Anabel Quan-Haase

Uses and Gratifications of Social Media: A Comparison of Facebook and Instant Messaging

Users have adopted a wide range of digital technologies into their communication repertoire. It remains unclear why they adopt multiple forms of communication instead of substituting one medium for another. It also raises the question: What type of need does each of these media fulfill? In the present article, the authors conduct comparative work that examines the gratifications obtained from Facebook with those from instant messaging. This comparison between media allows one to draw conclusions about how different social media fulfill user needs. Data were collected from undergraduate students through a multimethod study based on 77 surveys and 21 interviews. A factor analysis of gratifications obtained from Facebook revealed six key dimensions: pastime, affection, fashion, share problems, sociability, and social information. Comparative analysis showed that Facebook is about having fun and knowing about the social activities occurring in one’s social network, whereas instant messaging is geared more toward relationship maintenance and development. The authors discuss differences in the two technologies and outline a framework based on uses and gratifications theory as to why young people integrate numerous media into their communication habits.

PRIVACY PROTECTION STRATEGIES ON FACEBOOK: The Internet privacy paradox revisited

The privacy paradox describes peoples willingness to disclose personal information on social network sites despite expressing high levels of concern. In this study, we employ the distinction between institutional and social privacy to examine this phenomenon. We investigate what strategies undergraduate students have developed, and their motivations for using specific strategies. We employed a mixed-methods approach that included 77 surveys and 21 in-depth interviews. The results suggest that, in addition to using the default privacy settings, students have developed a number of strategies to address their privacy needs. These strategies are used primarily to guard against social privacy threats and consist of excluding contact information, using the limited profile option, untagging and removing photographs, and limiting Friendship requests from strangers. Privacy strategies are geared toward managing the Facebook profile, which we argue functions as a front stage. This active profile management allows users to negotiate the need for connecting on Facebook with the desire for increased privacy. Thus, users disclose information, because they have made a conscious effort to protect themselves against potential violations. We conclude that there is a tilt toward social privacy concerns. Little concern was raised about institutional privacy and no strategies were in place to protect against threats from the use of personal data by institutions. This is relevant for policy discussions, because it suggests that the collection, aggregation, and utilization of personal data for targeted advertisement have become an accepted social norm.

Digital inequalities and why they matter

While the field of digital inequality continues to expand in many directions, the relationship between digital inequalities and other forms of inequality has yet to be fully appreciated. This article invites social scientists in and outside the field of digital media studies to attend to digital inequality, both as a substantive problem and as a methodological concern. The authors present current research on multiple aspects of digital inequality, defined expansively in terms of access, usage, skills, and self-perceptions, as well as future lines of research. Each of the contributions makes the case that digital inequality deserves a place alongside more traditional forms of inequality in the twenty-first century pantheon of inequalities. Digital inequality should not be only the preserve of specialists but should make its way into the work of social scientists concerned with a broad range of outcomes connected to life chances and life trajectories. As we argue, the significance of digital inequalities is clear across a broad range of individual-level and macro-level domains, including life course, gender, race, and class, as well as health care, politics, economic activity, and social capital.

