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This book provides a balanced and nuanced study of how the super-sticky WeChat platform interweaves into the fabric of Chinese social, cultural, and political life. It keeps the wider global and national social media landscape in view and compares and contrasts WeChat with Weibo, QQ and other Western social media platforms.

The rapid growth in the widespread acceptance and usage of the Internet and the ease of creating online communities have brought advantages in terms of swift access to information alongside ethical problems interrelated with the dark side of the workings of these communities. Relevant research approaching ethics and the dark side of online communities has received widespread publication in a diverse set of journals with a wide variety of objectives and readers that has left its academic contribution broadly fragmented. To help shrink this gap in the literature, this study, through undertaking a systematic review, seeks to map the research on ethics and the dark side of online communities to grasp where the literature has come from and where it is going and, consequently, provide opportunities for future research. This study applied a bibliometric approach based on analysis of the bibliographic coupling with the manual coding of documents to examine the literature on the ethics and the dark side of online communities to set out a holistic framework of its different facets. The content and the thematic analysis of 53 studies identified four thematic groups: quality of the information in online communities, virtual identities, safety in online communities, and the content of online communities. The findings of this study also highlight the various shortcomings in the literature on the ethics and dark side of online communities and lead to some research questions that justify future academic research.

How is value created in an online community (OC) over time? We explored this question through a longitudinal field study of an OC in the healthcare arena. We found that multiple kinds of value were produced and changed over time as different participants engaged with the OC and its evolving technology in various ways. To explain our findings, we theorize OC value as performed through the ongoing sociomaterial configuring of strategies, digital platforms, and stakeholder engagement. We develop a process perspective to explain these dynamics and identify multiple different kinds of value being created by an OC over time: financial, epistemic, ethical, service, reputational, and platform. Our research points to the importance of expanding the notion of OC users to encompass a broader understanding of stakeholders. It further suggests that creating OC value increasingly requires going beyond a dyadic relationship between the OC and the firm to encompassing a more complex relationship involving a wider ecosystem of stakeholders.

This book offers a comprehensive scholarly overview of Reddit, one of the most popular and least studied social platforms of the early 21st century. The book inspires new ways of thinking about Reddit, considering it from multiple perspectives: through a historical lens, as a site where identity is forged, as a democracy, as a community, and as a news aggregator and distributor. By bringing theories from computer-mediated communication, communication studies, and sociology to bear on original, large-scale observational analyses of Reddit's communities, this book provides a uniquely comprehensive overview of the platform's first 15 years. Understanding Reddit will help us make sense of how rapidly growing communities function in an era of mass online anonymity. Serving both as a primer on how social behavior on Reddit plays out, and as a way of locating it within multiple theoretical traditions, the book will offer important insights to scholars and students in the disciplines of communication, media studies, information science, internet and emerging media studies, and sociology.

No detailed description available for \"Twitter and Tear Gas\".

Daily life is connected life, its rhythms driven by endless email pings and responses, the chimes and beeps of continually arriving text messages, tweets and retweets, Facebook updates, pictures and videos to post and discuss. Our perpetual connectedness gives us endless opportunities to be part of the give-and-take of networking. Some worry that this new environment makes us isolated and lonely. But in Networked , Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman show how the large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals expand opportunities for learning, problem solving, decision making, and personal interaction. The new social operating system of \"networked individualism\" liberates us from the restrictions of tightly knit groups; it also requires us to develop networking skills and strategies, work on maintaining ties, and balance multiple overlapping networks. Rainie and Wellman outline the \"triple revolution\" that has brought on this transformation: the rise of social networking, the capacity of the Internet to empower individuals, and the always-on connectivity of mobile devices. Drawing on extensive evidence, they examine how the move to networked individualism has expanded personal relationships beyond households and neighborhoods; transformed work into less hierarchical, more team-driven enterprises; encouraged individuals to create and share content; and changed the way people obtain information. Rainie and Wellman guide us through the challenges and opportunities of living in the evolving world of networked individuals.

Arabic Glitch explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics—one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed from an archive of social media data collected over the decades following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book interrogates how the logic of programming technology influences and shapes social movements. Engaging revolutionary politics, Arab media, and digital practice in form, method, and content, Laila Shereen Sakr formulates a media theory that advances the concept of the glitch as a disruptive media affordance. She employs data analytics to analyze tweets, posts, and blogs to describe the political culture of social media, and performs the results under the guise of the Arabic-speaking cyborg VJ Um Amel. Playing with multiple voices that span across the virtual and the real, Sakr argues that there is no longer a divide between the virtual and embodied: both bodies and data are physically, socially, and energetically actual. Are we cyborgs or citizens—or both? This book teaches us how a region under transformation became a vanguard for new thinking about digital systems: the records they keep, the lives they impact, and how to create change from within.

This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoundly affects our experience of online sociality. In a short period of time, services like Facebook, YouTube and many others have come to deeply penetrate our daily habits of communication and creative production. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Offering a dual analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of social media, the author dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecosystem of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, filtering content, governance and business models rely on shared ideological principles. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. “Sharing,” “friending,” “liking,” “following,” “trending,” and “favoriting” have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become “social.”

There is substantial research on the effects of formal control structures (i.e., incentives, identities, organization, norms) on knowledge sharing leading to innovative outcomes in online communities. However, there is little research on how knowledge-sharing trajectories in temporary online crowds create innovative outcomes without these structures. Such research is particularly of interest in the context of temporary online crowds solicited with crowdsourcing in which there is only minimal structure for knowledge sharing. We identify eight types of crowdsourcing with different knowledge-sharing patterns. The focus of this study is on the one type of crowdsourcing—collaborative innovation challenges—in which there is the least restriction on knowledge sharing in the crowd. A content analysis was conducted of all time-stamped posts made in five different collaborative innovation challenges to identify different knowledge-sharing trajectories used. We found that a paradox-framed trajectory was more likely to be followed by innovative outcomes compared to three other knowledge-sharing trajectories. A paradox-framed trajectory is one in which a novel solution emerges when different participants post in the following sequence: (1) contributing a paradox associated with the problem objective, (2) sharing assumptions to validate the paradox, and (3) sharing initial ideas for resolving the paradox in a manner that meets the problem statement. Based on the findings, a theory of paradox-framed trajectories in temporary online crowds is presented along with implications for knowledge creation theories in general and online knowledge-creating communities in particular.

Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL offers backgrounds in information studies, computer science, and sociology.This book is divided into three parts: analyzing social media, NodeXL tutorial, and social-media network analysis case studies.Part I provides background in the history and concepts of social media and social networks.