Social Media Change Research Articles

How We Speak When We Say Things about Ourselves in Social Media: A Semiotic Analysis of Content Curation

How We Speak When We Say Things about Ourselves in Social Media: A Semiotic Analysis of Content Curation

Tweeting Taksim communication power and social media advocacy in the Taksim square protests

The extent to which social media empower individuals represents a fruitful yet untapped area of communication research. This study explores the phenomenon whereby individuals exert their influence and seek change in a particular case of social media engagement—the Taksim Square protests in Turkey in 2013. Building from literatures in social media engagement and empowerment, and using Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, we content analyzed 770 Taksim-related messages on Twitter. Results suggest that efforts to seek change in social media are realized through information dissemination more than through calls to action and social organization. Namely, social media users seek influence through vicarious experience—representation of the experience of others—than direct personal experience. From these findings, we argue that social media is used to effect change from a distance, and that content ownership and online reputation are driving forces of online participation in an issue.

Diffusion of lexical change in social media.

Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user accounts). Using a latent vector autoregressive model to aggregate across thousands of words, we identify high-level patterns in diffusion of linguistic change over the United States. Our model is robust to unpredictable changes in Twitter's sampling rate, and provides a probabilistic characterization of the relationship of macro-scale linguistic influence to a set of demographic and geographic predictors. The results of this analysis offer support for prior arguments that focus on geographical proximity and population size. However, demographic similarity – especially with regard to race – plays an even more central role, as cities with similar racial demographics are far more likely to share linguistic influence. Rather than moving towards a single unified “netspeak” dialect, language evolution in computer-mediated communication reproduces existing fault lines in spoken American English.

Persistence and Change in Social Media

Persistence and Change in Social Media