Week 8-Social Media Flashcards
What’s the Presence of Social Media?
■ 2016 - approximately 3.4 billion Internet users and 2.3 billion active social media accounts
■ Uses and Gratifications framework – we actively seek media content to fulfil psychological needs (e.g., connect with others, professional use etc.,)
■ York (2017) twin study data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS III) survey
■ Approximately one-to two-thirds of variance in social media use is attributable to additive genetic traits (associated with our personality, extrovertedness, openness etc.,). Unique and shared environmental factors account for the remainder of variance.
-Sometimes we don’t have a choice in social media usage e.g., a job where phones are prohibited
What is Social Media usage like? (PEW Research Center, 2018)
-We regard this presence of social media as important to us (not many times where we don’t have access to social media)
-A majority of Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram users visit these platforms on a daily basis
-The majority of users say it would NOT be hard to give up social media (seen more in older generations)
What are some Measurement Issues in Social Media Research Studies?
■ Substantial and increasing number of social media research studies
■ Research typically involves self-report questionnaires (e.g., how many times you’ve logged on and how long or reporting usage) – but little assessment of self-report questionnaire validity
What are some Measurement Issues in Social Media Research Studies? (Andrews et al., 2015)
■ 29 participants (aged 18-33) all university staff or students
■ Mobile Phone Problem Use Scale (MPPUS), estimates of phone use, and an app measuring when the phone is being used
■ For number of phone uses, there were significantly more actual phone uses per day (84.68) than were estimated (37.20), and no significant correlation between the two
■ For total daily duration there was no significant difference between actual (5.05 hours) and estimated use (4.12 hours) per day; and there was a moderate positive correlation between the two (p = .02).
■ Duration of use has better validity than frequency of use
■ MPPUS scores not correlated with objective or estimated use
Measurement Issues: When do people use Social Media?
-Midnight is when a lot of people spend their time online
-Trolling tends to occur between 7pm to 1am
Interaction on Social Media - Deindividuation and disinhibition: What are the six aspects of online disinhibition? (Suler, 2004)
There are certain things that make/encourage a person to behave a certain way online:
1. Asynchronicity (someone can post a message and leave it + come back to it whenever they want so don’t have to acknowledge anything)
- Dissociative anonymity (We are anonymous when online meaning people don’t realise when to back off or if they have gone too far)
- Dissociative imagination (rules in society don’t tend to apply online so can do as they please)
- Invisibility (No physical presence making us more likely to respond to people in a certain way i.e., easier to be rude when you can’t see them. The more removed we are from ourself, the easier it is to be rude and aggressive)
- Minimizing authority (we don’t have the same difference to authority just see them as their profile i.e., a blank sheet with a different hierarchy to daily life)
- Solipsistic introjections (When we don’t have the cues, we tend to make it up e.g., what they may look or sound like, what they are like etc., the things that we make up to fill in the gaps impacts how we interact online)
-Disinhibition: we don’t feel as if we are restricted
-Disindividuation: we are away from our actual self when online (may be less likely to say something mean in person)
What is Trolling?
■ Online communication with the intention of being provocative, offensive, or menacing in order to trigger conflict and cause distress for the amusement of the troll
■ Four common elements, deception, aggression, disruption, success (Hardaker, 2010)
■ Men are more likely than women to engage in trolling and report greater enjoyment from trolling (Buckels et al., 2014)
■ Trolling decreases as the amount of identifying information (e.g., real names vs pseudonyms) increases (Cho & Acquisti, 2013)
■ Trolls try to disrupt what someone is doing - there is always an element of the troll wanting to achieve something
■ Psychological outcomes are similar to in-person harassment (it could be argued to be worse as you don’t know who it is, when they will harass you and how many accounts they may create)
■ Relatively few cases prosecuted
■ Sean Duffy one of the first internet trolls to receive a custodial sentence – posting offensive messages and videos on tribute pages dedicated to passed teenagers
What has Trolling been linked with?
■ Relative to other online behaviour, relatively few academic studies investigating trolling behaviour
■ Initial studies focused on linguistic analysis, then ‘communities’ of trolls
■ Shachaf and Hara (2020) Wikipedia trolls (people who change info on Wikipedia) – boredom, attention seeking, revenge, pleasure, desire to cause damage were motivations
■ Buckels et al. (2014) - trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (viewing other people as means to an end), using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores.
