This dissertation explores the impact of technology on social life. Focusing on webcam-mediated audio-visual conversations between Japanese families in the United States and their extended family members in Japan, I examine how technology participates in creating an interactional space for the families to manage intra- and intergenerational relationships. Combining ethnography with turn-by-turn analyses of naturally occurring webcam interactions, I specifically investigate how cultural, discursive, and family practices are transformed in innovative ways and how families adapt to the emerging mediated space. Looking at how interactional activities are coordinated across spaces, I show that webcam interactions constitute a new type of shared living space in which multigenerational family relationships are created and managed. I call this emerging space the virtual ie (‘house’ and ‘stem-family system’). In this virtually conjoined space, children, parents, and grandparents are visually familiarized with each other’s households and socialized to each other’s virtual presence. Even though the ie is no longer a juridical unit of co-residence, my goal is to discuss the significance of the ie in understanding how transnational Japanese families can dwell in a shared living space created by webcam interactions. My analyses demonstrate how webcam encounters create a stage for participants to perform various identities in interactions. Learning to talk and participate in such webcam interactions, children are socialized to their ie belongings and identities. Additionally, even though far-flung children do not provide physical and daily care for their parents in Japan, they actively take care of elder parents’ media environments. I demonstrate that what I call media care practices add another context for adult children living abroad to carry out their filial responsibilities. I also show that the management of webcam visual fields creates a type of social field that reflects local understandings of social positioning in ie structures. How participants decide to display themselves to others by manipulating the webcam’s visual fields provides a new way to demonstrate various social relationships and responsibilities over long distances. From this perspective, a virtual ie is not merely a reflection of an ideological understanding of Japanese families, but an interactional achievement facilitated by webcams. / text

Social interactions affect the onset and maintenance of major depressive disorder (MDD; e.g., Hammen, 2006). However, little research has examined depressed people’s communications in daily life. This dissertation’s primary aim is to test three models of the association between MDD and everyday communication. The disclosure model suggests that people with MDD, particularly if currently depressed, communicate about themselves and their distress. The social disengagement model suggests that people with MDD, particularly if currently depressed, communicate less. The selectivity model suggests that people with MDD, particularly if currently depressed, communicate more negatively only with people with whom they have closer relationships. This dissertation’s second aim is to investigate associations between communication patterns of individuals with MDD and residual depressive symptoms. Sixteen women with MDD and 15 never-depressed women submitted a year’s worth of their e-mails with up to ten correspondents. For participants with MDD the year included at least one month of depression and one month of remission. E-mails were submitted to computerized text analysis. For the primary research question, the study design was conceptualized as a 2x2 between-subjects (MDD vs. never-depressed) x within-subjects (currently depressed vs. not currently depressed) ANOVA missing one cell (never-depressed individuals with currently depression). Data were e-mails nested within correspondents within participants and were analyzed using multi-level regression. For the second research question, OLS regression analyses were used. People with MDD e-mailed their correspondents marginally more frequently when in a depressive episode, suggesting increased efforts at engagement. During episodes, however, participants showed less verbal synchrony with their correspondents. This suggests that despite reaching out more, currently depressed people are less attuned with others. People with major depressive disorder used more positive emotion words and fewer negative emotion words than never-depressed controls. Although there was a general pattern among participants of using more negative emotion words with correspondents with whom they had closer relationships, this tendency was accentuated in depressed individuals in current major depressive episodes. These findings are consistent with the view that individuals – particularly when depressed – regulate aspects of their communication to protect and manage their social relationships. / text

Cyberbullying incidents often occur in the presence of other bystanders. The inaction of bystanders can augment the deleterious effects of bullying on a victim. However, bystanders can often take action to stop a cyberbullying incident or offer support to the victim. Two studies examined the association between several variables which were expected to influence the propensity for a bystander to take action in cyberbullying incidents -- the number of bystanders, the depersonalization/anonymity of the bystander, and the relational closeness between the bystander and the victim. Moreover, the first study addressed the need for more descriptive research into cyberbullying by examining the strategies and topics used by perpetrators. Results of both Study 1 and Study 2 provided support for the diffusion of responsibility effect. Specifically, a higher number of bystanders was negatively associated with a bystander's propensity to intervene and stop the incident. In Study 2, this effect was moderated by both depersonalization and closeness. That is, individuals were most likely to intervene when they did not feel depersonalized, the victim was a close friend, and there were a low number of bystanders. Moreover, in both Study 1 and Study 2 the perceived anonymity of bystanders negatively related to their propensity to intervene, and closeness with the victim was associated with a higher likelihood to intervene and support the victim. Finally, descriptive data illustrated the types and strategies of cyberbullying episodes which occur in a college-aged sample. Altogether, the results shed light on the interplay of context, relationships, and technology in the behavior of bystanders to a cyberbullying episode. / text

