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Homophily & Algorithms on Social Media!!!

Potential benefits of connecting & developing homophily through social media!!!!

 Social comparison theory suggests that people use others as a measuring stick when judging themselves. It’s also been found though that users attempt to avoid such upward comparisons and instead seek out individuals worse off than themselves which helps their self-esteem (Greitemeyer, 2016). Individuals who feel isolated by their interests or beliefs may seek out connections with those with similar beliefs on social media. Homophily in moral purity is a excellent predictor of potential connections on social media (Dehghani et al, 2016). Homophily can be beneficial for helping users find more connections and friends, who will then agree with their posts, like, and comment on them. Algorithms take a look at user profiles and activity. They then can make predictions and suggestions for like minded groups to join as well as other users with the greatest connection potential (Elkabani & Aoo Khachfeh, 2015). Users tend to purposely seek out confirmation of their beliefs and avoid clicking on or seeking out opposing information. While homophily may lead to positive feelings, it can also help individuals from learning and growing. It can also lead to lower levels of tolerance of those who are different. Homophily can lead to bullying, extremism, and has even been to terrorism.

Social media has influenced how we see ourselves, others, and how we interact. The friendships we are making, despite the unprecedented diversity available through social media, continue to follow a long-established concept homophily. Homophily (love of same) refers to the concept that people (connect) with people similar to themselves more than with a diversity of (others). This phenomenon has been widely used to explain certain sociological concepts like segregation, social mobility, and etc (Bisgin et al, 2012). Social media algorithms are now the basis for all social media platforms. Algorithms used by Facebook are designed to show people the content the algorithms determine most relevant to them, based on their use history. Twitter like Facebook have decided on implementing algorithms that base on relevance not on chronology. Instagram is a more recent adopter of algorithm-based feed’s in social media. “As technology becomes more advanced, algorithm-based feeds will become more intelligent and engagement will be the only metric that matters” (Agrawal, 2016).

 References:

Greitemeyer, T. (2016). Facebook and people’s self-esteem: The impact of the number of other users’ facebook friends. Computer in Human Behaviors, 59,182-186.

Dehghani, M., Johnson, K., Hoover, J., Sagi, E., Garten, J., Parmer, N. J. & Graham, J. (2016). Purity homophily in social networks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(3),366-375

Elkabani, I., & AooKhachfeh, R. (2015). Homophily-based link prediction in the facebook online social network: A rough sets approach. Journal of Intelligent systems, 24(4),491-503

Retrieved from: https//www.medium.com/ealisabethtullo/dangers-of-homophily-in-social-media-1e7d13ebe138 Alisabeth Tullo. 2017. Dangers of homophily in social media.

Bisgin, H., Agarwal, N., & Xu, X. (2012). A study of homophily on social media. Pp.17-34. Hershey, PA

Agrawal, AJ. 2016. “what do social media algorithms mean for you?” Forbes.com website: www.forbes.com/sites/ajagrawal/2016/04/20/what-do-social-media-algorithms-mean-for-you

Retrieved from: https//:www.medium.com/@menosfun/do-you-know-what-homophily-and-algorithms-are-doing-in-your-social-media-6b08e555aebb

Kathleen McClain, Oct, 26, 2017 Do you know what homophily and algorithms are doing in your social media?

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Social media Algorithms!!!

A national survey asked 323 US adults about paralinguistic digital affordances (PDAs) and how these forms of lightweight feedback within social media were associated with their perceived social support. People perceived PDAs (likes, favorites, and upvotes) as socially supportive both quantitatively and qualitatively even without implicit meaning associated with them. People who are highly sensitive about what others think of them and have high esteem are more likely to perceive higher social support from PDAs. Social support is the “extent to which an individual believes that his or her needs for support, information, and feedback are fulfilled’ (Procidano, et al, 1983). The moderating role of well-being variables such as loneliness, self-esteem, and public self-consciousness could help to explain these relationships. This investigation will explore how quantity, perceived quality, and the moderating role of well-being variables impacts perceived social support. Public self-consciousness is a personality trait that indicated a tendency of a person to direct attention outward and be more affected by what other people think or say (Fenigstein et al, 1975).

         Loneliness is a feeling of lack of connectedness with others or perceived social isolation and can occur even when one is surrounded by other people (Cacioppo et al, 2010).

         Self-esteem is a trait variable that indicates how highly one thinks of oneself. People with low self-esteem are often more affected by negative comments and put less value on their opinions and ideas than those with high self-esteem and often lack social support (Fenigstein et al, 1975).

         Social engagement is defined as individuals’ participation in formal (e.g. an association or club) and informal (e.g. a group of friends) collective activities of social groups (Prohaska et al, 2012). Social media use is found to affect individuals’ communication behaviors by providing interactive and convenient features of communication space in which many others from various backgrounds are connected (Shirky, 2010). The current study examines a mediating mechanism among the psychological origins of individuals’ needs (i.e. need to belong), digital media use (i.e. social media and smartphones) and social engagement. Individuals’ need to belong may be positively related with their tendency to interact with others by using communication tools including social media and mobile phones (Ledbetter et al, 2011).

