Online Social Life Research Articles

Is internet the cherry on top or a crutch? Offline social support as moderator of the outcomes of online social support on Problematic Internet Use

The study is part of a research whose goal is identifying what predictors determine either a positive or a dysfunctional use of Internet. The factor at stake is here social support. Specifically our study, carried out through an online questionnaire, hypothesized a moderation of Offline Social Support in the relationship between Online Social Support, Problematic Internet Use, and Life Satisfaction. The study found that while Offline Social Support reduces the chances of developing a Problematic Internet Use, Online Social Support increases them. Furthermore the data supported the moderation of Offline Social Support in the outcomes of Online Social Support: when the first is low, as the latter increases the Problematic Internet Use gets higher; when Offline Social Support is high, an increase in Online Social Support determines a decrease in Problematic Internet Use. By contrast the moderation of Offline Social Support on the relationship between Online Social Support and Life Satisfaction was not confirmed. Our research show that when investigating psychological constructs related to Internet activity these must be considered in their offline and online variations to provide an answer to the debate on psychological outcomes of undertaking social interactions in Internet land. Our results suggest that the usage of the Web may become dysfunctional when it is meant to compensate for lacks of the “offline life”.

Computer-mediated communication in adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders and controls

It has been suggested that people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are attracted to computer-mediated communication (CMC). In this study, we compare CMC use in adults with high-functioning ASD (N=113) and a control group (N=72). We find that people with ASD spend more time on CMC than controls, are more positive about CMC, and report relatively high levels of online social life satisfaction. However, CMC use is negatively related to satisfaction with life for people with ASD. Our results indicate that the ASD subjects in this study use CMC at least as enthusiastically and successfully as controls but that there may also be negative sides to its use.

Exploring the relationship between adolescents' self-concept and their offline and online social worlds

Recent research has established online social lives as a significant aspect of adolescents' lives and development. The current study considered the relationship between adolescents' offline (i.e., ‘real life’) and online social worlds and their self-concept, which is a broad indicator of well-being during adolescence. In this quantitative study, 733 adolescents between the ages of 10 and 18 (M = 15, SD = 2.33) were surveyed about their online and offline social worlds and self-concept. Regression analysis revealed the moderating effect of online socializing in the relationship between offline social life and general self-concept, consistent with a ‘Rich Get Richer’ hypothesis of online use.

Bullying on the pixel playground: Investigating risk factors of cyberbullying at the intersection of children’s online-offline social lives

Although cyberbullying as a serious social problem has received significant attention within the mass media as well as among researchers, experiences of cyberbullying among children in the U.S. are still occurring (Dean, 2012; Salazar, 2010). The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between social factors (i.e., sociability, social networking site use, Internet use via cell phones), risky online behaviors (i.e., lying about age, sexting, and harassing others), children’s emotional attachment to interactions within SNS, and parental involvement in children’s online social lives on the likelihood of being victims of cyberbullying as well as offline bullying. We found that increased sociability and parental involvement decreased the likelihood of being both cyberbullied and being bullied offline; daily SNS use, Internet use via cell phones, emotional attachment to interactions within SNS, and engaging in risky online behaviors increased the likelihood of being both cyberbullied and bullied offline. The findings suggest (1) cyberbullying is not categorically distinct from offline bullying; (2) future research is necessary to explore the qualitative impact of various risky online behaviors on both online and offline bullying; and (3) research is necessary to further understand the qualitative dimensions of parental involvement and emotional investment in online social life in decreasing online and offline bullying.

Active players in a network tell the story: Parsimony in modeling huge networks

One of the methodological and logistic problems of network research is the challenge of big data. Dynamics and network qualities are not as easy to extrapolate as averages and distributions. The numbers are huge, and traditional sampling doesn’t solve the problem. What if, by using a small sub–group of the members of a population, we could understand the nature of the network connecting them? For instance, what if we could draw network analysis conclusions, such as predicting the outbreak and evolution of an epidemic, without measuring the entire network of individuals? Christakis and Fowler (2010, cited in Wilson, 2010) found a unique group of users that could predict an epidemic days before its peak in the relevant population.This study continues their work. Instead of exploring millions of online social activities, we suggest investigating the active users (as we define them) in their community and using their activity logs to build a partial network. This network of intensive users can depict the dynamics of a huge social network, in our case Yahoo! Answers intensive activities.Barabási, et al. (2002) explored the connection between topology and network size on real–life networks. Twelve years later, our online Q&A social network study reached the same findings and conclusion: the partial network has several basic topological parameters that correlate with activity parameters of the entire social network and, hence, make it suitable for depicting the dynamic parameters of the huge network.Since exploring online social lives is so interesting and time consuming, we believe that our findings can help the investigation of huge social networks. We call for further investigation of these findings and their implications.

