Social Network Space Research Articles

The Emerging “Metaverse” and Its Implications for International Business

This article presents information on the metaverse as a digital space, highlighting areas for further inquiry by international business researchers. The metaverse is an overarching virtual platform, much like the Internet, but with a few key differences. The metaverse is expected to be a massively-scaled, hyper-connected network with seamless real time 2D and 3D connection to the physical world via virtual, augmented, neural, and traditional interfaces. Early examples of the metaverse exist like digital twins, gaming, education, and social networking spaces. If the metaverse comes to maturity over the next 10-15 years, it can be a US$ 8-13 trillion economy.

A Decade of Social Media for Learning: A Systematic Review

Since the emergence of social media in the early 2000’s, innovative educators have sought ways to utilise, adapt, and maximise the opportunities for learning within social networking and collaborative online spaces. The purpose of this systematic review is to analyse the work published on social media for learning in the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice (JUTLP) over the 20-year life of the journal to date. We summarise the current evidence on the use of social media for learning and document how the field has evolved and changed since its emergence as a pedagogical theme. We explore themes for the use of social media for learning, key challenges, how the use of social media has changed over time, and we look at specific types of papers that contribute to the original research on social media for learning. We achieved this through a systematic review 3-step process: 1) scoping and understanding the review context and research questions, 2) undertaking methods using an established approach for a systematic and quality assessment of the literature, and 3) undertaking a thorough thematic analysis of the empirical evidence from the systematic review papers to provide meaningful outcomes and recommendations. This robust approach resulted in the analysis of 11 papers and exploration of 4 key themes: Computer mediated communication, digital capabilities, and confidence, learning community, and social media pedagogy. Finally, we make recommendations that aim to benefit both editors and authors of JUTLP, and editors and authors more generally.

Conceptosphere of cultural mediatisation

The purpose of the article is to clarify the essence of the concept of "mediatisation of culture" in the modern context, to analyse the range of its conceptual sphere and its impact on the socio-cultural space of Ukraine. Research methodology. To achieve this goal, a number of research methods were used. Thus, to consider the interaction of cultures in the traditional space of communication and the space of social networks, the method of comparative analysis was used. To identify the mechanisms of formation of cultural boundaries, as well as their overcoming, the method of analysing open sources of information which are information resources on the Internet was applied. For qualitative and quantitative study of documents characterising the modern content of the concept of "mediatisation of culture", analytical synthesis was used. The method of theoretical generalisation allowed summarising the data obtained in the course of the study. The scientific novelty of the study is due to the need for new scientific views on the processes that shape and characterise the mediatisation of the cultural sphere of our time. An attempt to do this by defining a number of related concepts, united by the concept of conceptosphere, is qualitatively new. This study, which is comprehensive, takes into account the changes taking place in the cultural environment under the influence of the media. It takes into account their role in shaping the modern socio-cultural space of Ukraine, especially in the context of Russia's military aggression against Ukraine. Conclusions. The study examines the concept of "mediatisation of culture" in the modern context and its impact on the socio-cultural space of Ukraine. The work takes into account important changes in the cultural environment caused by the influence of the media, in particular their role in shaping the modern socio-cultural space of Ukraine. Keywords: mediatisation of culture, conceptosphere, concepts, concept, modern media technologies, mass media, social networks, socio-cultural space of Ukraine, cultural environment, cultural freedom, media spaces.

Social Media and Nutritional Habits among nutrition students: A Social Work Perspective

Introduction: According to the research conducted in recent years and after the evolution of social networks, the statistics of obesity and the consumption of fast foods and high-calorie foods have increased significantly. Also, food blogging has become much more widespread and popular in the space of social networks, so we are investigating the impact of social networks on people's nutritional habits.Material and Methods: The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship and impact of social networks on people's nutritional habits. For this research, a 20-question questionnaire was answered by 60 college students and the obtained data was analyzed by SPSS 26.Results: The most social media has been used are Instagram, Telegram, and YouTube, and 22% use social media between 3 and 4 hours a day. More than 58% used ready food less than 2 days a week. But 56% of them reported that social media didn’t have a noticeable effect on their informed decision in choosing food.Conclusion: This study showed that the use of social media can be effective in people's lifestyle and food pattern and food intake.

