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To Homophily or Not to Homophily, That is Your Connection!

Like Connects with Like

Homophily is a singularity that happens frequently in social groups where like minds interact constantly and this notion is methodically regarded in social sciences (Kazi et al., 2020). Moreover, the author states that Homophily is a social theory where people in these networks communicate with those who are like them more so than those who are dissimilar and the motive for starting these groups is for the purpose of likeminded associations and social influence. Further, the author expresses that studies in homophily usually reveal that subjects have a tendency to make friends or connect with others who are similar in race, culture, and gender. Homophily regarding personality serves as a function to reduce cognitive load as when we are familiar and connected with others whose activities and behaviors correspond similarly to ours, less mental exertion is spent in predicting their responses (Laakasuoet et al., 2020). Further from the author relays that Psychological research has revealed that the breadth of homophily is linked to the magnitude of the network as when groups become too all-encompassing from expansion, homophily ceases, and this signifies that positive relations with a trait is not the only factor that cause homophily; but also a perception of superiority that makes the group distinctive from others. 

Algorithms at Work

      Algorithms used in Social media can strengthen homophily and these groups begin to create bias that influence their view of the world which can lead to isolation or divisiveness (Dandekar et al., 2013).  This raises potential risks on social media when these online groups, such as a fitness group I was a part of but no longer, where I saw fitness being objectified by people with well-toned bodies and obese individuals in the group being bullied and scorned.  The extreme opinion that I saw in this social media group was the polarization between lean muscular people and those who were obese where the lean muscular people received all the likes and encouragement for their photos and the obese people received harsh comments and laughing or other than supportive emoji’s for their comments and images. This was a private group so the moderators of the group through their failure to correct this behavior and social media algorithms suggesting this groups to users, therefore promote this negative aspect of homophily and are liable for users feeling isolated.

Refuse or Renounce Negative Social Media Connections

A Facebook friend said to a friend of mine, “your ex-girlfriend is doing well without you, she is taking trips and looking good.” This really didn’t affect him too much because he understood that his ex was wealthy in social currency in the economy of attention. According to Parnell (2017), the individual on social media can become the product and in turn others attribute value to you in likes, shares, and comments. Therefore, her personal self-worth was tied into the amount of likes, shares, and comments she received to which value is attributed. As a result, she only showed her highlight reels, or the great moments and mountaintop experience of her life (Parnell, 2017), that is why the comment didn’t have to much of an effect on him because he knew of her low and mundane points which she would never share on social media. On the other hand, there are friends of mine on Social Media that post all of their woes and get tons of social currency in the form of sympathy likes, shares, and comments. These stress related behaviors being performed over an extended period of time have lasting effects on an individual and have the potential to become full blown mental issues as we quantify our self-worth based on others opinion of what we post (Parnell, 2017). The author of this lecture goes on to say that if we are experiencing symptoms related to substance abuse particular to Social Media such as anxiousness when we don’t have access, compulsively obsessing over how many likes we have amassed, fear of missing out (f.o.m.o.), depression when our lives don’t line up with others’ highlight reel, distracted from our life’s essentials to check notifications, etc. The solution is to practice safe social media in order to maintain social media wellness by recognizing if we have a problem and are experiencing the previously described symptoms. Further from the author suggests that we audit our social media diet, especially on days when we are not feeling too good about ourselves, seeing others living their perceived best lives will only add to our self-worth attrition. Therefore, create a better online experience and audit the people and groups we connected to that make us feel bad or worthless, and purge from the things, brands, or images that you feel are harmful and too engrossed in your self-worthiness (Parnell, 2017). Additionally, the author cautions us to remember that the dark side of Social Media is not necessarily evil innately derivative of being connected to Social Media itself, as Social Media is content driven and the dark, harassing, and bullying content or insecure feelings, stems from being connected and exposed to the darker sides of us people.

John

Dandekar, P., Goel, A., & Lee, D. T. (2013). Biased assimilation, homophily, and the dynamics of polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(15), 5791–5796. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1217220110

Kazi, Z. K., Srivastava, G., & Mago, V. (2020). The homophily principle in social network analysis. Cornell University Library, arXiv.org.

