Browsing by Subject "Social media"

Throughout the life of the Church, certain habits have been cultivated to shape the identity of its community and deepen our communion with God. We see in the writings of the Desert Fathers that attentiveness is one habit that people of faith have taken care to cultivate to better connect with God. Contemporary of the Desert Fathers, Saint Augustine, also speaks to attentiveness and its relation to time. What both the Desert writers and Augustine understand is that our ability to connect with God depends on our ability to be attentive in the present moment.

This thesis will argue that an embodied, present attentiveness is foundational to a relationship with God; furthermore, given the patterns of attention developed around Wireless Mobile Devices (i.e. smartphones) and the strong pull on its users for their constant interaction, I argue that the practices created around these devices do in fact hinder one's ability to connect with God, despite their other potential for good. The thesis employs qualitative research in the form of literature reviews. First, drawing from the practices of the Desert Fathers and Augustine's understanding of the relationship between time, memory, and knowledge of God, I make a case for the discipline of embodied attentiveness to the present moment as foundational to our relationship with God. I then draw from current psychological, sociological and anthropological insights to model how the current technological landscape places particular pressures on an embodied present attentiveness, with specific focus on the Wireless Mobile Device (WMD), commonly known as the smartphone. Finally, I place in conversation the findings from these reviews; leading to an assessment on the patterns technology creates around attentiveness.

People are becoming increasingly aware and concerned that the Internet and Wireless Mobile Devices are not neutral mediums and consistent exposure (and use) of these mediums is affecting us. We will see in this thesis that not only are habits of communication shifting, but also we are literally being rewired as our neural pathways are firing into uncharted territory. While psychological, sociological, and philosophical assessments of communication technologies and the self are critical to understand various implications on attentiveness, the goal of this thesis is to articulate the practices that the use of Wireless Mobile Devices cultivates regarding attentiveness through a theological lens.

As we begin to understand the concerns of the Saints who have gone before us, combined with understanding the shifting landscape of technology as it pertains to attentiveness, we can imagine why it is that the Church ought to be concerned with the continued cultivation of the discipline of attentiveness. Rather than simply "sounding the alarm" that technology is detrimental to our spiritual formation, however, this thesis will attempt to help the Church have a more nuanced understanding of why social media inhibits our ability to be attentive, as it examines to what end (telos) our attention is being drawn. After developing a more robust understanding of why a present, embodied attentiveness is foundational to our relationship with God, we will be able to enter into conversations regarding social media that are nuanced beyond it having "positive" and "negative" effects.

With the widespread stigmatization of “women’s rights” in China, I observed that young women increasingly reject the identification of “feminists.” In comparison, some of them voice their opinions on social media advocate for “feminist” agenda, such as demands for equal employment opportunities and an end to sexual harassment. This thesis focuses on a cultural phenomenon, which I call “feminist without feminism.” I argue that “feminism without feminists” is symptomatic of the failure of both state feminism and Western neoliberal feminism to address daily issues confronting Chinese women today. Social media provides the space for them to challenge patriarchy on a micro-level, sometimes by strategically avoiding being targeted by censorship or vilified by misogynist netizens. Moreover, I believe this feminism-from-below constitutes a postmodernist/postsocialist rejection of any singular feminist metanarrative. With guerilla-like decentralized tactics, “feminism without feminists” is a creative and strategic form of online activism

This study seeks to describe the political profiles of Army officers through data scraping the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) and LinkedIn platforms. After creating and analyzing a database of 500 Army officers, the thesis finds that (1) the majority of Army officers on Twitter are not partisan and are not extreme in its political views; (2) most Army officers on Twitter appear to tilt to the Republican Party over the Democratic Party; (3) a slight majority of field grade officers on Twitter, specifically majors and lieutenant colonels, appear to tilt to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party; (4) politically interested officers express more politically liberal sentiments than conservative sentiments; (5) female officers appear to tilt to the Democratic Party and express more liberal sentiments compared to male officers.

These findings were the result of data scraping the number of Democratic or Republican politicians each officer follows and the political content of what each officer tweets to determine partisan tilt and ideological preferences. These findings demonstrate little evidence of a politicized and partisan Army officer corps. Army officers are also unaware of how much political and personal information they expose on social media platforms. Army organizations and officers may benefit from reconsidering their use of social media as the information they provide may degrade the leadership of their units and bolster our adversaries’ information operations capabilities.

Background: In Kenya, timely antenatal care, postnatal family planning, breastfeeding and maternal health literacy impact maternal and child health. mHealth interventions such as chatbots offer novel ways to address health literacy and other health determinants. A chatbot is a computer software that can simulate a human conversation. Identifying the feasibility of chatbots in Kenya for pregnancy support within Facebook’s social media platform is uncharted. To map the feasibility of a chatbot for pregnancy support, questions surrounding the current utilization of health resources and attitudes matter.

