A tremendous amount of information is being shared every day on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+. However, only a small portion of users provide their location information, which can be helpful in targeted advertising and many other services. Current methods in location estimation using social relationships consider social friendship as a simple binary relationship. However, social closeness between users and structure of friends have strong implications on geographic distances. In the first task, we introduce new measures to evaluate the social closeness between users and structure of friends. Then we propose models that use them for location estimation. Compared with the models which take the friend relation as a binary feature, social closeness can help identify which friend of a user is more important and friend structure can help to determine significance level of locations, thus improving the accuracy of the location estimation models. A confidence iteration method is further introduced to improve estimation accuracy and overcome the problem of scarce location information. We evaluate our methods on two different datasets, Twitter and Gowalla. The results show that our model can improve the estimation accuracy by 5% - 20% compared with state-of-the-art friend-based models. In the second task, we also propose a Local Event Discovery and Summarization (LEDS) framework to detect local events from Twitter. Many existing algorithms for event detection focus on larger-scale events and are not sensitive to smaller-scale local events. Most of the local events detected by these methods are major events like important sports, shows, or big natural disasters. In this work, we propose the LEDS framework to detect both bigger and smaller events. LEDS contains three key steps: 1) Detecting possible event related terms by monitoring abnormal distribution in different locations and times; 2) Clustering tweets based on their key terms, time, and location distribution; and 3) Extracting descriptions include time, location, and key sentences of local events from clusters. The model is evaluated on a real-world Twitter dataset with more than 60 million tweets. The analysis of Twitter data can help to predict or explain many real-world phenomena. The relationships among events in the real world can be reflected among the topics on social media. In the third task, we propose the concept of topic association and the associated mining algorithms. Topics with close temporal and spatial relationship may have direct or potential association in the real world. Our goal is to mine such topic associations and show their relationships in different time-region frames. We propose to use the concepts of participation ratio and participation index to measure the closeness among topics and propose a spatiotemporal index to calculate them efficiently. With the topic filtering and the topic combination, we further optimize the mining process and the mining results.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the types of communication activities adolescents reported as important and used most frequently, and how these communication preferences were reflected in adolescents' identity development status. Participants were approximately 600 new university students who completed a survey regarding 18 communication activities, along with the Erikson Psychosocial Stage Inventory identity subscale. Data analysis was conducted in two phases. To reduce the frequency and importance data to a manageable size, exploratory factor analyses and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted. Two identical factors were identified and validated related to the importance and the frequency of communication activities. The first factor comprised four items related to online ''performance": online gaming, participation in virtual reality settings, live chat with strangers, and live chat with groups unknown to the individual. The second factor comprised four communication activities that occurred on social networking sites as individuals created lasting "exhibits" of themselves: updating a personal profile, viewing the profiles of others, posting status messages, and sharing pictures or other content (articles, jokes, videos) with others. Analysis of means indicated that the three communication activities rated as most important and frequently used were face-to-face interaction, voice calls and text messaging. These were followed by social networking activities, and then writing activities such as blogging. The performative activities identified in the exploratory factor analysis were ranked as least important and least frequently used. Regression analysis revealed small but statistically significant negative relationships between the reported importance of performative activities and identity development status, and between the reported frequency of performative activities and identity development status. Small positive relationships were also identified between the importance of face-to-face interaction and identity development status, and the importance of voice phone calls and identity development status. Small positive relationships were also identified between the frequency of face-to-face communication and identity development, between the frequency of voice phone calls and identity development, and between the frequency of email use and identity development.

The purpose of this study was to examine romantic relationships that began through face-to-face (FtF) interaction or computer-mediated communication (CMC). Two hundred seventy-six participants who were currently in romantic relationships that began in person (196) or online (80) completed an online questionnaire. The study explored several relational variables (relationship satisfaction, intimacy, trust, communication satisfaction, physical attraction) and tested for differences in the two types of relationships; however, the data were not consistent with the hypotheses and research questions. Post-hoc tests revealed that sample characteristics (including sex, exclusivity of relationships, same/opposite sex relationships, and length of relationships) accounted for several differences when tested with the relational variables. Finally, the study sought to find which of these variables related to relationship satisfaction in relationships that began FtF and online. Trust and communication satisfaction significantly predicted relationship satisfaction in relationships that began FtF, and physical attraction and communication satisfaction significantly predicted relationship satisfaction in relationships that began online.

