Automatic from the people: Uber’s iconic interface and the automation of sociality

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-273
Author(s):  
Christopher M. Cox
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Patent Application ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Push Button ◽  
Critical Locus ◽  
Mobile Interface ◽  
The People ◽  
Iconic Imagery

This article undertakes a content analysis of the Uber mobile interface as depicted in a patent application for a process that integrates and automates social media information to match potential UberPool riders. As depicted in the patent application, the Uber interface is a critical locus for incorporating social media information and rendering this information usable and palpable for users. By aligning the Uber interface with the communicative and symbolic richness of iconic imagery, I argue for the Uber interface as a juncture for critical abstractions between the manifestation of social interactions appearing to users on the Uber interface and Uber’s techno-economic motivations to shape, configure and guide user enactment of sociality. By designing for simplicity, the Uber interface abstracts between the push-button ease of undertaking sociality and the need to reflect on circumstances giving rise to these prescribed forms of sociality. Through this viewpoint, I specify abstractions between simplified forms of sociality presented to users and Uber techno-economic motivations configuring interfacial sociality, implicating algorithmic objectivity, connective friending and programmed sociality as unseen forces configuring and prescribing social interactions for user engagement.

Infobotting COVID-19: A case study of Ask Nameesa in Egypt

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Khattab
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Information Literacy ◽  
The Internet ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Interactive Engagement ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Credible Information ◽  
Public Demand

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation and unscientific interpretations flooded the internet. Seeking credible information in Egypt was paramount at the time. An answer to this quest was ‘Ask Nameesa’, an award-winning Egyptian-focused chatbot that utilizes Facebook Messenger to communicate with social media users in an individualized response engagement. It relies on information validated by WHO and the Egyptian Ministry of Health. This article examines the structure of Ask Nameesa as an example of infobots and studies the interactive engagement it offers users to provide health information. The study analyses data gathered by interviewing the founder and CEO of DXwand, the company that developed Ask Nameesa as well as content analysis of conversations with Ask Nameesa to assess its user engagement. The study aims at understanding the potential Ask Nameesa has in providing information literacy and tackling public demand for information.

scholarly journals Médias d’actualité, journalistes et publics sur Twitter : vers un renouvellement des relations ? Résumé de la thèse de doctorat

1970 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Van Hove
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Digital Transformation ◽  
Quantitative Content Analysis ◽  
Quantitative Content

This thesis focuses on the question of the renewal of relations between media actors and audiences in the context of the digital transformation of journalism and the advent of social media. It is based on a qualitative and a quantitative content analysis of tweets related to twelve francophone news threads in 2011 and 2016. The results mainly show a gap between uniform and unidirectional uses of Twitter by media actors and the diversified, personal and interactive uses of news on Twitter by audiences. Findings suggest the persistence of long-standing trends in the relations between media actors and audiences – which remain asymmetrical (and tend to become stronger in this sense) despite the possibilities of social interactions offered by the microblogging tool Twitter – and a “resistance” by media actors, especially journalists, to change institutionalized journalistic practices.

Making Community Beliefs and Capacities Visible Through Care-mongering During COVID-19

2022 ◽  
Vol 6 (GROUP) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Tiffany Knearem ◽  
Jeongwon Jo ◽  
Chun-Hua Tsai ◽  
John M. Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Collective Efficacy ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Online Groups ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Present Design

The COVID-19 global pandemic brought forth wide-ranging, unanticipated changes in human interaction, as communities rushed to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In response, local geographic community members created grassroots care-mongering groups on social media to facilitate acts of kindness, otherwise known as care-mongering. In this paper, we are interested in understanding the types of care-mongering that take place and how such care-mongering might contribute to community collective efficacy (CCE) and community resilience during a long-haul global pandemic. We conducted a content analysis of a care-mongering group on Facebook to understand how local community members innovated and developed care-mongering practices online. We observed three facets of care-mongering: showing appreciation for helpers, coming up with ways of supporting one another's needs, and continuing social interactions online and present design recommendations for further augmenting care-mongering practices for local disaster relief in online groups.

