(Art)ificial Reminiscence of Cultural Heritage in the Service of Marketing Communication
This scientific paper represents a complementary and parallel extension of the initial empirical study “Deepfake: Digital Reincarnation of Art” (Štosel & Spálová, in press). The primary objective of the aforementioned study is to identify the attitudes of fans and followers on social media who responded to marketing and communication activities related to the application of generative artificial intelligence tools of the Deepfake type, in the context of the digital reincarnation of artworks presented within cultural institutions such as The Dalí Museum in Florida, the Danish Museum Fredericia, and the Liptov Museum in Ružomberok. This research study builds upon the same methodological foundations, while focusing on a different empirical dataset. The main aim of the research is to examine the attitudinal responses of participants on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, in relation to three curatorial projects: Ask Dalí, Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen and Interactive Holograms: Survivor Stories Experience of the three cultural institutions The Dali Museum, Museum of the Moving Images and Illinois Holocaust Museum. The output is framed within a qualitative approach, grounded in content-based sentiment analysis. This analytical procedure makes it possible to explore participants’ attitudes as articulated through comments on social media toward the application of generative artificial intelligence tools of the Deepfake type, with particular attention devoted to their use in the digital reincarnation of artworks.
- Research Article
111
- 10.5204/mcj.561
- Oct 11, 2012
- M/C Journal
Lists and Social MediaLists have long been an ordering mechanism for computer-mediated social interaction. While far from being the first such mechanism, blogrolls offered an opportunity for bloggers to provide a list of their peers; the present generation of social media environments similarly provide lists of friends and followers. Where blogrolls and other earlier lists may have been user-generated, the social media lists of today are more likely to have been produced by the platforms themselves, and are of intrinsic value to the platform providers at least as much as to the users themselves; both Facebook and Twitter have highlighted the importance of their respective “social graphs” (their databases of user connections) as fundamental elements of their fledgling business models. This represents what Mejias describes as “nodocentrism,” which “renders all human interaction in terms of network dynamics (not just any network, but a digital network with a profit-driven infrastructure).”The communicative content of social media spaces is also frequently rendered in the form of lists. Famously, blogs are defined in the first place by their reverse-chronological listing of posts (Walker Rettberg), but the same is true for current social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms are inherently centred around an infinite, constantly updated and extended list of posts made by individual users and their connections.The concept of the list implies a certain degree of order, and the orderliness of content lists as provided through the latest generation of centralised social media platforms has also led to the development of more comprehensive and powerful, commercial as well as scholarly, research approaches to the study of social media. Using the example of Twitter, this article discusses the challenges of such “big data” research as it draws on the content lists provided by proprietary social media platforms.Twitter Archives for ResearchTwitter is a particularly useful source of social media data: using the Twitter API (the Application Programming Interface, which provides structured access to communication data in standardised formats) it is possible, with a little effort and sufficient technical resources, for researchers to gather very large archives of public tweets concerned with a particular topic, theme or event. Essentially, the API delivers very long lists of hundreds, thousands, or millions of tweets, and metadata about those tweets; such data can then be sliced, diced and visualised in a wide range of ways, in order to understand the dynamics of social media communication. Such research is frequently oriented around pre-existing research questions, but is typically conducted at unprecedented scale. The projects of media and communication researchers such as Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, Wood and Baughman, or Lotan, et al.—to name just a handful of recent examples—rely fundamentally on Twitter datasets which now routinely comprise millions of tweets and associated metadata, collected according to a wide range of criteria. What is common to all such cases, however, is the need to make new methodological choices in the processing and analysis of such large datasets on mediated social interaction.Our own work is broadly concerned with understanding the role of social media in the contemporary media ecology, with a focus on the formation and dynamics of interest- and issues-based publics. We have mined and analysed large archives of Twitter data to understand contemporary crisis communication (Bruns et al), the role of social media in elections (Burgess and Bruns), and the nature of contemporary audience engagement with television entertainment and news media (Harrington, Highfield, and Bruns). Using a custom installation of the open source Twitter archiving tool yourTwapperkeeper, we capture and archive all the available tweets (and their associated metadata) containing a specified keyword (like “Olympics” or “dubstep”), name (Gillard, Bieber, Obama) or hashtag (#ausvotes, #royalwedding, #qldfloods). In their simplest form, such Twitter archives are commonly stored as delimited (e.g. comma- or tab-separated) text files, with each of the following values in a separate column: text: contents of the tweet itself, in 140 characters or less to_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet recipient (for @replies) from_user: screen name of the tweet sender id: numerical ID of the tweet itself from_user_id: numerical ID of the tweet sender iso_language_code: code (e.g. en, de, fr, ...) of the sender’s default language source: client software used to tweet (e.g. Web, Tweetdeck, ...) profile_image_url: URL of the tweet sender’s profile picture geo_type: format of the sender’s geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_0: first element of the geographical coordinates geo_coordinates_1: second element of the geographical coordinates created_at: tweet timestamp in human-readable format time: tweet timestamp as a numerical Unix timestampIn order to process the data, we typically run a number of our own scripts (written in the programming language Gawk) which manipulate or filter the records in various ways, and apply a series of temporal, qualitative and categorical metrics to the data, enabling us to discern patterns of activity over time, as well as to identify