Educational Environment in the Inclusive Space of Mush: Problems and Ways to Solve Them

The article presents research on educational environment in an inclusive space. Emphasis is placed on identifying problems faced by heads of general secondary education institutions, parents, teachers, and psychologists. It is emphasized that all problems arising in educational institutions have certain solutions that need to be solved.
 The research indicates that heads of educational institutions, being in an administrative position, understand their functionality and responsibilities and strive to make the educational space of students safe and comfortable. Like any other participant in the educational process, the administration of an educational institution faces certain difficulties or problems that must be responded to quickly enough and find ways to solve them. We identified a number of problems faced by the administrator of the educational institution; however, the personnel potential is significant.
 The article presents the position of parents regarding the educational environment in an inclusive space. Parents should be oriented in the informational space of social networks, providing informational support and considering the expediency of cooperation at the level of parents and inclusive resource centers. A significant problem for parents identified in the study is the lack of knowledge among parents about the impact of correctional and developmental work on children with special educational needs.
 Working in an educational institution, a pedagogical worker may have a problem in the direction of the absence of a teacher’s assistant and a child’s assistant. The presence of such an employee in the educational institution will allow to plan the educational process in a modern way and to establish communication with the students of education. In the future, the close interaction of a pedagogical worker, a teacher's assistant and a child’s assistant will significantly improve the educational process and help the child adapt to the conditions of the educational space faster.
 Among the main problems faced by psychologists, it is important to determine the work with parents to resolve the conflict in the classroom with adults who are not ready to send the child to school, a class where there is a child with special educational needs. To solve this problem, the psychologist should conduct lectures, individual conversations, both with parents and with the class teacher and children.
 Complex interaction and close cooperation of the administration of the educational institution, teaching staff, psychologists and parents will allow to create comfortable conditions in the inclusive space of the New Ukrainian School, which further motivates the students to study.

Молодежь в пространстве социальных сетей Интернета: итоги социологического опроса

Many scientists in Russia pin their hopes on positive social transformations in the country on the youth, which is most often understood as the most active social group, including citizens from 18 to 35 years old. From a scien-tific point of view, the study of the position of representatives of this age category in the space of social net-works of the Internet is also of interest. The two most common stereotypes of using social networks of Internet were identified as: 1) continuous, constant usage of Internet networks; 2) regular news scrolling. The research confirmed the author’s assumption that in modern society, young people use online social networks to satisfy a wide range of needs: not only to communicate with friends, but also to obtain news and professional infor-mation. It was also found that representatives of the new generation in modern Russian society treat news posts, messages published in social network channels and blogs predominantly critically, double-checking the information received from the Internet or trusting only the channels and blogs chosen for themselves.

How to Analyse Emojis, gif s, Embedded Images, Videos, and url s: A Bakhtinian Methodological Approach

Abstract This article offers a means of analysing social networking, visual dialogues of emojis, gif s (images in the Graphics Interchange Format), embedded images, videos, and url s (Uniform Resource Locators). Doing so addresses these often overlooked and undervalued forms of visual communication, suggesting a unique means of gaining insights into their use within online interactions. Utilising a Bakhtinian methodology, the author extracts excerpts from her research, situated within Facebook, to demonstrate a Bakhtinian genre analysis, a framework that the author contends is adaptable to multiple social networking spaces. Highlighting emojis, gif s, embedded images, videos, and url s as integral components of online communication, an emphasis is placed on how the text dances with the visual, presenting a nuanced framework for such an analysis. Consequently, an argument is developed for the significance of visual dialogues in contemporary online spaces, and the need for researchers to better understand these dynamic forms of communication, offered through Bakhtinian dialogism.

Cross-platform language learning: A spatial perspective on narratives of language learning across digital platforms

In the current reality of digital activity, individuals often explore more than one digital platform for language learning. Despite increasing research on the uses of digital platforms for language learning in informal contexts, the cross-platform experience remains in need of elucidation. Drawing on spatial perspectives on digital technology and language learning to conceptualize digital platforms as digital spaces, this study examines the cross-platform experiences of two international students studying English in Australia based on narrative data collected from journal entries, stimulated recall interviews, and social media posts. A narrative approach to the analysis reveals precisely how they organized a variety of digital resources and learning opportunities in online gaming, searching, media-sharing, social networking, and language learning spaces. The learners strategically orchestrated this particular range of digital spaces in alignment with personal interest and need. In accordance with the specific affordances of technological features in these spaces, they created a shared space of interaction in which learning occurred across geographically remote, networked individuals through multimodal language practices. The narrative approach is seen to add analytical power to the issue of space in the sphere of informal digital language learning, in which unique learning pathways for navigating diverse digital spaces are important.

