A Basic Guide to Job Search Resources on the Internet

Job searching is often a frustrating experience, due in part to the lack of an organized and convenient method to gather information on careers, career development and job leads. The Internet is quickly becoming an efficient means for gaining access to all of these resources. This paper lists and describes several relatively stable Internet sites containing information and job postings. In addition, monitoring Usenet newsgroups and listsews to look for position announcements is also discussed. Finally, several comprehensive guides to job searching on the Internet are cited and discussed.     

Bereaved Parents’ Online Grief Communities: De-Tabooing Practices or Relation-Building Grief-Ghettos?

This article presents results from case studies of online grief communities for bereaved parents in Denmark and Sweden, analyzing how development of practices and norms for grieving and mourning online are related to the conditions for participation in the online forums, and to dominant ideas of grief in society as such. Rooted in contemporary research on grief and mourning, we discuss practices of tabooization, de-tabooization, or even re-tabooization in the different online forums and how norms and traditions are performed, challenged, and negotiated in the various formats.     

Television fiction and online communities: an analysis of comments on social networks and forums made by female viewers

This article analyzes the feeling of communities of female social viewers who watch television fiction and participate in social networks and forums dedicated to the programs. The sample is made up of 7,849 comments from 157 platforms (49 Facebook pages, 71 Twitter accounts, and 37 forums). We describe the characteristics of these communities of fans, which differ significantly from cult fandoms and are based on ICT interweaving between reception and female viewers’ daily lives. The results reveal that these active online poster and lurker communities express themselves through their emotional ties with the television series, self-reflection, and the manifestation of intimacy. Identification with the group is based on the relationship of the storylines with their own lives, with no attempts at constructing a cultural or political identity.     

DON'T FEED THE TROLLS!

“Trolling” and other negative behaviour on magazine websites is widespread, ranging from subtly provocative behaviour to outright abuse. Publishers have sought to develop lively online communities, with high levels of user-generated content. Methods of building sites have developed quickly, but methods of managing them have lagged behind. Some publishers have then felt overwhelmed by the size and behaviour of the communities they have created. This paper considers the reasons behind trolling and the tools digital editors have developed to manage their communities, taking up the role of Zygmunt Bauman's gardeners in what they sometimes refer to as “walled gardens” within the Internet's wild domains. Interviews were conducted with online editors at the front line of site management at Bauer, Giraffe, IPC, Natmags, RBI and the Times. This article shows how publishers are designing sites that encourage constructive posting, and taking a more active part in site management. Web 2.0 and the spread of broadband, which have made management of fast-growing communities difficult, may themselves bring positive change. As uploading material becomes technically easier, “ordinary” citizens can outnumber those who, lacking social skills or with little regard for social norms, originally made the Internet their natural habitat.     

Listening Competence in Initial Interactions II: Applying Trait Centrality to Discover the Relative Placement of Listening Competence Among Implicit Competency Theories

This article explores the relative placement of listening competence within other implicit theories used to form judgments of interlocutor competence. Two studies explore the relations among communicative competence, social skills, and listening competence and various attributes that are purportedly implied by each. Study 1 reveals that very few attributes are uniquely related to any one implicit theory. Study 2 demonstrates that listening competence is located subordinately to communicative competence. The discussion focuses on what these studies add to the competency literature and how future research can continue to explore implicit competency theories.     

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.     

“I Hate When They Do That!” Netiquette in Mourning and Memorialization Among Danish Facebook Users

By analyzing online practices of mourning and memorialization on Facebook, this article identifies underlying norms behind Danish Facebook users’ attitudes towards networked grieving and emotional displays on Facebook. Drawing on the concept “context collapse” and Jakoby’s model for social rules of displaying emotions of grief, quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis are combined, through the use of survey techniques and grounded theory. The article helps explain contrasting attitudes to emotional displays on Facebook and significant differences between “netiquettes” of mourning and memorialization. The findings counter popular perceptions of Facebook as a desired online mourning platform.     

Online field experiments

ABSTRACT

Changes in information communication technology across the Asian region have altered our field substantively and methodologically. The rapid growth of digitized communications allows us to find new purchase in examining questions fundamental to our understanding of communication theories, norms, and practices across Asia. While methods such as text mining and user analytics are increasingly popular among computational scholars, here, we focus on online field experiments, an approach to studying communication that has the potential to overcome many existing obstacles to social scientific inquiry but one that has been used relatively rarely in Asia. In this paper, we discuss what online field experiments are and how they differ from traditional experiments as well as online lab and survey experiments. We show how researchers can go about designing and implementing online field experiments, focusing on issues where online field experiments differ from their traditional counterparts – legal and ethical considerations, construct validity, randomization and spillover, and statistical analyses. Finally we discuss how online field experiments can advance our understanding of communication in Asia by helping researchers to gain insight and make causal inferences on attitudes, behaviors, and interactions that were previously unobservable ?.     

Using everyday life information seeking to explain organizational behavior

Everyday life information-seeking (ELIS) studies have previously addressed nonwork or citizens' information needs and seeking. This article contributes to the theoretical growth of the field by applying Chatman's small-world theory—a conception of ELIS—and social network theory to explain organizational behavior. The applicability of these two theories to analyze human information behavior in strategic value creation is discussed and shown through the results of an earlier pilot study in higher education. The concepts of social types, described as insiders and outsiders, worldview, social norms, information behavior, and trust are invoked. Combined with the concepts of homogeneity, density, and content from social network theory, Chatman's small-world theory yields a promising social dimension for a new theory of strategic information management. However, the conceptual base of the proposed new theory requires validation by testing in strategic partnerships.     

Still the Same?