topics and themes, key actors, and the relations among them; in some circumstances we may also undertake further processes of filtering and close textual analysis of the content of the tweets. Network analysis (of the relationships among actors in a discussion; or among key themes) is undertaken using the open source application Gephi. While a detailed methodological discussion is beyond the scope of this article, further details and examples of our methods and tools for data analysis and visualisation, including copies of our Gawk scripts, are available on our comprehensive project website, Mapping Online Publics.In this article, we reflect on the technical, epistemological and political challenges of such uses of large-scale Twitter archives within media and communication studies research, positioning this work in the context of the phenomenon that Lev Manovich has called “big social data.” In doing so, we recognise that our empirical work on Twitter is concerned with a complex research site that is itself shaped by a complex range of human and non-human actors, within a dynamic, indeed volatile media ecology (Fuller), and using data collection and analysis methods that are in themselves deeply embedded in this ecology. “Big Social Data”As Manovich’s term implies, the Big Data paradigm has recently arrived in media, communication and cultural studies—significantly later than it did in the hard sciences, in more traditionally computational branches of social science, and perhaps even in the first wave of digital humanities research (which largely applied computational methods to pre-existing, historical “big data” corpora)—and this shift has been provoked in large part by the dramatic quantitative growth and apparently increased cultural importance of social media—hence, “big social data.” As Manovich puts it: For the first time, we can follow [the] imaginations, opinions, ideas, and feelings of hundreds of millions of people. We can see the images and the videos they create and comment on, monitor the conversations they are engaged in, read their blog posts and tweets, navigate their maps, listen to their track lists, and follow their trajectories in physical space. (Manovich 461) This moment has arrived in media, communication and cultural studies because of the increased scale of social media participation and the textual traces that this participation leaves behind—allowing researchers, equipped with digital tools and methods, to “study social and cultural processes and dynamics in new ways” (Manovich 461). However, and crucially for our purposes in this article, many of these scholarly possibilities would remain latent if it were not for the widespread availability of Open APIs for social software (including social media) platforms. APIs are technical specifications of how one software application should access another, thereby allowing the embedding or cross-publishing of social content across Websites (so that your tweets can appear in your Facebook timeline, for example), or allowing third-party developers to build additional applications on social media platforms (like the Twitter user ranking service Klout), while also allowing platform owners to impose de facto regulation on such third-party uses via the same code. While platform providers do not necessarily have scholarship in mind, the data access affordances of APIs are also available for research purposes. As Manovich notes, until very recently almost all truly “big data” approaches to social media research had been undertaken by computer scientists (464). But as part of a broader “computational turn” in the digital humanities (Berry), and because of the increased availability to non-specialists of data access and analysis tools, media, communication and cultural studies scholars are beginning to catch up. Many of the new, large-scale research projects examining the societal uses and impacts of social media—including our own—which have been initiated by various media, communication, and cultural studies research leaders around the world have begun their work by taking stock of, and often substantially extending through new development, the range of available tools and methods for data analysis. The research infrastructure developed by such projects, therefore, now reflects their own disciplinary backgrounds at least as much as it does the fundamental principles of computer science. In turn, such new and often experimental tools and methods necessarily also provoke new epistemological and methodological challenges. The Twitter API and Twitter ArchivesThe Open
- Research Article
- 10.1016/j.ptdy.2022.08.012
- Sep 1, 2022
- Pharmacy Today
Beware: Patients increasingly purchasing medications via social media
- Research Article
45
- 10.1053/j.ackd.2013.04.001
- Jun 26, 2013
- Advances in Chronic Kidney Disease
Using Digital Media to Promote Kidney Disease Education
- Research Article
8
- 10.1080/1051712x.2021.1920697
- Apr 3, 2021
- Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing
Purpose: Overwhelmed by the huge rise in the number of social media (SM) platforms, B to B firms have been increasingly using multiple social media (SM) platforms to enhance their relationships with their customers. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of the competitive pressure to use SM on B to B firms use of multiple SM platforms, organization and individual SM competences and on relationship sales performance. Method: An online survey is implemented to collect data from B to B firms from different industries in an emerging market, i.e. Kuwait, to produce 152 usable questionnaires. Structural equation modeling is carried out using Smart PLS 3. Findings: The main findings show that competitive pressure to use SM fully influences relationship sales performance through individual social media competence. It also influences relationship sales performance through two mediations (1) organizational SM competence, (2) on a less important level, through the use of multiple SM platforms and organizational SM competence. Additionally, both organization and individual SM competence are found to significantly influence relationship sales performance. Implications: This study uncovers the complex mechanism through which competitive pressures to use social media influence both individual and organization social media competence and their relationship with their customers. It demonstrates that the use of multiple SM platforms significantly increases relationship sales performance, but this influence is weak. Therefore, top managers must choose the right number of SM platforms and design clear SM strategies. Originality: This study sheds light on the influence of competitive pressure to use SM on B to B firms’ relationships with their customers i.e. relationship sales performance. This coercive pressure could potentially spread B to B firms’ resources over a large number of SM and lead to poor SM presence. The study also emphasizes the role of top management in choosing the optimal combination of SM platforms and developing their organization SM competence.
