Chei Sian Lee

News sharing in social media: The effect of gratifications and prior experience

Recent events indicate that sharing news in social media has become a phenomenon of increasing social, economic and political importance because individuals can now participate in news production and diffusion in large global virtual communities. Yet, knowledge about factors influencing news sharing in social media remains limited. Drawing from the uses and gratifications (U&G) and social cognitive theories (SCT), this study explored the influences of information seeking, socializing, entertainment, status seeking and prior social media sharing experience on news sharing intention. A survey was designed and administered to 203 students in a large local university. Results from structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis revealed that respondents who were driven by gratifications of information seeking, socializing, and status seeking were more likely to share news in social media platforms. Prior experience with social media was also a significant determinant of news sharing intention. Implications and directions for future work are discussed.

Why We Share: A Study of Motivations for Mobile Media Sharing

Mobile phones equipped with cameras have become popular among consumers, and this has fuelled an increase in mobile media sharing. The present research investigates the sharing of mobile media by conducting a diary study to specifically understand the type of media captured and shared, and the motivations behind these activities. Participants maintained a month-long diary, documenting their media sharing activities. Post-study interviews were also conducted to elicit additional information not captured in the diary. Results suggest a range of motivational factors, and that social and emotional influences played an important role in media sharing behavior. Participants were also more inclined to share photos that any other media due to cost and transmission time considerations. Implications of our work are also discussed.

Perceptions, quality and motivational needs in image tagging human computation games

Human computation games (HCGs) are applications that use games to harness human intelligence to perform various computational tasks. That is, users perform computations as a byproduct of being entertained while playing a game. Such games are increasing in popularity and it is critical to examine how different types of HCG affect players’ perceptions and performance. In addition, understanding their motivational appeal to different players is also important to good HCG design. In the present research, we focus on image tagging HCGs, where users play games to generate keywords for images. Three versions were created: a collaborative HCG which required players to cooperate, a competitive HCG where players worked against each other, and a control non-game manual tagging application. The applications were evaluated to uncover the quality of the tags, users’ perceptions of these variants, and the influence of motivational needs on usage intention. Results suggest that, while participants reported liking the collaborative and competitive HCGs over the control application, those using the latter seemed to generate better quality tags. Further, using the trichotomy of needs theory, we found that an individual’s need for achievement and power influenced intention to use the various applications.

Understanding news sharing in social media : An explanation from the diffusion of innovations theory

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to draw from the diffusion of innovations theory to explore multi-levels of influences (i.e. individuals, networks, news attributes) on news sharing in social media. Design/methodology/approach – A survey was designed and administered to 309 respondents. Structural equation modelling analysis was conducted to examine the three levels of influential factors. These included self-perceptions of opinion leadership and seeking at the individual level, perceived tie strength and homophily at the network level, and finally, perceived news credibility and news preference at the news attribute level. Findings – The results revealed that the influences of self-perceptions of opinion leadership, perceived tie strength in online networks and perceived preference of online news had significant effects on users’ news sharing intention in social media. However, self-perceptions of opinion seeking, homophily, and perceived news credibility were not significant. Originality/value – T...

Resource discovery through social tagging: a classification and content analytic approach

Purpose – Social tagging systems allow users to assign keywords (tags) to useful resources, facilitating their future access by the tag creator and possibly by other users. Social tagging has both proponents and critics, and this paper aims to investigate if tags are an effective means of resource discovery.Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts techniques from text categorisation in which webpages and their associated tags from del.icio.us and trained Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers are downloaded to determine if the documents could be assigned to their associated tags. Two text categorisation experiments were conducted. The first used only the terms from the documents as features while the second experiment included tags in addition to terms as part of its feature set. Performance metrics used were precision, recall, accuracy and F1 score. A content analysis was also conducted to uncover characteristics of effective and ineffective tags for resource discovery.Findings – Results from the...