Persistence and Change in Social Media

In “Star Trek,” Scotty suggests that Transwarp beaming is “like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet, whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse” (Abrams, 2009). The study of social media faces similar challenges because new tools are developed at a rapid pace and existing tools are constantly being updated with new features, policies, and applications. Users tend to migrate, in often unpredictable ways, to new tools as well as to adopt multiple tools simultaneously, without showing consistent media preferences and habits (Quan-Haase, 2008). As a result, for scholars it sometimes feels as if the social media landscape changes too quickly to fully grasp and leaves scholars permanently lagging behind. We argue in this article that beyond the ebb and flow of everyday events and seemingly idiosyncratic usage, trends exist underlying long-term trajectories, persistent social practices, and discernable cultural patterns. Overarching findings have emerged within and across disciplines because the study of social media has from its early beginnings necessitated a multidisciplinary approach. From power laws to impression management, from privacy concerns to online social capital, there is a great onrush of scholarship on social media, its properties, and its consequences. Regardless of discipline, all scholars face the challenge of constant change occurring in this arena. This challenge exists on a number of different levels. On a practical level, research and publication timelines continue to be slow relative to the rapid transformation occurring in social media. This rapid change is particularly prominent with the study of social network sites, where both the popularity of certain sites and their privacy policies continue to be in continual flux (boyd, 2006, 2007; Gross & Acquisti, 2005; Tufekci, 2008; Young & Quan-Haase, 2009). On an applied level, challenges exist in teaching social media theory and methods because best practices and understandings quickly become obsolete. On a theoretical level, generalizable claims need to be constantly updated to reflect the new realities in policy, features, and usage. This and papers in the following issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society on “Persistence and Change in Social Media” compiles a series of papers to identify elements of social media practice that are persistent across platforms, users, and cultures. The goal of the papers is not only to present articles addressing current topics and the current state of knowledge, but also to present research pointing toward the long-term trajectory of social media development and usage. In this article, we propose the term social media practice as a means to overcome the transient nature of the phenomena encountered on social media and identify practices that are stable and universal. We argue that through a focus on the practices involved in the domestication and mainstreaming of social media, it is possible to develop more robust theories and present widely applicable findings. Because social media are a moving target, it is impossible to provide concrete answers to many research questions and to resolve conclusively existing debates about the longterm trajectory of social media. For example, there will never be a single and ideal way to self-present on social network sites (Tufekci, 2008) or a perfect hyperlink to place on one’s website. Despite the intangibility of the subject, recurring insights emerge. We list four examples of findings that have shown some stability:

Revisiting the digital divide in Canada: the impact of demographic factors on access to the internet, level of online activity, and social networking site usage

The present study relies on the 2010 Canadian Internet Use Survey to investigate differences in peoples access to the internet and level of online activity. The study not only revisits the digital divide in the Canadian context, but also expands current investigations by including an analysis of how demographic factors affect social networking site (SNS) adoption. The findings demonstrate that access to the internet reflects existing inequalities in society with income, education, rural/urban, immigration status, and age all affecting adoption patterns. Furthermore, the results show that inequality in access to the internet is now being mimicked in the level of online activity of internet users. More recent immigrants to Canada have lower rates of internet access; however, recent immigrants who are online have significantly higher levels of online activity than Canadian born residents and earlier immigrants. Additionally, women perform fewer activities online than men. Peoples use of SNSs differs in terms of education, gender, and age. Women were significantly more likely to use SNSs than men. Interestingly, high school graduates had the lowest percentage of adoption compared to all other education categories. Current students were by far the group that utilized SNSs the most. Canadian born, recent, and early immigrants all showed similar adoption rates of SNSs. Age is a strong predictor of SNS usage, with young people relying heavily on SNSs in comparison to those aged 55+. The findings demonstrate that the digital divide not only persists, but has expanded to include inequality in the level of online activity and SNS usage.

Are e‐books replacing print books? tradition, serendipity, and opportunity in the adoption and use of e‐books for historical research and teaching

This article aims to understand the adoption of e‐books by academic historians for the purpose of teaching and research. This includes an investigation into their knowledge about and perceived characteristics of this evolving research tool. The study relied on Rogerss model of the innovation‐decision process to guide the development of an interview guide. Ten semistructured interviews were conducted with history faculty between October 2010 and December 2011. A grounded theory approach was employed to code and analyze the data. Findings about tradition, cost, teaching innovations, and the historical research process provide the background for designing learning opportunities for the professional development of historians and the academic librarians who work with them. While historians are open to experimenting with e‐books, they are also concerned about the loss of serendipity in digital environments, the lack of availability of key resources, and the need for technological transparency. The findings show that Rogerss knowledge and persuasion stages are cyclical in nature, with scholars moving back and forth between these two stages. Participants interviewed were already weighing the five characteristics of the persuasion stage without having much knowledge about e‐books. The study findings have implications for our understanding of the diffusion of innovations in academia: both print and digital collections are being used in parallel without one replacing the other.

