- The Benefits of Facebook "Friends:" Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Networks
Nicole B. Ellison, Charles Steinfield, and Cliff Lampe
A student survey reveals a strong association between use of Facebook and three types of social capital. Facebook use also interacts with psychological well-being, suggesting greater benefits for users with low self-esteem and low life satisfaction.
- Online Communication and Adolescent Well-Being: Testing the Stimulation Versus the Displacement Hypothesis
Patti M. Valkenburg and Jochen Peter
A survey of 1,210 Dutch teenagers supported the hypothesis that online communication stimulates well-being via its positive effect on time spent with existing friends and the quality of those friendships.
- Configurations of Social Relations in Different Media: F2F, Email, Messenger, Mobile Phone, and SMS
Hyo Kim, Gwang Jae Kim, Han Woo Park, and Ronald E. Rice
Network analyses of Korean survey results show that mobile phones tend to be used in strong tie and text-based CMC media in weak tie relationships, whereas face-to-face is a universal medium with few differences across user types.
- Types of Fantasy Sports Users and Their Motivations
Lee Farquhar and Robert Meeds
Q-methods were used to identify the most common types of online fantasy sports users based on their motivations: casual players, skilled players, and isolationist thrill-seekers. Surprisingly, social interaction was not a strong motivator for most FSUs.
- A Case of Mistaken Identity? News Accounts of Hacker, Consumer, and Organizational Responsibility for Compromised Digital Records
Kris Erickson and Philip N. Howard
Hackers were involved in many incidents of compromised data between 1980 and 2006, but a greater number of incidents were caused by organizational mismanagement and administrative errors.
- Ethos in Chaos? Reaction to Video Files Depicting Socially Harmful Images in the Channel 2 Japanese Internet Forum
Muneo Kaigo and Isao Watanabe
Channel 2 has many dysfunctional aspects, but in a thread involving the dissemination of video files of the October 2004 Japanese hostage beheading in Iraq, a self-regulating mechanism emerged that functioned pro-socially.
- Mapping Diversities and Tracing Trends of Cultural Homogeneity/Heterogeneity in Cyberspace
Elad Segev, Niv Ahituv, and Karine Barzilai-Nahon
A longitudinal content analysis of MSN and Yahoo! local country homepages reveals that Yahoo!'s pages are more similar to each other and to the "parent" American portal, whereas MSN shows increasing cultural heterogeneity and localization.
- Estimating Linguistic Diversity on the Internet: A Taxonomy to Avoid Pitfalls and Paradoxes
Peter Gerrand
A new taxonomy distinguishes among the various indicators used to estimate language usage on the Internet and helps resolve the apparent paradox as to whether the use of English has declined rapidly or has remained fairly stable.
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- CMC Modes for Learning Tasks at a Distance
Trena Paulus
Small groups of experienced distance learners used a discussion forum more often for conceptual moves, and the forum and chat more often for later phases of knowledge construction, while email was preferred for social moves.
- Methical Jane: Perspectives of an Undisclosed Virtual Student
Lynette Nagel, A. Seugnet Blignaut, and Johannes C. Cronjé
A mythical online student took part in an online post-graduate course. This study explores the ethical implication of undisclosed identity and analyzes students' reaction to the disclosure of the mythical student after the course.
- Online vs. Face-to-Face Deliberation: Effects on Civic Engagement
Seong-jae Min
Results of an experiment in which students debated about concealed guns on campus suggest that both online and face-to-face deliberation can increase participants' issue knowledge, political efficacy, and willingness to participate in politics.
- Vive Les Roses!: The Architecture of Commitment in an Online Pregnancy and Mothering Group
Barbara L. Ley
Ethnographic analysis of a pregnancy and mothering support group reveals how the site's social and technical design influences in multiple and contradictory ways the commitment that members feel toward the site and one another.
Special Section on Blogging
- Blogging Practices: An Analytical Framework
Jan Schmidt
This article proposes a general model to analyze and compare different uses of the blog format based on ideas from sociological structuration theory. The analytical framework can facilitate systematic comparative and longitudinal studies of blogging practices.
- Anonymity and Self-Disclosure on Weblogs
Hua Qian and Craig R. Scott
An online survey examined the relationship between visual and discursive anonymity and self-disclosure on weblogs. Increased anonymity was only partially associated with greater self-disclosure, and bloggers whose target audience did not include people they knew offline felt more anonymous.
- Psychological and Social Influences on Blog Writing: An Online Survey of Blog Authors in Japan
Asako Miura and Kiyomi Yamashita
A questionnaire study of personal blog authors in Japan found support for two models of psychological and social processes associated with why authors continue to write their blogs. Readers who gave positive feedback also strongly encouraged authors to continue blogging.
- Gender Differences in British Blogging
Sarah Pedersen and Caroline Macafee
For both male and female British bloggers, blogging is mainly a leisure activity, and men and women find the same range of satisfactions in blogging. However, more women blog as an outlet for creative work, and women bloggers have a lower profile in the media.
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