Will those who Tweet vote? Social media clearly create new opportunities for voice, for agency, and potentially for influence. But they create risks as well, because there is no reason to assume that engagement with participatory politics will inevitably or organically develop in positive ways. That's where schools come into the picture, playing…

This work presents an exploratory study of how technology mediates the different types of relationships that are formed in sociotechnical systems. More people each day are connecting with each other through social networks, online communities, and other forms of virtual environments. Whether for education, information seeking, friendship,…

Language serves as a primary tool for structuring identity and loss of language represents the loss of that identity. This study utilizes a social network analysis of Ktunaxa speech community activities for evidence of internally generated revitalization efforts. These behaviors include instances of self-organized emergence. Such emergent behavior…

Statistics show that social media is being used by a large majority of college students. This technological advent brings with it questions about how social media is affecting the relationships of those who use it. This is especially true for the Church and Christian institutions that put a high value on relationships. This study asked 3,645…

Participatory digital media--broadly defined as media such as the Internet, social network sites and cell phones that allow users to interact--are ubiquitous among today's youth. Among teens ages 12-17, 95% have access to the Internet; 70% go online daily; 80% use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter; and 77% have cell phones. Many…

Applying theoretical studies of social capital, social presence, cognitive presence, and community helps researchers understand more fully the phenomenon of online social networks. The debate has moved from the positive and negative effects of online social networks to understanding how they fit into daily life. However, do biblical community…

Social media networks are a worldwide phenomenon encompassing multiple generations of faculty and students. As the World Wide Web has developed and grown, so has the ability of individuals to communicate across hundreds and thousands of miles via these social media networks. An exploratory survey of members in the Association of Educators in…

Emergency response agencies, which operate as command-and-control organizations, push information to members of the public with too few mechanisms to support communication flowing back. Recently, information communication technologies (ICTs) such as social media have challenged this one-way model by allowing the public to participate in emergency…

The purpose of this study was to examine cohort comparisons in levels of resources (e.g., mental health, physical functioning, economic and social resources, and cognitive functioning) for 211 community-dwelling centenarians (whose Mini-Mental Status Examination score was 23 or higher) of phases I and III of the Georgia Centenarian Study. The…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the new role that human resource developers play in the globally connected workplace. Towards that end, this paper explores the changing landscape of self-directed learning (SDL) within the digital ecosystem based on the concept of World 2.0. Design/methodology/approach: This paper reviews and…

Although research on virtual teams is becoming more popular, there is a gap in the understanding of how social capital affects knowledge sharing and creating, and their impacts on virtual team performance. To fill in this gap, this study establishes a framework by incorporating social capital with the SECI model and further examines it with an…

The role social network structure plays in facilitating flows of support between spouses is often overlooked. This study examined whether levels of support between spouses depended on the degree of overlap between spouses' networks. Network overlap may enhance spouses' support capacities by increasing their understanding of each other's support…

Drawing on the embeddedness, varieties of capitalism and macrosociological life course perspectives, we examine how institutional arrangements affect network-based job finding behaviors in the United States and Germany. Analysis of cross-national survey data reveals that informal job matching is highly clustered among specific types of individuals…

Within coalitions of consumer advocates formed to advance health insurance coverage expansions, engaging in united advocacy activities soon after formation might be an important precursor to attaining coalition effectiveness in shaping policy. In this article, the authors apply social network analysis (SNA) to examine how organizational…

Twitter is a microblogging site, one where users send out messages of no more than 140 characters. The messages, known as tweets, can be seen by anyone who follows the account. Twitter is free, but free as in kittens, not as in pizza. To use it effectively, it will take time to learn the language and develop content. When used effectively, Twitter…