Language workers and the challenge of digitalisation

AILA Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-144
Author(s):  
Steven Breunig
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Social ◽  
Military Members ◽  
The Us ◽  
Academic Researchers ◽  
Senior Officers

Abstract The increasing digitalisation of communication has not gone unnoticed by the US military. The teaching of communication takes place at the Defense Information School (DINFOS), providing professional instruction to US military members, civilian personnel and allies from around the world. With the emergence of social media and the increasing significance of user-generated content, the teaching of communication, even more so than previously, prioritises the collaboration of academic researchers, practitioners and industry leaders in digitalised media for professional development. Viewing the collaboration as an example of transdisciplinary practice (McGregor, 2014), this paper seeks to gain insight into their thoughts on social media messaging and management for developing themes (Perrin & Kramsch, 2018) for research and practice, as well as for teaching language learners to be language workers (Koller, 2018) in a digitalised mediated world. The analysis of the social media workshop from 2017 is inspired by content analysis (Krippendorff, 2004). Through the analysis, the themes of “Community”, “Content” and “Conduct” are created based on a series of 23 lectures for practitioners by senior officers, academic researchers and persons from social media companies like Twitter and Instagram. The analysis shows, among other things, that the technological dimension of social media may constrain and enable language use in unpredictable ways. For research, practice and learning, the themes may function as a “shared language” for more effective language use towards the increasing digitalisation of communication. The paper concludes by reflecting on two concerns within transdisciplinarity, specifically transdisciplinary identity (Augsburg, 2014) and the link between process and impact (Hansson & Polk, 2018).

A market-based rationale for the privacy paradox

2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110158
Author(s):  
Opeyemi Akanbi
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Market Structures ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Privacy Paradox ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Privacy Risks ◽  
Social Collective

Moving beyond the current focus on the individual as the unit of analysis in the privacy paradox, this article examines the misalignment between privacy attitudes and online behaviors at the level of society as a collective. I draw on Facebook’s market performance to show how despite concerns about privacy, market structures drive user, advertiser and investor behaviors to continue to reward corporate owners of social media platforms. In this market-oriented analysis, I introduce the metaphor of elasticity to capture the responsiveness of demand for social media to the data (price) charged by social media companies. Overall, this article positions social media as inelastic, relative to privacy costs; highlights the role of the social collective in the privacy crises; and ultimately underscores the need for structural interventions in addressing privacy risks.

scholarly journals Examining the Antecedents of User Donation Intentions Toward Social Media Articles: Moderation Effects of Social Contagion

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824402110063
Author(s):  
Isaac Owusu Asante ◽  
Jiaming Fang ◽  
Dennis Fiifi Darko ◽  
Hossin M. D. Altab
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Nonprofit Organization ◽  
Perceived Value ◽  
Perceived Usefulness ◽  
Social Contagion ◽  
Moderation Effects ◽  
The Social ◽  
Academic Researchers ◽  
Perceived Enjoyment ◽  
Donation Intention

Donations to articles on social media, as a new behavior, have been trending in recent years. Unlike donations to a charitable and nonprofit organization or victims, donations to social media articles have been accorded minimal attention from academic researchers. From the stimuli–organism–response framework, this study proposed a model to investigate the factors that influence the donation intentions of users on social media toward articles. Our results demonstrate that the credibility of the article determines users’ donation intentions. The results also indicate that the perceived value (usefulness and enjoyment) of the article mediates the effects of article credibility on users’ donation intentions. The social contagion nature of the article is also proven to moderate the magnitude of impacts on donation intention by users’ perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, and perception of article credibility.

scholarly journals NORMCORE PLUTOCRATS in GOLD ELEVATORS

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Littler
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Physical Context ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us

