The Impact of Social Media on Knowledge Culture

Author(s):  
Samantha Engel ◽  
Linda Lee-Davies

Culture is not static and technological innovations have greatly changed culture throughout history, no more so than in recent years. Modern culture is very much influenced and defined by recent technology and media use, primarily through social media applications such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Twitter. Although use and impact vary around the world, globalization brings this cultural change into wider and faster channels. Social media has transformed the way people interact and learn in local, national and international terms as well as evolving new social practices. Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and fake news dominate the internet and people's lives, determining and even limiting the content of learning that people are exposed to on social media platforms. This, in itself, channels cultural practice into homogenized tranches creating a cyclical influence which feeds back into evolving technology. This article sets out to discuss the current cultural impact of social media, its limitation on learning and surface the ethical issues surrounding its use.

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-48
Author(s):  
Samantha Engel ◽  
Linda Lee-Davies

Culture is not static and technological innovations have greatly changed culture throughout history, no more so than in recent years. Modern culture is very much influenced and defined by recent technology and media use, primarily through social media applications such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Twitter. Although use and impact vary around the world, globalization brings this cultural change into wider and faster channels. Social media has transformed the way people interact and learn in local, national and international terms as well as evolving new social practices. Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and fake news dominate the internet and people's lives, determining and even limiting the content of learning that people are exposed to on social media platforms. This, in itself, channels cultural practice into homogenized tranches creating a cyclical influence which feeds back into evolving technology. This article sets out to discuss the current cultural impact of social media, its limitation on learning and surface the ethical issues surrounding its use.


2016 ◽  
Vol 02 ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malik Shahzad Shabbir ◽  
Muhammad Saarim Ghazi ◽  
Atta Rasool Mehmood ◽  
◽  
◽  
...  

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of social media applications on small business entrepreneurs. It also examines how small business owners are motivated to use social media applications. Social media has completely transformed the way businesses are done. Social media applications in the present time have become the most efficient and effective tool for small business entrepreneurs, and normally all small businesses use social media platforms for the advertising and publicity of their products and services. They make fan pages for their followers, and they warmly welcome their suggestions and opinions, which help in improving their businesses. However, based on literature review, we conclude that there is a positive impact of social media applications on small business entrepreneurs as well as they are highly motivated to use these platforms.


2016 ◽  
Vol 02 ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malik Shahzad Shabbir ◽  
Muhammad Saarim Ghazi ◽  
Atta Rasool Mehmood ◽  
◽  
◽  
...  

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of social media applications on small business entrepreneurs. It also examines how small business owners are motivated to use social media applications. Social media has completely transformed the way businesses are done. Social media applications in the present time have become the most efficient and effective tool for small business entrepreneurs, and normally all small businesses use social media platforms for the advertising and publicity of their products and services. They make fan pages for their followers, and they warmly welcome their suggestions and opinions, which help in improving their businesses. However, based on literature review, we conclude that there is a positive impact of social media applications on small business entrepreneurs as well as they are highly motivated to use these platforms.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (01) ◽  
pp. 176-183
Author(s):  
Annie Y. S. Lau ◽  
Pascal Staccini ◽  

Objective: To summarise the state of the art published in 2019 in consumer health informatics and education, with a special emphasis on “Ethics and Health Informatics”. Methods: We conducted a systematic search of articles published in PubMed using a predefined set of queries, which identified 368 potential articles for review. These articles were screened according to topic relevance and 15 were selected for consideration of best paper candidates, which were then presented to a panel of international experts for full paper review and scoring. The top five papers according to the external reviewers’ ranking were discussed in a consensus meeting. Finally, the paper that received the highest score from four of the five experts was selected as the best paper on social media and ethics for patients and consumers of the year 2019. Results: Despite using the terms “ethics” and “ethical” in the search query, we retrieved very few articles. The bibliometric analysis identified three major clusters centred on “social”, “health”, and “study”. Among the top five papers, one was a review where the authors identified ethical issues across four areas at the intersection of social media and health: 1) the impact of social networking sites on the doctor-patient relationship; 2) the development of e-health platforms to deliver care; 3) the use of online data and algorithms to inform health research; and 4) the broader public health consequences of widespread social media use. The other papers highlighted ethical concerns in using social media to interact with patients at different phases of a clinical research protocol, such as recruitment phase, participant engagement, data linkage, and detection and monitoring of adverse events. Conclusions: Findings suggest that most users do not think that using social media for patient monitoring in clinical research, for example using Twitter for clinical trial recruitment, constitutes inappropriate surveillance or a violation of privacy. However, further research is needed to identify whether and how views on ethical concerns differed between social media platforms and across populations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S714-S715
Author(s):  
Jean-Etienne Poirrier ◽  
Theodore Caputi ◽  
John Ayers ◽  
Mark Dredze ◽  
Sara Poston ◽  
...  

