Social media in Egyptian government websites: Presence,usage, and effectiveness

This paper examines the presence, usage, and effectiveness of Egyptian government social media websites. The adoption of social media technology provides an illustration of the application of New Public Service (NPS) theory to public administration. The first phase of this study examined the presence of social media applications on these government websites. The second phase analyzed the use of Facebook by governmental entities in Egypt. The use of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were the top social media applications in Egyptian government websites, which is consistent with other government surveys of social media found in developed countries. In terms of effectiveness of these social media websites, they were used mainly to post information, with very little two-way interaction between citizens and government. The analysis in this paper shows that social media in Egypt is not much in line with the NPS theory.     

Frictionless Sharing and Digital Promiscuity

This article analyses the recent Facebook innovation of “frictionless sharing”, a term which describes a smoother and wider distribution of content by individual users and a less overtly acknowledged but more efficient instrumentalization of users' immaterial labour within a structure of corporate monetization. It builds on my recent work on “the sharing subject” of contemporary digital media, in which I argue that current online social networking practices, in their emphasis on “sharing” content with networks of contacts, construct and validate the networked subject according to a version of neoliberal individualism. Moreover, the construction of this subject position implicitly recalls the heteronormativity of AIDS panic, through an unlikely rebranding of promiscuity as a desirable and successful mode of interactivity. If the new rhetoric of “sharing” erases the riskiness of circulation previously encoded in dominant images of virality, notably behaviours associated with HIV, then what is the relationship of the projected potential of “frictionless sharing” to existing normative frames of ethics and morality? In approaching this question, I revisit significant queer interventions into concepts of community and risk that emerged in the post-AIDS context, notably Tim Dean's recent examination of the barebacking subculture to which mediations of an idealized frictionlessness are also central.     

Moving Beyond the Reference Desk: Being Where Users Need Us

ABSTRACT

This article suggests a variety of ways in which reference librarians can be where the users are, in addition to service at the reference desk.     

Including alternative stories in the mainstream. How transcultural young people in Norway perform creative cultural resistance in and outside of school

The development of an inclusive pedagogy takes on new urgency in Norwegian schools as the student body has become increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse. Traditionally, the Norwegian school has been dominated by homogenising and assimilating discourses, whereas alternative voices have been situated at the margins. In response to this tendency, we present two transcultural students’ autoethnographic stories produced in alternative spaces to the Norwegian mainstream, that is, in a transition class for newly arrived students and on Facebook. Both spaces are perceived as contact zones in the sense that they are culturally and linguistically complex. This article illustrates how the students perform cultural and linguistic resistance towards dominant homogenising discourses as the transition class and Facebook seem to offer opportunities for constructing alternative stories. Moreover, we contend that these alternative stories offer important knowledge for conventional education contexts since they represent stories of competence in contrast to the assumed limitations of these students.     

In it for the Long Run?

While previous research has focused on the uses of a variety of online services—such as Web pages and, more recently, Twitter—by media organizations and their audiences, a rather limited amount of empirical inquiry has been directed towards the often more and broadly used Facebook platform. The current paper contributes to the research field by providing a longitudinal study of journalist and audience engagement on the Facebook pages of Sweden's four major newspapers—Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Expressen and Svenska Dagbladet. Employing state-of-the-art methods for data collection, the results indicate that while audiences appear to be increasing their engagement with news organizations on Facebook—albeit mostly through so-called “likes”—the media organizations themselves are decreasing their engagement with audiences.     

Early career teacher peer support through private groups in social media

This paper describes the support that Australian early career teachers are accessing through private groups within social media. It presents findings from 22 interviews with teachers who indicated that Facebook was a source of support. Participants describe using private online groups for: (a) support during casual employment; (b) accessing collegial support from pre-existing connections, in particular those formed during initial teacher education; and (c) support to deal with challenging situations such as a hostile work environment. The paper suggests that further research needs to be conducted into how private media groups might support the needs of early career teachers.     

Digital host national identification among Filipino temporary migrant workers

In recent decades, social networking sites (SNSs) have revolutionized transnational immigrant social networks channels. SNSs have become a source for engagement within these migrant communities and facilitate a fervent discourse on their perceptions and overall engagement with host societies. In this study, we aim to examine this discourse as they play out over the SNS landscape. Specifically, we ask how does the use of SNSs shape the encounter between migrant workers and host societies? To explore this query we suggest focusing on the case of live-in Filipino caregivers in Israel and their manifestations of host national identification on Facebook. Through an extensive methodological design that incorporates over 800 Facebook postings, and supported by an extensive ethnographic research, the study identified cultural constructs that integrated Israeli cultural components into the local Filipino discourse were identified and classified by four thematic categories: exploring Hebrew performance, Israeli annual festivities and Jewish holidays, current affairs in Israel and discussing Israeli public places. These findings underscore an affinity between these migrant workers and the local culture in what we deem as ‘Digital Host National Identification’. The study suggests that understanding this development can be conducive to understanding (albeit partial) integration processes of marginalized communities, elucidating temporary migrants’ cultural encounter with their host society and the role of computer-mediated-communications in representing these encounters to both local and international publics.     

Tell Me Who Your Sources Are

This study found that while participants rated their own Facebook friend as more credible and more similar to them than a news organization, they rated news articles as more credible when they are shared on Facebook by a news organization than when they are shared by their own Facebook friend. Source, however, interacts with motivation. News articles shared by a news organization are rated more credible only when motivation is high. There were no significant differences between sources when motivation is low.     

Bringing Information Literacy into the Social Sphere: A Case Study Using Social Software to Teach Information Literacy at WFU

This article presents an approach to teaching information literacy in an academic course from a socio-technical perspective. It includes an overview of the course framework, a review of course contents, and an analysis of student responses provided through pre- and post-course surveys. The premise of the course design was that students bring a set of technical and information skills to class that address specific but not generalized information literacy goals. By designing a course to engage students from this perspective, the instructors hoped to find a new method for approaching information literacy instruction.     

Engaging the Social News User

One of the most common formats of audience participation in journalism consists of online reader comments in response to articles, weblogs, or online television and radio broadcasts. While initially the audience only commented on media platforms themselves, Facebook made it possible to outsource commenting to a third-party platform. The options users have, the rules commenters are obliged to follow, and the moderation regime they confront, could influence the quantity and quality of comments. In this study, we explore how news media deal with audience comments on Facebook and their own news site, and how this influences the quality and quantity of comments. We compared comments on news platforms and Facebook of 62 Dutch national and regional newspapers, public and commercial broadcasters, newsweeklies, national news programmes, and online news sites. Subsequently, we analysed the content of the comments with the qualitative text analysis tool MAXQDA. The results indicate that news media prefer outsourcing comments to Facebook although commenting on their own platforms is still possible. By discouraging anonymous responses, the quality of comments improved but above all the quantity of comments decreased after outsourcing comments to Facebook.