Jayant Venkatanathan

Uses & gratifications of a facebook media sharing group

This paper explores uses and gratifications of a content community on a social network service - a music video sharing group on Facebook. In a two-stage study, 20 users first generated words or phrases to describe how they used the group, and what they enjoyed about their use. These phrases were coded into 34 questionnaire items that were then completed by 57 new participants. Factor analysis on this data revealed four gratifications: contribution; discovery; social interaction and entertainment. These factors are interpreted and discussed, leading to design implications and guidelines aimed at informing the design of future online services that combine media sharing with social interaction to create online systems based on a rich and meaningful object-centered sociality.

Who's your best friend?: targeted privacy attacks In location-sharing social networks

This paper presents a study that aims to answer two important questions related to targeted location-sharing privacy attacks: (1) given a group of users and their social graph, is it possible to predict which among them is likely to reveal most about their whereabouts, and (2) given a user, is it possible to predict which among her friends knows most about her whereabouts. To answer these questions we analyse the privacy policies of users of a real-time location sharing application, in which users actively shared their location with their contacts. The results show that users who are central to their network are more likely to reveal most about their whereabouts. Furthermore, we show that the friend most likely to know the whereabouts of a specific individual is the one with most common contacts and/or greatest number of contacts.

Making Friends in Life and Online: Equivalence, Micro-Correlation and Value in Spatial and Transpatial Social Networks

Social networks are increasingly constructed and maintained by online social networking tools in addition to traditional face-to-face interactions. This paper reports on how the structure of social ties established by online tools relate to those ties established by face-to-face interactions. We explore and map the social ties within a cohort of 2602 users, for whom we study the social ties mediated by both physical co-presence and Facebook. Our results suggest that the spatial social network consisting of face-to-face interactions exhibits similar characteristics to the transpatial social network consisting of Facebook ties. However, we find that individuals’ involvement in each network varies considerably.

Network, personality and social capital

We present a study on the relationship between social network structure on Facebook and social capital, and how this relationship is moderated by personality traits. The findings suggest that ones number of friends does not necessarily have an effect on the amount of bridging social capital. Conversely, the extent of structural holes and isolated friends in the network have an effect on bridging social capital. In addition, individuals low on agreeableness benefit more from isolated friends in terms of bridging social capital. In terms of bonding social capital, introverts benefit more from networks with higher transitivity. Women overall report higher bonding social capital, but there are no significant gender differences when it comes to leveraging ones network structure for bridging or bonding social capital.

Modeling What Friendship Patterns on Facebook Reveal About Personality and Social Capital

In this study, we demonstrate how analysis of users’ social network structure—a topic that has remained until recently inconspicuous within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on social systems—can contribute to our understanding of Social Networking Services (SNS) effect on users. Despite a consensus that SNS enhance peoples social capital, prior studies on SNS have provided inconsistent evidence on this process. In a multipronged study, we analyze personality, social capital, and Facebook data from a cohort of participants to model the extent to which ones SNS reflects aspects of his or personality and affects his bridging social capital. Our empirically validated model shows that empathy and conscientiousness influence the structural holes in ones social network, which in turn affects bridging social capital. These findings highlight the importance of network structure as an intermediary between ones personality and the social benefits one reaps from using SNS. Our work demonstrates how the implicit structural information embedded in users’ social networks can provide key insights into users’ personality and social capital.

Improving users' consistency when recalling location sharing preferences

This paper presents a study of the effect of one instance of contextual cues, trajectory reminders, on the recollection of location sharing preferences elicited using a retrospective protocol. Trajectory reminders are user interface elements that indicate for a particular location of a persons trail across a city the locations visited before and after. The results of the study show that reminding users where they have been before and after a specific visited location can elicit more consistent responses in terms of stated location sharing preferences for that location visit. This paper argues that trajectory reminders are useful when collecting preference data with retrospective protocols because they can improve the quality of the collected data.

Online Disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information with Strangers: Effects of Public and Private Sharing

Safeguarding personally identifiable information (PII) is crucial because such information is increasingly used to engineer privacy attacks, identity thefts and security breaches. But is it likely that individuals may choose to just share this information with strangers? This study examines how reciprocation can lead to the disclosure of PII between strangers in online social networking. We demonstrate that the widespread use of public, one-to-many, communication channels such as ‘wall posts’ and profile pages in online social networks poses an exception to the assumption that reciprocationhappensonone-to-onechannels.Wefindthatindividualsnotonlyreciprocateandshare PII when the disclosure of such information is private and directed towards them by a stranger, but also when the stranger shares this information through a public channel that is not directed towards anyone in particular. Implications for privacy and design are discussed.

A network science approach to modelling and predicting empathy

In this paper we adopt a network science approach to investigate empathy and its implications for online social networks. We demonstrate that empathy is closely linked to social capital - the findings suggest that individuals higher on cognitive empathic skill are overall likely to report both higher bridging and higher bonding social capital. On the other hand, attributes of network structure around the individual, quantified through networks analysis metrics, were related to cognitive empathy. Further, an examination of the interplay between network structure, social capital and empathy suggests that empathy facilitates the relation between network structure and social capital previously reported in literature. We discuss the implications of our findings for the understanding of empathy in the context of online social networks and for the design of these systems.