- Research Article
14
- 10.1016/j.jand.2021.11.007
- Nov 15, 2021
- Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
Guidance for Professional Use of Social Media in Nutrition and Dietetics Practice
- Research Article
- 10.58481/bjbe/2523
- Dec 1, 2025
- BUFT Journal of Business and Economics
Purpose: This paper aims to understand how social media platforms are used for educational purposes and how they engage students in the learning process in the context of private universities in Bangladesh. Methodology: As the study is explorative in nature, qualitative research approach was adopted to gather in-depth insights into the experiences of both students and faculty members. The participants were divided into two clusters: Cluster-1, consisting of 37 students from bachelor’s to master’s levels, and Cluster-2, comprising 19 faculty members with at least three years of teaching experience. Findings: Social media platforms have recently transformed traditional educational paradigms. In Bangladesh, university students’ social media usage has surged due to affordable smartphones and widespread internet access. While exploring the role of social media in enhancing learning in the digital age, the findings revealed that social media significantly enhances student engagement, promotes collaborative learning, facilitates access to educational resources and information sharing, and fosters real-time communication between students and teachers. Practical Implications: This study discusses the usefulness of social media platforms for resource sharing, cooperative learning, and student involvement in higher education. Additionally, university curricula ought to incorporate instruction in digital literacy to assist students in analyzing and utilizing social media content for academic purposes. Value/Originality: This research provides original perspectives on social media applications as they are currently transforming the nature of student engagement and learning in private universities in Bangladesh through a qualitative approach. Limitations: One key limitation of the study is that it focuses on a limited sample from private universities only, which may not fully represent the broader experiences of students and faculty across different educational institutions in Bangladesh.
- Research Article
31
- 10.2147/amep.s310181
- May 24, 2021
- Advances in Medical Education and Practice
BackgroundIn the world today, many people use various communication technologies, like as computer-aided equipment, the internet, and so on. In information communication technologies, people use social media as one of the tools with which to exchange their ideas in everyday communications. Hence, the present study aimed at examining social media usage in improving English language proficiency from the viewpoint of medical students among Ethiopian public university students.MethodsA descriptive survey design was employed since the purpose of this study was to gain detail information about social media usage in improving English language proficiency from the viewpoint of medical students. Hence, the researchers intended to use a quantitative approach. This is because a quantitative methodology helps researchers calculate the results more easily and avoid the difficulties which a qualitative approach might entail.ResultsThe reports obtained from respondents showed that social media (SM) platforms have many advantages in improving medical learners’ English understanding in the process of EFL learning. It positively affects them in improving their level of English proficiency. Gender not only influenced the attitude of students in using social media for learning English but also improved their proficiency in the process of language learning. Even if gender differences exist in nature, significant differences in the viewpoint of male and female students regarding social media (SM) usage in enhancing their English proficiency were not observed. The majority of the respondents strongly agreed that social media use plays a dominant role in improving English proficiency.ConclusionIn the English language learning–teaching process, social media platforms have many advantages in enhancing medical students’ English proficiency in their own learning and teaching practices. Gender did not influence the attitude of students in using social media for learning English or improve their proficiency in the process of language learning.