Methods: Phase 1 used focus group discussions (FGDs) to understand health resource usage, attitudes and preferences towards a chatbot application for pregnancy. Participant input was used to develop the chatbot in Phase 2. Phase 3 focused on the experience of those using the chatbot to inform feasibility and acceptability of the chatbot developed. Post-intervention we conducted FGDs and interviews, surveyed the sample and analyzed app usage data.

Results: Participants described unsatisfying relationships with health resources including health care providers. These experiences led to mistrust. Participants identified criteria that a chatbot for pregnancy support should have. After making these adaptations to the chatbot developed in Phase 2, the chatbot was tested during Phase 3. Results from Phase 3 indicate positive attitudes towards the chatbot experience and engagement.

Conclusions: The current context of Kenya regarding patient provider relationships, internet access and Facebook have proven beneficial for the feasibility of this innovation. Participant experiences were positive and relate to the use of Human Centered Design, Innovation Diffusion Theory and trust.

In the study of politics and campaigns, scholars have focused on television as the primary medium for advertising. But recent years have seen political candidates turn to internet and social media platforms, which offer different opportunities and constraints for their campaigns. How do candidates communicate with voters in social media ads? In this dissertation, I explore the nature and dynamics of digital campaign rhetoric. I construct a large-scale dataset of all Congressional campaign ads run on Facebook during two recent U.S. elections. Using computational text analysis, I show that ads distributed by candidates are frequently polarizing — they attack members of the opposing party and convey loyalty to their own party using identity-driven rhetoric. Yet candidates are strategic in their use of this rhetoric. They avoid using polarizing language when targeting voter networks but deploy it at high rates when targeting partisan donor networks outside their constituency. I argue that social media platforms incentivize candidates to adopt such a strategy by making it easy to narrowcast polarizing messages only to audiences most likely to be responsive. The result, however, is candidates displaying different “faces” to different groups of the American public. Overall, my findings have important implications for the asymmetric distribution of polarizing speech around virtual spaces. With this dissertation, I offer a framework for understanding how Congressional candidates, internet technology, and the quest for political power come together, contributing to broader trends of polarization in the U.S.

The emergence and persistence of communities has long been of interest to social scientists, and the increasingly digital landscape in which these communities exist present some important theoretical and methodological challenges and opportunities. In this dissertation, I develop methods for identifying and characterizing communities on Twitter and examine the kinds of interactions that affect social cohesion. Using the Fat Liberation community as a case study, I find that there is a core set of users engaged in conversations around criticizing conceptions of Fatness, and I observe partitions in the community differentiated by stylistic approaches to discussion rather than topical focus. I next operationalize hypotheses from Randall Collins' Interaction Ritual Chain theory using novel methods for measuring the effects of engaging in particular types of interactions. I find support for several hypotheses generated directly from this theory in online settings and further find that high-status users play a particularly important role in producing group cohesion - a perhaps underplayed aspect of the theory that may be particularly important in online settings. Finally, I build on conflict theories to hypothesize that exposure to toxic interactions will affect social cohesion - particularly when they involve other high-status users. I do not find support for these hypotheses, however, suggesting further work should investigate the role of toxic behavior by accounting for the situational dynamics produced by interactions.

We present novel model frameworks and inference procedures for stochastic point processes on dynamic networks. The point process can be defined for a random phenomenon that spreads among the network nodes, and for the temporally evolving network itself. Methods development is motivated by the needs of health and social science data, where partial observations or latent structures are common and create challenges to likelihood-based inference. In this dissertation, we will discuss parameter estimation techniques that can handle these latent variables and make effective use of the complete data likelihood for efficient inference. We start with developing individualized continuous time Markov chain models for stochastic epidemics on a dynamic contact network. Data-augmentation algorithms are designed to address partial observations (such as missing infection and recovery times) in epidemic data while accommodating the network dynamics. We apply the frameworks to the study of non-pharmaceutical interventions in a college population. Next, we move on to study the higher-order latent structures of dynamic inter-personal interactions by combining a multi-resolution spatio-temporal stochastic process with a latent factor model for a dynamic social network. We apply it to analyzing basketball data where the discovered latent structure defines a metric that helps evaluate the quality of game play. Finally, we discuss extensions to a non-Markovian setting of self and mutually exciting point processes (Hawkes processes). We utilize the branching structure of the Hawkes processes to uncover the latent replying structure of a group conversation, which can be further employed to quantitatively measure individual social impact.

Attendance in U.S. churches continues to decline, while leaders struggle to identify both root causes and possible responses. While the causes for decline are numerous, The Great Digital Commission: Embracing Social Media for Church Growth and Transformation utilizes the fields of evangelism, new media, and digital religion to argue that social media usage can be an effective tool to quell church decline, foster authenticity within a community, lead to church growth, and share the Good News of God’s radically transformative love.