Abstract Background A small number of powerful users (“influencers”) dominates conversations on social media platforms: less than 1% of Twitter accounts have at least 3,000 followers and even fewer have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. Beyond simple metrics (number of tweets, retweets...) little is known about these “influencers”, particularly in relation to their role in shaping online narratives about vaccines. Our goal was to describe influential Twitter accounts that are driving conversations about vaccines and present new metrics of influence. Methods Using publicly-available data from Twitter, we selected posts from 1-Jan-2016 to 31-Dec-2018 and extracted the top 5% of accounts tweeting about vaccines with the most followers. Using automated classifiers, we determined the location of these accounts, and grouped them into those that primarily tweet pro- versus anti-vaccine content. We further characterized the demographics of these influencer accounts. Results From 25,381 vaccine-related tweets available in our sample representing 10,607 users, 530 accounts represented the top 5% by number of followers. These accounts had on average 1,608,637 followers (standard deviation=5,063,421) and 340,390 median followers. Among the accounts for which sentiment was successfully estimated by the classifier, 10.4% (n=55) posted anti-vaccine content and 33.6% (n=178) posted pro-vaccine content. Of the 55 anti-vaccine accounts, 50% (n=18) of the accounts for which location was successfully determined were from the United States. Of the 178 pro-vaccine accounts, 42.5% (n=54) were from the United States. Conclusion This study showed that only a small proportion of Twitter accounts (A) post about vaccines and (B) have a high follower count and post anti-vaccine content. Further analysis of these users may help researchers and policy makers better understand how to amplify the impact of pro-vaccine social media messages. Disclosures Jean-Etienne Poirrier, PhD, MBA, The GSK group of companies (Employee, Shareholder) Theodore Caputi, PhD, Good Analytics Inc. (Consultant) John Ayers, PhD, GSK (Grant/Research Support) Mark Dredze, PhD, Bloomberg LP (Consultant)Good Analytics (Consultant) Sara Poston, PharmD, The GlaxoSmithKline group of companies (Employee, Shareholder) Cosmina Hogea, PhD, GlaxoSmithKline (Employee, Shareholder)


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia Hughes ◽  
Rachael Hunter

BACKGROUND Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin condition, which can be affected by stress. Living with psoriasis can trigger negative emotions, which may influence quality of life. OBJECTIVE This study explored the experiences of people with psoriasis with attention to the potential role of anger in the onset and progression of the chronic skin condition. METHODS Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with twelve participants (n=5 females, n=7 males) recruited online from an advert on a patient charity’s social media platforms. Data were transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis. RESULTS Four key themes were identified: (1) ‘I get really angry with the whole situation:’ anger at the self and others, (2) the impact of anger on psoriasis: angry skin, (3) shared experiences of distress, and (4) moving past anger to affirmation. CONCLUSIONS Findings suggest that anger can have a perceived impact on psoriasis through contributing to sensory symptoms and unhelpful coping cycles and point to a need for enhanced treatment with more psychological support. The findings also highlight the continued stigma which exists for people living with skin conditions and how this may contribute to, and sustain, anger for those individuals. Future research could usefully focus on developing targeted psychosocial interventions to promote healthy emotional coping with psoriasis.