Orientadora: Rita Melissa Lepre / Banca: Maria Laura Nogueira Pires / Banca: Raul Aragão Martins / Banca: Antonio Francisco Marques / Banca: Luciane Guimarães Batistella Bianchini / Resumo: Os Sites de Redes Sociais são grandes dinamizadores do fluxo de informação e interconexões entre pessoas. Eles favorecem a construção e a produção de discursos que manifestam as múltiplas "verdades" sociais e suas representações. Além disso, são espaços complexos que estimulam o debate, geram ou desoprimem as tensões e, sobretudo, trazem os discursos sociais que refletem os valores e a moral de seus participantes. Nos Sites de Redes Sociais o ideal admitido é a liberdade e, portanto, os usuários tendem a avaliar e julgar a ação dos demais e vão além, aplicam sanções que bem entendem. O objetivo geral da pesquisa foi verificar e analisar como algumas questões relativas à moralidade apareceram nas publicações dos usuários e moldaram as suas ações dentro do Facebook. Temos como justificativa a necessidade de estudos que explorem a moralidade "virtual" dos participantes e apresentem programas e estratégias que promovam o uso consciente e responsável. Para tanto utilizamos como metodologia a netnografia. Ela consiste em uma pesquisa observacional participante, pois permite que o pesquisador adentre no universo que estuda por um determinado tempo, utilizando-se além das ferramentas próprias do Facebook, o diário de campo. Para cumprir com objetivos acessamos a plataforma diariamente durante o período de Junho de 2017 à Agosto de 2018, em busca de casos que causavam grande indignação nos usuários e eram as mais polêmicas da época. Além disso, elas deveriam tratar de questões... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Social Networking Sites are great dynamizers of the flow of information and interconnections between people. They favor a construction and production of discourses that manifest as multiple "truths" and their representations. In addition, they are spaces that stimulate debate, generate or unfavor the tendencies and, above, bring social discourses that reflect the values and a moral of its participants. In Social Networking Sites the ideal is freedom, and therefore users tend to evaluate and judge an action of others and go beyond the attention that is understood. The purpose of the research was identified and shown as some issues related to morality. Studies justifying studies that explore a "virtual" morality and participate in programs and strategies that promote conscious and responsible use. For such use as a netnography network. It consists of a participatory observational survey, because it allows you to search in a universe that has a fixed rhythm, using the own tools of Facebook, the field diary. The date in the case of annual data to 2017 June of 2018, in the case of the case in the case of big data in the users are the greater data in time. In addition, they can be moral issues, such as: justice, robberies, lies, cooperation, altruism. We know that the feeling of indignation comes when the spectator disapproves of an action that considers a moral good and; in itself a value, and therefore what must be done must also follow the same foundations. Not accompanying the... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Doutor

Most studies on online self-help groups for healthcare contexts have explored the content of social support. However, very little research has shed light on the communicative behaviors and language use of participants in online self-help groups for mental illness. This thesis studies the communication of social support in online self-help groups for anxiety and depression (OSGADs) to reveal their characteristics as communities of practice (CofPs) and how the predominant communicative acts of the participants contribute to social support communication. The data of the present study is a self-compiled corpus of 120 threads collected from six selected OSGADs. Mixed methods discourse analysis (MMDA) is used as a research method to conduct three empirical studies (i.e., Chapters 4, 5, and 6), in which both qualitative and quantitative approaches of discourse analysis are utilized, including content analysis, textual analysis, and interaction analysis. Different analytical frameworks are employed in the analyses. The data analysis begins by investigating the main communicative patterns of the interactions (Chapter 5) and then examines two predominant communicative acts (Chapters 5 and 6). Issues closely related to the analysis are also discussed in each of the analytical chapters. Using conversation analysis (Jefferson & Lee, 1992) and Social Support Behavior Code (Coulson, 2005), Chapter 4 reveals the sequential structures and main content of the interactions. The results show that self-disclosure and advice-giving are the most predominant communicative acts in the interactions. This chapter argues that the optimal matching theory (Cutrona & Russell, 1990) is probably inadequate to elucidate that the support proffered by respondents aids the support seekers. Chapter 5 investigates the multiple functions of self-disclosure in personal, textual, and interactional layers. The functions are examined through textual analysis and interaction analysis in tandem with frameworks including cognitive discourse analysis (Tenbrink, 2015) and rhetorical structure theory (Mann & Thompson, 2009). The findings show that self-disclosure enables support providers to distance themselves from problems, release their emotions, and increase reliability/persuasiveness. Self-disclosure facilitates the disclosure of other participants and support recipients may perceive it as advice, mitigation, and normalization. Chapter 6 conceptualizes the politeness of advice messages. Viewing advice as a speech event, textual analysis is conducted to explore the discursive moves and relational strategies (Locher, 2006) in advice messages, and shows that the advice messages contain many emphatic moves and relational strategies, including sharing own experience, empathizing, and assessment. The notions of contextualization (Gumperz, 1987) and relational work (Watts, 2003) are used to argue that empathy is a contextualization cue to make the advice messages appropriate and politic. Based on the three empirical studies, this thesis suggests three main characteristics of OSGADs as CofPs, including an emphasis on supportiveness, participants' performance of multiple identities, and frequent self-disclosure and advice. This thesis argues that self-disclosure is particularly crucial in the social support communication due to its multi-functionality. Self-disclosure is also an act that contextualizes an empathetic interactional context wherein advice is often politic and appropriate. This thesis concludes by discussing implications for interpersonal communication and online support groups in Hong Kong

