Three Research Essays on Human Behaviors in Social Media

Social Media (SM) has grown to be one of the most popular Internet technologies for individual users and has fostered a global community. For instance, recent statistics reveal that monthly active users of Facebook are almost 1.5 billion by Mar 2015. At the same time, 20% of internet users in the US are expected to have Twitter accounts. This figure has grown from 15.2% in 2012, and is expected to rise to 24.2% by 2018 (Twitter 2015). People like spending their time on SM to track the latest news, seek knowledge, update personal status, and connect with friends. It is possible that being exposed to others’ positive information on SM could generate darker emotions, such as envy. Extant literature suggests that envy significantly influences human behaviors and life satisfaction (Krasnova et al. 2013). This dissertation, consisting of three essays, studies the effects of SM on human behaviors. Chapter 2 investigates how others’ positive information arouses envy and influences user behaviors from different angles. Chapter 3 focuses on how espoused national cultures reshape online benign envy and impact SM usage. Chapter 4 discusses the relationship between social media and envy with textual analysis techniques. Chapter 5 provides a summary and overall conclusion to this work. Chapter 2- Envy and How it can Influence SM Use Users tend to disclose the positive side of their lives on SM. Such information can be perceived in an extremely positive light in the eyes of their connections, which could leads to envy. In the current study, we develop a theoretical framework that elaborates the mechanism through which online envy is generated and consequently influences SM usage. We specify that online users experience two types of envy: malicious and benign envy, which have distinct impacts on IS use. Specifically, malicious envy plays a mitigating role and benign envy serves as an enhancer of SM use. Our findings provide valuable implications for both academic researchers and IS practitioners. Chapter 3 – Benign Envy, Social Media, and Culture Although envy universally exits in human society, its influence on human behaviors varies by cultural contexts. As shown in chapter 2, benign envy is a more salient factor in the social media context. In the current essay, we focus on investigating how different espoused national cultural values affect this relationship between online benign envy and consequent behaviors. We also developed a benign envy and IT usage model, which integrates four espoused national cultural values. We conceptualized several main constructs and then theoretically justified the relationships between them. As expected, if people experience benign envy when using SM, they are more likely to continue their use. Moreover, different espoused national culture values work as independent and moderating variables along with the envy procedures. People who hold different levels of culture behave distinctly. The study found that people who espouse a greater level of collectivism were be more likely to compare with other peers in order to evaluate their self-social status; people who espouse higher levels of uncertainty avoidance were more likely to experience benign envy; and the relationship between perceived enhancement and use intention was stronger for individuals with higher levels of espoused masculinity. However, espoused power distance values were not significantly moderating the relationship between perceived enjoyment and intended behavior in the current context (general SM). This study provided some theoretical and practical implications. Chapter 4 – Tweet, Favorite, Status, and Envy Many social media studies have demonstrated that aggregating social information could provide valuable insight into sociological, economical, healthcare, and other critical fields. Among these studies, Twitter has been one of the most popular social platforms that researchers value. It has a greater potential for academics to observe and explore critical social behaviors, such as envy, which could lead to avoidance of using certain IT platforms, emotional depression, and even worse, suicide. With text mining techniques, massive numbers of tweets can be collected, classified, and analyzed. The envy literature has largely theorized on the motivations of envy. However, in the IS context, envy related research is very limited, and the empirical tests are confounded by limited data. In order to address these gaps, we collected envy related tweets from Twitter and classified them into the two types (benign and malicious) of envy relying on text mining techniques with sentiment analysis (positive to negative). Based on the data set, we further analyzed the patterns of online envy. Additionally, by using logistic regression, the impacts of certain social media usage behaviors were tested on differentiating online envy. Our work included both qualitative observation and quantitative analysis, along with the evaluation of regression output

How Misinformation and Mistrust Compound the Threat of Epidemics

This thesis was conducted to study the effects of misinformation and medical mistrust on the public health field. I use the events of the Chapare Virus outbreak in Bolivia in the summer of 2019 and the public dialogue during that time period to discuss these themes. I used data from market survey\u27s in La Paz, newspaper articles from Página Siete, and Tweets from the time period of the outbreak. My findings suggest that misinformation and medical mistrust affected public health measures, which has major implications for the way the public health field should address future public health events