Character assassination as a right-wing populist communication tactic on social media: The case of Matteo Salvini in Italy

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110392
Author(s):  
Carlo Berti ◽  
Enzo Loner
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Communication Strategy ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
The People ◽  
Individual Traits ◽  
Social Media Communication

The article conceptualizes character assassination (CA) as a tactic of populist communication on social media by using the case study of Italian politician Matteo Salvini. CA consists of personal attacks aimed at damaging the reputation of individuals, used as political means to attack the “enemies of the people.” By means of CA, populists operate a shift from issues and arguments toward individual traits and behaviors. CA’s importance is linked to the features of social media communication (i.e. disintermediation, speed, virality, fragmentation, emotionality). The article uses content analysis of tweets, and qualitative analysis of relevant examples; it demonstrates the strategic nature of CA in Salvini’s communication and identifies five functions (i.e. polarizing, personalizing, symbolic, discriminating, emotional) of CA in right-wing populist communication. CA’s logic is unpacked, by showing how the delegitimization of individuals is used to reinforce a populist communication strategy. Potential implications and responses to CA are discussed.

scholarly journals Internet memes in Covid-19 lockdown times in Poland

Comunicar ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (67) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roza Norstrom ◽  
Pawel Sarna
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Participatory Culture ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Redes Sociales ◽  
Common Category ◽  
The People ◽  
The Government ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

Poland was one of the countries that was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and its government imposed restrictions to combat the spreading of the virus. The Internet and social media became outlets for people’s reactions to the events that unfolded, including the lockdown. A part of this reaction came in the form of creating and sharing memes – an expression of digital participatory culture. This paper aims to analyze how Covid-19 was communicated and narrated through Internet memes and how they presented the pandemic and actors responsible for fighting it. 1,763 memes from six media platforms were analyzed using content analysis with framing elements and a comparative narrative analysis. The results show that the memes provided a form of commentary on the situation experienced by Poles. The most common category of memes was “bans and orders”, involving restrictions that were often criticized and ridiculed as pointless. The main characters within the memes were ordinary citizens, often portrayed in a comedic way as careless in regards to the virus and violating the restrictions. They were also presented as victims of the police and the government. Furthermore, the people responsible for fighting the pandemic were portrayed as incompetent and imposing needlessly severe restrictions and penalties for not abiding by them. Polonia fue uno de los países golpeados por la pandemia del Covid-19 en 2020, cuyo gobierno impuso restricciones para combatir la propagación del virus. Internet y las redes sociales se convirtieron en un escape para las reacciones de las personas a estos eventos, incluido el confinamiento. Una parte de esta reacción vino en forma de creación y difusión de memes, una expresión de la cultura digital y participativa. El presente estudio tiene como objetivo analizar cómo el Covid-19 fue comunicado y narrado a través de los memes en Internet y cómo fue presentada la pandemia y los responsables de combatirla. Fueron analizados 1.763 memes de seis medios empleando un análisis de contenidos con elementos de enmarque y análisis comparativo narrativo. Los resultados muestran que los memes fueron una forma de expresión sobre la situación vivida por los polacos. La categoría más popular fue la de «prohibiciones y órdenes», aludiendo a las restricciones que frecuentemente fueron criticadas y ridiculizadas como inútiles. El personaje principal de los memes fueron los ciudadanos, frecuentemente retratados de una manera cómica como personas irresponsables en cuanto al virus y violaciones de las restricciones. También fueron presentados como víctimas de la policía y el gobierno. Además, las personas responsables de combatir la pandemia fueron retratadas como incompetentes, al imponer restricciones y sanciones excesivamente estrictas por no obedecerlas.

scholarly journals Who Is the Note-Worthy Fan? Featuring Players in the Official Facebook Communication of Mainstream Video Games