The use of online communication media has increased dramatically over recent years, with people from different age groups becoming users of online communication media. Many scholars have become interested in how online communication media influence or even reshape people's social networking practices and social networks. Most existing studies on the impacts of online communication media are based on the observation of online practices of the general population or the younger population, while older adults are rarely taken into consideration. An increasing number of elderly people have become active users of online communication media and they may differ from younger people in many aspects such as networking strategies. Studying the elderly population may therefore enhance our understanding of the utility of online connectivity. Based on 35 in-depth interviews of elderly WeChat users in urban China, which were conducted between December 2017 and March 2019, this study considers two major questions: (1) How do older adults use online communication media to network with their different social relations? (2) How do the online networking practices of older adults influence their social relations? The analysis focuses on two major issues to answer the second question: accessibility and the relational intimacy of social ties. By considering these two questions, this study aims to determine whether older adults become "networked individuals" or just stay "alone together" when they become active users of online communication media. My findings show that how elderly people use online communication media to interact with their social ties is different from younger users and their unique networking strategies have different digital impacts on their social relations. Elderly people often lack opportunities to socialise due to their age-related conditions. Online communication media can reduce their costs of manage social ties and serve an important channel to help many elderly users to (re)connect and develop their social ties, enhancing both the accessibility and relational intimacy of those social ties and help them to become "networked individuals"

Scholars have paid increased attention to the impact of social technologies on organizational communication but have yet to explore how their use has influenced organizational socialization, a process in which organizational newcomers transition into the organization. To fill this gap, this thesis investigates the use of social networking applications, a type of social technology, and its relation to three key processes in organizational socialization: information seeking, identity work, and workplace relationship development. Drawing on the concepts of affordance and paradox, this thesis examines how technological features and human factors such as mobile communication culture, technological frames of users, and organizational contexts shape processes of using social networking applications during organizational entry. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with Chinese organizational newcomers regarding their experience of using WeChat, the most popular social networking mobile application in China. Findings suggest that WeChat provides communicative opportunities that are otherwise not available in other communication platforms or channels. The participants obtain official and unofficial information from using WeChat. In addition to conventional, direct information seeking, the participants rely on persistence of information afforded by WeChat to indirectly access information. The participants seek information about identity expectations through indirect methods such as observation and experiment with their provisional identities using WeChat Moments. Details of mundane everyday work life and achievements are the most frequently mentioned content for identity construction. For workplace relationship development, the participants develop metaknowledge of their coworkers through browsing their coworkers' posts from WeChat Moments. WeChat work groups provide opportunities for newcomers to initiate and develop relationships with their coworkers with low social costs. Despite that WeChat provides lots of benefits, the participants describe WeChat as a problematic tool in that they could be trapped in paradoxical situations when they are concerned with engagement in organizational communication flows, construction of flexible identities, genres of professional communication enabled by WeChat, and blurred boundaries between professional and personal life. Dealing with these paradoxes provides opportunities for newcomers to learn technology culture of their organizations, reflect on their technological frames, and adjust their expectations and behaviors with respect to WeChat use. This technologically occasioned learning is an unexpected outcome of responding to the paradoxes of using WeChat during organizational entry. This thesis extends organizational communication research to provide an initial exploration of the use of social technologies in organizational socialization, uncovering how social networking sites and applications both enable and constrain information seeking, identity work, and workplace relationship development. It also provides insights into how various individual, interpersonal, and organizational factors influence the perceived affordances of social networking mobile applications and how these factors interact to shape the paradoxical user experience. With their wide adoption in the contemporary workplace, social networking sites and applications have huge potential to help newcomers transition into new organizations and have become an important aspect in organizational socialization. By learning and adapting to the norms of use for social networking sites and applications in new organizations and making sense of paradoxes in their user experience, newcomers can begin to understand the technology culture of their new organization. This thesis argues that it is necessary to reconceptualize organizational socialization, taking into consideration distinctive processes enabled and constrained by social technologies, and to reflect upon how organizational tactics and the design of social technologies can help newcomers to learn, to adapt, and to thrive in their organizations.