The Communicative Potential of Internet Commentary at the System of Public Relations (Macedonian-Albanian case)

An Internet comment, being, in fact, a private opinion left under a post, with a certain set of similar statements, may reflect a trend in issues and topics of concern to society. In this article, based on the analysis of the comments of users of the social network, an assumption is made about the reflection in them of a threat to the integrity of society. The Macedonian social media space was chosen as a case for monitoring, the subject of interest was Internet comments on representatives of the Albanian ethnic minority of the Republic of North Macedonia. The relationship between representatives of two ethnic groups (Albanians and Macedonians) has a conflict background and conflict potential. Based on the results of the analysis of the corpus of verbal data, the author formulated assumptions about the role of Internet commentary in reflecting the mood of society and its potency as one of the conditions in the development of the Albanian-Macedonian conflict, which is currently in a latent phase. On the one hand, comments left on social networks have a significant destructive potential within the framework of the described case; on the other hand, they have constructive potency, since the space of social networks becomes a kind of substitute in relation to the physical space and makes it possible to keep a possible conflict at the level of rejection in Internet comments, not allowing it to "get out outside."

Вербальные маркеры угрозы в публичных высказываниях англоязычного сегмента социальной сети Твиттер

The aim of the study is to establish a correlation between the intensity of a threat and the specific linguistic means expressing it in the social network Twitter (lexemes, distribution of lexemes, grammatical constructions). Threat as a regular phenomenon of Internet public pages is realised in the appropriate contextual conditions, it is endowed with a particular style and is actualised through recurrent grammatical constructions. Such conditions of threat actualisation make it possible to associate it with the speech strategy relevant in Internet discourse. The scientific novelty of the study is accounted for by considering the functions of markers of threat in the gradation of its intensity in the English-speaking segment of the social network Twitter. As a result of the study, it has been determined that the textual space of social networks has a high degree of implicitness, expressiveness and evaluativeness, verbal markers of threat occupy a special place in the textual space of social networks as key elements of comments and messages. The intensity of a threat can be determined through the linguistic means of its actualisation in a social context. The statements containing a threat themselves have the appropriate style and expression, are built according to the most typical grammatical constructions. The analysis of the latter allows us to talk about the credibility of the action predicted by the threat and the possibility of transition from the plane of Internet communication to the real world.

Cross-Border Dialogues: A Collaborative Instructional Design Inquiry to Promote Equity and Diversity

The COVID-19 pandemic complicates ingrained educational inequalities around the globe and foregrounds the pertaining challenges that teachers have encountered due to school closures and the shift to distance learning. This cross-border teacher education project intended to examine how academics and pre-service teachers in different geographic locales could collaboratively explore equitable learning opportunities for diverse learners through the use of critical media literacies to respond to interconnected global crises. In this six-week cross-border teacher education project, we recruited four Mandarin and English literacy teacher candidates in Hong Kong to interact with one another and one Canadian professor as part of the teacher preparation phase of a larger-scale cross-border research project that connects youth from Hong Kong and Canada in a social networking space. For the purposes of teacher professional development, the Hong Kong teacher candidates and Canadian researchers engaged in collective exploration of how instructional designs in literacy education could promote equitable learning opportunities for diverse learners. Findings show that the cross-border teacher education project supported teacher candidates’ development of pedagogical skills and espoused their agency in promoting educational equity and collective problem-solving through critical media literacies. Findings relate the teacher candidates’ shifted perspectives from focusing on students’ decontextualized language skills to nurturing critical media skills. Changing from a deficit-oriented view about what literacy learners could not do, the teacher candidates also adopted an asset-oriented view about the linguistic and cultural repertoires that diverse learners could bring to literacy classrooms.

