Naaman, Mor, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai. “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” ACM Digital Library, ACM, dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718953. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.
Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.
Summary
In “Why we Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”, the author raises the question of understanding why and how microblogging tools are used. In this paper, the data is analyzed by understanding user intent on Twitter and looking at the construction of social networks in respect to geography. Based on their analysis they found that users had these main intentions: daily chatter, conversations, sharing information, and reporting news. Additionally, they found users had three different main roles in different communities: information source, information searcher, and as a friend. Similar roles were also expressed in “Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams”, expressing that there are three types of user activities, “Information seeking, information sharing, and social activities”. However, this paper has a different focus on understanding trends within the messages themselves such as their content and what type of user they are called informers or meinformers. There are more meinformers than informers, but based on friends and follower numbers, informers are more well liked. Both papers help shape an idea that Twitter is a site used for quick expression of an idea, thought, or expression of a feeling, showing user do have a distinct behavior patterns and connections with one another that can be analyzed to see trends.
Reflection
Both of these papers provide an overview of what kind of data and correlations can be found from Tweets, which I find useful for gaining insight into Social Computing in general such as determining types of users, geographical connection between users, and the response of other socially based on types of users. They both came to conclusions about their original questions. However, I think providing options for possible applications for the conclusions could have been beneficial. Despite this, the papers did a good job at creating some further questions for more research based off topics covered in them.
I found the second paper about how users’ who are “me now” focused had less followers than informers, which makes sense, but I often feel the “me now” posted are created for the reason of getting attention from others. The data provided seemed to contradict the individual’s personal goal of receiving more attention, because it inherently makes them less attractive for others to follow. Therefore, it is is interesting to wonder why the individual continues to make “me now” posts if, based off this research, it is not accomplishing the task of bringing in more attention (or friends). Logically, if a user was a machine, it would notice this and switch to the informer role, but as humans, we struggle to reflect on ourselves and behaviours in such a way. This brings some curiosity in my mind on how we portray ourselves on social media in connection with what social media provides for us mentally and emotionally. I am not sure how that could be made quantifiable, but it’s an interesting question to me.
Questions
Some other research questions that I became curious about from these papers were:
Is there any connection to a change in language within a user’s tweeting from recent tweets the user was tagged in, celebrity following, or news following?
For example: If User A follows Kim Kardashian, and Kim starts using the word “kitties” to express upset, will the user in the future start using that language as a result of following Kim? How much affect is there (if any) or correlation is your social media language based on others such as celebrities?
Do we see a trend that users in America don’t follow other users in foreign countries, but non-Americans follow more Americans? Does this mean the rest of the world is more in touch with American society than Americans are with other societies?
For example: The whole world was watching the last American election, but did American’s care about any other world elections?