Networks of digital humanities scholars: The informational and social uses and gratifications of Twitter

Big Data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterized as an informational or social network. We contribute to this line of inquiry through an investigation of digital humanities (DH) scholars’ uses and gratifications of Twitter. We conducted a thematic analysis of 25 semi-structured interview transcripts to learn about these scholars’ professional use of Twitter. Our findings show that Twitter is considered a critical tool for informal communication within DH invisible colleges, functioning at varying levels as both an information network (learning to ‘Twitter’ and maintaining awareness) and a social network (imagining audiences and engaging other digital humanists). We find that Twitter follow relationships reflect common academic interests and are closely tied to scholars’ pre-existing social ties and conference or event co-attendance. The concept of the invisible college continues to be relevant but requires revisiting. The invisible college formed on Twitter is messy, consisting of overlapping social contexts (professional, personal and public), scholars with different habits of engagement, and both formal and informal ties. Our research illustrates the value of using multiple methods to explore the complex questions arising from Big Data studies and points toward future research that could implement Big Data techniques on a small scale, focusing on sub-topics or emerging fields, to expose the nature of scholars’ invisible colleges made visible on Twitter.

Instant messaging social networks: Individual, relational, and cultural characteristics

Most research on social media tends to focus on individual or group-level characteristics, neglecting to consider the influence of relational and cultural variables. To fill this void, we collected social network data in Israel (N = 492) and Canada (N = 293) to investigate the effect of individual, relational, and cultural variables on the frequency of communication via instant messaging (IM) and the multiplexity of communication topics. We found that geographic distance continues to matter in interpersonal contact in spite of heavy reliance on digital tools for connectivity. Similar patterns of association were discerned in both countries for propinquity, the use of IM, and closeness. We discuss the findings in terms of theories of networked individualism.

Trends in online learning communities

In the past decade, there has been a trend toward using the Internet to support traditional classroom teaching and to substitute traditional teaching for online learning. In particular, online learning communities play an important role in distant education. This trend raises important questions about the nature of online learning, the types of learning promoted by online learning communities, the challenges inherent in online learning communities, and the ways in which online learning communities can be improved. Moreover, it is important to understand online learning communities in the context of peoples everyday lives. This special issue brings together studies that examine how online learning communities have evolved, the types of online learning communities available, and what design features are useful for promoting vibrant online learning communities. These studies show online learning communities as a complex phenomenon and propose new frameworks and research methods. This introduction outlines the important questions asked in these papers about online learning communities as well as results from empirical studies. It concludes with a set of design considerations that emerge from the studies.

Interviews with digital seniors: ICT use in the context of everyday life

ABSTRACT The literature on the digital divide suggests that seniors continue to lag behind in access to the Internet, digital skills, and engagement in various online activities. Much of the research, however, gains insight from large-scale survey research and neglects to examine the challenges and opportunities that digital seniors, those who are connected, experience in their everyday use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). We employed the theoretical lens of ICT use in the context of everyday life to inform this study. Twenty-one digital seniors (60 +) took part in interviews about how ICTs influenced their routines and practices such as news consumption, library use, information seeking, and reading. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using grounded theory. Three key findings emerged. First, digital seniors are developing new practices and routines around their ICT use; these are novel and emerge out of ICTs’ affordances. Second, digital seniors are creating hybrid practices, where they seamlessly combine traditional habits with new ones emerging from ICT use. Finally, digital seniors are recreating existing practices with digital means, i.e. the digital enhances or sometimes even replaces traditional practices. We find that agency is central to our understanding of digital seniors’ adoption and use of ICTs, they critically consider various options, and make choices around their preferences, convenience of use, and affordability. For digital seniors, ICT use is not a binary because they want to have the flexibility to choose for themselves under what circumstances and for what purposes the use of ICTs is appropriate.