Information networks and social media use in public diplomacy: a comparative analysis of South Korea and Japan

This article examines how South Korean and Japanese public diplomacy organizations employ digital media to embrace the principle of ‘networked public diplomacy’ through analyses of the web and social media practices. A network analysis was used to map interorganizational information networks among core public diplomacy organizations in each country. To reveal the key organizations' communication strategies on Facebook, a content analysis was also conducted. The findings indicate that Japan had a strong internal network infrastructure achieved through dispersed connections and partnerships; however, Korea had a centralized network, including a limited number of dominant actors. The results of content analysis suggest that both South Korea and Japanese public diplomats focused on promoting their cultural products and national values through their use of texts and visual images. In addition, user profile analysis gaged the degree of users' engagement in the organizations' profiles and identified the demographic features of users. Comparative data suggest the Korean public diplomacy organization was more successful at attracting and engaging with foreign public than the Japanese public diplomacy organization. These results imply that although these two countries had similar sociopolitical backgrounds and perspectives of public diplomacy, they had distinct forms of internal information networks, communication strategies, and social networking performances with public.     

Project Me: understanding social identities through social media

Courses: Intercultural Communication, Communication and Identity, Interpersonal Communication

Objectives: After completing this semester-long activity, students should be able to (1) discuss and apply the concepts of social identities; (2) analyze the influence of self-identities on online communication practices of self to others and others to self; and (3) create critical, informational, and respectful online content that promotes conversations and learning about social identities.     

Mapping user relationships for health information diffusion on microblogging in China: A social network analysis of Sina Weibo

This study applies social network analysis to examining the pattern of relationships among networked users on Sina Weibo, the most popular social networking site in China. Focusing on verified (or V-) users and ordinary (non-V-) users, this study maps three centrality attributes of the social network, in terms of in/out degree, closeness, betweenness, along with cliques, in the dissemination and sharing of health-related information in the virtual community. Findings reveal a ‘spider web’ pattern of relationship among 50 V-users and 50 non-V-users during a regular period of time, highlighting the dominant position of the V-users for health-related information diffusion. Data analysis then reports a ‘drifting dandelion’ pattern of network among those who shared the information about a health-related incident on Weibo. This study also provides further information about the topical categories of health-related messages shared during the regular period as well as the topics concerning the incident. The implications of social networking media for health communication are also discussed.     

我国档案馆微博社会网络分析

近年来随着微博政务的发展,档案工作的侧重点逐渐向借助新媒体提高档案的利用效率偏移。选取我国各省相对具有代表性和影响力的新浪微博账号为研究对象,利用UCINET工具软件对其进行社会网络构建,并从中心性、小团体等方面深入分析,从而较为全面地把握目前我国档案馆微博推广及合作情况。     

国际自媒体涉华舆情现状、传播特征及引导策略

本文选取了10种国际自媒体形式,通过内容分析的方法研究国际自媒体涉华舆情现状及传播特征。通过研究,本文发现:近年,中国重大事件频发引发国际自媒体关注;自媒体对中国报道框架与传统媒体相比并无明显变化,涉华经济、文化、科技往往给予正面反应,而涉华政治、环境以及民族、宗教问题多负面反应。国际自媒体涉华内容并非自创,而以转载西方国际主流媒体为主;英美发达国家基本垄断国际自媒体上涉华信息流;发达国家受众形塑自媒体涉华舆论;传统媒体从业人员成为自媒体时代的舆论领袖;在此基础之上,本文提出了针对国际自媒体涉华舆论引导的策略和建议。     

Flagging fake news on social media: An experimental study of media consumers' identification of fake news

Policymakers are taking action to protect their citizens and democratic systems from online misinformation. However, media consumers usually have a hard time differentiating misinformation from authentic information. There are two explanations for this difficulty, namely lazy reasoning and motivated reasoning. While lazy reasoning suggests that people may feel reluctant to conduct critical reasoning when consuming online information, the motivated reasoning theory points out that individuals are also thinking in alignment with their identities and established viewpoints. A proposed approach to address this issue is adding fact-checking flags in the hope that flags could alert people to information falsehoods and stimulate critical thinking. This study examines the impact of fact-checking flags on media consumers' identification of fake news. Conducting an experiment (n = 717) on Amazon Mechanical Turk, the study finds that experimental participants with different political backgrounds depend heavily on flag-checking results provided by flags. Flags are powerful to influence people's judgments in a way that participants have blind beliefs in flags even if the flag assessments are inaccurate. Furthermore, the study's results indicate that flag assessments made by professional fact-checkers or crowdsourcing are equally influential in shaping participants' identification. These observations provide public and private leaders with suggestions that fact-checking flags can significantly affect media consumers' identification of fake news. However, flags appear to have little ability to promote critical thinking in this experiment.     