References:

Procidano ME, Heller K. Measures of perceived social support from friends and from family: three validation studies. American Journal of Community Psychology 1983;11:1-24.

Fenigstein A, Scheier MF, Buss AH. Public and private self-consciousness: assessment and theory. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology 1975;43:522-527.

Cacioppo JT, Hawkley LC, Thisted RA. Perceived social isolation makes me sad:5-year cross-lagged analyses of loneliness and depressive symptomatology. 2010:25;453-463

Retrieved from: Wohn DY, Carr CT, & Hayes RA. 2016. How affective is a “like”? The effect of paralinguistic digital affordances on perceived social support. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social networking 1979;562-566.

Https://www.doi-org.library.capella.edu/10.1089/cyber.2016.0162

Prohaska TR, Anderson LA, Binstock RH, eds. 2012. Public health for an aging society. Baltimore, MD\

Shirky C. 2010. Cognitive surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age. New York, NY

Ledbetter AM, Mazar JP, DeGroot JM, et al. Attitudes toward online social connection and self-disclosure as predictors of Facebook communication and relational closeness. 2011;38:27-53

Retrieved from: Kim Y, Wang Y. & Oh J. 2016. Digital media use and social engagement: How social media and smartphone use influence social activities of college students. Cyberpsychology. Behavior and social networking 19(4)264-269.

https://doi-org.lirbary.capella.edu/10.089/cyber.2015.0408

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Attention Spans!!!!

Using the internet is physically changing our brains so that we have shorter attention spans and worse memory, major study has suggested. By academics from Oxford, Kings College London, Harvard and western Sydney University found smartphones were also replacing our ability to remember facts while tricking us into thinking we are smarter than we actually are. It comes as earlier this month Ofcom found that the average British adult is now spending 50 whole days a year online. OH MY!!!!! Experiments reviewed in the study showed that people who spent their time constantly flipping between short activities online “ require greater cognitive effort to maintain concentration”. 

The endless stream of notifications and digital distractions were found to be physically influencing the brain, with those affected showing less grey matter in the cerebral areas the associated with maintaining focus. 

Internet has an immediate impact on our ability to concentrate with people displaying a reduced capacity to maintain attention after activities such as internet shopping. Whereas offline activities such as reading a magazine showed no such impact. Multitasking online was even found to make people less effective at multitasking off online. 

One experiment cited showed that a group of people searching online found information faster than another using the encyclopedias, but were less able to recall the information accurately. Other studies showed that the internet was also deceiving people into thinking they were smarter than they are as they “blurred the lines”  between their own memories and what they can easily look up on ever present smartphones. 

The study noted that there could be an upside to this reliance on the internet as a virtual memory in the future as  it could free up brain power for other activities although it did not speculate what these could be. The academics found that the social side of our brains acted in a way similar ways online as offline (Wright, 2019).

References:

Mike Wright,.2019. Internet is giving us shorter attention spans and worse memories, major study suggests. Retrieved from: https//www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/06/06/internet-giving-us-shorter-attention-span-worse-memories

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Dangers of Homophily in Social Media:

Social comparison theory suggests that people use others as a measuring stick when judging themselves. One study found that people who looked at the profile pictures of attractive users were more dissatisfied with themselves and their appearance afterwards. Individuals who feel isolated by their interests or beliefs, may seek out connection with those with similar beliefs on social media. It’s referred to as homophily or the love the same (Dehghani et al, 2016). Homophily in moral purity is a excellent predictor of potential connections on social media (Dehghani et al, 2016). It’s been found that users with more Facebook friends have better well-being. Then when the individual’s new friends like and respond to posts, their self-esteem grows (Greitmeyer, 2016). Algorithms take a look at user profiles and activity. Facebook uses an algorithm for determining what users see in their newsfeed (Bessi et al, 2016). While homophily may lead to positive feelings, it can also keep individuals from learning and growing. It can also lead to lower levels of tolerance of those who are different.

Homophily can lead to bullying, extremes and has even been linked to terrorism. It’s easy to feel powerful enough to bully or terrorize when the individual feels safe and surrounded by like minded individuals. Social media does however help terrorists to create credibility and keep their message out there (Huey, 2015). However, is to education people on the backfire effect so that they can be more aware of it when it occurs. Another way to help it would be to keep areas like politics, science, and conspiracies out of the algorithms. Social media as well as individuals can encourage fact checking. Used to prevent terrorists from being able to make themselves and their messages seem cool, requires the creation of satirical memes. It uses knowledge of popular culture to mock terrorists, and therefore make them less appealing (Huey, 2016).

References:

Bessi, A., Zollo, F., Vicario, M.D., Puliga, M., Scala, A. et al. (2016). Users polarization on Facebook and YouTube. Pols,11(8),1-24

Dehghani, M., Johnson, K., Hoover, J., Sagi, E., Garten, J., Parmar, N.J., and Graham, J. (2016). Purity homophily in social networks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(3), 366-375.