With the propagation of individuals' presence in various online environments from social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and dating websites (e.g., Match.com, eHarmony.com) to personal blogs (e.g., WordPress.com) and employment websites (e.g., linkedIn.com), the need to understand online social dynamics has grown. In many cases, people are experiencing introductions online rather than in-person. In the absence of non-verbal information, one potentially important source of information available in virtual environments and communication is in the way people use language. With the development of computerized word count tools, it has become increasingly feasible to analyze large samples of text-based stimuli (e.g., Ireland, et al., 2011; Mehl, Gosling, & Pennebaker, 2006; Pennebaker, Mehl, & Niederhoffer, 2003; Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010). These analyses have been able to reliably reveal a number of traits (e.g., Big Five, gender) and states (e.g., depression) about the authors of the texts. In a study of approximately 500 dyads, participants were asked to spend 10 minutes in an online chat room getting to know an individual for whom they were unacquainted. Participants then rated one another on a number of personality and individual difference traits. Analyses focused on sample-level, pair-level, and trait-level self-other agreement within the sample. Additionally, linguistic mediators of the self-other agreement were investigated. A Brunswick Lens Model was employed in order to interpret the relationship between linguistic cues and overall judgmental accuracy. Results revealed that self-other agreement in the online chat environment was achieved slightly above chance. Traits that were perceived accurately included Extraversion, Political Liberalism, and Tradition. Results also revealed that there were a number of valid linguistic markers to predicting accurate personality judgment. These cues, however, were rarely utilized to achieve accuracy. Also, counter to hypotheses, linguistic style matching (or the degree to which individuals were mimicking each other linguistically) was not predictive of self-other agreement. It was, however, significantly related to interaction quality. Taken together, the findings revealed that computer-mediated environments are a valid context for forming impressions. However, valid cues are either not available or not detected by perceivers. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed as well as areas for future research. / text

This study addresses a gap in the second language writing research through examining processes occurring during the pre-writing and drafting stages of adult second language learners' writing when computer-mediated communication (CMC) pre-writing activities are involved. The theoretical framework adopted in the study is Writing-as-process approach with a focus being the pre-writing and drafting stages of the writing process. The design of the study is a parallel component mixed method design with an ongoing dominant qualitative stage and a nested less-dominant quantitative stage. In the qualitative stage of the project, two case studies were conducted: a group case study of the 60 intermediate level ESL learners who participated in the study and a more focused instrumental case study of eight learners selected based on their post-treatment writing gains. The research focus was on the social environment, including the learning task, peer interaction, mode of communication, and the intertextual connections between pre-writing discussions of the participants and their first drafts. The qualitative stage findings suggested that the CMC mode of communication (synchronous vs. asynchronous) affected differently the participants' patterns of interaction as well as the intertextual connections of their first drafts with the pre-writing discussions. In the quantitative stage, the researcher compared the first-draft writings of students who participated in asynchronous and synchronous pre-writing discussions (treatment) through the analysis of eight textual features of students' first drafts, namely: (1) syntactic complexity, (2) the amount of information present in a single focus, (3) the quantity of overall information present, (4) lexical information per clause, (5) vocabulary complexity, (6) rhetorical soundness, (7) presentation and development of main ideas, and (8) overall language use. The first five textual features, presented with continuous scores, were analyzed using five ANCOVA tests with significance level alpha being set at .05; the concomitant variables were the corresponding pre-treatment scores for each of the measures. Textual features 6-8, presented with ordinal scores, were analyzed through two-tailed Mann-Whitney U tests. While no differences were found for any of the eight proposed features when the writings of the participants in the asynchronous CMC and the synchronous CMC groups were compared, the consideration of the qualitative findings suggested that further analysis of an additional textual aspect of students' first drafts, more specifically - distinct lexical items, could be informative. The quantitative analysis of distinct lexical items of students' writings completed after synchronous and asynchronous pre-writing discussions was performed through the application of a two-tailed t-test. The results of this analysis led to the conclusion that at significance level alpha = .05, the CMC mode in which the pre-writing discussion was completed influenced differently students' first drafts on a lexical level: the intertextual connections between the pre-writing interactions and the first drafts of the participants from the asynchronous group at a lexical level were significantly stronger than those of their counterparts who participated in synchronous pre-writing discussions.

This study examines the impact of political information conveyed through computer-mediated social networks. Using a popular social networking website, Facebook, a randomized field experiment involving Georgia State University undergraduates explores the extent to which computer-mediated peer-to-peer communication can increase political knowledge. For this experiment two Facebook profiles were created, one to administer information about the 2009 Atlanta mayoral election and the other to administer timely entertainment information. Students were randomly assigned one of these profiles to “friend.” Students choosing not to “friend” their assigned profile were aggregated to create an additional control condition. Treatments were administered to those who “friended” their assigned profile for the seven days preceding the mayoral election. To assess the transfer of knowledge between the profiles and the students a subsequent in-person survey was conducted (N=374). Results reveal that being exposed to political information by a peer through a social networking website increases the probability of recalling at least some of that information by 18.2 percent. Notably, the same method of exposure to entertainment information produces no significant effects on the recall of that information.