A model for understanding new media literacy: Epistemological beliefs and social media use

New media literacy (NML) skills are regarded as crucial for the 21st century. However, there is limited research on the factors affecting NML skills. A robust model was built for exploring the antecedents of NML. The model incorporated epistemological beliefs and social media use purposes. Individuals` purposes of social media use were found to have an effect on beliefs about information. Further, interactional and communicational use of social media makes epistemological beliefs more sophisticated. However, it is more likely to have naïve beliefs with the use of social media for making new friends. Also, the purposes of social media use and epistemological beliefs affect NML skills. Accordingly, interactional use of social media might contribute to justifying information, in turn, increasing NML skills. This study indicates that knowledge of social media use and epistemological beliefs enables us to largely understand the NML skills.     

Voting intentions on social media and political opinion polls

Opinion polls play an important role in modern democratic processes: they are known to not only affect the outcomes of elections, but also have a significant influence on government policy after elections. Recent years have seen large discrepancies between polls and outcomes at several major elections and referendums, stemming from decreased participation in polls and an increasingly volatile electorate. This calls for new ways to measure public support for political parties. In this paper, we propose a method for measuring the popularity of election candidates on social media using Machine Learning-based Natural Language Processing techniques. The method is based on detecting voting intentions in the data. This is a considerable advance upon earlier work using automatic sentiment analysis. We evaluate the method both intrinsically on a set of hand-labelled social media posts, and extrinsically – by forecasting daily election polls. In the extrinsic evaluation, we analyze data from the 2016 US presidential election, and find that voting intentions measured from social media provide significant additional predictive value for forecasting daily polls. Thus, we demonstrate that the proposed method can be used to interpolate polls both spatially and temporally, thus providing reliable, continuous and fine-grained information about public opinion on current political issues.     

Leveraging library trust to combat misinformation on social media

One reason librarians are confident they have a role to play in fighting misinformation is the level of trust in libraries as institutions. Exactly how they might leverage that trust remains unclear and untested. Building on recent work in correcting health misperceptions on social media, this study tests whether libraries can leverage trust to combat misinformation online. Using a misperception about the influenza vaccine as a test case, an experiment (n?=?625) was conducted in fall 2018 using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Results suggest that the misperception can be reduced, but not by library institutions. An unsuccessful follow-up (n?=?600) suggests that the effectiveness of the correction is season dependent and opens the possibility that libraries may yet play a role, but not necessarily because they are trusted. Future library proposals for combating misinformation need to be developed and tested within a broader contemporary misinformation research program.     

An artist ranking system based on social media mining

Currently users on social media post their opinion and feelings about almost everything. This online behavior has led to numerous applications where social media data are used to measure public opinion in a similar way as a poll or a survey. In this paper, we will present an application of social media mining for the art market. To the best of our knowledge, this will be the first attempt to mine social media to extract quantitative and qualitative data for the art market. Although there are previous works on analyzing and predicting other markets, these methodologies cannot be applied directly to the art market. In our proposed methodology, artists will be treated as brands. That is, we will mine Twitter posts that mention specific artists’ names and attempt to rank artists in a similar manner as brand equity and awareness would be measured. The particularities of the art market are considered mainly in the construction of a topic-specific user network where user expertise and influence is evaluated and later used to rank artists. The proposed ranking system is evaluated against two other available systems to identify the advantages it can offer.     

当代媒介场研究导论

为了更全面地研究中国的媒介改革和各种现实问题,需要一个在宏观和微观方面适合中国国情并具有一定普遍性的成熟范式作为切入口。笔者认为,“媒介场”范式是一个值得注意的新视角。在回顾了场域理论的发展历史后,本文重点对布尔迪厄的媒介场范式进行了介绍和批判,并且对其在中国的应用提出了一些建议与方向。     

从媒介使用到媒介参与:中国公众媒介素养的基本现状

本研究聚焦媒介素养的两个维度——媒介信息处理能力和媒介参与意向,探讨个体政治认知、人际讨论模式、媒介使用、媒介评价和媒介参与功效意识对它们的影响。在对四城市2409名市民随机面访调查的基础上,研究发现:公民的政治与公共事务兴趣和开放型的人际讨论模式对媒介素养的两个维度均有显著的正面影响,网络新闻和海外媒介的使用对媒介信息处理能力有重要贡献,媒介评价和媒介参与功效意识正向影响公众的媒介参与意向,而更高的媒介信息处理能力也预示着更高的媒介参与意向。     

Echoslamming: how incivility interacts with cyberbalkanization on the social media in Hong Kong

Cyberbalkanization has growingly become common on the Internet and can lead to public’s opinion polarization. This study investigates a specific process of cyberbalkanization through which incivility is circulated within online communities. From a dataset of Hong Kong-based Facebook Pages collected during a social movement, a set of politically-organized communities was identified and their connectivity generated a post-sharing network. A random sample of contents shared between and within these communities was then manually classified based on the level of incivility. The targets of offence through the use of uncivil language were also coded. Contents shared within ideologically compatible communities were found to be more likely to be uncivil. The association was significantly more positive in a populistic community, of which members had unique political nature and cultural norms. The targets were usually political opponents and incivility was adopted to petition detractors from within-community discussions. We therefore suggest ‘echoslamming’ is an online phenomenon through which uncivil contents catalyse anger toward political opponents among ideologically congruent information sources and consequently reinforce the audience’s predilection. Such a mechanism can be one underlying explanation for a vicious circle of cyberbalkanization-induced polarization on political opinions.     