GroupAligner : A Deep Reinforcement Learning with Domain Adaptation for Social Group Alignment

Social network alignment, which aims to uncover the correspondence across different social networks, shows fundamental importance in a wide spectrum of applications such as cross-domain recommendation and information propagation. In the literature, the vast majority of the existing studies focus on the social network alignment at user level. In practice, the user-level alignment usually relies on abundant personal information and high-quality supervision, which is expensive and even impossible in the real-world scenario. Alternatively, we propose to study the problem of social group alignment across different social networks, focusing on the interests of social groups rather than personal information. However, social group alignment is non-trivial and faces significant challenges in both (i) feature inconsistency across different social networks and (ii) group discovery within a social network. To bridge this gap, we present a novel GroupAligner , a deep reinforcement learning with domain adaptation for social group alignment. In GroupAligner , to address the first issue, we propose the cycle domain adaptation approach with the Wasserstein distance to transfer the knowledge from the source social network, aligning the feature space of social networks in the distribution level. To address the second issue, we model the group discovery as a sequential decision process with reinforcement learning in which the policy is parameterized by a proposed p roximity-enhanced G raph N eural N etwork (pGNN) and a GNN-based discriminator to score the reward. Finally, we utilize pre-training and teacher forcing to stabilize the learning process of GroupAligner . Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets are conducted to evaluate GroupAligner , and experimental results show that GroupAligner outperforms the alternative methods for social group alignment.

‘I am very emo’

The contemporary expansion of English is becoming remarkably rapid and exceptionally global (Ostler, 2011). In present-day China, English has gained unprecedented popularity, fueled by the nation's current political and social development (Bolton & Graddol, 2012). There is a notable trend of bilingual education using English as a medium of instruction in Chinese schools (Wei, 2013). Therefore, an increasing number of Chinese are enthusiastic about learning and using English in communication. With the active participation of youths, ‘Internet English’ has been used widely in social networking spaces. The practice of ‘English mixing’ in various Chinese homegrown social networking sites has become the most remarkable intranational use of English in today's mainland China (Zhang, 2012). Interestingly, youngsters1 often create novel meanings when using languages on the Internet as ‘teenagers are well-known for introducing innovations into language, and indeed are generally regarded as prime agents of language change’ (Palacios Martínez, 2018: 363). Many linguistic studies have dealt with the mechanisms of the evolution of word meanings in past decades (Kachru, 1983; Qin & Guo, 2020; Tan, 2009; Yang, 2005). Much evidence indicates that meanings and usages of words are variable and composite, and may turn out differently depending on how words are used in contexts.

The Power of Instagram's Algorithm in Boosting the Visibility of Startups & Small Businesses

As the world progresses towards digitalized platforms for ease of access, social media is getting more popular amidst the younger generations, causing marketers to quickly adapt to the social networking space to be able to interact with customers.
 India is one of the world’s fastest growing economies, with startups contributing approximately 4-5% to the nation’s gdp. The metropolitan city of bangalore serves as a hub for many up-and-coming startups and small businesses. Networking is crucial for small businesses, as word-of-mouth referrals can boost sales. Social media marketing is a cost-effective way to reach a broader audience and engage with customers. Additionally, traditional advertising channels such as billboards, flyers, and newspaper ads can still be effective in certain regions.
 In order to stand out in a saturated market such as ours, it is essential to strategize and create a marketing campaign that taps into the resources offered by interactive social media platforms the likes of instagram, facebook and many others.
 Through social media, big business can do better and small business can become better known without putting much investment on advertising. This study aims to provide insight into the seemingly vast marketing tool often underestimated by many – instagram’s algorithm.

Analysis of Relationships in the Virtual Space of Social Networks

The article is devoted to a brief review of approaches to the analysis of social relations in social networks using comments and credentials located in the profiles of social network users. The study is aimed at revealing the behavior of the user and understanding the nature of his relationship with others. The proposed architectural scheme of the system for the intellectual analysis of social relations will make it possible to better understand and identify social relations between users of social networks.

