有關表情符號的跨文化分析，現有之研究皆以亞洲國家（例如日本或韓國）和美國做比較。然而此間差異不僅包含文化上的，也包含語言使用上的不同。如此一來，在了解影響人們使用表情符號的因素時，文化背景與語言的因素混雜一體，難以區辨各別影響狀況。本研究試著控制文化的因素，將文化背景具有一定相似性，但官方語言不同的新加坡和台灣做比較。結果顯示新加坡與台灣使用者確實表現出不同的表情符號使用偏好。前者傾向使用橫式表情符號，後者則以使用直式表情符號居多。形式的不同也導致使用者在組合表情符號的眼型與口型時呈現明顯差異。此外，語言背景也會影響一個人對表情符號的認識與解讀能力。本研究發現，此現象在新加坡的受試者身上較為顯著，他們在認識與解讀台灣使用者的常用表情符號時較容易出現障礙。最後，本論文也討論了研究結果的意義以及研究者對於未來研究的建議。 / Existing literature on the cross-cultural use of emoticons often discuss how styles of emoticons vary by comparing countries such as Japan or Korea with the United States. However, these countries differ both in terms of their culture as well as the language used in the country. Thus, there remains a dilemma in distinguishing whether the effects of cultural background or language plays a greater role in determining the style of emoticons a person uses. This research explores this issue by comparing the use of emoticons between users from Singapore and Taiwan. Both countries have similar cultural background but differ in terms of their first language. By focusing on the difference of language and holding cultural background as a constant, results indicated that users from both countries do have a difference in preference for emoticons style. While the former predominantly use horizontal emoticons, the latter prefer vertical emoticons instead. Such difference has also resulted in different representation of the eyes and mouths of emoticons used by Singaporean and Taiwanese users. In addition, it has also been found that language background has an effect on a person’s ability to recognize and interpret emoticons used by natives from the other culture. This situation was more prominent among Singaporean participants as they were found to be less capable in recognizing and interpreting emoticons commonly used by their Taiwanese counterparts. The implications of these findings and recommendations for future research are discussed.

With the increased use of online communication in our everyday lives, there is a growing need to understand social influence in such settings. The current research posits that online social norms can influence readers‟ anti-social and pro-social behaviours online, specifically individual expressions of prejudice. Participants read an online article proposing an increase to international student scholarship funding, then were randomly placed in one of two normative conditions where they read Anti-Prejudiced or Pro-Prejudiced comments allegedly placed by other users. Participants then left their own comments before completing a self-report prejudice questionnaire and an implicit association test (IAT). Social norms created by the fictitious comments influenced respondents to comment with more or less bigoted sentiments aligned with the fictitious social norm. Participants reading prejudiced online comments showed increased implicit and explicit prejudice, while those reading anti-prejudiced online comments showed the reverse. Participants‟ internal and external motivations to control prejudice were also measured and hypothesised to moderate the effects of social norms on bias expressions. However, this hypothesis was unsupported with participants‟ internal and external motivations to control prejudice inconsistently moderating the effects of the social norm on their prejudice expressions. These findings suggest possible avenues for social change in online environments, and criteria to help establish more positive online social norms.

This qualitative study examined fifteen organizational members across four international technology companies to discover how they behave and manage daily interactions in a virtual environment within a geographically distributed team. Using a grounded theory methodology, an extensive analysis of the interview data was conducted. Three core themes emerged that focus on the individuals’ attempts to manage impressions in an environment that demands multicommunication. The themes of time stacking, participation predications and performance are discussed in detail using the theoretical lens of impression management. / text

In spite of the popularity of technologies that facilitate distance learning, institutions still educate students who gather together in shared physical spaces. But now even these traditional settings for learning are more collaborative and technology-rich environments. Qualitative methods in the sociolinguistic tradition allowed me to attend carefully to the vocal and non-vocal interactions of students engaged in a computer supported collaborative authoring assignment. Three research questions guided my inquiry: 1) In what ways did students negotiate roles and responsibilities?; 2) In what ways did students negotiate access to their assignment?; and 3) what was the nature of discourse in computer supported collaborative authoring? I conducted microanalysis of the communication in online discussions and face-to-face discourse throughout an entire semester of one graduate level course entitled The Psychology of Teachers and Teaching. My data revealed that the online discussion forum, physical proximity to the computer during face-to-face collaboration and instructor influence shaped the students’ roles and responsibilities as well as their entry into the assignment. I propose a model illustrating how students negotiate entry into computer supported collaborative authoring assignments and discuss its implications for teaching and learning. / text

The main goal of this study was to investigate whether computer-mediated communication (CMC) intercultural exchange offers the conditions necessary for the development of the sociolinguistic competence of L2 learners. The secondary goal was to provide a description of the characteristics of the exchange as a language practice regarding language learning and cultural contact. Non-native speakers (NNS) of French in British Columbia interacted through computer-mediated communication with native speakers (NS) of French in Quebec over the course of one school semester. The data for this study included the transcripts of text-based chat discussions and of a group forum, and answers to questionnaires and interviews. Drawing on the sociocultural perspective, this study used a qualitative approach to analyze the collected data. The framework used to guide the sociolinguistic inquiry consisted of The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001). The findings of this study suggest that intercultural CMC exchange offers positive conditions for the development of this competence. NNS were exposed to sociolinguistic variation and made minor changes in their use of sociolinguistic elements, showing that they developed sensitivity to the vernacular style used by NS. In addition, the exchange fostered the creation of a collective meaning that allowed L2 learners to participate in meaningful interactions and to increase their level of confidence. Finally, the exchange allowed participants to experience the dimension of “culture as individual” (Levy, 2007), an aspect of culture that encouraged them to share their personal views on culture and to connect on a personal level with their NS partners.

