Golden Years in Social Media World

The context of demographic aging, combined with the wide dissemination of information and communication technologies (ICT), in the various domains of society defined a set of challenges, potentialities, and limits for seniors (65+). Although there is a positive evolution regarding adhesion and even domestication of ICT by this age segment, namely the internet and digital social networking sites, the literature review presents us with an immature, limited, and fragmented field of study, comprising an immense space of evolution. Aware of the strength, magnitude, and considerable ignorance of the action of seniors in the network society, this chapter intends to map, through a review of the multidisciplinary literature, how the relationship of seniors with ICTs is configured. In addition, usage behavior, as well as the drivers, and the consequences for the elderly of navigating digital social networks are also analyzed.

Will Social Media and Its Consumption Converge or Diverge Global Consumer Culture?

Social media have been claimed to homogenize human and consumer behaviors around the world – in other words, to make people think, feel, and act alike regardless of national borders. Scholars often debate this claim from either a convergence or a divergence perspective from the marketing and consumer behavior literature. The theoretical foundation will be based on the convergence-divergence debates that postulate universal consumption patterns and values are made possible, due to the industrialization, modernization, technology, and wealth accumulation. The authors use perceptions of online privacy among users of privacy-invasive technologies as an example to discuss why people will think the same about their own privacy could be a myth for the failure to consider the unique socio-cultural characteristics of each nation. This study begins with a global consumption analysis of social media around the world. Then, they examine how privacy concerns may help account for the homogenization or heterogenization trend of global consumer culture. Discussions and implications are provided.

Digital Social Networking Use Effect on Individual Job Performance

This chapter aims to explore the impact of social networking sites (SNS) usage on individual work performance (IP). A literature review revealed contrasting results. A multiple-case study on 15 employees from eight Tunisian firms has been conducted to highlight the SNS effects on IP in the specific context of democratic transition. Data have been collected by semi-structured interviews and coded using the Nvivo 10 software. The analysis shows that, depending on the level of SNS usage, three types of effect are identified on IP at work: positive, negative, or null. This result invites researcher to consider the usage intensity when analyzing SNS effects on IP. Understanding the different types of SNS usage by actors and their effects on IP could help managers to take appropriate decisions to take profit from this usage. This research suggests also that organizational policy moderates the relationship between SNS usage and IP.

Blogs as Pathways to Information and Influence Within the Kenyan Blogosphere

Kenya has a robust blogger community, with hundreds of active bloggers and a variety of stimulating blogs on politics, agriculture, technology, education, fashion, food, entertainment, sports, and travel. The purpose of this chapter was to explore whether Kenyans participate in online discussions and to determine the role of Kenyan bloggers in online communities. Data was collected through a survey of 3,269 respondents aged between 14 and 55 years and social media mining on Twitter using Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL) API. Survey data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and cross-tabulation while mined data was analyzed for centrality metrics. The study identified Farmers Trend, Ghafla Kenya, KahawaTungu, and Kachwanya as influential blogs in the Kenyan blogosphere and that most Kenyan women read travel and food and fashion blogs while men mostly read sports and politics blogs. This chapter contributes to a better understanding of the Kenyan blogosphere.

Institutionalism, Social Media, and Democracy in Africa

This study focuses on the process of institutional change with regard to the capabilities of African political systems to embrace the conditions that instill and support democracy in the context characterized by pervasive social media consumption. The author wonders in what way institutions and individual behaviors can integrate social media in order to consolidate democracy. In other words, is social media-supported democracy sustainable in Africa? The study analyzes the patterns of social media consumption in its functionality for democratic change in Africa. It examines patterns of institutional change on the basis of the impact of social media consumption in African politics. It highlights two theories of institutional change—structured institutional change and evolutionary institutional change—based on their relevance to the impact of social media consumption in African political settings.