- Front Matter
52
- 10.1016/j.ophtha.2019.02.015
- May 20, 2019
- Ophthalmology
Navigating Social Media in #Ophthalmology
- Research Article
7
- 10.11114/bms.v4i3.3573
- Aug 27, 2018
- Business and Management Studies
Aim: To review and discuss the use of social media platforms as digital marketing tool and promotional strategy by brands. The digital age inevitably brings changes and increased competition in ways businesses target, reach and recruit customers. This phenomena raises the question of which medium or media do businesses adopt in the marketing effort to reach, inform and convert customers; ultimately for survival? This review is an attempt to address this question within the context of the promotional activities of a beauty brand, Taliah.Approach: A review was conducted on the social media marketing activities of Taliah. It discusses different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube which the brand has combined to target, reach, persuade and convert their customers. In addition, the review identified four factors that reasonably affect the social media marketing as time and date; personality, call to action and post type. Consequently, this logical approach towards the subject-matter would help to provide knowledge and facilitate reaching the best-fit decision that can optimize the marketing activities of brands and businesses; considering the increasingly evolving technological era.Findings: The review considers the evolving changes in business as a result of the presence of various digital and interactive platforms and technologies. The study recognizes that the social media platforms provide opportunities for media content; including information on products and services to be processed and distributed to the targets. There is a worry that the market space is increasingly becoming competitive; particularly as consumers are empowered by the digital technologies to make informed choices among different brands and businesses. Arguably, this is one of the major factors that triggered the competition in the market and among brands.Review limitations/implications: The characteristics of the impact of the social media marketing on brands and businesses have recently been widely discussed because of their general applicability. Consequently, it is impossible to review and cover all the important aspects of the subject-matter in this review. This review focuses on the Taliah brand and how it has particularly conducted its social media and digital marketing management. It also examines four factors that reasonably affect the social media marketing; namely, time and date; personality, call to action and post type. The review examines and provides its own views based on content analysis of the social media marketing activities of Taliah brand.Practical implications: The review highlights the activities, benefits and challenges of applying social media as a marketing and promotional strategy. Social media platforms provide the channel through which brands and businesses can develop and disseminate information about their activities to their targets in an easy, less expensive and convenient manner. On the other hand, if brands and business understand the factors affecting the social media marketing; namely, time and date; personality, call to action and post type – they would be better prepared to checkmate these factors; including been able to aptly adapt the strengths of the social media in their marketing activities. This complement would strike the balance and potentially present a practical means through which brands could coordinate their marketing efforts in using various social media platforms. It is also crucial to gain insight into other factors that potentially impacting the activities of social media marketing strategy.Value: The review considers that the increasing changes in the market is itself an opportunity for the brands to rethink strategy on how various digital technologies and networking platforms can be optimized in marketing their activities and information. It is crucial and beneficial to emerging businesses and academics to understand how Taliah brand combined and utilized diverse social media platforms to target, reach out and recruit target customers; ultimately boosting its market shares.
- Book Chapter
1
- 10.1108/978-1-83982-848-520211051
- Jun 4, 2021
This chapter examines the structure and sentiment of the Twitter response to Nathan Broad's naming as the originator of an image-based sexual abuse incident following the 2017 Australian Football League Grand Final. Employing Social Network Analysis to visualize the hierarchy of Twitter users responding to the incident and Applied Thematic Analysis to trace the diffusion of differing streams of sentiment within this hierarchy, we produced a representation of participatory social media engagement in the context of image-based sexual abuse. Following two streams of findings, a model of social media user engagement was established that hierarchized the interplay between institutional and personal Twitter users. In this model, it was observed that the Broad incident generated sympathetic and compassionate discourses among an articulated network of social media users. This sentiment gradually diffused to institutional Twitter users – or Reference accounts – through the process of intermedia agenda-setting, whereby the narrative of terrestrial media accounts was altered by personal Twitter users over time. Keywords Image-based sexual abuse Informal justice Social network analysis Technology facilitated violence Twitter Digital criminology Citation Broadbent, E. and Thompson, C. (2021), "Justice on the Digitized Field: Analyzing Online Responses to Technology-Facilitated Informal Justice through Social Network Analysis", Bailey, J., Flynn, A. and Henry, N. (Ed.) The Emerald International Handbook of Technology-Facilitated Violence and Abuse (Emerald Studies In Digital Crime, Technology and Social Harms), Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 689-709. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83982-848-520211051 Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited Copyright © 2021 Ella Broadbent and Chrissy Thompson. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This chapter is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these chapters (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. License This chapter is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these chapters (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. Introduction On the evening of September 30, 2017, the final siren sounded on the Australian Football League (AFL) season, and the Richmond Football Club (RFC) secured their first Premiership cup in 37 years. In the hours following the evening's celebrations, an image of a young woman with a premiership medal around her neck – her face cropped and breasts exposed – began to circulate through social networking platforms and fan forums. This image was quick to disperse through social media channels, becoming a symbol for the victory celebrations of the young men within the team and their army of supporters. It later emerged that the woman photographed had not consented to having the image shared. In the month after this incident, a formal police inquiry was conducted at the request of the victim to protect her anonymity, leading to a gradual reduction of the image's appearance within social and terrestrial media. Following the closure of this investigation, the victim's lawyers issued a statement maintaining that while the image had been taken with her consent, she was under the impression that it had been deleted shortly after – and certainly not distributed via social media (Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, 2017). She sought to drop the charges police laid against the accused both to protect her identity and to prevent further distress (SBS, 2017). On 29 October 2017 – almost a month after the image's release – premiership player Nathan Broad was identified as the person responsible for taking and distributing the original image. A press conference was held with Broad and the president of the RFC, Peggy O'Neal, where Broad issued a statement claiming he would take full responsibility for his actions and confirmed he took and distributed the image without consent (Cherny, 2017). The only formal sanction Broad received from the RFC was a three-week suspension at the beginning of the 2018 AFL season (Cherny, 2017). This incident (henceforth referred to as the “Broad incident”) 1 represents a high-profile case of a certain form of technology-facilitated violence (TFV) – image-based sexual abuse (IBSA). Due to police intervention, attempts were made to remove the original image from circulation on social media. While this image can still be located today, its circulation decreased significantly after police attempted to remove it. As a result of these efforts, the ability to analyze the diffusion of the original incident of nonconsensual sexual imagery was limited. However, the subsequent identification in late October 2017 of Nathan Broad as the individual who took the image generated significant social media interest, and produced a body of historical Twitter data that provided a valuable substrate for us to analyze how social media users sought to contest or condone Nathan Broad's naming and sanction. Incidents such as these hold value for criminological analysis, as they can provide a window into public sentiments on the perpetration of, and institutional responses to, IBSA. Moreover, as criminologists such as Powell, Overington, and Hamilton (2018) have demonstrated, examining responses to high-profile crimes on social media can provide a valuable means of researching the content and diffusion of narratives about crime in the contemporary mediascape. In undertaking such projects, a Social Network Analysis (SNA) methodology provides important insights into the degree of homophily within networks who respond to crimes on social media, and the role of central “nodes” in diffusing narratives about crime and perpetration. 2 Such insights are important given that early work within digital criminology has emphasized the “networked” morphology of contemporary harms – speaking, for example, of “networked misogyny” (Banet-Weiser & Miltner, 2016; Thompson & Wood, 2018, p. 12) – but has yet to examine the structural properties of these networks. To date, criminologists have yet to explore the utility of an SNA approach for examining social media–based responses to IBSA and other criminalized acts. To demonstrate the utility of SNA within this context, this study examined this incident of IBSA in Australia. In addition to answering the questions below, this project was concerned with not only the what of the research process but also the how. Readers are encouraged to consider the results and analysis as they would a pilot study – wherein qualitative Twitter data and a network of user relations were operationalized to generate an initial framework for understanding how structural analysis of incidents of IBSA can better demarcate the spread of sentiment through a network. In examining the Broad incident using this methodology, we sought to address the following questions: What are the structural and intermedia features of Twitter users' responses to IBSA? In what ways do Twitter users contest and/or condone IBSA? These questions enabled us to explore user engagement as a process involving both personal and media accounts, and the interactions they share to contest and/or condone a narrative on an incident of IBSA. Furthermore, our analysis offers a novel approach to analyzing public sentiment toward an incident of IBSA, providing structural and intermedia analysis of the response to the incident. This chapter is divided into four main sections. In section one, we review the relevant literature relating to online engagement, digital platforms, and IBSA. In the next section, we discuss the methodological contributions of this work and reflect on the utility of the methods used in this research for future studies into TFV and IBSA. In section three, we detail the major findings from this research; drawing on an Applied Thematic Analysis (ATA) we outline the narrative promulgated by both journalist and news media accounts, alongside personal Twitter users, and how interactions between these users generated a reverse-flow of sentiment. This is represented within a hierarchized visual framework characteristic of SNA to outline the flow of information and sentiment between different types of users responding to the Broad incident. This process enabled us to identify three “user roles” – Reference, Mediator, and Listener – with each performing distinct functions in the diffusion and reception of sentiment within the network. These user roles demonstrate how responses to crime on social media may be structured by clear hierarchies, with some users occupying dialogically significant positions within these networks. Through an ATA of the tweets responding to Broad's naming in the media, we identified an informal justice-seeking response by users to Broad and his actions, alongside a replication of this sentiment within Reference users over time. The counterhegemonic discourses that appeared in response to Broad disrupted the neutral narrative of the Broad incident within Reference accounts and produced a more favorable and balanced consideration of the harms to the victim. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on the implications of this research for online responses to IBSA. We posit that demarcating the connections between social media actors – Mediators, Listeners, and Reference accounts – may enhance our understanding of their specific role in contesting and altering passive narratives of sexual harm online. Literature Review This chapter is situated amid a burgeoning literature on the spectatorship of, and engagement with, TFV and IBSA (Henry, McGlynn, Flynn, Johnson, Powell, & Scott, 2020; Henry & Powell, 2018). It is important to note that such spectatorship involves not only individual observation of an incident of IBSA but also their response to this observation. Here, the act of spectatorship is not confined simply to the object and viewer, or “the spectator and the spectacle,” but also involves “the association between spectators,” or in this instance structural relations between Twitter users (Wood, 2017, p. 9). This grounds our methodology, in seeking to demarcate the connections that shape engagement on social media platforms, a process which is mediated not only by social forces but also the technological (infra)structure of social networking platforms. Twitter has been described as a “personal public” (Schmidt, 2014, p. 4) – a communicative space framed by the dimensions of software, relations, and rules. The concept of personal publics is not limited to Twitter and operates as a foundation for understanding the mechanics of Web 2.0 and user-generated content and interactions. Within a personal public, information is selected and displayed according to personal relevance criteria such as the social network a user situates themselves within. This is then mediated through ties made explicit by the platform – such as following, retweeting, and liking. Twitter itself can be distinguished from other social networks by the specific articulation of these user relations which are utilized to structure communicative flow – “the nexus of social ties and textual references, based on code-enabled connections” (Schmidt, 2014, p. 6). The foundational concept guiding these Twitter relations is that of “following” users – a unilateral relationship used to subscribe to other users' tweets and calculate user visibility metrics. Replies, retweets, and mentions, function as communicative references that allow for navigation to user profiles. These factors produce a stable and dynamic social networking service consisting of networked and distributed conversations (Schmidt, 2014), which enables potentially exponential public distribution and engagement with nonconsensual sexual imagery such as the image released by Broad. Researchers have noted that social media platforms such as Twitter have allowed for a redemocratization of the public sphere (Papacharissi, 2002). The assembly of counterpublics (Fraser, 1990) by girls and women on social media to contest social exclusion and subordination has been documented within criminological literature (Khoja-Moolji, 2015). Technology has, for example, allowed victims and their supporters to engage in “name and shame” tactics to ensure that behavior of abusers is not excused, and to contest the inadequacy of institutional responses to sexual violence such as TFV (Powell, 2015; Salter, 2013; Wood, Rose, & Thompson, 2019, p. 3). Considering the inadequacy of existing institutional responses to rape and violence against women in the form of state-sanctioned justice (Powell, 2015), social media–enabled informal justice-seeking plays an important role in the way victims of sexual violence and their supporters can create counterhegemonic discourses online. Informal justice and contemporary digital activism movements have been conceptualized as an asymmetrical and nonhierarchical endeavor within Powell, Stratton, and Cameron's (2018) theory of rhizomatic justice. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's (1988) figuration of the rhizome, Powell, Stratton et al.’s (2018) theory accounts for the diversity of activist behaviors in a digital context, where organizations, groups, and individuals are linked loosely and embody significant diversity (Funke, 2014). The resulting spread of motivations and agendas can lead these forms of activism to both enhance democracy and new forms of bigotry, which may outweigh the original infraction (Powell, Stratton et al., 2018). This is a constructive explanation for the consequences of informal justice-seeking. The utilization of a rhizomatic analogy, however, implies a flattening of hierarchies within these communities, which minimizes the “algorithmically-curated information environment” (Wood, 2019, p. 573) of social media, the in-built architecture that structures social media use. Identifying key nodes and influencers residing within a network who occupy a more significant role in information diffusion (Wood et al., 2019) holds the potential to identify information flow to institutional social media accounts. This chapter compliments the rhizomatic model of informal justice-seeking through an identification of the structural relations that underpinned online users' informal justice response to the Broad incident. Methodology Our study utilized a parallel mixed methods research design that combined a quantitative SNA and qualitative ATA (Borgatti, Everett, & Johnson, 2018) to establish a structural understanding of the social media response to the 2017 Broad incident. These methods enabled the assessment of differing components of the phenomenon, enhancing its interpretability. We collected and analyzed these quantitative and qualitative data sources separately before integrating them in the second phase of the project (Creswell & Clark, 2007). To begin this process, an SNA was conducted to develop a quantitative representation of different user types with a corpus of data relating to an incident of IBSA. SNA enabled the visualization of relational ties between social actors – in this case individual Twitter users, such as journalists, institutional news media accounts, and personal Twitter users. This included interactions such as liking or retweeting user content, and follower/followee relationships. These ties could be typologized through user type differentiation established by Beguerisse-Díaz, Garduno-Hernández, Vangelov, Yaliraki, and Barahona (2014) in their SNA of the London riots:
- Research Article
1
- 10.34778/5h
- May 27, 2022