The purpose of this study was to explore the factors that contribute to online collaboration in a web-based course by investigating the impact and the potential of an online learning environment in terms of both the students&#039 / and instructor&rsquo / s perceptions about learner benefits, learner support, motivation, computer mediated communication, and group work. A mixed methods case study design was thought to be appropriate to match the purpose of the study, thus a combination of components normally found in descriptive, case study and qualitative research was used to analyze the data. The study was conducted in the context of &ldquo / CSIT444-Online Web Design&rdquo / , an online course offered by the Institute of Distance Education of East Mediterranean University (EMU) in Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. This course was designed and developed by the instructor working at the Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology of the Middle East Technical University located in Ankara and carrying out the classes for this course as online for the students at EMU. The participants were the instructor and 209 vocational education last year students, who participated in the course for three successive semesters, at the School of Computing &amp / Technology. In order to explore the perceptions of the students, they were asked to complete a questionnaire at the end of the each semester. Of the 209 participants 175 students ranked their agreement on each twenty eight five-point Likert-type item and 129 of them wrote also their comments about their online learning experience by answering the open-ended item in the questionnaire. Several interviews were conducted with the instructor using the informal conversational interview approach to explore his perceptions through his reflections on his online teaching experience in the web-based course. The perceptual student responses from the questionnaire were analyzed quantitatively. The responses to the open-ended item in the questionnaire and informal interviews were evaluated qualitatively to find out the emerging themes. In addition, the online learning environment offered in the web-based course was examined by using the instructional design framework. This study concluded that both the students and the instructor perceived the online collaborative learning/ experience positively by reporting that it was a beneficial and motivating experience with the availability of group work, CMC, and adequate support structure. Several specific factors that contributed to collaboration via CMC in the web-based course were identified under seven major topics. By considering these factors, it is hoped that the results will yield better solutions in terms of providing meaningful online learning experiences.

“In an ill-structured domain you cannot, by definition, have a pre-compiled schema in your mind for every circumstance and context you may find ... you must be able to flexibly select and arrange knowledge sources to most efficaciously pursue the needs of a given situation.” [57] / In order to interact and collaborate effectively, agents, whether human or software, must be able to communicate through common understandings and compatible conceptualisations. Ontological differences that occur either from pre-existing assumptions or as side-effects of the process of specification are a fundamental obstacle that must be overcome before communication can occur. Similarly, the integration of information from heterogeneous sources is an unsolved problem. Efforts have been made to assist integration, through both methods and mechanisms, but automated integration remains an unachieved goal. Communication and information integration are problems of meaning and interaction, or semantic interoperability. This thesis contributes to the study of semantic interoperability by identifying, developing and evaluating three approaches to the integration of information. These approaches have in common that they are lightweight in nature, pragmatic in philosophy and general in application. / The first work presented is an effort to integrate a massive, formal ontology and knowledge-base with semi-structured, informal heterogeneous information sources via a heuristic-driven, adaptable information agent. The goal of the work was to demonstrate a process by which task-specific knowledge can be identified and incorporated into the massive knowledge-base in such a way that it can be generally re-used. The practical outcome of this effort was a framework that illustrates a feasible approach to providing the massive knowledge-base with an ontologically-sound mechanism for automatically generating task-specific information agents to dynamically retrieve information from semi-structured information sources without requiring machine-readable meta-data. / The second work presented is based on reviving a previously published and neglected algorithm for inferring semantic correspondences between fields of tables from heterogeneous information sources. An adapted form of the algorithm is presented and evaluated on relatively simple and consistent data collected from web services in order to verify the original results, and then on poorly-structured and messy data collected from web sites in order to explore the limits of the algorithm. The results are presented via standard measures and are accompanied by detailed discussions on the nature of the data encountered and an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithm and the ways in which it complements other approaches that have been proposed. / Acknowledging the cost and difficulty of integrating semantically incompatible software systems and information sources, the third work presented is a proposal and a working prototype for a web site to facilitate the resolving of semantic incompatibilities between software systems prior to deployment, based on the commonly-accepted software engineering principle that the cost of correcting faults increases exponentially as projects progress from phase to phase, with post-deployment corrections being significantly more costly than those performed earlier in a project’s life. The barriers to collaboration in software development are identified and steps taken to overcome them. The system presented draws on the recent collaborative successes of social and collaborative on-line projects such as SourceForge, Del.icio.us, digg and Wikipedia and a variety of techniques for ontology reconciliation to provide an environment in which data definitions can be shared, browsed and compared, with recommendations automatically presented to encourage developers to adopt data definitions compatible with previously developed systems. / In addition to the experimental works presented, this thesis contributes reflections on the origins of semantic incompatibility with a particular focus on interaction between software systems, and between software systems and their users, as well as detailed analysis of the existing body of research into methods and techniques for overcoming these problems.