The research adopts the technological affordance approach and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to examine the role of enterprise social media (ESM) in employee communication and its effects on employees in the context of mainland China. The research postulated that organizations can actualize affordances of ESM to influence employees' cognitive perceptions of ESM (i.e., attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control) that further affect their ESM use intention and relationships with organizations (i.e., employee-organization relationships; EORs). Using a mixed-methods approach to examine Enterprise WeChat (EWeChat), the research interviewed 36 participants to explore organizational actions of EWeChat affordance actualization and employee perceptions about EWeChat use in mainland China. An online survey with 427 mainland Chinese employees adopting EWeChat was conducted to investigate the role of ESM affordance actualization in forming the employees' intention to continuously use EWeChat, as well as in cultivating their EORs through their attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and habits of EWeChat use. Key results of the research include the following. Thirteen EWeChat affordances and means of actualization (i.e., association, control, diversity, feedback, outeraction, perpetual contact, persistence, personalization, portability, privacy, social presence, synchronicity, and visibility) for specific organizational goals were identified. The influence of EWeChat affordance actualization on employees' intention to continuously use EWeChat was mediated by their perceived benefits and risks of EWeChat use. The utilitarian benefit, hedonic benefit, avoidance of work-life conflicts, social concerns, privacy concerns, and perceived behavioral control were positive indicators of the continuous EWeChat-use intention, while performance risk was a negative indicator. The effects of affordance actualization on EORs were partially mediated by employees' perceived utilitarian benefit and perceived professional image related to EWeChat use. The research extends the TPB to predict ESM use in Chinese workplaces. It explicates ESM affordance actualization as the interaction between ESM and organization (actor 1), and also between ESM and employees (actor 2). It also evidences that ESM can be used as a relationship cultivation tool. The research sheds light on how organizations in mainland China can effectively configure their ESM to maximize the efficacy and relational outcomes of its mobile application in employee communication

Digital activism is an increasingly popular field in academia. However, scarce attention has been paid to the process of cultural and political mediation that have shaped different examples of the contents of digital activism as well as the character of actors who collectively utilize this instrument and also personally respond to the specific context in which digital activism emerges and evolves. This study investigates the #MeToo movement in the context of China as a concrete example of digital activism in a manner that ascribes attention to both digital technologies and activist practices. With regard to the practices of social movement, this study aims to capture the discursive processes that enable different actors to be recognized and make sense of themselves in public in the #MeToo movement in China. From the digital perspective, this study attempts to identify the characteristics of activists who participated in China's #MeToo movement. This study combined content analysis and discourse analysis with social network analysis to analyze the process and discourses on the #Metoo movement in China and examined the characteristics of actors who contributed to the promotion of the #MeToo movement on a networked public space. Following the three-stage model of social drama, five themes were identified in the narrative form of China's version of the #MeToo movement. This study also found that advocates and opponents of the #MeToo movement achieved their narrative agencies through the intersection of gender, sexuality, class, and culture in the Chinese sociocultural context. Finally, this study revealed that the expressive repertoires manifested in the reposting network of China's #MeToo and testified that homophily could exist between pairs of Weibo users along with similar attributes including gender, location, and engagement

The research adopts the technological affordance approach and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to examine the role of enterprise social media (ESM) in employee communication and its effects on employees in the context of mainland China. The research postulated that organizations can actualize affordances of ESM to influence employees' cognitive perceptions of ESM (i.e., attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control) that further affect their ESM use intention and relationships with organizations (i.e., employee-organization relationships; EORs). Using a mixed-methods approach to examine Enterprise WeChat (EWeChat), the research interviewed 36 participants to explore organizational actions of EWeChat affordance actualization and employee perceptions about EWeChat use in mainland China. An online survey with 427 mainland Chinese employees adopting EWeChat was conducted to investigate the role of ESM affordance actualization in forming the employees' intention to continuously use EWeChat, as well as in cultivating their EORs through their attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and habits of EWeChat use. Key results of the research include the following. Thirteen EWeChat affordances and means of actualization (i.e., association, control, diversity, feedback, outeraction, perpetual contact, persistence, personalization, portability, privacy, social presence, synchronicity, and visibility) for specific organizational goals were identified. The influence of EWeChat affordance actualization on employees' intention to continuously use EWeChat was mediated by their perceived benefits and risks of EWeChat use. The utilitarian benefit, hedonic benefit, avoidance of work-life conflicts, social concerns, privacy concerns, and perceived behavioral control were positive indicators of the continuous EWeChat-use intention, while performance risk was a negative indicator. The effects of affordance actualization on EORs were partially mediated by employees' perceived utilitarian benefit and perceived professional image related to EWeChat use. The research extends the TPB to predict ESM use in Chinese workplaces. It explicates ESM affordance actualization as the interaction between ESM and organization (actor 1), and also between ESM and employees (actor 2). It also evidences that ESM can be used as a relationship cultivation tool. The research sheds light on how organizations in mainland China can effectively configure their ESM to maximize the efficacy and relational outcomes of its mobile application in employee communication