It\u27s All About Me: How Self-Brand Connection and Social Media Interactivity Influence Purchase Intent

Social media is ubiquitous and allows consumers to display identity by through possessions through posts, images, and interactions. The self is all the individual calls their own and is expressed outwardly through everything visible, including possessions, relationships, and interactions. They tell their story through the display of envy-inducing artifacts, and create a perfect, photoshopped life. Consumers seek a connection to positively viewed brands they feel are self-representative through interaction. This dissertation seeks to better understand consumer rationale for and gratification from online brand engagement and how that, in turn, impacts the brand. Three studies examined the effects of self-brand connection, narcissism, brand status, and interactivity to better understand their effect on purchase intent. Study 1 measured the effect of narcissism, self-brand connection, and likelihood to interact on Social media impact purchase intent. Results indicated narcissism, or concern public perception, positively moderated the relationships between self-brand connection and purchase intent, and likelihood to interact on purchase intent. Results showed self-brand connection mediated the relationship between Social value of a brand and likelihood to interact. Study 2 extended the results to examine the effect of brand status. As narcissists are concerned with others’ perceptions and desire to be associated with high status, Study 2 added the variable of status. Results showed a positive relationship between self-consciousness and self-brand connection, as moderated by brand Social value, with self-brand connection also mediating the relationship between Social value and likelihood to interact. Last, product status moderated the relationship between likelihood to interact and purchase intent. Based on those results, Study 3 added interactivity with a brand to better understand the effect on purchase intent. Interactivity and self-brand connection both positively mediated the relationship on status and purchase intent, but it depended on the level of Social value. Understanding the effect of consumer-brand interaction is critical to marketers spending key advertising dollars online, as it is a hallmark of identity. Online behavior helps shape the digital self, which partly depends on Social interactions. As consumers develop their relationship to a brand, they are more apt to purchase those products to continue incorporating them into their lives

E-philology and Twitterature

This paper presents an original use of Twitter to interpret and rewrite the poems of Francesco Petrarca's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf) implemented within the Oregon Petrarch Open Book OPOB). This activity was partially inspired by the idea of Twitterature developed by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin; we believe with them that our digital time should develop new and more functional ways of addressing literary texts but at the same time we are convinced that the "burdensome duty of hours spent reading" cannot be eliminated. On the contrary, the new ways of reading in the digital era as we envisage them are the result and consequence of broader and deeper reading activities. We conceived the project of writing 366 tweets, out of the 366 poems that make the last form of Petrarca’s Rvf, as the result of different philological activities, from reading the texts in the original language to consulting manuscripts, translations and intersemiotic renderings of the texts. Before writing the 140 characters that make one tweet we also elaborated paraphrases, summaries and keywords related to the individual poems. Students created the first version of the tweets during the 2011 UO seminar on Re-reading Petrarca’s Rvf in the Digtal Era. The second version was elaborated in the context of a seminar on the same topic during Winter 2014. This paper presents the two versions of the Twitter Edition of Petrarca's Rvf now available in the OPOB and focuses on the philology connected to the latest edition that provided an English translation of the original tweets written in Italian. The actual Italian and English 366 tweets are published in the Appendix to the article

The future is now: A mixed-methods analysis of astronauts\u27 experience associate with space travel

As SpaceX and other commercial entities enter the space industry, space travel for a broader audience will become more feasible. Since the early 1990s, tourism study has witnessed an ongoing conversation on space tourism, which mainly covers motivations of potential space tourists and their pricing expectations. This study takes a novel perspective by framing astronauts’ direct experiences as inputs to build a conceptual model of space travel experience. Through a combination of traditional qualitative analysis and computation-based linguistic analysis on 19,114 Tweets (2008-2018) posted by 36 astronauts, this study aims to address an important theoretical void: When people travel to outer space, what leisure experiences attached to orbital space travel could they have? We propose “amateur astronaut” as a transiting title from astronauts to space tourists, and suggest that space travel experience brings an overview effect as our core theoretical contributions of touristic attraction

The Cowl - v.78 - n.3 - Sep 19, 2013

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 78 - No. 3 - September 19, 2013. 20 pages

Suffolk Journal, vol. 74, no. 20, 4/09/2014

https://dc.suffolk.edu/journal/1583/thumbnail.jp