[Truncated abstract] Rumours can lead to unpredictable events: the manner in which an organisation responds to a commercial rumour can alter its reputation, and can affect its profitability as well as, ultimately, its survival. Commercial rumours are now a prominent feature of the business environment. They can emerge from organisational change, pending workforce layoffs, mergers, and changes to management, in addition, commercial rumours can lower morale and undermine productivity. There are several well-known examples of commercial rumours that have been, or continue to be, circulated. Commercial rumours are typically either about a conspiracy or contamination issue. Conspiracy rumours usually target those organisational practices or policies which are identified as undesirable by the stakeholders. This form of rumour is often precipitated by situations where people do not have all the information about a situation, for example the rumour about Proctor & Gamble being run by the Moonies. Snapple, the soft drink company, was rumoured in 1992 to be supporting the Ku Klux Klan in closing abortion clinics. Contamination rumours are wide-ranging and typically have revulsion theme, such as McDonald’s "worms in the burger", Pop Rock’s candies which exploded in the stomach, and poison in Herron’s paracetamol . . . Marketers suggest that web sites Commerical Rumour Responses on the Web represent the future of marketing communications on the Internet. The key implication of this study for organisations is when faced with a negative rumour, specific and selected Web pages can be used manage company’s stakeholders recall the rumour and organisational stakeholders can be persuaded by the company’s rumour response strategies.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Communication, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-70).

Magister Artium - MA / Social networking sites are used on a daily basis, to communicate with friends we have known for quite some time as well as make new friends from all over the globe - a global phenomenon. According to Aparicio (2011) the use of social networking sites have given way to a new “social dynamic” where friendships are formed with individuals from diverse backgrounds and geographical locations. Larsen (2007) continues to state that social network sites make for the creation of new friendships and the maintenance of new relationships. Using social networking sites to develop relationships provides us with new social skills, but through constant use of these sites we lose valuable interpersonal skills learnt through the use of face to face interaction (Aparicio, 2011). This thesis investigated the notion of social networking sites, specifically focusing on interpersonal relationships and language use within the networking context. The social networking site in question is that of Twitter, as majority of existing studies in this area focuses on the more popular Facebook. The main objective was to determine whether social networking sites, specifically Twitter, influence the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships and language use. Participants included a group of 11 males and 11 females (22 in total), ranging from the ages of 17 to 33 and from different geographical locations (e.g. United Kingdom, South Africa, Tokyo, and so on). These participants frequently keep in contact with each other. Four ways in which Twitter has been adapted to emulate face to face communication have been found, namely: (1) the use of Paralinguistic and Prosodic Features to imitate speech, (2) Ustream, although not prominent within the data collected, is used to make up for the lack of face to face communication.This, however, is one-way; only one user provides a video link while those communicating with him or her (as there can be more than one) would type messages, (3) as expected a variety of shortenings can be found within the data collected. Shortenings imitate speech among the younger generation, and (4) participants make use of an informal register, as the most common type of relationship found on Twitter is that of friendships. Both strong and weak ties exist in the collected data; with weak ties being the majority. It is possible for weak ties to become strong ties. All online relationships start off as weak and gradually, over time, become strong ties. This is done through establishing trust between participants and communicating on a regular basis. Paolillo (1999) found that online relationships manifests as both weak and strong. However, “online ties are not ‘branded’ as weak ties” and these ties differ in quality; “those who have regular contact have strong ties and those with less frequent contact have weaker ties weak”. Social support is evident in the collected data and possible in online, textbased communication. In is manifested in four types of support, namely: instrumental, emotional, informational, and appraisal. The most common type of support found in the collected data is that of informational support. With regards to support activation strategies, most tweet fall under the ‘ask’ and ‘cry’ types of strategies. Also, considering the amount of emoticons found in the data, little or no emoticons were found in the activation strategies. There are also more indirect support activation strategies as opposed to direct. This could possibly be due to the fact that majority of the ties are ‘in the weak stage’. Textese has not been adapted in anyway; the same elements used by texters and IMers are used by tweeters, such as initialisms, phonetic spellings and contractions. Although present in the Twitter data, elements of textese did not occur as frequently as that found in e.g. Bieswanger’s (2007) and Thurlow’s (2003) studies; however more elements of Twitter language was found. If anything, the characteristics of textese are well-suited for Twitter; as shortened forms of words would make it easier for users to maintain a character count below the imposed limitation and it promotes the idea of writing quick and concise messages instead of filling message space with irrelevant content. With regards to the difference in the way male and female participants use language in terms of the linguistic characteristics of textese and the language unique to Twitter and the use of paralinguistic and prosodic features, it can be said that females tend to use these characteristics more than males do.