This article analyzes two notorious photos of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage—one on their own, and one alongside Arron Banks, Gerry Gunster, Andy Wigmore, and Raheem Kassam—standing in a gold-plated elevator after Trump had won the US election. The article provides a cultural and political analysis of the plutocrats who are playing at being ordinary “winners,” or what it calls normcore plutocrats. Analyzing the symbolic and material contexts of these two images, it considers the physical context of the lift within Trump Tower; the tangled web of relationships uniting the men in the lift; and the first photograph’s later life as a social media meme. Asking how a depiction of glittering luxury can be presented as populist revolt, it discusses how elites draw on discourses of meritocracy, of “traveling up the social ladder,” to validate their actions. That Trump and friends are not on a ladder but in an express lift symbolizes the attempted velocity of this phase of corporate meritocracy. In the process the analysis provides a multilayered contribution toward understanding how these normcore plutocrats in gold elevators have achieved and extended their power.

scholarly journals Using, Citing and Publishing Scholarly Content in the Digital Age: Case Study of Humanities Researchers

2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (1(105)) ◽  
pp. 7-19
Author(s):  
David Nicholas
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Open Access ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
International Study ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Academic Researchers ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

PURPOSE: The research upon which this article is largely based comes from a year-long international study of trustworthiness in scholarly Communications in the digital age, Essentially, the main thrust of the project was to determine the impact of the digital transition and the new products it has ushered in, such as open access publications and the social media, on academic researchers’ scholarly practices. This paper focuses and reflects further on the disciplinary differences of scholarly researchers when it comes to using, citing and publishing and, especially, whether arts and humanities researchers are any different in the way they think and behave to their counterparts in the sciences and social sciences. APPROACH/METHODS: An international survey of over 3650 academic researchers examined how trustworthiness is determined when making decisions on scholarly reading, citing, and publishing in the digital age. The survey asked respondents whether or not they agreed with comments and ąuotes about scholarly behaviour obtained from pre-survey focus groups and interviews. Data from focus groups, interviews and the published literature are also used to explain further the results of the survey. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: In generał, it was found that traditional methods and criteria remain important across the board. That is, researchers have moved inexorably from a print-based system to a digital system, but have not significantly changed the way they decide what to trust, where to publish, what to cite or use. Social media outlets and (non-peer reviewed) open access publications are not fully trusted. However, there were some significant differences according to the discipline of the respondent and this papers focuses upon these differences by comparing the views and behaviour of arts and humanities researchers with those from other disciplines. The main findings were: a) journals and the metrics that surround them are clearly not so important to humanities scholars, but nevertheless still pretty important; b) humanities researchers take a lot more care about what they use and where content comes from; c) humanities researchers look slightly more favourably on the social media. Originality/value: As far as it is known this is the first comprehensive study of digital humanities researchers and their decisions on what they use and cite and where they choose to publish.

scholarly journals #aintnobodygottimeforthat: cultural appropriation, stylization and the social life of hashtag interjectionality

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Anne H. Fabricius
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Language Use ◽  
American English ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future

Th is paper will discuss a particular hashtag meme as one example of a potential new manifestation of interjectionality, engendered and fostered in the written online context of social media. Th e case derives from a video meme and hashtag from the United States which ‘went viral’ in 2012. We will ask to what extent hashtags might perform interjectional-type functions over and above their referential functions, thereby having links to other, more prototypically interjectional elements. Th e case will also be discussed from multiple sociolinguistic perspectives: as an example of the (indirect) signifying of ‘whiteness’ through ‘black’ discourse, as cultural appropriation in the context of potential policing of these racial divides in the United States, and as a case of performative stylization which highlights grammatical markers while simultaneously downplaying phonological markers of African American English. We will end by speculating as to the implications of the rise of (variant forms of) hashtags for processes of creative language use in the future.

Handling Facebook: social media in the light of human rights violations

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Gleb Bogush ◽  
Olga Kudinova
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
The Gambia ◽  
International Justice ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Media Corporations

