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Facebook is expected to facilitate more equal participation in civic engagement across genders and countries. With the use of a big data tool (Wisdom), we explored gender disparities in various Facebook liking practices concerning expressions of civic engagement among 21,706,806 Facebook users in ten countries across Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. We observed distinct patterns with regard to civic and political expressions on Facebook, with males drawn more toward politically and information-oriented liking practices as compared to females. Moreover, females (aged 13–28 years) in Europe and the Americas are more likely than males to support humanitarian aid and environmental issues on Facebook. This latter finding was not evident in Asia and Africa, where males are more active in liking all forms of civic expressions on Facebook. In conclusion, this study shows that the gender differences in civic engagement that exist offline to a large degree are replicated and reinforced on Facebook. ; submittedVersion

While there has been a great deal of research on younger people using Social Networking Sites (SNSs), there has been less work on older people and non-users. We present a mixed-methods design with a technology-acceptance survey and focus-group interviews to study older Norwegian non-users' perceptions of SNSs. Our study reveals that most non-users in our sample deliberately do not use SNSs. They perceive SNS communication as cold and narcissistic and view the usefulness of SNSs to be low. This finding indicates a generational culture gap in how young versus older people experience SNSs. Privacy and security concerns are also prevalent. Non-users, expressing an interest in SNSs, believe SNSs could increase contact with family and friends, but perceive lack of competence to be a barrier.

This article explores the use of mediated communication among Norwegian children aged between 10 and 12 years. The analysis is based on a survey and 88 qualitative interviews with 130 children about their use of different types of communication technologies. This allowed a sketch of connections between the nature of the childrens' social relationships, mediated content and various means of communication employed. Six main content categories of mediated communication were identified. The study points out that new media technologies offer the children new ways of communicating content and meaning which were not easily communicated by children before; both aggressive and emotionally positive content are exchanged more easily through digital technologies than face-to-face. Above all, the children use communication technologies to build and strengthen relationships for the benefit of their schoolmates and friends. Whether the use of new communication technologies, Short Message Service (SMS) in particular, is accelerating the ongoing process of individualization of the family, is discussed.

Media use has changed considerably during the past five years and earlier research has produced contradictory results on how media use links to children's psychosocial factors. This study charts the access to and use of several media technologies among 825 Norwegian schoolchildren between 10 and 12 years of age. The questionnaire contained items concerning children's self-concept, parental monitoring and social competence. It found that children engage with different kind of media activities and some of these are significantly related to psychosocial factors, however, these correlations were in general quite small. Entertainment usage was associated with low scholastic competence. Both utility usage and heavy advanced usage of new media were related to self-perceptions of athletic competence. Low social acceptance was linked to Gameboy usage and advanced usage of media. Finally, there was a relationship between experienced parental monitoring and utility usage of media technology. The possible implications for these empirical relations are discussed.

Chatbots are increasingly becoming important gateways to digital services and information—taken up within domains such as customer service, health, education, and work support. However, there is only limited knowledge concerning the impact of chatbots at the individual, group, and societal level. Furthermore, a number of challenges remain to be resolved before the potential of chatbots can be fully realized. In response, chatbots have emerged as a substantial research area in recent years. To help advance knowledge in this emerging research area, we propose a research agenda in the form of future directions and challenges to be addressed by chatbot research. This proposal consolidates years of discussions at the CONVERSATIONS workshop series on chatbot research. Following a deliberative research analysis process among the workshop participants, we explore future directions within six topics of interest: (a) users and implications, (b) user experience and design, (c) frameworks and platforms, (d) chatbots for collaboration, (e) democratizing chatbots, and (f) ethics and privacy. For each of these topics, we provide a brief overview of the state of the art, discuss key research challenges, and suggest promising directions for future research. The six topics are detailed with a 5-year perspective in mind and are to be considered items of an interdisciplinary research agenda produced collaboratively by avid researchers in the field. ; publishedVersion