Facebook: public space, or private space?

Social networks have become a central feature of everyday life. Most young people are members of at least one online social network, and they naturally provide a great deal of personal information as a condition for participation in the rich online social lives these networks afford. Increasingly, this information is being used as evidence in criminal and even civil legal proceedings. These latter uses, by actors involved in the justice system, are typically justified on the grounds that social network information is essentially public in nature, and thus does not generate a subjective expectation of privacy necessary to support a civil rights-based privacy protection. This justification, however, is based on the perceptions of individuals who are outside the online social network community, rather than reflecting the norms and privacy practices of participants in online social networks. This project takes a user-centric approach to the question of whether online social spaces are public venues, examining of the information-related practices of social network participants, focusing on how they treat their own information and that of others posted in online social spaces. Our results reveal that online social spaces are indeed loci of public display rather than private revelation: online profiles are structured with the view that ‘everyone’ can see them, even if the explicitly intended audience is more limited. These social norms are inconsistent with the claim that social media are private spaces; instead, it appears that participants view and treat online social networks as public venues.

THE CONTENTIOUS GAP

With the rise and widespread application of the internet, social scientists rapidly emphasized that some people were better able to gain control over these technologies than others. This so-called digital divide between the haves and the have-nots was seen as a new feature of contemporary inequality – as a reproduction or transformation of existing social disparities. Motivated by these concerns about social inequality, it is argued in this paper, research on the digital divide has been theoretically and empirically blinkered. Even though the focus changed from simplistic questions of having access or not, towards the more informative dimension of usage and skills, the same socio-economic bias was maintained. In this paper, we therefore theorize that appropriating the internet (or not) is less related to socio-economic position or usage and skills, and is more culturally informed than theories about a digital divide allow for. To empirically test our assumptions, we used the internet-based community project ‘Telebrink’ as a case study for our quantitative and qualitative research. Based on a survey among Dutch citizens involved in this project (N = 251), we studied the explanations for (not) using these applications by testing hypotheses about the influence of skills and knowledge on the one hand and culture, i.e. moral evaluations of online social life, on the other. Our statistical analyses show that cultural attitudes, i.e. moral beliefs regarding social interaction, are most strongly explaining the appropriation of social internet technologies. Enriched with our qualitative data confirming those results, it is concluded that how people feel and think about this technology in social life is of major importance. In short: culture matters!

Spinning Our Wheels: Improving Our Ability to Respond to Bullying and Cyberbullying

Bullying is physical and or psychological abuse perpetuated by one powerful child upon another, with the intention to harm or dominate. Bullying and aggression in schools has reached epidemic proportions. Abusive bullying behaviors begin in elementary school, peak during middle school, and begin to subside in high school. Bullying behaviors are associated with catastrophic violence. Cyberbullying has emerged as one result of the increasingly online social life in which modern teens and children engage. Mediation may be inappropriate. The only safety mechanism that children will ultimately retain is the one between their ears.

Contesting Community Online: Virtual Imagery among Dutch Orthodox Protestant Homosexuals

Whereas substantial scholarly attention has been paid to the online presentation of self, symbolic interactionist approaches are largely absent in the literature on virtual communities. Instead, recurrent questions are whether communities can exist online and whether specific online venues qualify as communities. This article aims to move beyond these dichotomous questions by studying how different meanings attached to an online venue can be understood from offline experiences. In a case study of a Dutch forum for orthodox Protestant homosexuals, two types of understanding of online community emerged from an analysis of fifteen in-depth interviews. Users struggling with stigmatization in offline life seek empathic support and have an encompassing sense of online community—the forum as “refuge.” For users dealing with practical everyday questions, online contacts are part of so-called personal communities and help ameliorate offline life—the forum as “springboard.” Apart from demonstrating that online forums can serve as Goffmanian backstages in two distinct ways, these results indicate it is fruitful to take a symbolic interactionist approach to uncover relationships between offline and online social life.