Laakasuo, M., Rotkirch, A., van Duijn, M., Berg, V., Jokela, M., David-Barrett, T., Miettinen, A., Pearce, E., & Dunbar, R. (2020). Homophily in Personality Enhances Group Success Among Real-Life Friends. Frontiers in psychology, 11, 710. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00710

Parnell, B. (2017, June 22). Is social media hurting your mental health? [Video]. YouTube. | Transcript. https://youtu.be/Czg_9C7gw0o

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The Benefits of Social Media

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YOU, Shut Up and Pay Attention!

Capturing Attention in Social Media

            Apologies for being so ominous, but did it work? Now that I have you here, stay and read on for your intellectual stimulation. Social media is currently one of the leading sources for information flow in our day-to-day and professional lives and consequently, we are at the threshold of anattention economy, if not already there, among the ever growing, heavily congested real estate of social media (Lu et al., 2021). Brady et al. (2019) expresses that in boasting over three billion consumers online in social media’s attention economy, content must surpass $15 billion dollars’ worth of ads, newsflashes and propaganda, vicious political arguments, a ton of memes, celebrity updates, and individuals’ unique postings in order to garner any attention to be recognized. The author goes on to suggest that out-standing content is more likely to translate into consumer commitment (e.g., retweeting, commenting, reacting, etc.), and the content that catches or cashes the attention checks and dollars, enjoys the wealth of consumers’ engagement to their online content. Once the fortitude for content to arrest individuals’ attention is established, it has the potential to expand that audience and exercise social influence across multiple areas (Brady et al., 2019). After all that incredible data, not to underwhelm you but the question hovers, how do we gain viewer attention in social media? I will give you a few strategies to ponder.

Get emotional and be expressive! I knew a young man that gave a speech in his public speaking course titled, “Make them laugh, Make them angry, Make them cry.” At the premise of his speech was the notion to the class to invoke any strong emotional response in your public addresses. Brady et al. (2019) relays from research that ethical and demonstrative language apprehends attention far more greater than dispassionate rhetoric or display, and this may be a fraction as to why language exhibiting this method of communications are more likely to see higher distribution on social media platforms. The author goes on to express that moral and passionate displays are more polarizing in initial visual awareness than beige subject matter, and that attention apprehension is linked to increased sharing and retweets.

Shock value. An unsuspecting presentation can abruptly capture our attention as a result of the presence of nudity, blatant rebellion, ghastly images, sexual mentions, rudeness or moral violation and the shock presence spins a typical display into an astounding exhibition (Halvadia & Patel, 2011). The author expresses that Shock value arouses strong feelings within most consumers and eyebrow raising content in an ad significantly raises attention, procures memory and influences consumer activities. Additionally, the author cautions that while shock phenomenon may spawn an unforgettable impression on consumer behaviors and brand impression, one must consider how this style may impact their image or brand be it positive or negative with consideration to your target market, lifestyle, or backlash.

#Hashtagit. Twitter's retweet attribute permits users to share content via forwarding it to their supporters, and a special character known as a hashtag # which precedes a transmitted word with a subsequent tweet of that specific #, tows a page presenting the account of all tweets covering that hashtaged theme (Kenett et al., 2014). The authors express that this in turn generates a community of like minds discoursing that certain hashtag and encourages those of interest in the topic to apply the linked hashtag prefixed to their tweets as a means to increase the volume and audience of their tweet (Kenett et al., 2014). Hashtag # aka pound symbol, received this renaming and was made prominent by Twitter, though they were not the first to utilize this character (Dcosta, 2021).  The author explains that the # ‘s foremost usage on the internet is dated back to 1988 on a site called Internet Realy Chat (IRC) who applied it to groups and themes for transcripts, videos, or images centered on the available information across the early internet; predominantly for the purpose of locating specific sources of significant content. Further, the author reports as Twitter began to garner major attention, consumers who posted brief updates complained of irrelevant subjects, difficulty in finding required information, and an outcry arose for a more user friendly way to enhance communication. Voilà, Twitter users were sated with the now infamous IRC’s # that permeates multiple social media platforms today. As you apply this strategy, use the hashtag, #Johntoldme.

Maintaining Engagement in Social Media

 If getting attention on Social Media is a conundrum, how much more is maintaining it? Bradbury (2016) arguably relays that the traditional lecture has been perceived as an anachronism lacking efficiency based on the communal understanding that an egregious waning of student attention occurs 10–15 min into the discourse or lecture. If this is the debatable case of attention span and maintaining it in the halls of higher learning, how much shorter and disengaging could it be with the power to easily click away with a mouse or a swipe and on the next stimuli?  Let’s look at a few strategies that have been postured to maintain engagement in social media.

