Academics and Social Networking Sites: Benefits, Problems and Tensions in Professional Engagement with Online Networking

The web has had a profound effect on the ways people interact, with online social networks arguably playing an important role in changing or augmenting how we connect with others. However, uptake of online social networking by the academic community varies, and needs to be understood. This paper presents an independent, novel analysis of a large-scale dataset published by Nature Publishing Group detailing the results of a survey about academics use of online social networking services. An open coding approach was used to analyse 480 previously unused text responses. The analysis revealed a wide range of benefits and also problems associated with engaging with online networking, and tensions within this. The analysis provides further insight into the nuances of uptake, by exploring clusters of co-reported benefits and problems within the qualitative analysis. The findings will help move forward current debates surrounding social media use by academics from being viewed in solely beneficial terms, towards an understanding of the problems and tensions that arise through academic work online

Happiness is assortative in online social networks

Social networks tend to disproportionally favor connections between individuals with either similar or dissimilar characteristics. This propensity, referred to as assortative mixing or homophily, is expressed as the correlation between attribute values of nearest neighbour vertices in a graph. Recent results indicate that beyond demographic features such as age, sex and race, even psychological states such as "loneliness" can be assortative in a social network. In spite of the increasing societal importance of online social networks it is unknown whether assortative mixing of psychological states takes place in situations where social ties are mediated solely by online networking services in the absence of physical contact. Here, we show that general happiness or Subjective Well-Being (SWB) of Twitter users, as measured from a 6 month record of their individual tweets, is indeed assortative across the Twitter social network. To our knowledge this is the first result that shows assortative mixing in online networks at the level of SWB. Our results imply that online social networks may be equally subject to the social mechanisms that cause assortative mixing in real social networks and that such assortative mixing takes place at the level of SWB. Given the increasing prevalence of online social networks, their propensity to connect users with similar levels of SWB may be an important instrument in better understanding how both positive and negative sentiments spread through online social ties. Future research may focus on how event-specific mood states can propagate and influence user behavior in "real life".Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure

Online social networking and psychological experiences:the perceptions of young people with mental health difficulties

Objectives This study explores the interaction between online social networking experiences and wellbeing in 12 young people accessing mental health services. Methods Data from semi-structured interviews was analysed using Grounded Theory methodology. Results “Threats and judgement” and “connection and support” were experienced by adolescents, facilitated by having continuous access to a vast social network. These experiences influenced adolescents' psychological wellbeing, mediated by their responses to threat and judgement and maintaining “safe sharing” with their network. Social network use was conceived as a gamble of balancing its potentially positive and negative impact in a culture in which social network use appears to be unavoidable. Conclusions The findings indicate the importance of routine assessment and formulation of social networking use in understanding adolescents' psychological distress. Furthermore, a range of opportunities exist for clinicians to utilise the anonymity and peer support that social networks offer to broaden the range of mental health services offered to young people

A Technique for Ranking Friendship Closeness in Social Networking Services

The concept of friend and friendship are critical to both theoretical and empirical studies of social relations, social media and social networks. Measuring the closeness among friends is a big issue for developing online social networking services (SNS) such as Facebook. This paper will address this issue by proposing a technique for ranking friendship closeness in SNS. The technique consists of an algorithm for ranking need-driven friendship closeness and an algorithm for behaviour-based friendship closeness in online social networking sites. The former is based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, while the latter is based on behaviours of users on Facebook and TOPSIS. Examples provided illustrate the viability of the proposed algorithms. The research in this paper shows that ranking friendship closeness will facilitate understanding of needs and behaviours of friends and friendships in SNS. The proposed approach will facilitate research and development of social media, social commerce, social networks, and SNS

Social and place-focused communities in location-based online social networks

Thanks to widely available, cheap Internet access and the ubiquity of smartphones, millions of people around the world now use online location-based social networking services. Understanding the structural properties of these systems and their dependence upon users' habits and mobility has many potential applications, including resource recommendation and link prediction. Here, we construct and characterise social and place-focused graphs by using longitudinal information about declared social relationships and about users' visits to physical places collected from a popular online location-based social service. We show that although the social and place-focused graphs are constructed from the same data set, they have quite different structural properties. We find that the social and location-focused graphs have different global and meso-scale structure, and in particular that social and place-focused communities have negligible overlap. Consequently, group inference based on community detection performed on the social graph alone fails to isolate place-focused groups, even though these do exist in the network. By studying the evolution of tie structure within communities, we show that the time period over which location data are aggregated has a substantial impact on the stability of place-focused communities, and that information about place-based groups may be more useful for user-centric applications than that obtained from the analysis of social communities alone.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

From chunks to clusters: Identifying similarity features in social discussion

Users’ reviews on social media are crucial to understanding users’ interests and their opinions. Although there has been sufficient research on online reviews about products and services, there has been a lack of studies examining online reviews about books. This study extends our earlier work on frequency analysis of review words on online book reviews, which identified users’ interests in discussing books by analyzing the frequency of words users used in their book reviews on a social networking site. This paper intends to investigate whether the frequencies of the review words would represent similarities that would help understand the characteristics of books in selecting books for children. This study performs hierarchical cluster analysis on the selected books to identify homogeneous clusters of cases (books) based on selected characteristics (word frequencies). The finding of this study shows meaningful similarities in the social discussion by clustering books based on the characteristics of books. The results of this study help us understand the specific features of books and user behavior in discussing books on a social networking site. This study has implications for providing practical insights into the intrinsic values of users’ social discussion in identifying similarities among books

Understanding the determinants of s-commerce adoption: From unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) perspective

Social commerce has become a new trend of inquiry for researchers to investigate the behaviour of consumer in online shopping. Linkedln, Facebook and Twitter is a popular social networking that opened opportunities for new business models. The combination between Web 2.0 social media technologies and infrastructure had support online interactions and user to the acquisition of product and services. To understanding the user’s social shopping intention, this study conducted an empirical study based on questionnaire that had develop to investigate what is the factors affect the user’s intention of participation in social commerce. This research proposed unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to study actual use of social commerce. This study will examine four direct effects on social commerce adoption such as Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Social Influence (SI), and Facilitating Condition (FC

From Social Networks to Publishing Platforms: A Review of the History and Scholarship of Academic Social Network Sites

Social network sites enable people to easily connect to and communicate with others. Following the success of generic platforms such as Facebook, a variety of online services launched during the mid 2000s in order to bring the benefits of online social networking to an academic audience. However, it is not clear whether these academic social network sites (ASNS) are primarily aligned with social networking or alternative publishing, and functionalities continue to change. Now ten years since the launch of the three main platforms which currently lead the market (Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Mendeley), it is timely to review how and why ASNS are used. This paper discusses the history and definition of ASNS, before providing a comprehensive review of the empirical research related to ASNS to-date. Five main themes within the research literature are identified, including: the relationship of the platforms to Open Access publishing; metrics; interactions with others through the platforms; platform demographics and social structure; and user perspectives. Discussing the themes in the research both provides academics with a greater understanding of what ASNS can do and their limitations, and identifies gaps in the literature which would be valuable to explore in future research