enterprise research and teaching in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam. It was conducted by the University of Northampton in partnership with local research teams in each country. It finds that social innovation is the subject of growing number of courses in these countries, with the vast majority of modules focused at the undergraduate level, and social innovation teaching seen as a critical element in students’ development, especially in fostering communication skills, empathy, problem-solving, and analytical thinking. However, it notes that one of the existing challenges is that social innovation modules remain dominated by business schools. Research into social innovation is also growing, and there is a desire for more research centred on business modelling, social enterprise success factors and social impact measurement. However, it notes that research collaborations in this field between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are uncommon and that there is a lack of funding for social innovation research from HEIs. The authors make a number of recommendations in the comparative study at the practice, institutional and systemic levels. They suggest, for instance, that social innovation should be embedded across all academic disciplines and degree programmes and that HEIs increase their engagement with corporates for support of social innovation research and teaching

Numerous faces of feminism and their meaning in contemporary South Korea through the lens of the country’s young adults

Beginning with contextualizing and historicizing South Korean feminism, this work aims to provide an inclusive perspective that recognizes numerous social, political, as well as economic conditions that have influenced the feminist resurgence in contemporary South Korea, but also the increasing backlash it has been recently receiving there. Further, the research continues by introducing the diverse forms of contemporary feminist activism in the country, focusing the examination on several of the most influential and publicized ones. In addition to the wide range of previously conducted studies on the subject, several secondary quantitative data sources, such as surveys, are used to thoroughly demonstrate the currently prevailing trends and phenomena. Finally, relying primarily on qualitative data in the form of seven semi-structured interviews with young South Koreans, the research explores the meanings, personal experiences, and attitudinal orientations, as well as ultimately, the feminist identity or lack thereof, as expressed by this group of interviewees. The study concludes that the major impediment to the endorsement of the feminist identity of its participants seems to be the negative cultural stereotypes attributed to the country’s feminism that either make individuals reluctant to manifest such a label or influence their complete rejection of this ideology as harmful and deviant. The difference between the two orientations can be potentially associated with the experiences of gender discrimination of both the participants themselves and of people in their social environment, as well as their perception of the nature of the existing inequalities as an either structural, systemic, and collective social problem or as a highly individual, unshared incidents

Facebook: Changing the face of communication research

The ubiquitous social networking site, Facebook, registered over one billion active users in 2012 and continues to grow (Facebook, 2018a). Not surprisingly, communication researchers around the world noticed this phenomenal shift in communication practice, a practice aided by a combination of digital communication tools—easy to access communication networks, low cost bandwidth, smartphones, application features, and so on. These developments transformed the understanding of “social networks,” turning them from face-to-face interactions among small groups into world spanning digital connections, from networks of business or professional associations supported by analogue or “old” communication practices (such as letter writing, telephone calls, or conference meetings) into always-on real-time tracking of people’s activities. This review examines 400 articles published between 2006 and 2017 in peer reviewed communication- related journals and listed in the EBSCO Communication Source database. The database returned the initial list of articles to a query using the single search term “Facebook.” Subsequent analysis grouped the articles into a number of themes. As we will see, much of the published research that involves Facebook addresses not Facebook itself but Facebook as a source of material or research data on more particular communication topics. In a way, Facebook appears as another medium for communication. After some introductory comments on the history and prior study of Facebook, this review will present the key themes that appear in the research. These include Facebook in theoretical perspectives, Facebook used in interpersonal communication, Facebook’s relationship to journalism, Facebook in education, Facebook in political communication, corporate and organizational use of Facebook, legal and ethical issues arising with Facebook, and other areas of research

Leaky Pipeline and Sacrificial Lambs: Gender, Political Parties, and Descriptive and Substantive Representation of Women in South Korea, 1988 – 2016

This study examines women’s political representation in pre-election (candidate nomination), election, and post-election (legislative activities) stages in South Korea. First, I examined factors contributing to electing women to the National Assembly in the eight national legislative elections since democratization in 1987. I conducted statistical analysis to examine how a candidate’s political experience, major party nomination, incumbency, and districts’ party loyalty affect the candidate’s electoral victory and how each influences women and men differently. I also interviewed candidates, candidate aspirants, elected legislators, legislative staffers, scholars and activists on their personal experiences with major party nomination and election campaigns. Second, I analyzed how legislators’ gender, partisanship, ideology, and gender stereotypes interact in shaping lawmakers’ legislative priorities. Using digital archives, I tracked who proposed women-friendly bills in the previous four Assemblies (2000-2016) and analyzed how invisible factors such as electoral rules, the culture of parliaments, party affiliation, and their seat types affect lawmakers’ legislative agendas and productivity, using both statistical analysis and interview analysis. This research contributes to the literature on gender and politics. There is very little known about the effectiveness of gender quotas on women’s political representation in the South Korean context. By identifying promotional or inhibitive factors leading to the election of more women to the national legislature, the findings propose policy measures that appear more effective in tackling the issue of women’s underrepresentation in politics. Based on original data in Korean language, this research also provides valuable resources for comparative studies in the future

Smartphones

Many of the research approaches to smartphones actually regard them as more or less transparent points of access to other kinds of communication experiences. That is, rather than considering the smartphone as something in itself, the researchers look at how individuals use the smartphone for their communicative purposes, whether these be talking, surfing the web, using on-line data access for off-site data sources, downloading or uploading materials, or any kind of interaction with social media. They focus not so much on the smartphone itself but on the activities that people engage in with their smartphones