Digital belongings: The intersections of social cohesion, connectivity and digital media

Ethnicities ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay M Marlowe ◽  
Allen Bartley ◽  
Francis Collins

The rapid proliferation and ongoing transformation of digital technologies and social media platforms have had a substantial influence on the participatory cultures of young people and their associated social connections. This social/digital nexus raises important questions of social cohesion, with digital technologies at once augmenting social interaction whilst simultaneously creating an uneven landscape of access for participation. To address this interface of the digital and the social, this paper presents a qualitative study of 24 tertiary students from ethnic minority backgrounds living in Auckland, New Zealand, who use social media. Incorporating a pre-screening questionnaire, a one-week social media diary and semi-structured interviews, this study presents the ways in which digital belongings influence participants' practices of friendship and family. The ways that connective media influence, and even constrain interaction alongside the politics of belongings, are theorised to further examine the meanings and experiences behind participants' social media usage and social contact. By integrating these ideas, this paper presents the ways in which young university students use social media and the extent to which digital interaction and networking influence social participation and social cohesion.

Author(s):  
Norsiah Abdul Hamid ◽  
Mohd Sobhi Ishak ◽  
Syamsul Anuar Ismail ◽  
Siti Syamsul Nurin Mohmad Yazam

Social media are playing an increasing role in today’s living. The social media platforms allow users to search, create, share, collaborate, and organise contents among them, and at the same time provide virtual self-presentation and self-disclosure of oneself. Social media were also claimed to give implications to human beings with regards to personality, yet these variables have not much been emphasised in previous studies. Thus, it is important to highlight the implications of social media on users’ personality. Given the issues and challenges faced by the country in profiling the adoption of social media and its implications in view of the perspective of personality, it is timely and significantly important to undertake this research in Malaysia. The objective of this chapter is to discuss a research conducted recently to determine the relationships between social media and personality traits. The specific objectives of this study are to identify the profile of social media adoption among students in Malaysia, including duration, frequency of use, purpose, and person/s that introduced the social media, and to determine the relationships between social media and personality traits.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-52
Author(s):  
Aznan Omar ◽  
◽  
Syed Alwi Syed Abu Bakar ◽  
Mahizan Hijaz Muhammad ◽  
◽  
...  

This research project is an interpretation of a societal phenomenon in terms of the culture of using digital application for leisure and entertainment especially regarding the human behaviour and its obsession of using these applications in the social media platforms. This idea was translated by using the idea of an installation of a fabricated sculpture. The idea of how the digital media plays a major role for leisure and its obsession was inspired by the artist Scott Snibbe. This reference includes on how netizens utilize and share their interests and interactions with these digital media, games and other kinds of digital media entertainments. The method used for this practical studio research are through self critical evaluation, studio experimentation and contextual reviews. This research project was intended to contribute to the field of fine arts in terms of collecting symbolic visual narratives and its issues of the collective culture in regarding of leisure and entertainment and its popularity as a life style today. With hope this research project will give a major impact in terms of understanding towards its trend and the digital entertainment itself. The variation, the ever changing content of its application has impacted the popular culture itself through its spirit and behaviour, the wants and needs projected by the new expression of consumerism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-49
Author(s):  
Kehinde Kadijat Kadiri ◽  
Adetola Kehinde ◽  
Adeyinka Tella ◽  
Raji Khalid

There is a growing interest in the ways non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can ensure that electorates have access to information that could improve comprehension of the electoral process and reinforce tranquil relations between the electorates and political stakeholders. This study examined the usage of social media for 2019 electoral peace campaign by NGOs in Kwara State, Nigeria. The study adopted a qualitative research method and multistage sampling technique was adopted as sampling technique. The study focused mainly on four LGAs i.e. Asa, Ilorin South, Ilorin West and Ilorin East Local Government Areas. In these four LGAs, 15 NGOs with vested interest in electoral peace campaigns were purposively selected. Unstructured interview was used to collect data from the social media handlers of theses NGOs. The data collected were recorded and transcribed. The gathered data were arranged in themes following the approach of manual thematic analysis. Findings from this study showed that NGOs in Kwara State used social media for electoral peace campaign during 2019 general elections. Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn were the most used social media platforms among NGOs in Kwara State during 2019 general elections; however, there level of usage is average. The motivation for social media usage among NGOs in Kwara State during 2019 general elections can be attributed to the wider coverage and reach of social media. Lastly, during 2019 general elections, NGOs in Kwara State embarked on peace campaigns before elections, some do it during and few do it post electoral peace campaign. Among several recommendations, the study recommended that the electoral umpire in Nigeria, Independent National Electoral Commission should include training of officers in their electoral briefings on the viability of social media use during elections by officers.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sadie Saltzman

Does the number of social media platforms that an adolescent uses have an effect on the quality of their social relationships? As social media continues to grow and evolve, sociologists have begun to explore its effect on an individual’s everyday life. I propose that the more social media platforms that an adolescent uses, the more they will experience negative effects on their social relationships. Using survey data from 786 respondents living in the United States, ages 13 to 17 and collected by the Pew Research Center in 2014 and 2015, regression analyses were conducted to determine the relationship between social media usage and its effect on quality of adolescent social relationships, controlling for sex and age. The bivariate results show a statistically significant, positive but weak association between number of social media platforms used and the social relationship experience scale. In the multivariate results, this association was still statistically significant. Additionally, the multivariate results show that the control variables, sex and age, have no significant effect on one’s social relationship experience. Therefore, these results show that the more social media platforms used, the more negative a social relationship experience an adolescent will have. The results support the hypothesis and indicate that adolescents who interact with a higher number of social media platforms will experience an increased negative effect on their social relationships. In future studies, researchers should investigate how specific social media platforms influence social relationships. Additionally, this type of research should not only continue, but should refine its methods as social media continues to quickly grow and evolve.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 196-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arijus Pleska ◽  
Andrew Hoskins ◽  
Karen Renaud