Author(s):  
Jedidiah Carlson ◽  
Kelley Harris

AbstractEngagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of a paper’s social media audience provide a wealth of information about how scholarly research is transmitted, consumed, and interpreted by online communities. By paying attention to public perceptions of their publications, scientists can learn whether their research is stimulating positive scholarly and public thought. They can also become aware of potentially negative patterns of interest from groups that misinterpret their work in harmful ways, either willfully or unintentionally, and devise strategies for altering their messaging to mitigate these impacts. In this study, we collected 331,696 Twitter posts referencing 1,800 highly tweeted bioRxiv preprints and leveraged topic modeling to infer the characteristics of various communities engaging with each preprint on Twitter. We agnostically learned the characteristics of these audience sectors from keywords each user’s followers provide in their Twitter biographies. We estimate that 96% of the preprints analyzed are dominated by academic audiences on Twitter, suggesting that social media attention does not always correspond to greater public exposure. We further demonstrate how our audience segmentation method can quantify the level of interest from non-specialist audience sectors such as mental health advocates, dog lovers, video game developers, vegans, bitcoin investors, conspiracy theorists, journalists, religious groups, and political constituencies. Surprisingly, we also found that 10% of the highly tweeted preprints analyzed have sizable (>5%) audience sectors that are associated with right-wing white nationalist communities. Although none of these preprints intentionally espouse any right-wing extremist messages, cases exist where extremist appropriation comprises more than 50% of the tweets referencing a given preprint. These results present unique opportunities for improving and contextualizing research evaluation as well as shedding light on the unavoidable challenges of scientific discourse afforded by social media.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Evelina Francisco ◽  
Nadira Fardos ◽  
Aakash Bhatt ◽  
Gulhan Bizel

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting stay-at-home orders have disrupted all aspects of life globally, most notably our relationship with the internet and social media platforms. People are online more than ever before, working and attending school from home and socializing with friends and family via video conferencing. Marketers and brands have been forced to adapt to a new normal and, as a result, have shifted their brand communication and marketing mix to digital approaches. Hence, this study aims to examine the shift of influencer marketing on Instagram during this period and the possible future implications. By employing an online survey for exploratory research, individuals answered questions addressing their perceptions about the impact of the pandemic, brands and influencers’ relationship, and the overall changes made in marketing strategy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Wayne W. L. Chan ◽  

The legal authorities, particularly the police force, have been increasingly facing challenges given the popularity of social media [1, 2]. However, we know very little about how public perceptions of the police are being shaped by social media. In this context, this study attempted to investigate the impact of social media on young people’s perceptions of the police in Hong Kong. The focus of this study was placed on Facebook since it was one of the most popular social media platforms in the city. Facebook was not only conceptualized as a communication medium but also a social networking arena. In this connection, qualitative individual interviews were conducted to explore the online social networking on Facebook and its relation to the perceptions of police force. It was found that the Facebook users who were more likely to stay closely connected with other users with similar views would tend to form the politicized perception of police force. On the other hand, the Facebook users who were to be networked with some other users or real persons with dissimilar views would hold more neutral perceptions of the police. This study was the first of its kind to investigate the role of online social networking in the perceptions of the police, thus filling an important gap in our knowledge of the increasing impact of social media. Therefore, the results of current study were expected to contribute to society by avoiding the disproportionate public discourse about law and order. Keywords: Social Media, Online Social Networking, Public Perception, Police Force.


Author(s):  
Marco Bastos ◽  
Dan Mercea

In this article, we review our study of 13 493 bot-like Twitter accounts that tweeted during the UK European Union membership referendum debate and disappeared from the platform after the ballot. We discuss the methodological challenges and lessons learned from a study that emerged in a period of increasing weaponization of social media and mounting concerns about information warfare. We address the challenges and shortcomings involved in bot detection, the extent to which disinformation campaigns on social media are effective, valid metrics for user exposure, activation and engagement in the context of disinformation campaigns, unsupervised and supervised posting protocols, along with infrastructure and ethical issues associated with social sciences research based on large-scale social media data. We argue for improving researchers' access to data associated with contentious issues and suggest that social media platforms should offer public application programming interfaces to allow researchers access to content generated on their networks. We conclude with reflections on the relevance of this research agenda to public policy. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations'.


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