Knowledge access, creation and transfer in e‐government portals

Purpose – Knowledge management (KM) is an important consideration in e‐government portals to ensure that knowledge flows efficiently between governments, individuals and organisations. A crucial aspect of e‐government portals that has not been addressed adequately is the extent to which KM mechanisms have been implemented. Specifically, the authors argue that appropriate KM mechanisms are necessary to support the access, creation and transfer of knowledge between these portals and their users. The paper aims to propose an evaluation model for this purpose by first defining the main KM mechanisms and then burrowing deeper into their constituent dimensions.Design/methodology/approach – An evaluation model known as knowledge access, creation and transfer (K‐ACT) is presented which identifies three KM mechanisms for portals: knowledge access, creation and transfer. Each mechanism is characterised by a set of dimensions and sub‐dimensions representing the tools and features for supporting that mechanism. The m...

Mobile content contribution and retrieval: An exploratory study using the uses and gratifications paradigm

Using the uses and gratifications (UnG) theory, this paper explores the gratification factors for which people contribute and retrieve mobile content. Through the deployment of MobiTOP, a mobile content sharing application, it was found that perceived gratification factors for mobile content contribution were different from those for mobile content retrieval. In particular, factors which had significant positive effects on content contribution stemmed from leisure/entertainment and easy access. Factors fuelling content retrieval included the efficient provision of information resources/services and the need for high quality information, both of which tend to be information-centric. Interestingly, gratification factors for mobile content contribution were also found to have significant effects on mobile content retrieval intention and vice versa. Specifically, the access gratification factor had a significant positive effect on content retrieval intention while the self-gratification factor for content contribution had a significant negative effect on content retrieval intention.

Exploring emotional expressions on YouTube through the lens of media system dependency theory

This study extends current work by investigating the role social networking sites play in facilitating emotional expressions following the death of a public figure, Michael Jackson. Through the lens of Media System Dependency theory, I perform a qualitative content analysis on comments generated by users of YouTube. Results show that YouTube plays an important role in facilitating emotional expressions as the analysis uncovered a variety of emotions (i.e. sadness and grief, anger and frustration). I also identify other possible micro-level and macro-level effects which may have influenced these emotional responses. This study also found that emotional expressions differed between gender with respect to the passage of time, ongoing events in the environment, and negative reports about Jackson. The results indicate that users can depend on the content provided by YouTube to meet their emotional needs during the grieving process following the death of a public figure.

Can Social Tags Help You Find What You Want

One of the uses of social tagging is to associate freely selected terms (tags) to resources for sharing resources among tag consumers. This enables tag consumers to locate new resources through the collective intelligence of other tag creators, and offers a new avenue for resource discovery. This paper investigates the effectiveness of tags as resource descriptors determined through the use of text categorisation using Support Vector Machines. Two text categorisation experiments were done for this research, and tags and web pages from del.icio.us were used. The first study concentrated on the use of terms as its features. The second study used both terms and its tags as part of its feature set. The results indicate that the tags were not always reliable indicators of the resource contents. At the same time, the results from the terms only experiment were better compared to the experiment with terms and tags. A deeper analysis of a sample of tags and documents were also conducted and implications of this research are discussed.

Exploring the Relationship Between Communication Risk Perception and Communication Portfolio

With the rapid development of information communication technologies (ICT) over the past decade, the nature of how organization members communicate has changed, becoming far more complex and challenging. Communication risks brought about by technology-mediated communication can sometimes be detrimental to the overall organizational function and success. We classify these communication risks into three types: reception, understanding, and action risks. We propose the notion of communication portfolio which refers to a single ICT or a specific combination of lCTs that can be used to manage any perceived risk of communication. Specifically, this study aims to examine the relationship between perceived risks (i.e., risk of reception, risk of understanding, and risk of action) in the communication process and the dimensions (i.e., content, and structuring mechanism) of the communication portfolio used for communication. We also identify communication risk factors that may accentuate the different types of risks. We develop a communication risk perception framework to illustrate the relationship between the communication risk factors, the different types of communication risks, and the communication portfolio. Finally, we illustrate how the communication risk perception framework can be applied in a real-life natural setting by using the shuttle Challenger incident, as an example.