International justice does not remain on the sidelines from the intensive development of social media: the data stored on the social media possesses great evidentiary value in international courts. The dispute over the disclosure of information by Facebook for use in the Gambia v. Myanmar dispute before the International Court of Justice raises a broader issue of the international legal status of telecommunications companies, obligations of companies and states in relation to the use of social media for human rights violations and commission of international crimes. The article assesses the existing international legal regime of human rights obligations of global social media corporations, as well as their role in administration of international justice, by examining the case of the use of Facebook disseminating hate speech and inciting violence against the discriminated group of Rohingya in Myanmar. The authors analyze the report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, Facebook’s reaction to the information of its influence on the situation with Rohingya, and measures taken by the company to reduce the negative impact of its business activity on human rights. The article draws attention to the inconsistent position of Facebook with regard to facilitating the investigation of violations of international law committed through the social media. In particular, the authors comment on the dispute between the Gambia and Facebook before the U.S. Courts arising from the request on disclosure of materials forming evidence in the case of the Gambia v. Myanmar, and lack of action from the US with respect to human rights violations and genocide committed with resources of the US-based social media company. The authors underscore the uncertainty of international legal regulation that impedes effective international investigations of serious human rights violations. Non-state actors remain outside the reach of international justice and international accountability mechanisms, especially when they operate in jurisdictions of states that ignore their positive human rights obligations. The authors conclude that it is necessary to develop effective mechanisms for cooperation and accountability of social media corporations in the field of international justice, as they play an increasing role in the investigation of serious violations of human rights.

The social mediated age of information: Twitter and Instagram as tools for information dissemination in higher education

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (11) ◽  
pp. 4155-4176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip C Arceneaux ◽  
Lucian F Dinu
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Information Dissemination ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Information Retention ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
Information Tools ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Visually Based

Despite high levels of global connectivity, Americans are generally underinformed about the world. The US Department of Education named social media as a viable option for improving learning objectives, yet minimal research supports such a claim regarding internationalization. While what research exists exclusively investigated Facebook, no research explored the viability of other popular platforms, such as Twitter or Instagram. Through an experimental design conducted on 405 college students, this study probed how the presentation of textually based (Twitter) and visually based (Instagram) messages affected American college students’ recall of digital information. It also investigated how communicator credibility affected the way college students consumed digitally disseminated information. Results showed that information retention was most improved by visually based information published by professional news outlets. Such findings help to better understand the contributions social media are capable of making as information tools, particularly when applied to American post-secondary education.

The social silos of journalism? Twitter, news media and partisan segregation

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 815-835 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wihbey ◽  
Kenneth Joseph ◽  
David Lazer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Social Media Networks ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Standard Text ◽  
Media Ecosystem ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Modest Correlation

The present work proposes social media as a tool to understand the relationship between journalists’ social networks and the content they produce. Specifically, we ask, “what is the association between the partisan nature of the accounts journalists follow on Twitter and the news content they produce?” Using standard text scaling techniques, we analyze partisanship in a novel dataset of more than 300,000 news articles produced by 644 journalists at 25 different US news outlets. We then develop a novel, semi-supervised model of partisanship of Twitter following relationships and show a modest correlation between the partisanship of whom a journalist follows on Twitter and the content she produces. The findings provide insight into the partisan dynamics that appear to characterize the US media ecosystem in its broad contours, dynamics that may be traceable from social media networks to published stories.

scholarly journals Biased Random Walk based Social Regularization for Word Embeddings

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ziqian Zeng ◽  
Xin Liu ◽  
Yangqiu Song
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Random Walk ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
Sentiment Classification ◽  
Word Embeddings ◽  
Biased Random Walk ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

Nowadays, people publish a lot of natural language texts on social media. Socialized word embeddings (SWE) has been proposed to deal with two phenomena of language use: everyone has his/her own personal characteristics of language use and socially connected users are likely to use language in similar ways. We observe that the spread of language use is transitive. Namely, one user can affect his/her friends and the friends can also affect their friends. However, SWE modeled the transitivity implicitly. The social regularization in SWE only applies to one-hop neighbors and thus users outside the one-hop social circle will not be affected directly. In this work, we adopt random walk methods to generate paths on the social graph to model the transitivity explicitly. Each user on a path will be affected by his/her adjacent user(s) on the path. Moreover, according to the update mechanism of SWE, fewer friends a user has, fewer update opportunities he/she can get. Hence, we propose a biased random walk method to provide these users with more update opportunities. Experiments show that our random walk based social regularizations perform better on sentiment classification.

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