Anne Suphan

THE STRESS POTENTIAL OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE WORKPLACE

Social media have enriched the communication profession with new and immediate ways of stakeholder interaction. Along with new possibilities also come challenges – as professionals are engaging in real-time conversations with their audiences on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the like, they have to learn to mentally cope with an oversupply of possibly relevant information, with an invasion of work matters into the private domain and with changing work contents and structures. This paper proposes a measurement routed in the technostress and overload research to assess these challenges brought to communication workforces by social media. These data were collected in a quantitative survey among 2,579 marketing and communication professionals. Based on an exploratory factor analysis, we demonstrate that being literate in an age of social media encompasses not only knowing how to retrieve and process information appropriately in various social settings, but also – and maybe more importantly – to mentally cope with overload, invasion and uncertainty.

A social net? Internet and social media use during unemployment

Many people who are unemployed tend to experience forms of psychological and social losses, including a weakened time structure, diminished social contacts, an absence of collective purpose, falling status, and inactivity. This article focuses on the experience of diminished social contacts and addresses whether social media help the unemployed maintain their relationships. Based on qualitative interviews with unemployed individuals, the article identifies various types of social support networks and their impact on individual experiences of inclusion and exclusion. Although the unemployed use social media to cultivate their social support networks, the opportunity to establish new contacts, both private and professional, is underutilized. Thus, social network differentiation between the unemployed and employed persists online in social media.

Social Media’s Potential in Improving the Mental Well-Being of the Unemployed

This article presents research into the compensating potential of social media for the psychological consequences of job loss. In particular the questions to be answered are whether subjective well-being as well as perceived exclusion are influenced by involvement in social media, and whether age as a context variable may moderate these influences. We demonstrate, based on 2,400 telephone interviews with unemployed persons in Germany, that the use of social media may indeed increase well-being for the unemployed, if they can transfer their online contacts in real social life activities. This transfer is, curiously, easier for older participants. Digital Immigrants display a different relationship structure in their online social networks which allows them to alleviate the more exclusionary effects, whereas Digital Natives are in jeopardy to feel more excluded due to their social media usage.

The impact of use motives on politicians’ social media adoption

ABSTRACT Studies on politicians’ social media adoption have focused on structural antecedents, such as race competitiveness or resource availability. Yet theory suggests that new media adoption is heavily influenced by use motives. Based on a survey of politicians active on the federal level in Switzerland, we analyze the impact of use motives on politicians’ social media adoption. We identify three salient use motives and differentiate two user groups based upon their primary use motives. A multiple-group analysis of a well-established adoption model reveals how use motives affect politicians’ adoption of social media.

Being unemployed in the age of social media

This article reports the results of a stratified sample survey of 2414 unemployed individuals in Germany regarding Internet usage, accompanied by a small sample of qualitative interviews and time-use diaries. The Internet serves as a structuring device for individuals during unemployment and helps such individuals maintain social contacts; it fills time with activities for the unemployed that are meaningful from a normative perspective and are perceived subjectively as a good use of time. The Internet enables degrees of interaction that would otherwise not be possible because of financial difficulties. The research suggests that expanded interaction on the Internet for the unemployed would likely be beneficial.

The Supportive Role of Social Media Networks for those Out of Work

In this paper we discuss the inclusionary potentials of participation in social media networks for the unemployed, both with regard to alleviation of the perception of being left behind by society, as well as the consequences on subjective well-being. Based on interviews with unemployed individuals, we show by the example of 809 facebook users that social media networks may in fact increase the perception of inclusion, under the condition that virtual contacts are transformed into real life social activities. Otherwise, many unemployed risk being stuck in the virtual space, resulting in more perceived exclusion. We also show that the unemployed in urban areas show less difficulty in transforming their virtual contacts into real life activities than those in rural areas. Due to their social media usage behavior, unemployed individuals in urban areas are at a high risk to drop out in previous social networks which results in poorer mental states during situations of unemployment.