Encounters on the social web: Everyday life and emotions online

Encounters also happen online nowadays and, yes, they are still difficult to describe, even though it is sometimes easier to observe them-and obtain data about them- than in the past. The internet is crucially 'shaping the interactions people have with one another' (Johns 2010: 499). With the recent explosion and popularity of Web 2.0 services and the social web, such as Facebook (FB), Twitter, and various other types of social media, internet users now have at their disposal an unprecedented collection of tools to interact with others. These modes of online sociability allow users to pursue social encounters with variable levels of involvement, attention, and activity (Papacharissi and Mendelson 2010). For many of us it is now difficult to imagine our social relationships without access to the internet. The social web plays an important role in relationships among internet users (Boyd 2006), with the expression, management and experience of emotions being key to the maintenance of these relationships

Qualitative analysis of social media data

Society has become thoroughly mediatised. Every aspect and part of society from the economy, politics and education to civil society and everyday social relations is immersed by media. Today we have the internet, smart phones, apps, social network services, blogs, email, and other social media platforms. Social media has brought changes to the way we inform, communicate with others, learn, play and socialize. Most people are quite well connected and communicate with others and while being connected they obtain, organize, produce and share information on a regular basis. These common routinely activities generate a large amount of information and knowledge of different forms, much of it created by ‘ordinary people’. This information is generally referred as digital social data which is potentially of great interest to social scientists (Sloan and Quan-Haase, 2017). From the emergence of the internet, both quantitative and qualitative research have been interested in analysing digital data for its endeavour. As social media have enlarged the size and variety of the traces of social actors’ actions and expressions, the analytical possibilities available for social science researchers have been reshaped too. This has brought to the fore the necessity of methodological innovations and interdisciplinary collaboration for the study of social media data. Conversely, this digital turn has generated lively debates about its potential to know the contemporary social world. While at the beginning of internet research scholars tended to study social life online as a separated from ‘real life’, researchers disputed this and argued the need for online social life to be viewed as an integral part of social life (Beneito-Montagut, 2011). Nevertheless, linking social media data to what is going on offline is still one of the challenges of digital social science research

Emotions, everyday life and the social web: age, gender and social web engagement effects on online emotional expression

Emotional expression is key to the maintenance and development of interpersonal relationships online. This study develops and applies a novel analytical framework for the study of emotional expression on the social web in everyday life. The analytical framework proposed is based on previous ethnographic work and the self-reported measurement of the visual cues, action cues and verbal cues that people use to express emotions on the social web. It is empirically tested, using an online survey of Spanish frequent Internet users (n=301). The analysis focuses particularly on how age, gender and social web engagement relate to emotional expression during online social interactions. We find that both personal characteristics (age and gender) as well as levels of social web usage affect emotional communication online. The effect size is particularly strong for gender. The paper illustrates and reflects upon the potential of the proposed analytical framework for unveiling norms and strategies in online interaction rituals

Big data and educational research

Big data and data analytics offer the promise to enhance teaching and learning, improve educational research and progress education governance. This chapter aims to contribute to the conceptual and methodological understanding of big data and analytics within educational research. It describes the opportunities and challenges that big data and analytics bring to education as well as critically explore the perils of applying a data driven approach to education. Despite the claimed value of the increasing amounts of large and complex data sets and the growing interest in making sense of them there is still limited knowledge on big data and educational research. Over the last decades, the developments on information and communication technologies are reshaping teaching and learning and the governance of education. A broad variety of online behaviours and transactional data is (or can be) now stored and tracked. Its analysis could provide meaningful insights to enhance teaching and learning processes, to make better management decisions and to evaluate progresses –of individuals and education systems. This chapter starts by defining big data and the sources and artefacts collect, generate and display data. In doing so it explores aspects related to data ownership and researchers’ access to big data. It then assesses the value of big data for educational research by critically considering the stages involved in the use of big data, providing examples of recent educational research using big data. The chapter is not meant to provide the “how to” details of the analysis of big data. Instead, it aims to offer a pragmatic perspective and to highlight the necessity for educational researchers to acquire computational and statistical skills and to engage with interdisciplinary work to deal with big data, and, at the same time, abide a sociological mind. The chapter also highlights research areas that can be explored to augment our understanding of the role of Big data in education

Healthcare, lifestyle and well-being apps. Who am I sharing my data with and what for?