■ March et al. (2017) - dysfunctional impulsivity predicts trolling on Tinder, but only when the person has medium or high levels of trait psychopathy
What is the McCann Trolling Community Example? (Synott et al., 2017)
■ Madeleine McCann disappeared in May 2007
■ Ten years post disappearance, still 100 tweets using the McCann hashtag each hour
■ Identified the most prolific twitter users using the McCann hashtag and followed those
■ 400 tweets from 37 user accounts (200 between anti-McCann users and 200 between anti-McCann and pro-McCann users)
■ Researcher prompted a discussion – lasting over 3 hours (online data will provide useful insight on people’s thoughts without directly asking them which is an issue with this study as they personally asked these trolls)
Trolling strategies:
■ Digression from the topic
■ Hostility and attacking users with little provocation
■ Mocking the achievements of others
■ Distribution of memes and offensive images to provoke pro-McCann users
■ After the researcher contacted a user via direct message, they informed others of their intentions
■ Many became hostile, criticising the researcher’s intelligence, grammar etc
■ “you need better English to do a PHD luv!”
■ “if your bias [sic] your dissertation will be a complete failure you need my help”
-The research should have considered the wellbeing of the users and the researcher themselves
■ And criticising the researcher among themselves
■ “she sent me a questionare file back in May, lots of stupid q’s”
What’s the Importance of Context?
-Core events for example can shape how we view social media and topics e.g., the election
■ Facebook network size associated with higher levels of perceived social support, contributing in turn to higher life satisfaction (Nabi et al. 2013)
■ Approximately 30% of people have experiences of “unfriending” with acquaintances or friends on Facebook due to opposing political viewpoints (Lee & Chan, 2015)
What’s the Importance of Context? (Lau et al., 2016)
■ The Umbrella Movement, originally called “Occupy Central”, emerged between September 28th and December 15th, 2014 in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
-Researched how this impacted individual’s online networks and presence
■ 1,208 respondents, 815 (67.5%) reported no social resource loss on social media, 300 (24.9%) reported loss to a small degree, and 92 (7.6%) reported loss to a moderate to great degree (quite a big % of loss for people considering the political, environmental contexts)
■ Recruited two months after the conclusion of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong
■ Social resource loss on social media was positively associated with depressive symptoms but not anxiety symptoms
■ Association was significant only among middle-aged (39-55 years) and older (56 years+) adults but not younger (18-38 years) adults (these older adults may be more likely in a routine with a standard set of friends)
What’s the link between Social Media and Personality? (Goffman, 1956)
■ Goffman (1956) ‘presentation of the self’
■ We ‘perform’ to project a desirable image and version of ourselves
■ Conscious of being observed and having undesirable opinions about self
■ Some argue that online interaction means that Goffman’s work is outdated (as this was in the 1950s regarding in-person interactions), others say that online interaction is a natural extension of the original work
■ Distance between the performer and online self makes it easy to conceal aspects of the self and embellish others
How does personality relate to our photos we post online?
■ Uses and gratification theory –people make their own decisions about which type of platform they use. Social and psychological factors affect this
■ Eftekhar et al. (2014)
■ Measured Personality and photo-related activity
■ Wang (2019) – narcissism and extraversion positively related to editing selfie
■ There are lots of relationships between your personality, engagement online and your online social network
What are the purpose of Emoticons?
■ Functions of emoticons; to portray emotional or social intent and reduce ambiguity
Tossell et al. (2012):
■ Real communications data from individuals’ smartphones over a 6-month period
■ 4% of all messages containing at least one emoticon (and tends to be with our friends rather than strangers; seen as an indication of familiarity and meaning)
What are the reasons people use Emoticons? (Kaye et al., 2016)
■ Participants (N = 92) provided open-ended accounts of their reasons for using emoticons (email, text message, and social networking site)
■ Emotional tone “To emphasise certain emotions which are sometimes hard to establish over a text message” (text messages)
■ Lighten mood “To show what I’m saying is less serious, more friendly” (email)
■ Reduce ambiguity “To make sure that the message I am sending isn’t interpreted sarcastically or that I seem irritable.” (email)
■ Context “I do not use emoticons in this context. I tend to send emails only to people of authority or professional people such as at work (area managers, line managers, supervisors, other stores, etc.)
and to university lecturers. I see emoticons as something to be used in a general or casual conversations not in professional emails” (email)
