Communities have come to rely on technology to enhance public safety and communication during disasters. With nearly one-third of online adults receiving information from government organizations using digital tools other than websites, it is no surprise that increasingly government organizations are leveraging social media to push out information to their communities. My interest in the topic of government use of social media during disasters began when I began managing social media platforms for a city emergency medical services system. My hope for the research is to reveal how government organizations are using social media for emergency management and to discover what they have learned. This paper reviews literature about community use of social media during various stages of disasters, and includes findings from interviews with five government organizations regarding their social media use during emergency events. The goal of the research is to develop a deeper conversation among government and emergency management professionals to establish a direction for further research. Eventually, this ongoing research will better quantify the value of social media use by government organizations during disasters so they can make informed decisions on how government can best utilize social media platforms. / text

Thesis (M.A.)--George Mason University, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jan. 22, 2008). Thesis director: Byron Hawk. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English. Vita: p. 58. Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-57). Also available in print.

This dissertation analyzes representations of the social media platform YouTube, as described by its community and the company, in order to understand how the platform fits within American narratives of democratic technology. I argue that throughout different descriptions of YouTube, such as the corporate branding of the platform as democratic and the communal understanding of YouTube as outside of mainstream media, the language of democracy functions as a balancing act. The YouTube company, content creators, and regular viewers use democratic rhetoric to negotiate the ideals of community on the platform and capitalist endeavors, such as advertising and brand deals. I argue that democratic narratives of YouTube rely on and reinforce the appearance of authenticity and collaboration to justify the desire of monetary gain as good for the company and community. The fluidity, vagueness, and even contradictoriness of the concepts of democracy and authenticity allow them to soothe any rhetorical tensions because they can maintain different meanings in different representations of YouTube. I contend that YouTube's façade of democracy reinforces values of American exceptionalism as the foundation of modern technology and perpetuates it to a global audience. Through my analysis of YouTube, I examine how American technology stories rely on the emphasis of community and democracy to soothe concerns about power imbalances and capitalism in general.

Social media platforms have offered students—and all of us—more opportunities for self-sponsored writing. In response to calls from researchers to explore students' 21st-century writing practices and their relevance to college writing instruction, this dissertation articulated and applied a feminist teacher research methodology and a mixed-methods research design to explore first-year composition (FYC) students' self-sponsored writing practices, attitudes, and transfer opportunities on a popular, albeit under-examined, social media application: Instagram. This study found that students have developed elaborate, rhetorical, multimodal composing processes that include planning, drafting, evaluating, selecting, and styling images as well as planning, drafting/revising, and styling captions. Additionally, though most survey participants said that audience awareness figured into their composing practices, data from interviews revealed that students often misunderstood or inaccurately specified their audiences. Similarly, while all interviewees used a process-based approach to compose their Instagram posts, significant differences exist regarding students' levels of awareness about their composing decisions. Concerning students' perceptions of transfer opportunities between Instagram and FYC, this study found that most survey respondents did not conceptualize their Instagram writing as writing nor did they see their Instagram writing practices as related to the writing required in FYC. Further, respondents generally disagreed that opportunities to transfer skills and knowledge learned from Instagram to FYC exist. However, student interviewees offered evidence that contradicted survey results. Specifically, all interviewees within the study cited connections between their writing practices on Instagram and FYC composing practices by the end of their interviews. Findings from this study productively extend and nuance prior research on students' extracurricular composing practices, offer new findings that address the lack of empirical data about Instagram and writing process, and have several implications for FYC pedagogy. Particular curricular suggestions are provided along with two guiding principles that extend this dissertation's results.

Online social networks have gained tremendous attention. People learn new knowledge from their online role models, and reshare information causing cascades of online information sharing. Disinformation can also be shared rapidly, and it is difficult to disambiguate the real the fake news on OSNs. Traditional social behavioral theories often fail to fully explain social behavior online due to the discrepancy between how people communicate online versus offline. Modeling information exchange and propagation on OSNs is critical across a variety of domains from business to politics. Many approaches to modeling online social behavior leverage manual pattern matching, semantic networks, and traditional machine learning techniques, where the estimated modeling itself is static. This dissertation proposes a temporal perspective to examine the patterns of online social behavior with deep neural network learning based approaches. The objective of this dissertation is to implement a deep network learning framework that effectively addresses the temporal aspect of online social behavior. The dissertation consists of three articles. All of these articles study online social behavior in a specific context and each one focuses on a different aspect of the online social behavior. Chapter 4 tests the ability of recurrent neural networks to detect online disinformation in financial text data. This study used a temporal recurrent neural network to simultaneously model textual and temporal features and examine their relationships with stock price movement to gain a deeper understanding of how disinformation effects online social behavior. Chapter 5 examined the impact of "influencer effects" in distributed project management. Based on social learning theory, this study utilized deep network dynamics to examine how people learn from their role models in the form of triadic effect. Chapter 6 considers the diffusion aspect in online social behavior and proposes a novel temporal cascade deep network learning model to identify the depth, breath and scale of the diffusion process. In the proposed model, large-scale high-fidelity cascades are simulated to illustrate these sophisticated interactions within different populations. This overarching goal of this dissertation is to model the following: online social behavior in a variety of domains, the effects of influencers on information dissemination, and to quantify the capability of disinformation detection via state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks.

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”The modern library in the network society” A study of cultural politicians and librarians opinions about libraries' use of social media Social media is becoming more and more interacted in our daily lives and Carlsson (2013) argues that today's libraries have undergone major challenges in the digital information technology's entry in the library arena. The new technology has led to sum up in one question: how a library should relate to the digital information technology, the issue has applied in particular the social communications media, such as Facebook, Twitter and more. The purpose of this paper is to examine the culture of politicians and librarians 'perceptions of public libraries' use of social media linked to the libraries and their democracy promotion efforts. This is analyzed from Castells theories about the network society and the digital divide. In summary, the study concluded that the majority of the culture politicians and librarians believe that social media is a part of the future of the library. But they have different views on how to get there, cultural politicians describe the ideas for the library and the use of social media more visionary, while the librarians descriptions are more closely with the business. The possibility of dual communication instead of one-way communication took many respondents as an important part of the library's presence on social media. The importance of the library's democracy promotion efforts to reach out to everyone even those as defined by or at risk of falling into the digital divide is also discussed in the study.

This study seeks to examine the connection between social media usage and the Enneagram personality model. This connection will aid in a better understanding of what motivates individuals to use social media. The information found in this study will be applied to understanding behavioral addiction. This understanding will allow more personalized treatment for individuals already subject to these behaviors and preventive treatment for those more susceptible to behavioral addiction to social media. In order to find the connection between social media use and the Enneagram personality model, a survey including an Enneagram personality inventory, a social media use inventory, and a demographic questionnaire was provided to college students at the University of Central Florida through an online research system. This provides information about an individual's Enneagram type, social media use habits, and other factors that could influence these variables.

Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur turistens beslut påverkas av TripAdvisor som är en form av social media. Slutresultatet blev en beskrivning av TripAdvisors påverkan vid resa för turisten. Arbetet har en deduktiv ansats med en kvantitativ metod. Begreppen vi här använt oss av är Påverkan, Word of Mouth, Beslutsprocessen samt Social Media och runt de här begreppen har vi skapat en teoretisk ram för vår studie. Empirin är en sammanställning av den enkät vi skapat kring den teoretiska ram som finns. Studien mynnar ut i ett resultat och avslutar med att ge exempel på framtida forskning utifrån tankar under studiens skapande.

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