Myspace Isn't Your Space: Expanding the Fair Credit Reporting Act to Ensure Accountability and Fairness in Employer Searches of Online Social Networking Services

The advent and popularity of online social networking has changed the way Americans socialize. Employers have begun to tap into these online communities as a simple and inexpensive way to perform background checks on candidates. However, a number of problems arise when employers base adverse employment decisions upon information obtained through these online searches. Three basic problems or issues accompany searches of online profiles for employment decisions: (1) inaccurate, irrelevant, or false information leads to unfair employment decisions; (2) lack of accountability and disclosure tempts employers to make illegal employment decisions; and (3) employer searches of an employee’s online social life violate an employee’s legitimate expectation of privacy.Because searches of online social networking services, such as “MySpace” and “The Facebook,” only stand to become more prevalent among employers, the law must expand to ensure adequate protection to users of these websites from unfair, illegal or arbitrary employment decisions. Employers also stand to gain from such an expansion of legal protections because they will be accountable to make good employment decisions. The original purposes of the Fair Credit Report Act (“FCRA”) permit – and demand – its expansion to cover the potential problems for candidates and employees caused when employers search for a candidate or employee’s online social networking profiles. This solution effectively strikes an agreeable balance between an employer’s right to know about candidates for employment and its employees and an employee’s or candidate’s right to privacy and fair employment decision making.

Time and space in cyber social reality

This article synthesizes a range of sociological views on time and space, and presents a departure point for future research on cyber social reality. Using basic sociological categories of culture, structure, and interaction, the cyber social reality is drawn into a matrix that further illustrates the embeddedness in technology, time, and space. The matrix is a theoretically and empirically grounded tool for exploring, describing, analyzing, and comparing the variety existing within online communities and communication. In the article, the matrix is illustrated step by step to show its inherent dimensions, and in conclusion it is proposed to be a useful systematic for, on the one hand, ensuring ethnographically thick descriptions of online social life, and on the other, comparing the various reality constructions found.

Rumlige dimensioner i det sociale cyberspace

Stine Gotved: Spatial dimensions in social cyberspace
 
 The temporal and spatial dimensions of online communication establish the basic conditions for social life within cyberspace communities. Looking at the protocol-based constructions – whether they are communicating in real time or in asynchronous mode and whether they hold a shared location – it is clear that spatial construction matters for the sense of community. Parallel to offline life, the spatial dimensions in online communities are important for how the individual navigates, relates, and communicates. This article presents a typology of online space, in which three different kinds of spatial dimensions are defined. These three spatial dimensions can be found in most (if not all) online communities in varying degrees, and analysis of the patterns of spatial dimension within an online community provides useful information about the basic terms of social life within that community. The typology is discussed in light of Henri Lefebvre's work on spatiality and social space, in order to uncover the implicit inspirations as well as the limitations of his approach by the inclusion of offline spatial sociology. The typology presented here serves as an analytical tool to separate the different spatial dimensions of cyberspace, and hopefully holds the key to understanding many of the differences within online social life.

A Sounding Board for the Self: Virtual Community as Ideology

Claims about the emergence of a new type of social aggregation—“virtual community”—cover a type of ideological discourse about social interactions. The main cultural resource fueling this ideology is the counterculture and its social project. Virtual community, both as a discursive and as a social practice, is a culmination rather than a resolution of the modern conflict between community and individuality. Presenting virtual community as a panacea for modern social tensions, especially that between individualistic and communitarian ideals, hides from sight not only some of the negative aspects of on-line social life (cliquish behavior and incivility) but also the role played by communication technology in fragmenting modern society.

Spatial Dimensions in Online Communities

The spatial dimensions of online communication establish the basic conditions for online social life. The protocol-based constructions make it clear that spatial constructions matter for the sense of community. Parallel to offline life, the spatial dimensions in online communities are important for the individual's navigation, relation, and communication. This article presents a typology of online space, where three different kinds of spatial dimensions are defined. Analyzing the patterns within any online community provides useful information on the basic terms of social life. The interface serves as a visible and ontological space on the screen, a shared common spot in the vast cyberspace. The social space is mainly epistemological, based on the individual's interpretations of social interactions. The metaphorical space is purely epistemological, based on reconstructed reality and geography, and evokes the sense of a place. The typology holds the key to understanding many of the differences within online social life.