Greitemeyer, T. (2016). Facebook and people’s self-esteem: The impact of the number of other user’s Facebook friends. Computer in Human Behavior, 59, 182-186.

Huey, L. (2015). This is not your mother’s terrorism: Social media =, online radicalization, and the practice of political jamming. Journal of Terrorism Research, 6, 1-16.

Retrieved from: https://www.medium.com/@alisabethtullo/dangers-of-homophily-in-social-media

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Love

This phenomenon is called homophily “meaning love of the same” (McPherson et all. 2001). Homophily can be directly observed in the virtual worlds using analytical techniques, for example (Huang et al. 2009) should that in the Massive Online Role-Playing Game Everquest players tended to interact with other players of similar age, experience and who lived near them in the real world. The fact only way they looked for homophily and didn’t find it was in gender, something that they put down to the fact that 32% of people play the game with a romantic partner.

Homophily has predictive power in social media, so much so that researchers looking at last.fm can predict real life friendship by examining on-line interaction should interests and location (Bischoff, 2012). Homophily is so powerful a principle that whole communities on Facebook can be modelled by extrapolating from as little as 20% of the population (Mislove et al. 2010). Homophily is a good example of where an existing social theory can now be explored numerically, and be easily verified in a wide variety of different networks, because the data is held digitally.

 References:

Bischoff, K. (2012). We love rock “n” roll: analyzing and predicting friendship links in Last.fm. Presented at the WebSci ’12: Proceedings of the 3rd Annual ACM Web Science Conference.

Huang, Y., Shen, C., Williams, D., & Contractor, N. (2009). Virtually There: Exploring Proximity and Homophily in a virtual world. International Conference in Computational Science and Engineering, 4,354-359.

McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J.M. (2001). Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks. Annual review of sociology, 27,415-444

Mislove, A., Viswanath, B., Gummadi, K.P., & Druschel, P. C. (2010). You are who you know. Presented at the third ACM international conference, New York, New York, USA: ACM Press

Retrieved from:

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/social-media/0/steps/16055

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Social Media

Capturing Attention in Social Media:

         Social media have transformed the worldwide web into a participatory community where both users and companies co-create share and modify content. The importance and the attention that social media has gained is widely studied among the scientific community as their growth seems unstoppable. This means 12 new active mobile social users join these platforms every second, meaning one million per day. Microblogs are a set of Internet tools where users publish short updates to friends and family or interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging (IM), e-mail or the web (Java, Song, Finin, & Tseng, 2007). Twitter is the most worldwide used microblogging platform. Most brands try to involve influencers on their marketing campaigns, as professionals in the field believe they are effective to reach their commercial targets (Augure, 2015).

Maintaining Engagement is Social Media:

         Virtual communities are more than just away of sharing valuable information because their members can share all kinds of experiences and knowledge (news, software, links, images, music, videos, and etc.) through these platforms (Flavian, & Guinaliu, 2005). Posts create become public so the creation of this new content is immediately accessible and available to other members of the virtual community. Also, twitter providers users with an automatic and instant feedback reaction from other members of the virtual community which could be useful in terms of identifying the most influential members of the group (Goh, & Lee, 2011). The theory of influential states that only a few members of a society have the abilities to be extremely persuasive when passing along ideas to others users. This differs from other social networks (facebook where you explicitly need a user accepts a friend before the latter can see his/her publications) because a user can follow other user without requiring the permission of the latter. E-WOM is less personal than face-to-face word of mouth it can be more powerful because it is immediate with global reach and accessible to others. These messages can have positive, negative, sarcastic or ironic feelings that content its difficult to classify (Bifet & Frank, 2010). Labeling tweets manually is arduous and expensive if not possible, user can eliminate tweets after their publication and therefore numbers change.

 References:

Augure, 2015

AugureEstatus y prácticas de las relaciones con influencers en 2015

(2015)

available at:

http://www.augure.com/es/bl

 Bifet and Frank, 2010

A. Bifet, E. FrankSentiment knowledge discovery in twitter streaming data

Discovery science, Springer Berlin Heidelberg (2010), pp. 1-15

 Flavián and Guinalíu, 2005

C. Flavián, M. GuinalíuThe influence of virtual communities on distribution strategies in the internet

International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 33 (No. 6) (2005), pp. 405-425

  Goh and Lee, 2011

D.H. Goh, C.S. Lee‘Gone too soon’: Did Twitter grieve for Michael Jackson?

Online Information Review, 36 (1) (2011)

 Java et al., 2007

A. Java, X. Song, T. Finin, B. TsengWhy we Twitter: Understanding microblogging usage and communities

H. Zhang, B. Mobasher, C.L. Giles, A. McCallum, O. Nasraoui, M. Spiliopoulou, et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the ninth WebKDD and first SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on web mining and social network analysis, ACM, New York, NY (2007), pp. 56-65

 https://www-sciencedirect-com.library.capella.edu/science/article/pii/S0747563216305258