Intimate partner violence (IPV) impacts the lives of millions of individuals, devastating survivors, and damaging families. Many survivors are unsure of how to get help, and many have limited access to resources. In recent years, those affected by IPV have turned online for answers and support, including forums such as Reddit, to anonymously disclose their experiences. This study examined the dialogue online between survivors of violence and those who respond to their posts on Reddit. The aim is to better understand the kinds of conversations and responses that are occurring in online communities discussing IPV. Analysis of the domestic violence subreddit highlighted positive conversations focused on helping survivors as commenters offered support, advise, understanding, education, access to resources and additional information to aid survivors in receiving help.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第21398号 / 情博第684号 / 新制||情||118(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)准教授 松原 繁夫, 教授 吉川 正俊, 教授 西田 豊明 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM

As our consumption behaviours of media and entertainment change in the age of new media technologies, the means of production change with them. Filmmaking usually follows a set procedure (often with clear hierarchy and specialised roles in the crew) and the flow of the narration has traditionally followed a one-way direction, from the producing part (the producer/director) to the receiving part (the audience). But since the arrival of the internet, its disruption of the industry has opened up for an increased dialogue between the two, turning the receiving part to a contributing one. This has resulted in a wider democratisation of the medium, where the once passive audience now becomes more involved in the creative production process. Crowdsourcing, already used frequently in service industries and product design processes, has become an alternative method of creative content creation. Made possible through the use of social media channels, entire films are now being created with material submitted by its audience. This study aims to answer the research questions: “What is required in order to use crowdsourcing successfully in filmmaking?”, as well as the sub-questions “What role has social media played in the making of crowdsourced films?” and “Is there a future in crowdsourcing within filmmaking?” Six cases of film and series productions, each of different formats, were analysed; two documentary films, three web series and one TV show. In this study, the production approach for each case has been investigated, in order to see how they have used crowdsourcing in their processes. Five qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted and each interviewee had held key positions in the making of their respective production. The findings showed the strong need for having an already well-established community in place before undertaking a crowdsourced endeavour. The use of social media also appears to be one of the fundamentally enabling factors for these types of projects, since it provides a platform for an immediate dialogue between the two parties. Using crowdsourcing in film will presumably continue, but the method has still considerable unexplored potential. Because of it’s ingrained dependence on social media, future research could benefit from exploring interdisciplinary collaboration between filmmaking and interactive media technologies. / Samtidigt som att våra beteendemönster i hur vi konsumerar media förändras i takt med att nya medieteknologier uppstår, förändras också sättet media produceras. Filmskapande följer många gånger en särskild process (ofta med en tydlig hierarki av specialister inom produktionsgruppen) och berättelsen har traditionellt sett berättats från en part till den andre – från producenten/regissören till publiken. Men internets intåg har i många avseenden förändrat filmindustrin, vilket har öppnat upp för en ökad dialog mellan dessa två parter, vilket har omformat publikens position till en mer medskapande sådan. Detta har resulterat i enstörre demokratisering av filmmediet, där den en gång passiva publiken nu involverar sig mer i den kreativa filmskapandeprocessen. Crowdsourcing, som redan är vanligt förekommande inom exempelvis produktdesign och serviceindustrier, har blivit en alternativ metod för att skapa kreativt innehåll. Med sociala medier som en möjliggörande faktor skapas hela filmer endast med hjälp av material inskickat från den framtida publiken. Denna studie ämnar svara på problemformuleringarna: "Vad krävs för att framgångsrikt använda crowdsourcing inom filmproduktion?", samt delfrågorna "Vilken roll har sociala medier spelat i skapandet av crowdsourcadefilmer?" och "Finns det någon framtid för crowdsourcing inom filmskapande?" Sex stycken film- och serie-produktioner av olika format har analyserats: två dokumentärer, tre webbserier och en TV-show. Denna studie har undersökt hur varje produktion har använt sig av crowdsourcing i dess produktionsprocess. Utöver det har en kvalitativ undersökning genom fem semistrukturerade intervjuer genomförts, där varje intervjuobjekt har haft nyckelpositioner inom respektive produktion. Resultaten visade på ett starkt behov av att ha en redan väletablerad skara av följare eller ambassadörer innan man startar en crowdsourcing-kampanj. Sociala medier visade sig också vara en fundamental beståndsdel i möjliggörandet av detta, eftersom de skapar en omedelbar tvåvägskommunikation mellan producenten och publiken. Användandet av crowdsourcing kommer förmodligen att fortsätta, och metoden har fortfarande en ansenlig outforskad potential. Med anledning av metodens beroende av sociala medier, kommer fortsatt forskning inom området troligtvis att gynnas av att utforska samarbeten mellan filmskapande och interaktiva medier.

Celebrity gossip blogs have quickly established themselves as a new media phenomenon that is transforming celebrity culture. This dissertation is an examination of the impact of the technological and textual shifts engendered by new media on the use of gossip as a form of everyday cultural production. Broadly, I investigate the historical role of gossip media texts in celebrity culture and explore how celebrity gossip blogs have reconfigured audience engagements with celebrity culture. Following Gamson’s (1994) approach to celebrity as a cultural phenomenon, I separate celebrity gossip blogs into three elements—texts, producers, and audiences—and examine the interplay between them using ethnographic methods adapted to the new media setting. I begin with an investigation of what is being said about celebrity on gossip blogs, supported by my five–week online fieldwork observation of six heavily–trafficked, commercially–supported celebrity gossip blogs. I focus on visual images and blogger commentary as the key elements of gossip blogs as media texts. I supplement these observations with oral interviews of the producers of these texts, the gossip bloggers. I argue that the blogger, as the primary author of the site, retains authority as a cultural producer of these texts. The final component of this study focuses on the reading and cultural production practices of celebrity gossip blog audiences using data gathered online and through a qualitative survey. I examine the various ways these practices support the emergence of community within these virtual spaces. While I claim that gossip is an active engagement with celebrity culture well suited to new media's emphasis on immediacy and interactivity, I conclude that an active audience is necessarily a resistant one. Blogs can be seen as a space for intervention into celebrity culture that allows bloggers and readers to challenge the power of the media industry to define celebrity culture. However, gossip blogs often uphold oppressive norms, particularly around questions of gender, race, and sexuality. Gossip is an important area of inquiry because it reveals the way women, the predominant audience for and participants on gossip blogs, may be implicated in the normative ideologies forwarded by the celebrity media.