The purpose of this project is to investigate factors that can be used to explain orthographic variation in City of Heroes (CoH), a virtual community based in an online role-playing game. While a number of models of variation exist for speech, to date, no statistical models of orthographic variation in virtual communities exist. By combining traditional variationist methods with computational text processing, this project documents socially meaningful alternations in the linguistic code regarding two types of sociolinguistic variables, namely spelling and use of abbreviations. For each of the two variable types, two dependent variables are posited, i.e. the alternation between: 1) –ing and –in in durative verbal aspect marking in forms such as coming and comin, 2) –s and –z markers of plurality in words such as cats and catz, 3) abbreviated and full forms for referential abbreviation in terms such as Atlas Park and AP, and 4) abbreviated and full forms for conative abbreviations in terms such as looking for team and lft. The study investigates the role that the following factors play in explaining orthographic variation in CoH: 1) message length, 2) standardness of the immediate linguistic environment, 3) cognitive load, 4) relative proximity in the virtual space, 5) degree of message publicness, 6) experience in the community, 7) avatar gender, and 8) social group affiliation. Through mixed-effects, multivariate models, the study demonstrates that each of the predictors has some role in explaining the orthographic variability observed in the textual record of the community. Moreover, interactions between some of the predictors prove to be significant contributors to the models, which highlight the importance of addressing interaction terms in models of language variation. The findings from the study suggest that the socio-contextual meaning of particular structures in the CoH community lead authors to make linguistic choices, which are realized as alternations in the linguistic code. Finally, implications for the study of language variation in general are discussed. / text

With the improvement of computer technology and the prevalence of the Internet, learning activities taking place in cyberspace by means of computer-mediated communication have become more common and accessible than even a decade ago. Being interested in how politeness phenomena as universal principles in human interaction played a role in the process of online collaborative learning in a graduate-level course, I conducted a naturalistic inquiry to explore students’ interaction through the lens of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory (1987). I analyzed the exchanges of 18 students divided into four teams with a consideration for such contextual factors as concerns about netiquette, time, modes of online communication, discourse functions, and sense of community. Influenced by the tradition of interpretivist/constructivist research paradigm, I adopted diverse data collection methods and discourse analytical techniques. Data are reported as a case study of a purposefully selected focal team of five students with supporting evidence interweaving multiple data sources (online discussion, self-reflective blog entries, self-report portfolios, peer/self assessments, field notes, videotapes of voice chat sessions, audiotapes of interviews, and online survey responses). Given the context of students being required to work collaboratively as a team throughout the semester, the findings of this study suggested that the focal team used a variety of politeness strategies to establish cohesion among members and to moderate the force imposed by presupposing too much underlying solidarity. Five contextual factors also emerged as influencing the focal team’s use of politeness strategies: norms/convention, online communication medium, topics and content of discussion, social distance, and personal differences. Instructional technology is subject to innovation and is meant to facilitate learning. Incorporating new technology (e.g., Second Life) into instructional settings can create new opportunities for learning on which learners’ use of politeness strategies depends. Thus, this study about politeness in an online collaborative learning context not only contributes to enriching views of politeness theory, but also in being able to help prepare learners to collaborate effectively in new immersive learning environments with comfort in the ways of fostering awareness of face-saving concerns to avoid or redress face threat situations that may damage team collaboration and lead to a negative learning experience. / text

This study is about graduate students’ discourse practices in a classroom text-based synchronous computer-mediated discussion (SCMD). Cultural historical activity theory (in short, Activity Theory) is the primary theoretical lens through which the data are analyzed. Engeström’s (1987) Activity System model among the various theoretical positions or perspectives of activity theorists has guided the overall process of the study, especially having the researcher focus on the identification and description of the model’s six key elements: subject, object, tool, community, rule, and division of labor. Several emerging themes were identified. An activity system in SCMD is situated in multiple dimensions of context: physical/biological, cultural/institutional, social/ emotional, and cognitive/intellectual dimensions; instead of a single utterance, a topical pair needs to be investigated as a unit of analysis in SCMD research; a collective unit of actions emerges through the discourse activity; and, finally, an ecological view is needed to understand an activity system as a whole. Based on these emerging themes, I conclude with a modified model of the activity system in the situation of dialogical transactions such as SCMD. / text

This qualitative interpretive research study of students participating in online discussion forums explores how the socio-constructivist nature of online discussion forums fosters the development of historical thinking. The study also focuses attention on the development of the historical understandings of students as they participant in online discussion forums in particular significance, empathy and agency. Set within the context of discussion forums and framed by socio-constructivism and historical thinking, the study uncovered what it means for students to “do history” and how students construct their own historical narratives as they interact with their peers online. Data collection included transcripts of online discussion forums, interviews with participants and the collection of other related artifacts. Findings suggest that the online discussion forums facilitate socio-constructivism in the classroom by providing students with extended opportunities to engage with their peers ideas and assumptions. Additionally, the findings also conclude that students understanding of significance, empathy and agency are related to their interactions with both the official and unofficial curriculums and the temporal and physical proximity of examples to students lived experiences. / text