Detecting Fake News on Social Media

As Web 2.0 technologies have turned the Internet into an interactive medium, users dominate the field. With the spread of social media, the Internet has become much more user-oriented. In contrast to traditional media, social media's lack of control mechanisms makes the accuracy of spreading news questionable. This brings us to the significance of fact-checking platforms. This study investigates the antecedents of spreading false news in Turkey. The purpose of the study is to determine the features of fake news. For this purpose, teyit.org, the biggest fact-checking platform in Turkey, has been chosen for analysis. The current study shows fake news to be detectable based on four features: Propagation, User Type, Social Media Type, and Formatting. According to the logistic regression analysis, the study's model obtained 86.7% accuracy. The study demonstrates that Facebook increases the likelihood of news being fake compared to Twitter or Instagram. Emoji usage is also statistically significant in terms of increasing the probability of fake news. Unexpectedly, the impact of photos or videos was found statistically insignificant.

Online Social Networks Misuse, Cyber Crimes, and Counter Mechanisms

Online social networks (OSNs) are nowadays an indispensable tool for communication on account of their rise, simplicity, and efficacy. Worldwide users use OSN as a tool for social interactions, news propagation, gaming, political propaganda, and advertisement in building brand awareness, etc. At the same time, many OSN users unintentionally expose their personal information that is used by the malicious users and third-party apps to perform various kind for cyber-crimes like social engineering attacks, cyber espionage, extortion-malware, drug-trafficking, misinformation, cyberbullying, hijacking clicks, identity theft, phishing, mistrusts, fake profiles, and spreading malicious content. This chapter presents an overview of various cyber-crimes associated with OSN environment to gain insight into ongoing cyber-attacks. Also, counter mechanisms in the form of tools, techniques, and frameworks are suggested.

Understanding Social Media Addiction Through Personal, Social, and Situational Factors

The main objective of this chapter is to gain an in-depth understanding of the social media addiction construct. For this purpose, prior studies on social media addiction are reviewed. Based on this review the influence of several personal, social, and situational factors on social media addiction are examined. Firstly, personal factors such as demographic characteristics, personality traits, self-esteem, well-being, loneliness, anxiety, and depression are studied for their impact on social media addiction. Next, the social correlates and consequents of social media addiction are identified, namely need for affiliation, subjective norms, personal, professional, and academic life. Lastly, situational factors like amount of social media use and motives of use are inspected. Following the review of literature an empirical study is made to analyze factors that discriminate addicted social media users from non-addicted social media users on the basis of these different factors.

Use of Novel Ensemble Machine Learning Approach for Social Media Sentiment Analysis

Twitter is a platform where people express their opinions and come with regular updates. At present, it has become a source for many organizations where data will be extracted and then later analyzed for sentiments. Many machine learning algorithms are available for twitter sentiment analysis which are used for automatically predicting the sentiment of tweets. However, there are challenges that hinder machine learning classifiers to achieve better results in terms of classification. In this chapter, the authors are proposing a novel feature generation technique to provide desired features for training model. Next, the novel ensemble classification system is proposed for identifying sentiment in tweets through weighted majority rule ensemble classifier, which utilizes several commonly used statistical models like naive Bayes, random forest, logistic regression, which are weighted according to their performance on historical data, where weights are chosen separately for each model.

Social Entrepreneurship, Smart Brands, and Epic Social Learning Networks

This study explores how brand cultures can become learning communities and highlights how social networking sites can emerge as social learning platforms by way of content, conversations, and community. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the concept of learning content in online social learning networks that are initiated by a commercial enterprise to provide a competitive advantage while at the same time providing social good. The proposed framework builds a bridge between the organization and the consumer, takes into account Generation Z, and looks at self-development and knowledge consumption as the key benefit. The work considers transmedia storytelling which has emerged in marketing to expand the brand story. The concept of transmedia learning networks and brand-consumer value-competitiveness model is proposed to show the value proposition of knowledge consumption. The work embraces learning communities, introduces the theory of conversationisim, and encourages participation and conversation on a global scale.