Search results

Russia's war against Ukraine prevents most Western scholars from doing fieldwork in the country. In this difficult situation, digital tools can help to compensate for the inability to travel.

SummaryWe test the relationship between the use of social networking sites (SNS) and a proxy of utility, i.e. subjective well‐being (SWB), using instrumental variables. Additionally, we disentangle the indirect effects of SNS on well‐being mediated by face‐to‐face interactions and social trust using a structural equation model. Results suggest that the use of SNS hampers people's well‐being directly and indirectly, through its negative effects on social trust. However, the use of SNS also has a positive impact on well‐being because it increases the probability of face‐to‐face interactions. Yet, the net effect of the use of SNS for SWB remains negative.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Computer Sciences, 2011 ; The wide adoption of Web 2.0, in which users can interact with Web sites to generate new content, has a serendipitous side effect. All of this user-generated data provides researchers with a unique lens on the behavior of the users who created it. While instrumenting millions of users with a device that records everything they read in real life would be impossible, we can easily record the articles they read on Wikipedia. Similarly, we can use Twitter data to map the interactions between tens of thousands of people, as well as studying the topics they discuss. I outline several studies taking advantage of this trove of behavioral data. Initially focusing on Wikipedia, I examine the patterns in the paths that users take when navigating from article to article, and contrast these with similar data for several other large Internet destinations. I then develop an understanding of bursty popularity dynamics, discovering that bursts in the attention to a page have dynamics similar to that observed in natural phenomena, like earthquakes and avalanches; I also present a simple model able to capture these dynamics. Next I switch gears --- away from looking at users as they travel between topics, and towards looking at how topics (memes) travel between users, and how users interact with each other. I frame this research in the context of political discussion on Twitter. I first perform a general overview of the space of this discussion, examining how users connect with each other. I conclude with a case study, the Web site truthy.indiana.edu, which focuses on the case of the deceptive dissemination of ideas, or so-called astroturf.

The recent wave of mobilizations in the Arab world and across Western countries has generated much discussion on how digital media is connected to the diffusion of protests. We examine that connection using data from the surge of mobilizations that took place in Spain in May 2011. We study recruitment patterns in the Twitter network and find evidence of social influence and complex contagion. We identify the network position of early participants (i.e. the leaders of the recruitment process) and of the users who acted as seeds of message cascades (i.e. the spreaders of information). We find that early participants cannot be characterized by a typical topological position but spreaders tend to me more central to the network. These findings shed light on the connection between online networks, social contagion, and collective dynamics, and offer an empirical test to the recruitment mechanisms theorized in formal models of collective action.

The purpose of this paper is to study the mechanisms of online networking and exchange of social support among members of a migrant virtual group of Russian-speaking women in Poland on Facebook. The research was based on content analysis and non-participant observation during two weeks in November and December 2019. I also had two online conversations with the moderator of the group based on a prepared list of questions. It appeared, that members of the group used networking to improve communication on a wide range of issues. Conversations available online provide insight on how migration determines daily issues and social life but also as a source of socially-reproducing precarity. Informality as a social model of inter-group relations prevails among members of the Russian-speaking community. Four main types of social support emerged from communication on the forum – informational, instrumental, emotional and community building. Russian-speaking women use Facebook group to share information, empower each other, boost self-esteem and find companionship. The findings allow to consider the role of the online group as a complementary mechanism for adaptation and improvement of well-being of migrants in Poland.

Dominant anti-trafficking policy discourses represent trafficking as an issue of crime, "illegal" migration, victimhood and humanitarianism. Such a narrow focus is not an adequate response to the interplay between technology, trafficking and anti-trafficking. This article explores different levels of analysis and the interplay between human trafficking and technology. We argue for a shift from policy discourses with a very limited focus on crime and victimisation to more systemic understandings of trafficking and more robust micro-analyses of trafficking and everyday life. The article calls for an agnotological understanding of policy responses to trafficking and technology: these depend upon the production of ignorance. We critique limitations in policy understandings of trafficking-related aspects of online spaces, and argue for better engagement with online networks. We conclude that there is a need to move beyond a focus on "new" technology and exceptionalist claims about "modern slavery" towards greater attention to everyday exploitation within neoliberalism. ; The People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/ REA grant agreement PIEF-GA-2011-29840

Interaction, discussion, and the exchange of diverse information make the Web the place it is today. Texts, images, videos, and even information such as geospatial and health data are shared at an unprecedented scale. This exchange of information on the Web generates an extensive, freely accessible data source for a variety of data-driven applications – with multiple opportunities, but also risks. In this paper, we present the overall idea of the research project ADRIAN – "Authority-Dependent Risk Identification and Analysis in online Networks" which is dedicated to the research and development of AI-based methods for detecting potential threats to individuals and institutions based on heterogeneous, online data sets. We will first monitor selected social sports apps and analyze the collected geospatial data. In a second step, the user profiles of sports apps and social media platforms will be correlated to be able to form a cluster of individuals and enable the identification of potential threats. Since a so-called "digital twin" can be reconstructed in this way, sensitive data is generated. If this data can also be correlated with other confidential data, it is possible to estimate the plausibility of the threat to individuals, groups or locations.

In diesem Beitrag beschäftige ich mich mit meiner cyberethnografischen Untersuchung über die internationale Frauenuniversität "Technology and Culture" (ifu) im Jahr 2000 und über das hieran anschließend auf Initiative der Teilnehmerinnen konzipierte virtuelle Netzwerk vifu. Ich skizziere zunächst meine methodologischen Überlegungen und einige methodische Herausforderungen, die mit dieser Forschungsarbeit verbunden waren. Zusätzlich befasse ich mich mit diesen methodologischen Überlegungen auch auf einer theoretischen Ebene, indem ich insbesondere die Konzepte "Heimat" und "Zugehörigkeit" hinzuziehe mit Blick auf die Frage, was diese Konzepte im Kontext mobiler Leben(sführung) bedeuten. Ich versuche zu zeigen, in welcher Weise Online-Forschung zum einzig möglichen methodischen Ansatz wurde, um den mobilen Charakter nicht nur der ifu und ihren virtuellen Extension vifu angemessen zu untersuchen, sondern auch um darüber hinausgehend verstehen zu können, wie die Teilnehmerinnen ihre Zugehörigkeit und Mobilität innerhalb ihrer jeweiligen Welten und innerhalb des (v)ifu-Netzwerks aushandelten.

To answer questions about the origins and outcomes of collective action, political scientists increasingly turn to datasets with social network information culled from online sources. However, a fundamental question of external validity remains untested: are the relationships measured between a person and her online peers informative of the kind of offline, "real-world" relationships to which network theories typically speak? This article offers the first direct comparison of the nature and consequences of online and offline social ties, using data collected via a novel network elicitation technique in an experimental setting. We document strong, robust similarity between online and offline relationships. This parity is not driven by sharedidentityof online and offline ties, but a shared nature of relationships in both domains. Our results affirm that online social tie data offer great promise for testing long-standing theories in the social sciences about the role of social networks.