Give them an experience. Users are now able to amend, share, and redistribute original content by remixing it from its base intent in order to communicate their own unique experience meaningful to themselves and their followers (Di Gangi & Wasko, 2016). The author adds that this makes Social Media valuable in that it accommodates the desires and interests of consumers, and also reinforces audience interactions for the presenting and marketing of their perspectives to various outlets. Moreover, the author states that when the user forges an experience through social interactions with friends, acquaintances, likeminded persons, ideas, and commonalities this guides the users’ level of engagement higher. Give your audience an experience that relates to them and binds them to your content. For example, the author J.K. Rowling (#HarryPotter) didn’t just give us #Potterheads one manuscript to experience and then go on to another random writing, she wrote several books in a series that built a likeminded community lusting for more. You may or may not experience her type of success but your online series of experience content about, “Thoughts on why the ice cream machine at McDonald’s is always broken,” may draw you millions of followers or haters online, but hey, a million followers is a million followers.

RSVP : répondez s'il vous plait means please reply. In the Black community it is a running joke that Black people don’t RSVP, the jury is still out on that and the data has not been analyzed. However, I have noticed many on social media present an incredible post and when you react to it, there is no response from the writer as if they are just thinking out loud or thinking online rather. Parr, B. (2015) writes that salutation or response caters to our desire for validation and identification with others as it is among our important needs however clandestine for some.  The author explains that all animals crave attention, however, it is only the human animal that acknowledgment is a necessity as this validates our sense of belonging to be among a community that cares about our wellbeing. That true and authenticating reply to well-wisher’s reaction on your timeline, creates a social media context-ed feeling that, “I like you because you think like me (Parr, 2015),” even if that is untrue, good, bad or indifferent; you created engagement beyond attention getting.

Tag me please. An individual's amount of connections has a broad outcome on the distribution of content online (Chen et al., 2017). Additionally, the author shares (pun intended) that the number of friends or followers, provides the shortest route between two associates connected on social media and the power of that association is a convenience of extent, expressive intensity, familiarity, and exchange of services among the persons connected. As a result, Brady et al. (2019) states that should one user having a 1,000 or more connections being linked to a post, concluding in 10% of those connected redistributing it on their own their newsfeed entailing a 1,000 connections also, that single message will have easily transmitted, received reactions, or reproduced to and by well over 100,000 users. If you have something worthwhile to say and you feel you are the voice that America and the world needs to hear, tag someone or two and let the algorithms of Social Media spread your content. Oh, please get permission, that's Social Media etiquette.

References

Bradbury, N. A. (2016, November 8). Attention span during lectures: 8 seconds, 10 minutes, or more? Advances in Physiology Education. Retrieved July 21, 2022, from https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/advan.00109.2016

Brady, W. J., Crockett, M. J., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2019). The MAD Model of Moral Contagion: The role of motivation, attention and design in the spread of moralized content online. Advance online publication. 10.31234/osf.io/pz9g6

  Chen, X., Van Der Lans, R., & Phan, T. Q. (2017). Uncovering the Importance of Relationship Characteristics in Social Networks: Implications for Seeding Strategies. Journal of Marketing Research, 54(2), 187–201. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.12.0511

Dcosta, C. (2021, January 14). History of hashtags introduced by Twitter for trending of the topics! Mindstorm. https://mindstorm.in/blog/history-of-hashtags-introduced-by-twitter-for-trending-of-the-topics

Di Gangi , P., & Wasko, M. (2016). (PDF) Social Media Engagement theory: - researchgate. Researchgate.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299357565_Social_Media_Engagement_Theory

Halvadia , N., & Patel, R. (2011). Shock advertising and its Impact. Researchgate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/216570873_Shock_Advertising_And_Its_Impact

Kenett, D. Y., Morstatter, F., Stanley, H. E., & Liu, H. (2014). Discovering social events through online attention. PloS one, 9(7), e102001. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102001

Lu, D., Ruan, B., Lee, M., Yilmaz, Y., & Chan, T. M. (2021). Good practices in harnessing social media for scholarly discourse, knowledge translation, and education. Perspectives on medical education, 10(1), 23–32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-020-00613-0

Parr, B. (2015, March 3). 7 ways to capture someone's attention. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved July 21, 2022, from https://hbr.org/2015/03/7-ways-to-capture-someones-attention

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