- DOCA - Database of Variables for Content Analysis
The depiction of alcohol is the focus of a growing number of content analyses in the field of social media research. Typically, the occurrence and nature of alcohol representations are coded to measure the prevalence, normalization, or even glorification of alcohol and its consumption on different social media platforms (Moreno et al., 2016; Westgate & Holliday, 2016) and smartphone apps (Ghassemlou et al., 2020). But social media platforms and smartphone apps also play a role in the prevention of alcohol abuse when they disseminate messages about alcohol risks and foster harm reduction, abstinence, and sobriety (Davey, 2021; Döring & Holz, 2021; Tamersoy et al., 2015; Westgate & Holliday, 2016). Field of application/theoretical foundation: Social Cognitive Theory (SCT; Bandura 1986, 2009) as the dominant media effects theory in communication science, is applicable and widely applied to social media representations of alcohol: According to SCT, positive media portayals of alcohol and attractive role models consuming alcohol can influence the audience’s relation to alcohol. That’s why positive alcohol portayals in the media are considered a public health threat as they can foster increased and risky alcohol consumption among media users in general and young people in particular. The negative health impact predicted by SCT depends on different aspects of alcohol portrayals on social media that have been traditionally coded in manual content analyses (Beullens & Schepers, 2013; Mayrhofer & Naderer, 2019; Moreno et al., 2010) and most recently by studies relying on computational methods for content analysis (e.g. Ricard & Hassanpour, 2021). Core aspects of alcohol representations on social media are: a) the type of communicator / creator of alcohol-related social media content, b) the overall valence of the alcohol portrayal, c) the people consuming alcohol, d) the alcohol consumption behaviors, e) the social contexts of alcohol consumption, f) the types and brands of consumed alcohol, g) the consequences of alcohol consumption, and h) alcohol-related consumer protection messages in alcohol marketing (Moreno et al., 2016; Westgate & Holliday, 2016). For example, a normalizing portrayal shows alcohol consumption as a regular and normal behavior of diverse people in different contexts, while a glorifying portrayal shows alcohol consumption as a behavior that is strongly related to positive effects such as having fun, enjoying social community, feeling sexy, happy, and carefree (Griffiths & Casswell, 2011). While criticism of glorifying alcohol portrayals in entertainment media (e.g., music videos; Cranwell et al., 2015), television (e.g., Barker et al., 2021), and advertising (e.g., Curtis et al., 2018; Stautz et al., 2016) has a long tradition, the concern about alcohol representations on social media is relatively new and entails the phenomenon of alcohol brands and social media influencers marketing alcohol (Critchlow & Moodie, 2022; Turnwald et al., 2022) as well as ordinary social media users providing alcohol-related self-presentations (e.g., showing themselves partying and drinking; Boyle et al., 2016). Such alcohol-related self-presentations might elicit even stronger identification and imitation effects among social media audiences compared to regular advertising (Griffiths & Casswell, 2011). Because of its psychological and health impact, alcohol-related social media content – and alcohol marketing in particular – is also an issue of legal regulation. The World Health Organization states that “Europe is the heaviest-drinking region in the world” and strongly advocates for bans or at least stricter regulations of alcohol marketing both offline and online (WHO, 2020, p. 1). At the same time, the WHO points to the problem of clearly differentiating between alcohol marketing and other types of alcohol representations on social media. Apart from normalizing and glorifying alcohol portayals, there are also anti-alcohol posts and comments on social media. They usually point to the health risks of alcohol consumption and the dangers of alcohol addiction and, hence, try to foster harm reduction, abstincence and sobriety. While such negative alcohol portayals populate different social media platforms, an in-depth investigation of the spread, scope and content of anti-alcohol messages on social media is largely missing (Davey, 2021; Döring & Holz, 2021; Tamersoy et al., 2015). References/combination with other methods of data collection: Manual and computational content analyses of alcohol representations on social media platforms can be complemented by qualitative interview and quantitative survey data addressing alcohol-related beliefs and behaviors collected from social media users who a) create and publish alcohol-related social media content and/or b) are exposed to or actively search for and follow alcohol-related social media content (e.g., Ricard & Hassanpour, 2021; Strowger & Braitman, 2022). Furthermore, experimental studies are helpful to directly measure how different alcohol-related social media posts and comments are perceived and evaluated by recipients and if and how they can affect their alcohol-related thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (Noel, 2021). Such social media experiments can build on respective mass media experiments (e.g., Mayrhofer & Naderer, 2019). Insights from content analyses help to select or create appropriate stimuli for such experiments. Last but not least, to evaluate the effectiveness of alcohol marketing regulations, social media content analyses conducted within a longitudinal or trend study design (including measurements before and after new regulations came into effect) should be preferred over cross-sectional studies (e.g., Chapoton et al., 2020). Example Studies for Manual Content Analyses: Coding Material Measure Operationalization (excerpt) Reliability Source a) Creators of alcohol-related social media content Extensive explorations on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok Creators of alcohol-related social media content on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok Polytomous variable “Type of content creator” (1: alcohol industry; 2: media organization/media professional; 3: health organization/health professional; 4: social media influencer; 5: ordinary social media user; 6: other) Not available Döring & Tröger (2018) Döring & Holz (2021) b) Valence of alcohol-related social media content N = 3 015 Facebook comments N = 100 TikTok videos Valence of alcohol-related social media content (posts or comments) Binary variable “Valence