The visual image has long been central to how war is seen, contested and legitimised, remembered and forgotten. Archives are pivotal to these ends as is their ownership and access, from state and other official repositories through to the countless photographs scattered and hidden from a collective understanding of what war looks like in individual collections and dusty attics. With the advent and rapid development of social media, however, the amateur and the professional, the illicit and the sanctioned, the personal and the official, and the past and the present, all seem to inhabit the same connected and chaotic space. However, to even begin to render intelligible the complexity, scale and volume of what war looks like in social media archives is a considerable task, given the limitations of any traditional human-based method of collection and analysis. We thus propose the production of a series of ‘snapshots’, using computer-aided extraction and identification techniques to try to offer an experimental way in to conceiving a new imaginary of war. We were particularly interested in testing to see if twentieth century wars, obviously initially captured via pre-digital means, had become more ‘settled’ over time in terms of their remediated presence today through their visual representations and connections on social media, compared with wars fought in digital media ecologies (i.e. those fought and initially represented amidst the volume and pervasiveness of social media images). To this end, we developed a framework for automatically extracting and analysing war images that appear in social media, using both the features of the images themselves, and the text and metadata associated with each image. The framework utilises a workflow comprising four core stages: (1) information retrieval, (2) data pre-processing, (3) feature extraction, and (4) machine learning. Our corpus was drawn from the social media platforms Facebook and Flickr.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Waqas ◽  
Zalfa Laili Hamzah ◽  
Noor Akma Mohd Salleh

PurposeSocial media platforms are important channels to create a favourable customer experience. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the types of experiences customers can have with the branded content on social media.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from 20 participants using semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the qualitative data.FindingsThe results identify seven types of branded content experience which are evoked when customers interact with branded content on social media. The results also suggest that branded content experience acts as a driver of consumer engagement with branded content which eventually leads to customers' sense of virtual community.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings provide theoretical implications for content creators. Further research should aim at comparing the branded content experience on different social media platforms and across different product categories.Originality/valueThis study contributes to customer engagement and experience literature in social media content by enhancing the understanding of branded content experience concept and its conceptual relationship with customer engagement in the social media context.Peer reviewThe peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-10-2019-0333


Author(s):  
Oluwole Olumide Durodolu ◽  
Collence Takaingenhamo Chisita ◽  
Tinyiko Vivian Dube

Globally, no country has been spared by the spectre of the COVID-19 pandemic and infodemic that continues to wreak havoc on the socio-economic and political stability of governments and communities. The oxymoronic nature of fake news raises many questions with regards to the issues of authenticity because the concept of news is underpinned by verifiability. While fake news lacks variability, it is surprising that its digital imprint on the social media platforms continues to leave indelible marks that will undermine democracy, responsible journalism, and the benefits of the digital media. It is against this background that this chapter seeks to find strategies to flatten the curve of fake news in the epoch of the COVID-19 pandemic and infodemic, an epistemic challenge. The chapter is based on a positivist research methodology that sought to gather views from the study respondents on their epistemic experiences with fake news amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and infodemic. It seeks to gather views to counter the upsurge of fake news amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 205630511982984
Author(s):  
Abigail E. Curlew

Anonymous social media platforms comprise sprawling publics where users, untethered from their legal identity, interact with other anonymous users to share and read user-generated content. The emergence of mobile applications that promise anonymity as a primary feature has led to novel social configurations that have so far been understudied. This article is an empirical and theoretical attempt to understand the ways in which anonymous social media have altered the social through performative, digital acts mediated through a community of anonymous users. I do this through two main propositions: first, that practices of anonymity mediated through a social media platform comprise discrete performative acts of identity due to a process of dissociability, and second, that those dissociated performative acts become undisciplined. To address these propositions, I have drawn from 12 semi-structured interviews of undergraduate and graduate students at Queen’s University who were avid users of Yik Yak to explore the sociology of anonymity, surveillance, and identity. The findings are discussed in relation to theories of performativity and discipline that have been commonly deployed in media and surveillance studies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Firdaus Samijadi

Social Media has made its’ way of playing an important role in e-Government implementation strategies. Many governments include social media as a tool to approach and engage its’ citizens, to increase transparency, trust and online participation. Although social media is not yet fully understood by governments on how to effectively utilize social media as a tool to be beneficial to the government and the general public. This research focuses on the Social Media activity of the Government Departments of Suriname. With around 1.9 billion active users, Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms in the world. This study furthers analyzes how active social media accounts are being used by the departments and how online users respond to departmental online activities. In order to achieve the goal of this paper, the 14 social media accounts of Suriname government departments will be taken as a case study. Several accounts indicate that government to citizen engagement show much potential for citizens’ active online participation. While the use of social media in e-Government initiatives is a feasible approach to successful implementation, there are still some improvement governments should take into consideration to increase online participation and fulfilling the needs of their citizens.


2021 ◽  
Vol volume 05 (issue 2) ◽  
pp. 100-110
Author(s):  
Adiba Akhtar ◽  
Amrat Haq

Social media has become immensely popular during the last one decade. The social media activities have occupied a sizable space in the daily lives of individuals. The virtual and vibrant social media platforms provide an easy access to its users which may lead to over use and consequently may result into social media addiction. This qualitative study is aimed at giving brief overview of some of the rising concepts and issues that have emerged in empirical studies during the last one decade regarding social media usage and its potential for addiction as it is important to establish consensual themes, concepts and issues so that researchers and clinical practitioners may combine their efforts to establish a communication system for a reliable assessments of social media addiction and behaviours associated with it.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document