'What was your blood sugar reading this morning?': representing diabetes self-management on Facebook

Social networking sites have swiftly become a salient venue for the production and consumption of neoliberal health discourse by individuals and organisations. These platforms offer both opportunities for individuals to accrue coping resources and a means for organisations to promote their agendas to an online audience. Focusing specifically on diabetes, this article examines the representation of social actors and interactional styles on three organisational Pages on Facebook. Drawing on media and communication theories, we situate this linguistic analysis in relation to the communicative affordances employed by these organisations as they publish content online. Diabetes sufferers are represented as an at-risk group whose vulnerabilities can be managed through forms of participation specific to the respective organisation. More popular diabetes Pages draw on the opportunities for social interaction afforded by Facebook and combine informational and promotional content to foster communication between the organisation and its audience. By encouraging reflexive management of diabetes risks, these Pages contribute to the construction of ‘biological citizens’ who interweave habitual interactions on social networking sites with responsible self-care, consumption of health information and health activism

Understanding Technology as Situated Practice: Everyday use of Voice User Interfaces Among Diverse Groups of Users in Urban India

Abstract: As smartphones have become ubiquitous across urban India, voice user interfaces (VUIs) are increasingly becoming part of diverse groups of users’ daily experiences. These technologies are now generally accessible as a result of improvements in mobile Internet access, [-8.5pc]Biography is Required. Please provide. introduction of low-cost smartphones and the ongoing process of their localisation into Indian languages. However, when people engage with technologies in their everyday lives, they not only enact the material attributes of the artifact but also draw on their skills, social positions, prior experience and societal norms and expectations to make use of the artifact. Drawing on Orlikowski’s analytical framework of “technologies-in-practice” we engage in an interview-based exploratory study among diverse groups of users in urban India to understand use of VUIs as situated practice. We identify three technologies-in-practice emerging through enactment of VUIs on users’ smartphones: looking up, learning and leisure. We argue that – instead of asking why and how users appropriate VUIs – identifying different kinds of enactments of VUIs present researchers and practitioners with a more nuanced understanding of existing and potential use of VUIs across varied contexts

Enhancing organisational competitiveness via social media - a strategy as practice perspective

The affordances, popularity and pervasive use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have made these platforms attractive to organisations for enhancing their competitiveness and creating business value. Despite this apparent significance of social media for businesses, they are struggling with the development of a social media strategy as well as understanding the implications of social media on practice within their organisations. This paper explores how social media has become a tool for competitiveness and its influence on organisational strategy and practice. Using the 'strategy as practice' lens and guided by the interpretivist philosophy, this paper uses the empirical case of a telecom organisation in Tanzania. The findings show that social media is influencing competitiveness through imitation and product development. Also, the findings indicate how social media affects the practices within an organisation, consequently making the social media strategy an emergent phenomenon

The Perils and Promises of Self-Disclosure on Social Media

In addition to their professional social media accounts, individuals are increasingly using their personal profiles and casual posts to communicate their identities to work colleagues. They do this in order to ‘stand out from the crowd’ and to signal attributes that are difficult to showcase explicitly in a work setting. Existing studies have tended to treat personal posts viewed in a professional context as a problem, since they can threaten impression management efforts. These accounts focus on the attempts of individuals to separate their life domains on social media. In contrast, we present the narratives of professional IT workers in India who intentionally disrupt the boundaries between personal and professional profiles in order to get noticed by their employers. Drawing on the dramaturgical vocabulary of Goffman (1959) we shed light on how individuals cope with increased levels of self-disclosure on social media. We argue that their self-presentations can be likened to post-modern performances in which the traditional boundaries between actor and audience are intentionally unsettled. These casual posts communicate additional personal traits that are not otherwise included in professional presentations. Since there are no strict boundaries between formal front-stage and relaxed back-stage regions in these types of performance, a liminal mental state is often used, which enables a better assessment of the type of information to present on social media

How social media can afford engagement processes

The increasing popularity of social media has led many organizations to find new ways of customer engagement. This paper presents an initial pilot study to explore the affordance of social media in engagement processes. By applying the affordance theory and Porter’s process for engagement model, we used a case study approach to examine the case company’s Facebook and Twitter content to identify the engagement possibilities of social media. Our preliminary results show that social media opens a new channel for organisations to engage with their customers. We present a preliminary theoretical model to understand the how the functional affordances of social media are socialised in engagement processes, which ultimately gives rise to socialised affordances