Philip Mai

Is Happiness Contagious Online? A Case of Twitter and the 2010 Winter Olympics

Is happiness contagious online? To answer this question, this paper investigates the posting behavior of users on Twitter.com, a popular online service for sharing short messages. Specifically, we use automated sentiment analysis to study a large sample of over 46,000 Twitter messages that reference the 2010 Winter Olympics. We determined that there are more positive messages than negative, and that positive messages are more likely to be forwarded than negative messages. However, we were not able to confirm with a reliable degree of certainty that the emotional context of messages is directly related to the users position in the Twitter network. It is likely that there are other factors involved as well. For example, we found that negative users were more prolific posters than positive users, suggesting their more argumentative and passionate nature. This paper concludes with some implications for the Twitter community and a description of our follow-up study.

Understanding communities in an age of social media: the good, the bad, and the complicated

Not only does this special issue of Information, Communication and Society bring you seven fascinating articles, it also brings together contemporary thinking about community and social media. The study of community no longer must keep to a parallel track with the study of digital media. We intertwine and integrate the two, celebrating the people who are connected in a community, by whatever means. Once upon a time, we thought we knew what communities were: small knots of people in local areas (‘neighborhoods’) where people knew each other and were mutually supportive. This golden narrative is repeated throughout time: nearly 80 years ago, American authors such as Thornton Wilder wrote romantic pieces about ‘Our Town’ (1938), and the play has been in production ever since. Even in 2016, U.S. presidential candidate John Kasich’s campaign is based on anecdotes about community’s social supportiveness. Yet, such pastoralist nostalgia for community is wrong in two ways. First, most people in neighborhoods do not know one other –much less like or support one other. Second, if we focus on the sociability and supportiveness of community ties, rather than on their putative neighborhood location, it turns out that in the developed world, most of the ties people have will stretch well beyond their neighborhoods and often well beyond the sea. All of this was shown to be true well before the advent of the internet (Darin, 1959; Fischer, 1976; Wellman & Leighton, 1979). Several things have happened to affect our understanding of ‘community’ over time. For one thing, politicians use the word to refer to aggregates of people with similar attributes or characteristics (such as ‘the gay community’) even if few of these people have ever met. That is quite different than a community based on connectivity and support. Political scientist Anderson (1991) expanded the term even further: ‘imagined communities’ which referred to nations to which people thought they were members. In Anderson’s imagined communities, ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (p. 6). Anderson’s concept has served as an illustrative lens through which to understand and appreciate online communities, such as World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that brings people together around the world in short or long-term clans or conflicts (Nardi, 2010). Even in such amorphous, less-bounded milieus, people may need to imagine that they belong to a community; in this way, community is a mental conceptualization of the people with whom they are

Social Media for Social Good or Evil: An Introduction

In the heyday of social media, individuals around the world held high hopes for the democratizing force of social media; however, in light of the recent public outcry of privacy violations, fake news, and Russian troll farms, much of optimism toward social media has waned in favor of skepticism, fear, and outrage. This special issue critically explores the question, “Is social media for good or evil?” While good and evil are both moral terms, the research addresses whether the benefits of using social media in society outweigh the drawbacks. To help conceptualize this topic, we examine some of the benefits (good) and drawbacks (evil) of using social media as discussed in eight papers from the 2017 International Conference on Social Media and Society. This thematic collection reflects a broad range of topics, using diverse methods, from authors around the world and highlights different ways that social media is used for good, or evil, or both. We conclude that the determination of good and evil depends on where you stand, but as researchers, we need to go a step further to understand who it is good for and who it might hurt.

Measuring the impact of pharmacoepidemiologic research using altmetrics: A case study of a CNODES drug-safety article

To provide an overview of altmetrics, including their potential benefits and limitations, how they may be obtained, and their role in assessing pharmacoepidemiologic research impact.

Social Media and Society: Introduction to the Special Issue:

As a scholarly domain, social media research has come a long way since the term “social media” first appeared in the literature in the early 2000s. Since then, researchers across disciplines have been actively examining the impact of social media on society. According to Web of Science, there are currently over 19,000 academic articles that include the term “social media.” This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist adds to this rapidly growing body of social media research with a focus on exploring (1) networked influence, (2) transmission of (mis)information, and (3) online and offline, which points to an unstated struggle between top-down attempts by governments and large organizations to influence society and bottom-up citizen articulations of needs and actions.

Introduction to the 2016 International Conference on Social Media and Society

This paper is the Introduction to the 2016 Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Media and Society, an annual gathering of leading social media researchers from around the world. Now, in its 7th year, the 2016 conference is hosted at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK from July 11 to 13. The conferences intensive three-day program features 24 full papers, 65 work-in-progress papers, 8 workshops, 4 panels, and 34 posters. The Proceedings features 24 full papers grouped into five broad categories: Politics, Visual(izing) Social Media, Business, Places & Spaces, and Online & Offline Communities.

Introduction to the 2015 social media and society conference

The Social Media & Society Conference is an annual international gathering of leading social media researchers from around the world. Now, in its sixth year, the 2015 conference is being held in Toronto, Canada, on July 27-29. The conferences intensive three-day program provides 18 full papers, 78 work-in-progress papers, 5 panels, and 52 posters. The wide-ranging topics in social media showcase research from nearly 400 scholars from 28 different countries working in many fields.