Teenagers and Young People in the Space of Social Networks: On the Problem of Analyzing Emotional Reactions in Network Communication

Teenagers and Young People in the Space of Social Networks: On the Problem of Analyzing Emotional Reactions in Network Communication

ПРОБЛЕМА КОНСТРУИРОВАНИЯ ЭКСПЕРТНОЙ ПОЗИЦИИ В СОЦИАЛЬНЫХ МЕДИА И БЛОГАХ

The article discusses and systematizes the latest approaches of researchers of digital media, immaterial labor, publicity, and the sociology of knowledge to the conditions under which modern people can acquire expert status and how modern Internet technologies are used to construct an expert position online. For the traditional expert paradigm, the division into experts and ordinary people is important. The concepts of expert and expert activity are usually associated with official institutions. However, in modern mediatized society, this position is being revised. Technological innovation plays an important role in changing social perceptions of expert status. Researchers are analyzing the different formats and ways in which new types of “experts” publicly present themselves in the space of social networks and blogs.

Social and network interaction on the Internet: to the definition of the media phenomenon

The large-scale introduction of computers into professional and everyday human activities, the formation of a global mass communication system based on the Internet and the formation of a single network space formed the basis of a modern social communication system. But at the same time, despite the long period of their development, there was no unambiguous concept denoting the phenomenon of Internet-based media, which includes means of communication, as well as the social-network interaction environment formed by them. The authors analyze four concepts used to display the media phenomenon: (1) information and communication environment, (2) social network space, (3) media space and (4) public communication space. Analysis shows that each of these concepts focuses on a specific aspect of the communications of modern society. The information and communication environment is a semi-structured set of computers and information and telecommunication technologies that allow organizing actor interactions to coordinate their activities in the storage, transmission, processing of information. A social network space is rhizome from social media, which allows users to organize online communication and produce user-generated content. Media space is a complex configuration of social media related to the production and consumption of media, the unity of which, within the framework of the information picture of the world, holds a certain social space together. The public communications space is a set of social media aimed at mainstreaming socially significant problems and discussing in the social-network space.

Development Trends of Intercultural Communication in Social Networks

The purpose of the study is to reveal the peculiarities and trends of the development of intercultural communications in the context of the specifics of the space of social networks at the current stage. Research methodology. The method of comparative analysis is applied (to consider the interaction of cultures in the traditional space and the space of social networks); analysis of open sources of information, which are information resources on the Internet (to identify the mechanisms of formation of cultural borders, as well as their overcoming). Scientific novelty. The specifics, forms, and functions of intercultural interaction in social networks have been studied; the nature and trends of the development of intercultural communications in social networks at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century have been revealed. Conclusions. Modern network communications (especially social networks) are a universal socio-cultural mechanism that arose as a result of the genesis and functioning of culture in interaction with social parameters, in which the use of information and communication technologies creates conditions for easy overcoming of cultural boundaries. Social networks, which are represented by web applications that allow people to interact with each other, provide an environment for sharing all types of content created by other media tools. They are an effective tool for the development of intercultural communication, as they provide a person with the opportunity not only to communicate freely, but also to discover intercultural values for yourself and easily adapt to them. Social media tools that cultivate cross-cultural communication are expanding and diversifying every day. In addition to the usual use of Facebook and other similar popular applications, many users communicate through microblogs and new applications. Because of the organic development of social networks, the concept of sustainable intercultural dialogue was formed: users get the opportunity to solve their own problems within the boundaries of another culture quite effectively, make friends faster, follow various events in a certain socio-cultural space, to be a part of cultural values, and to adapt.
 Key words: intercultural communication, social networks, applications, communication, intercultural dialogue, intercultural adaptation.

Spatial and social distances between U.S. domestic travelers in restaurant review assessment

This study discusses the effects of spatial and social distances between U.S. domestic travelers on online review assessment. Previous studies on online review assessment have augmented the understanding of quantitative measures of review usefulness; however, researchers have seldom observed dyadic perspectives from one another and their close versus far psychological distances that generate differences in assessing reviews. This study suggests a scenario-based experiment model that measures the spatial and social distances between posters and readers in social networking spaces. Results indicated that the perceptions of readers allied with spatial and social (elite status) distances predominantly influence review assessment while the spatial closeness and elite status of posters are considered as high impact factors for long distant travelers. Male travelers have a visible decline in affective evaluations as spatial and social distances are spontaneously encountered. Importantly, travel distance and social dyads indicate a strong interactive effect on cognitive and affective evaluations.