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Švelch ◽  
Tereza Krobová
Keyword(s):  
Data Mining ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Traditional Method ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Comparable Level ◽  
And Gender ◽  
One Year

Video game fans participate in the official promotion of video games, either voluntarily, or unwillingly when their fanworks are appropriated and used by video game publishers. The article provides a quantitative overview of the presence of fans in the official social media profiles of four selected mainstream games (Dragon Age: Inquistion, Evolve, Mortal Kombat X and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt) during a one-year period from August 2014 to July 2015. Combining the traditional method of content analysis and Facebook data-mining, we explore the frequency with which fans appear in social media (including questions of various forms of fanworks and gender) and what user activity is generated by posts featuring fans and fan creations. Results show that fans or their fanworks are featured in 8–24% of all posts depending on a game and in the most common categories of painting and cosplay they generate a comparable level of user engagement as traditional promotional posts.

Populism, Its Prevalence, and Its Negative Influence on Democratic Institutions

2022 ◽  
pp. 153-170
Author(s):  
Darren G. Lilleker ◽  
Márton Bene ◽  
Delia Cristina Balaban ◽  
Vicente Fenoll ◽  
Simon Kruschinski
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Negative Influence ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Populism is presented as a severe challenge to democracies as it delegitimises the institutions and processes on which democratic society is built. The infectious nature of populism within a system drives a shift in the public mood. The authors investigate this phenomenon through a content analysis of party posts on Facebook during the 2019 European parliamentary elections across 12 countries. They find almost a quarter of posts contain some form of populism, with anti-elitism the most common trope. Populist appeals are most likely to accompany critiques of labour and social policy, labelling elites or minority groups as causing inequalities which disadvantage the ordinary people. Both forms of populism enjoy high levels of user engagement suggesting they gain higher levels of reach within social media platforms. As support for populism rose in the wake of the economic and migrant crises, the authors suggest post-pandemic this increase is likely to continue.

scholarly journals The Influencing Factors of Nutrition and Diet Health Knowledge Dissemination Using the WeChat Official Account in Health Promotion

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dongsheng Bian ◽  
Yongmei Shi ◽  
Wenjia Tang ◽  
Dong Li ◽  
Kangni Han ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Logistic Regression ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Influencing Factors ◽  
Information Dissemination ◽  
Health Knowledge ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Nutrition And Diet

Background: The promotion of a healthy diet via health education is a component of the “Healthy China 2030” plan. However, few studies have reported whether health knowledge about nutrition and diet has gained public attention, and whether it is needed by the public.Methods: The numbers of views, shares, and reads of articles published by the official WeChat account of a hospital in China were accessed. The influence index was obtained via the entropy analysis of these three indices. A questionnaire survey was developed based on the purpose of the study and the conclusion of the content analysis, which conducted to analyze users' requirements for health knowledge and their influencing factors. Moreover, risk factors were explored by logistic regression models.Results: Of the 103 articles considered in this study, four articles in the Top 10 were related to nutrition and diet. The influence index of nutrition and diet knowledge was found to be the highest in the content analysis (p < 0.05). The higher degrees of humor (β = 0.224, p = 0.027), nutrition and diet articles (β = 0.776, p = 0.034), and cover articles (β = 0.312, p = 0.021) have significant influences on the influence index. In total, 581 questionnaires were obtained, and 78.1% of the respondents reported believing that the health knowledge of greatest concern was that related to nutrition and diet. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted to explore the associations between the features of the articles and users reading nutrition and diet knowledge; it was found that gender (female, OR: 4.651, 95%Cl: 2.598, 8.325, and p < 0.001), age (young adult, OR: 0.358, 95%Cl: 0.266, 0.481, and p < 0.001), cancer precaution knowledge (OR: 4.333, 95%Cl: 2.262, 8.299, and p < 0.001), traditional Chinese medicine (OR: 2.121, 95%Cl: 1.064, 4.230, and p = 0.033), the knowledge acquisition approach [circle of friends (OR: 2.586, 95%Cl: 1.373, 4.868, and p = 0.003), social media (OR: 2.183, 95%Cl: 1.204, 3.960, and p = 0.010)), hospitals (OR: 3.194, 95%Cl: 1.793, 5.692, and p < 0.001), television media (OR: 4.348, 95%Cl: 2.341, 8.077, and p < 0.001)], and social media strategies [professionalism and authority (OR: 2.354, 95%Cl: 1.231, 4.505, and p = 0.006)] have statistically significant relationships with users reading nutrition and diet knowledge.Conclusion: Nutrition and diet knowledge could contribute to WeChat user engagement of health information dissemination. Nutrition professionals should improve the scientific popularization ability and effectively use social media for health promotion.