Today we can find healthcare, lifestyle and well-being applications – for smartphones, tablets, wearable devices - for a plethora of aspects: from monitoring pregnancy to checking on blood pressure. These apps are used in our everyday life and not only in medical settings. They hold the promise of enhancing, managing, predicting and improving our individual health and healthcare services. Anyone with a smartphone can share personal health related data with healthcare services and companies, as well as other organisations and individuals. While people use these applications social media companies harvest, archive and manage huge amounts of data –aka big data. These two issues – people sharing personal data and the harvest of these data – have serious implications for the way in which research on human subjects can be undertaken and for the ethical frameworks that regulate such research. Key concerns are privacy, anonymity and data management. This talk focuses on the ethical implications arising from the everyday life use of healthcare applications and the risks, challenges and threats of big data. It addresses three issues (1) collection, analysis and sharing of personalised social media data; (2) anonymity and (3) privacy in a context where people is encouraged to share their data

Doing digital team ethnography: being there together and digital social data

With the digital availability of social data helping reshape ethnographic research and thus broadening the mainstream understanding of ethnography, this research proposes a set of strategies to overcome current limitations in doing ethnography. Based on a two-year online and offline ethnographic project on social media use in later life, insights are provided into how the practices and meanings of ethnography are being reconstructed and negotiated in response to the explosion of digital social data and through team practices. This paper reviews how collaborative and interdisciplinary ethnographic reflection is sustained and extended by digital tools, creating a live source of data that can be analysed within the framework of ethnography. As a contribution to current debates on the “Social Life of Methods“, it also reviews epistemic issues associated with digital data and team ethnography, such as the role of the ethnographer(s), the field(s) and computational data analysis. The article reaches the conclusion that digital team ethnography is a viable option for undertaking thick and descriptive studies about the use of social media, which in turn favours a collaborative, non-hierarchical and dialogue-driven knowledge production process

What do we know about the relationship between Internet mediated interaction and social isolation and loneliness in later life?

Social isolation and loneliness are recognised social, health and wellbeing problems that particularly affect later life. They have been the subject of many recent studies. Studies examining the role of the Internet in addressing these problems have increased. However, it is still unknown whether Internet-mediated social interaction has a role in mitigating social isolation and/or loneliness or not. To address this gap, this study reviews previous research that investigates the relationship between Internet use for communication and social isolation and loneliness. It reviews the empirical literature published since 2000 and expands on previous literature reviews by including a variety of research designs and disciplines. Despite the recent growth of studies there is still little evidence to demonstrate Internet effects on social isolation and loneliness. It is concluded that future research programmes aimed at reducing them by the use of the Internet should include more robust methodological and theoretical frameworks, employ longitudinal research designs and provide a more nuanced description of both the social phenomena (social isolation and loneliness) and Internet-mediated social interaction

From governing through data to governmentality through data: artefacts, strategies and the digital turn

The article argues that current discussions about governance through data in education can be fruitfully extended through: (1) the establishment of connections with wider debates about the role of commensuration processes and governmentality in the recreation of education systems; (2) greater emphasis on the ‘artefacts’ through which data – increasingly in the form of digital data – is collected, displayed and retrieved; and (3) the strategies of alignment and resistance that social actors adopt to deal with the increase in data availability and capacity for the automated interrogation of that data. The article concludes that these artefacts and strategies are providing a wide set of ‘active’ social actors with new resources in, and arenas for, their struggles for economic as well as social advancement, processes of self-monitoring and also, crucially, of self-formation. The article focuses on the interplay and tensions between governments and bureaucracies, private companies, education institutions, and various types of ‘active’ individuals (the individual customer, the individual manager and the individual worker) in the process of surveillance and recreation of education through digital data