Idag finns en oro för att människor som spelar och pratar med andra online är ensamma och att det hämmar deras sociala liv. För att utforska detta undersöker denna studie hur de människor själv ser på den tid de spenderar online och de människor de möter där. Hur gemenskap skapas online på kommunikationsplattformen Discord och vilken roll den gemenskapen spelar i medlemmarnas sociala liv. De teoretiska verktygen som används för att besvara detta är Andersons imagined communities (2016) samt Faraj och Johnssons teorier om reciprocitet online (2011). Empirin samlades in genom etnografiska metoder som netnografi, deltagande observation och semistrukturerade intervjuer med medlemmar i en Discordserver. Resultaten visar att gemenskaper online möjliggörs och skapas genom medlemmars reciprocitet och skapande av sociala band, teknikens utveckling och aktiva medlemmar somhåller samman gruppen.

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Knowledge sharing–the dissemination of knowledge from an individual/group to another–has been an interesting topic for knowledge management scholars. Previous studies on knowledge sharing in online communities have primarily focused on communities of practice (organizational/business communities) and the social factors of knowledge sharing behaviour. However, non-business-oriented online communities have not been rigorously examined in the academic literature as venues for facilitating knowledge sharing. In addition, the burst of new age Internet tools (artifacts) such as social bookmarking has changed the face of online social networking. Within the context of Web 2.0, this socio-technical research investigation introduces both social and technical factors affecting attitude towards knowledge sharing in communities of relationship and communities of interest, and proposes a relational model of knowledge sharing attitude in Web 2.0 online communities. Social Capital Theory provides the main theoretical backbone for the proposed model. Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and social constructionsim have also been used. Following the description of the proposed hypotheses and research methodology using a survey about three Web 2.0 websites (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Cnet), data analysis through Partial Least Squared (PLS) method is applied to examine the effect of social and technical antecedent of knowledge sharing attitude. The R2 value of 0.78 indicates the strong explanatory power of the research model. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No / This report summarizes results of the first EC/NSF joint Advanced Research Workshop, which identified key research challenges and opportunities in information technology. The group agreed that the first joint research workshop should concentrate on the themes of human-centered computing and VEs. Human-centered computing is perceived as an area of strategic importance because of the move towards greater decentralization and decomposition in the location and provision of computation. The area of VEs is one where increased collaboration should speed progress in solving some of the more intractable problems in building effective applications

Essay #1: Reconstructing Online Behavior through Effort Minimization Data from online interactions increasingly informs our understanding of fundamental patterns of human behavior as well as commercial and social enterprises. However, this data is often limited to traces of users' interactions with digital objects (e.g. votes, likes, shares) and does not include potentially relevant data on what people actually observe online. Estimating what users see could therefore enhance understanding and prediction in a variety of problems. We propose a method to reconstruct online behavior based on data available in many practical settings. The method infers a user's most likely browsing trajectory assuming that people minimize effort exertion in online browsing. We apply this method to data from a social news website to distinguish between items not observed by a user and those observed but not liked. This distinction allows us to obtain significant improvements in prediction and inference in comparison with multiple alternatives across a collaborative filtering and a regression validation problem. Essay #2: Measuring Individual differences: A Big Data Approach The amount of behavioral and attitudinal data we generate every day has grown significantly. This era of Big Data has enormous potential to help psychologists and social scientists understand human behavior. Online interactions may not always signify a deep illustration of individuals' beliefs, yet large-scale data on individuals interacting with a variety of contents on specific topics can approximate individuals' attitudes toward those topics. We propose a novel automated method to measure individuals' attitudes empirically and implicitly using their digital footprints on social media platforms. The method evaluates content orientation and individuals' attitudes on dimensions (i.e. subjects) to explain individual-content ratings in social media, optimizing a pre-defined cost function. By applying this method to data from a social news website, we observed a significant test-retest correlation and substantial agreement in inter-rater reliability testing. Essay #3: Social Media and User Activity: An Opinion-Based Study An increasing fraction of social communications is conducted online, where physical constraints no longer structure interactions. This has significantly widened the circle of people with whom one can interact and has increased exposure to diverse opinions. Yet individuals may act and respond differently when faced with opinions far removed from their own, and in an online community such actions could activate important mechanisms in the system that form the future of the outlet. Studying such mechanisms can help us understand the social behaviors of communities in general and individuals in particular. It can also assist social media outlets with their platform design. We propose models that capture the changes in individuals' activities in social media caused by interacting with a variety of opinions. Estimating the parameters of the models using data available from a social news website (Balatarin) as a case study, we extracted mechanisms affecting the communities on this platform. We studied the effect of these mechanisms on the future formation and the lifecycle of the platform using an agent-based simulation model. Having examined the effect of biased communities on the social media, the results imply that individuals increase their online activity as a result of interacting with contents closely aligned to their own opinion. / Ph. D.