of alcohol-related social media content” (1: positive/pro-alcohol sentiment; 2: negative/anti-alcohol sentiment) Cohen’s Kappa average of .72 for all alcohol-related variables in codebook* Döring & Holz (2021) *Russell et al. (2021) c) People consuming alcohol N = 160 Facebook profiles (profile pictures, personal photos, and text) Portrayal of people consuming alcohol on Facebook profiles Binary variable “Number of persons on picture” (1: alone; 2: with others) Cohen’s Kappa > .90 Beullens & Schepers (2013) d) Alcohol consumption behaviors N = 160 Facebook profiles (profile pictures, personal photos, and text) Type of depicted alcohol use/consumption Polytomous variable “Type of depicted alcohol use/consumption” (1: explicit use such as depiction of person drinking alcohol; 2: implicit use such as depiction of alcohol bottle on table; 3: alcohol logo only) Cohen’s Kappa = .89 Beullens & Schepers (2013) N = 100 TikTok videos Multiple alcoholic drinks consumed per person Binary variable “Multiple alcoholic drinks consumed per person” as opposed to having only one drink or no drink per person (1: present; 2: not present) Cohen’s Kappa average of .72 for all alcohol-related variables in codebook Russell et al. (2021) N = 100 TikTok videos Alcohol intoxication Binary variable “Alcohol intoxication” (1: present; 2: not present) Cohen’s Kappa average of .72 for all alcohol-related variables in codebook Russell et al. (2021) N = 4 800 alcohol-related Tweets Alcohol mentioned in combination with other substance use Binary variable “Alcohol mentioned in combination with tobacco, marijuana, or other drugs” (1: yes; 2: no) Cohen’s Kappa median of .73 for all pro-drinking variables in codebook Cavazos-Rehg et al. (2015) e) Social contexts of alcohol consumption N = 192 Facebook and Instagram profiles (profile pictures, personal photos, and text) Portrayal of social evaluative contexts of alcohol consumption on Facebook and Instagram profiles Polytomous variable “Social evaluative context” (1: negative context such as someone looking disapprovingly at a drunk person; 2: neutral context such as no explicit judgment or emotion is shown; 3: positive context such as people laughing and toasting with alcoholic drinks) Cohen’s Kappa ranging from .68 to .91 for all variables in codebook Hendriks et al. (2018), based on previous work by Beullens & Schepers (2013) N = 51 episodes with a total of N = 1 895 scenes of the American adolescent drama series “The OC” Portrayal of situational contexts of alcohol consumption in scenes of a TV series Polytomous variable “Setting of alcohol consumption” (1: at home; 2: at adult / youth party; 3: in a bar; 4: at work; 5: at other public place) Polytomous variable “Reason of alcohol consumption” (1: celebrating/partying; 2: habit; 3: stress relief; 4: social facilitation) Cohen’s Kappa for setting of alcohol consumption .90 Cohen’s Kappa for reason of alcohol consumption .71 Van den Bulck et al. (2008) f) Types and brands of consumed alcohol N = 17 800 posts of Instagram influencers and related comments Portrayal of different alcohol types and alcohol brands in Instagram posts Polytom
- Research Article
21
- 10.1080/07421222.2022.2063550
- Apr 3, 2022
- Journal of Management Information Systems
Driven by the need to enhance user traffic on social media (SM) platforms for increasing their advertising revenues, SM platforms are experimenting with new content creation features. However, it is unclear if such initiatives are also beneficial for SM profile owners such as influencers, who are the prime content creators on the SM platforms who use SM posts to build their influence within their network of followers. Our study investigates the effect of introducing one such new SM feature: the “story” on the creation and consumption of SM posts. Leveraging social penetration theory, we hypothesize the influence of introducing story feature on (1) the frequency of SM post creation by profile owners and (2) the extent of follower engagement with SM posts. Employing a quasi-experimental design, we find that the introduction of the story feature reduces the frequency of SM post creation, but the enhanced self-disclosure through the story feature increases follower engagement with the SM posts. However, these effects are moderated by the situating culture of the SM communities: while low-power-distance cultures value profile owners’ self-disclosure, high-power-distance cultures exhibit a mixed influence. Advancing literature on social penetration theory and SM user engagement, our study demonstrates that new self-disclosive SM content creation features do not necessarily benefit all the concerned stakeholders and that the effectiveness of such features might vary from one community to another. Hence, the intended impact of introducing new SM features needs to be carefully evaluated by SM platforms in a holistic manner.
- Research Article
3
- 10.5204/mcj.956
- Apr 29, 2015
- M/C Journal
Government Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media: The Case of Iran (2009)
- Book Chapter
1
- 10.1007/978-981-15-7961-5_122
- Oct 12, 2020
To determine which social media analytics tools, techniques, and platforms were developed in recent times, this paper reviews tools, techniques, and platforms related to social media analytics. In this paper, we talk about the tools used to deal with various social media data (social networking, media, etc.). In the past decade, there has been advancement in the technologies used to deal with social media as there has been an increase in the number of people using social media to share information and also the development of the new social media platforms that have let to increase in the amount of data that we have to deal with. Social media platforms have a considerable number of users across the world, which is overgrowing. These people are sharing information through these sources. There is a large quantity of social data comprising of data related to users, videos, web-based relations, and interactions, etc. which needs to be analyzed. Therefore analyzing social media data has become a significant activity for researchers, mainly due to the availability of the web-based API from social media platforms like twitter, facebook [1], Gmail, etc. This has also led to the development of data services, software tools for analyzing social media data. In this paper, there is a detailed review of the leading software tools and techniques that are used for scraping, cleaning, and analyzing social media data.
- Research Article
- 10.1215/15525864-9767996
- Jul 1, 2022
- Journal of Middle East Women's Studies
From Café Culture to Tweets