This article analyses whether a specific news event is reported differently online compared to print newspapers. The question is hardly new but has increased in importance as more readers pass from print newspapers to online news. The conditions of news selection and production are discussed departing from the theories of market-driven journalism and media logic, and are related to aspects of audience needs and gratifications, as well as professional norms and standards. A content analysis of news reporting during the 2010 Swedish election campaign reveals no significant differences between how major newspapers reported the aspects, issues and actors online compared to in print. Individuals using online news received the same information about the election campaign as those reading the print paper, which indicates a displacing rather than complementary effect of online journalism on print journalism.     

Meetings as Networks: Applying Social Network Analysis to Team Interaction

In recent decades, social network researchers have focused on analyzing networks of formal relationships (e.g., friendships). However, this work has yet to be applied to distributions of participation in small groups. This article provides an application of social network analysis to small group interaction and illustrates the approach through the analysis of 54 team meetings in two medium-sized German companies from the electrical and automotive supply industries (N?=?332). Within a group interaction process, individual actions affect subsequent behavior, and their interactions shape a network when group members respond to previous actions. Their responses can be understood as network ties. We describe how to calculate centralization for all forms of small group interactions, and contribute to network research by providing insights into the interaction structure of team meetings. Multilevel analyses show that a group-level measure of centralization has a significant negative effect on team performance, whereas individual participation has no such effect. Implications for future research on interaction data via social network analysis are discussed.     

Social reference: Toward a unifying theory

This article addresses the need for a theoretical approach to reference research and specifically concentrates on a lacuna in conceptual research on social reference. Social reference refers to online question answering services that are provided by communities of volunteers on question and answer (Q&A) sites. Social reference is similar to library reference, but at the same time, it differs significantly from the traditional (and digital) dyadic reference encounter; it involves a collaborative group effort and uses wikis and other Web 2.0 infrastructure. This article proposes a sociotechnical framework to analyze, evaluate, and understand social reference that relies on a systems approach to the reference encounter, combined with an input–process–output (IPO) approach to virtual group work. The framework also accounts for the collaborative process of question answering and the interplay between technology and users in their contexts.     

Participatory Communication with Social Media

Abstract Major museums worldwide are starting to use social media such as blogs, podcasts and content shares to engage users via participatory communication. This marks a shift in how museums publicly communicate their role as custodians of cultural content and so presents debate around an institution's attitude towards cultural authority. It also signifies a new possible direction for museum learning. This article reports on a range of initiatives that demonstrate how participatory communication via social media can be integrated into museum practices. It argues that the social media space presents an ideal opportunity for museums to build online communities of interest around authentic cultural information, and concludes with some recent findings on and recommendations for social media implementation.     

网络健康社区中的主题特征研究

[目的/意义] 探究不同类型网络社区中健康主题特征分布,促使各网站平台能够更好地提供在线健康信息服务。[方法/过程] 以糖尿病为例,选取来自健康论坛的社会化标签和社会化问答社区的问答记录作为研究对象;通过数据编码和文本处理的方法,得到八大类主题,并比较两种网络社区中该八大主题分布情况的异同。[结果/结论] 两种网络社区中糖尿病主题冷热分布大体趋于一致。在最为用户所关注的主题上,两类社区各有侧重,分别是“诊断和检查”、“社会生活”。以上探讨和发现对在线健康信息服务质量的提升有诸多启示。     

Riding in Cars Between Men

Through an analysis of public discourse surrounding two different controversies featuring professional race car driver, Deborah Renshaw, this article foregrounds contemporary relationships between gender and (auto)mobility. It draws on both theories of gender performativity and media ecology to outline the ways in which the automobile as a technology influences gender performance and the ways in which the automobile is understood through cultural discourses that are already largely gendered. The essay uses the discourse surrounding the Renshaw case to problematize both contemporary gender norms and understandings of the relationship between prosthetic media and the body.     

Speaking Ill of the Dead: Anonymity and Communication About Suicide on MyDeathSpace.com

From birth to death, many individuals chronicle their lives online through blogs, pictures, games, Web sites, and social networks. Online spaces, created by the living about the dead, provide a glimpse into often invisible or silent grieving practices. To investigate the role computer-mediated communication (CMC) plays in influencing communication surrounding the often private and taboo topic of suicide, we analyzed the comments sections of MyDeathSpace.com. Our results suggest both a breaking down of social taboos (speaking ill of the dead) and a reaffirming of strict social norms (enforcing a narrow range of acceptable presentation of identity and purpose in life), highlighting how anonymity as a characteristic of CMC can influence our online communication about death.     

Relationships among attitudes and subjective norms: Testing the theory of reasoned action across cultures

This study investigates the relationship between attitudes toward a behavior and subjective norms in the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA). Unique to this research, attitudes toward a behavior are divided into social and personal attitudes in order to test an explanation for the moderate to high correlation between attitudes and subjective norms reported in previous research. As expected, only social attitudes toward a behavior are significantly related to subjective norms. The finding indicates that the overlap between attitudes and subjective norms in TRA research occurs when the attitudes studied are social in nature. Additionally, members of a collectivistic culture tend to score higher on subjective norms and social attitudes, but the high score on subjective norms and social attitudes does not necessarily contribute to predicting behavioral intention. It is suggested that cross‐cultural differences on the absolute strengths of attitudes and subjective norms may not translate to the differences in the relative weights of the two components in predicting behavioral intention.     

在线科研社区中知识交流与共享：MOA视角

以MOA（动机-机会-能力）视角为切入点,分别从动机、机会和能力3个维度阐释影响在线科研社区环境下知识交流与共享行为的主要因素。在此基础上,进一步设计信任机制和激励机制。信任机制包括人际信任和社会信任,激励机制包括虚拟性激励和实质性激励。期望能以此有效地促进在线科研社区中用户持续性的知识交流与共享行为。