scholarly journals Analisis Kesiapan Masyarakat Pada Penerapan Smart City di Sosial Media Menggunakan SNA

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-81
Author(s):  
M. Khairul Anam ◽  
Tri Putri Lestari ◽  
Latifah ◽  
Muhammad Bambang Firdaus ◽  
Sofiansyah Fadli
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Network ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Smart City ◽  
The People ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Relationship

Smart People, which means smart city residents or people, not only refers to one's education but also the quality of social interactions that are formed. This Social Network Analysis (SNA) emphasizes the relationship between actors / users rather than the attributes of these actors. This analysis aims to see whether the people of Pekanbaru are ready to face changes to a Smart City. Pekanbaru is a civil city that will build a Smart City, with a concept that adopts 6 pillars, one of which is Smart People. There are 720,000 Twitter users in Pekanbaru City, while the people who actively interact are only 227 users or around 0.031%. Meanwhile, a city that can be said to be ready should be around 60-80% of active users who provide opinions or comments to the government of Pekanbaru City. From this research, it can be concluded that the people of Pekanbaru City are not ready to face Smart City Madani as seen from the interaction of the community on social media Twitter.

scholarly journals The use of KAAPS in newspapers

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-139
Author(s):  
Anastasia De Vries
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Print Media ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Advertising Revenue ◽  
Language Variety ◽  
The People ◽  
Critical Content ◽  
The One

In the increasingly competitive media landscape newspapers, among others, are underpressure from digital and social media. As a result, the performance and positioningof traditional Afrikaans newspapers like Rapport, Beeld, Die Burger and Volksblad, aswell as the forms of Afrikaans they use, are constantly scrutinised in surveys about therelevance and profitability of the Afrikaans print media. These surveys often point tothe use of Afrikaans ‘as spoken by the people’ in emerging newspapers like Son andSon op Sondag, as the main reason for the growing popularity, healthy sales figuresand advertising revenue of these two newspapers. As a result, Son developed into thelargest Afrikaans daily in an Afrikaans print market long dominated by establishedtitles like Beeld, Die Burger and Volksblad. In view of this, this contribution will firstlyinvestigate the profitability (in monetary terms and circulation) of actually using Kaapsin newspapers. Secondly, it will focus attention on the use of this form of Afrikaansin traditional newspapers in which Standard Afrikaans is the dominant form. Thequestion is: What is the nature of the Kaaps in these newspapers compared to theKaaps in Son specifically? The aim of this contribution is to explore how Afrikaansnewspapers create space for the use of colloquial varieties in general and Kaapsspecifically, and to determine the relevance or function of Kaaps in the news domain.On the one hand the focus will be on columns in which Kaaps is the medium and onthe other, on newspaper articles about the Afrikaans language variety. The data onwhich this paper is based were firstly, the responses to a list of questions posed to thenews-editor of Son, and secondly a critical content analysis and interpretation of themanifestations of Kaaps in this newspaper in comparison to the forms in the moreestablished Afrikaans newspapers. The general perceptions of, and attitudes towards,the use of colloquial varieties of Afrikaans, collated in a 2012 survey among readers,are also taken into account.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document