Making professional development more social: A systematic review of librarians' professional development through social media

To maintain relevancy with the ever-increasing competencies required of them, librarians on the job have frequently turned to professional development (PD) opportunities. One outlet that could potentially address barriers librarians face when accessing PD is social media, which can help librarians communicate across distances, are used at low to no cost, and can be accessed asynchronously as needed. Drawing from 25 studies conducted in 21 countries, this systematic literature review explored the empirical themes evident in the current research on librarians' adoption of social media for PD purposes. This review found (1) there is considerable potential in adopting social media for PD across contexts; (2) studies focused on the affordances provided by social media in areas where there is limited infrastructure, support, and resources for PD; (3) in congruence with prior research pertaining to the Technology Acceptance Model, librarians who felt more tech-savvy were more likely to adopt social media for PD; and (4) social media was viewed as democratic in creating a platform where diverse voices could participate. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for practitioners and recommendations for future research directions.     

Consumer health information seeking in social media: a literature review

Objective

The objective of this literature review was to summarise current research regarding how consumers seek health‐related information from social media. Primarily, we hope to reveal characteristics of existing studies investigating the health topics that consumers have discussed in social media, ascertaining the roles social media have played in consumers’ information‐seeking processes and discussing the potential benefits and concerns of accessing consumer health information in social media.

Methods

The Web of Science Core Collection database was searched for existing literature on consumer health information seeking in social media. The search returned 214 articles, of which 21 met the eligibility criteria following review of full‐text documents.

Conclusion

Between 2011 and 2016, twenty‐one studies published explored various topics related to consumer information seeking in social media. These ranged from online discussions on specific diseases (e.g. diabetes) to public health concerns (e.g. pesticide residues). Consumers’ information needs vary depending on the health issues of interest. Benefits of health seeking on social media, in addition to filling a need for health information, include the social and emotional support health consumers gain from peer‐to‐peer interactions. These benefits, however, are tempered by concerns of information quality and authority and lead to decreased consumer engagement.     

社会结构中的大众传媒:身份认同与新闻专业主义之建构

处于社会结构中的大众传媒,由于受到社会政治权力、经济权力的制约,呈现出独特的传播结构和内在的运行规律.传媒、政府、公众三方构成的传播结构及其在社会中的运行,深刻影响着传媒及其从业者的身份认同的建构,新闻专业主义也由此被建构并因社会和历史环境的变化呈现出不同的面貌.本文旨在厘清社会结构中的传媒、政府、公众之间的复杂关系,寻求一种适合中国国情的新闻专业主义,以助益于正在进一步改革的中国传媒.     

大众媒介的社会建设功能

文章从媒介可以赋予受众的知情权、话语权、监督权、免责权等方面，论述了大众传媒在促进建设和谐社会中所能够发挥的积极作用。     

Mediated images of success: Hegemonic media representations and social justice

This activity highlights the concept of cultural hegemony, illustrating it by a reflection on the images of success and successful people portrayed in the media. The purpose of the exercise is to introduce students to this concept, and for them to examine how hegemonic views of others and the self affect the way they conceptualize success and perceive who a successful person is. Students will understand the role of the media in reproducing hegemonic representations of reality in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, and so on, and how these representations limit their world view and are detrimental for those who do not abide by the dominant stereotypical images. The exercise also intends to expose students to complex narratives of what success may mean beyond accumulation of wealth, competition, nationality, whiteness, and patriarchal values, and for them to reflect upon intersectionality, by challenging and critiquing dominant portrayals of human achievement.

Courses: Introduction to Media Studies, Introduction to Media and Culture, or any introductory communication course discussing media representation.

Objectives: Students will (1) identify the role of cultural hegemony in the mediated construction of success; (2) understand and critically evaluate how hegemonic media representations of gender, class, race, ethnicity, physical ability, national origin, and so on limit people’s world views about human achievement; and (3) self-reflect on their own representations of success and reframe “success” moving beyond hegemonic representations attached to patriarchy, heteronormativity, whiteness, physical ability, competition, and capitalist accumulation.     

Capricious opinions: A study of polarization of social media groups

Experts claim that the world is increasingly polarized by emerging social media platforms. The political actors amplify the polarization through their agents' user-generated content. The extreme political ideologies sway the people sitting on the fence on these social media platforms. Using tweets on a recent policy change on identity in India, the present study seeks to perform a scientific analysis of the polarization of the debates within ordinary citizens' groups from a theoretical lens. We further highlight some of the crucial trends that triggered these polarized discussions in general. Through the lens of Echo chambers and Herd behavior, this study provides valuable insights surrounding the influencers and individuals involved in this discussion where the polarization of preferences is witnessed. Proposing a novel design of a root-level influencer, this study establishes them as polarization actors on a social media platform (Twitter). Through various engagement metrics, we also identify the role of targeted communication (hashtags) and similarity in the users' discussion across the political domain as potential behavioral explanations for opinion polarization on Twitter.