Feature Channels: Social Media

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A new study – the first to look at social media’s effect on memory – suggests posting personal experiences on social media makes those events much easier to recall.

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Keeping teens focused on what’s happening in class rather than their electronic device is a tall order, given that 73 per cent of them have access to a smartphone — and most would prefer to be on Instagram than at school. But what if making, sharing, liking and commenting on photos was part of the curriculum instead of a forbidden activity?

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Increasingly, social scientists use multiple forms of communication to engage broader audiences with their research and contribute to solutions of the pressing problems of our time. Yet, in academia, it is unclear whether these efforts to communicate with the public should count when colleges and universities are evaluating scholars.

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It appears that people who actively participate in demonstrations during social movements on behalf of those dissimilar to them do so for two important reasons.

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For older adults, having more or closer family members in one’s social network decreases his or her likelihood of death, but having a larger or closer group of friends does not, finds a new study that will be presented at the 111th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

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Youth cyberbullying is dramatically more likely to occur between current or former friends and dating partners than between students who were never friends or in a romantic relationship, suggests a new study that will be presented at the 111th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

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While studying the rapid growth of the therapeutic boarding school industry, Jessica A. Pfaffendorf observed that troubled young men in at least one program most often displayed a type of “hybrid masculinity.” This observation — young men incorporating more feminine behaviors in their social interactions while at boarding school — presented a notable incongruence.

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Death and mourning were largely considered private matters in the 20th century, with the public remembrances common in previous eras replaced by intimate gatherings behind closed doors in funeral parlors and family homes. But social media is redefining how people grieve, and Twitter in particular — with its ephemeral mix of rapid-fire broadcast and personal expression — is widening the conversation around death and mourning, two University of Washington (UW) sociologists say.

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Social media is redefining how people grieve, bringing conversations about death back into the public realm, University of Washington sociologists conclude in a new study. And Twitter in particular, they say, is broadening the discourse around who may engage when someone dies.

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An alternative to using Twitter geotags and hashtags to identify community members who have experienced collective trauma, such as a school shooting, shows promise in helping researchers rapidly assess local effects. The approach, developed by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, was deployed to study the impact of deadly gun violence at UC Santa Barbara, Northern Arizona University and Oregon’s Umpqua Community College.

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he economic crisis and austerity are having an unexpected consequence: more young men striving for gym-fit, photo-perfect bodies that they use to create a social media brand.

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People trying to shed pounds — but who hang out with heavier pals regularly — are more likely to lose weight if they include thinner people in their social lives, according to a study by a Baylor University researcher.

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Scientists at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) have revealed the network infrastructure used by Netflix for its content delivery, by mimicking the film request process from all over the world and analysing the responses.

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By now, the wearying trope of internet outrage is a global touchstone, especially when it comes to "angry young men."

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A survey of university turf students regarding social media use and attitudes suggests ways to increase student engagement.

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Women who engaged on social media after a breast cancer diagnosis expressed more deliberation about their treatment decision and more satisfaction with the path they chose, a new study finds.

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From politicians and celebrities, companies and organizations to individuals of certain nationalities and the socially disadvantaged, the list of parties affected by hate speech in social media is long. Insulting, threatening or derogatory comments are commonplace in today's digital world. The potential consequences of such virtual witch-hunts - whether justified or otherwise - include a loss of reputation, resignations, losing one's job, social isolation or falling share prices. Predominant opinion suggests that it is the supposed online anonymity which decreases the inhibitions of trolls on the internet.

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A new study by a Johns Hopkins Carey Business School professor finds a strong contemporaneous correlation does exist between the mood of a day’s worth of tweets about a particular stock and the performance of that stock.

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The ‘parent poll’ carried out by a team at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues found that only 15% of parents thought that popular social media sites, such as Facebook, provided a positive influence on a young person’s character.

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Realizing the risks of social media, major news organizations have created guidelines for employees regarding how to use these outlets, separate from the companies' existing codes of conduct. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the guidelines so far.

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Gay social and sexual networking app Grindr is an effective means through which to distribute HIV self-testing kits among men who have sex with men who have a high risk for contracting the virus.

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Exposure to prompts to make in-app purchases in mobile games has a significant impact on children's purchasing behaviour, according to a recent study funded by the European Commission involving Dr Giuseppe Veltri, who now works at the University of Leicester Department of Media Communication.

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Government agencies are having difficulty tracking potential terrorist attacks, since terrorists have developed new ways to communicate besides social media. A new framework developed by researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York is able to predict future terrorist attacks by recognizing patterns in past attacks.

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While events like the Arab Spring brought hope that the internet could inspire the growth of democracy in authoritarian countries, a new study offers a reality check.

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A public health measure and a slippery slope. That's how Iowa State University experts describe the decision by London's mayor to ban ads with "unrealistic body images" from the city's public transit system.

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Yong Ge, an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Informatics Department of Computer Science, has developed a tool that leverages social media data to help analyze use patterns of illegal drugs by young adults across the country. The National Institutes of Health funded his work.

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Hiding online is harder than you'd think

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Find Political Experts, The Latest Research and Polls in the U.S. Politics News Source

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A study recently published in Ergonomics in Design noted the results of an evaluation of 20 popular apps for usability, including Google Drive, Skype, Doodle Poll, Gmail, Windows Hotmail, CoSketch, and DropBox.

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In a computational analysis of the words used by more than 65,000 consenting Facebook users in some 10 million messages, it was discovered that women use language that is warmer and more agreeable than men.

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A study shows which psychological characteristics of some new mothers may affect how they use Facebook to show off their baby.

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By detecting semantic inconsistencies in content, researchers have developed a new technique for identifying promotional infections of websites operated by government and educational organizations.

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Youths who use social media are more likely to develop a “pick-and-choose” approach to customize their faith — regardless of what their religious tradition teaches — than those who do not use social media, according to a Baylor University study.

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The power to explore online social media movements -- from the pop cultural to the political -- with the same algorithmic sophistication as top experts in the field is now available to journalists, researchers and members of the public from a free, user-friendly online software suite released today by scientists at Indiana University. The Web-based tools, called the Observatory on Social Media, or "OSoMe" (pronounced "awesome"), provide anyone with an Internet connection the power to analyze online trends, memes and other online bursts of viral activity. The tools are online at online at osome.iuni.iu.edu.

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College students who spend hours scrolling through Facebook are actually more prepared for the real world than we once thought. That's according to Wichita State University researcher David (Jingjun) Xu, who found that students who look at friends' status updates and receive social feedback through likes and comments on Facebook are more confident in their ability to perform job-related tasks when they graduate.