This research examines the impact of an online platform’s revenue model on consumers’ ethical inferences of the company. We demonstrate that consumers perceive online platforms that employ the advertising-based revenue model to be less ethical than platforms that employ the service-fee-based revenue model because platforms that adopt the advertising-based revenue model are thought to be less consumer-serving motivated. The unfavorable ethical inferences induced by the advertising-based revenue model further lower consumers’ intention to disclose personal information (...) and the intention to generate positive word of mouth for the company. We further find that allowing consumers to skip advertisements does not improve the less favorable ethical inferences while using resources for public-service advertisements does. These findings advance the understanding of consumers’ ethical inferences regarding business models and provide insights for managers to develop effective strategies to alleviate less favorable ethical inferences. (shrink)

Value Co-Creation plays a major role in engaging knowledgeable individuals in a community via innovation, problem solving, and new service/product development. This study investigates the personal factors that influence individuals’ engagement in value co-creation in Higher Education Institutions through the use of online platforms. Some higher education institutions have successfully established or used appropriate online platforms, such as online forums, web applications, and mobile applications to engage their community in ideation or crowdsourcing as a part (...) of the value co-creation process. On the other hand, some HEIs have failed to engage their community in value co-creation activities, and even if they managed to engage some individuals in value co-creation once, they failed to sustain these individuals’ engagement in value co-creation using online platforms. Using the Stimulus Organism Response framework, this study examines the relationship between relevant personal factors and other motivational factors that provide perceived benefits with value co-creation engagement. Data was collected from 308 respondents at five Malaysian research universities. The software analysis tool Smart PLS is used for data analysis and validation. The results demonstrate that personal factors and perceived benefits as a motivational factor has a significant effect on individual engagement in value co-creation. However, the significance of these findings varies from one individual to another. The implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

For over 20 years, the Schmid Training Course (STC) has offered unique opportunities for marine biology students from European universities to learn about marine model organisms. While the topics of the course have continuously changed over the years with the advent of new research techniques and discoveries, the pedagogical approach has remained largely the same – a combination of lectures, lab practicals, and field excursions. Several life science researchers, who have taught in the STC for many years, sought to bring (...) the course's pedagogical approach into the 21st century, and with the support of Erasmus+ Programme of the European Community funding, the Digital Marine project was developed. Digital Marine began in 2018 as an international partnership between the six research centers from which the STC instructors hail, and its main objective was to introduce a flipped, blended approach to learning and teaching with respect to established and emerging marine biological model systems. The Digital Marine platform, which covers 12 marine model organisms, is now publicly available. (shrink)

Intensified and extensive data production and data storage are characteristics of contemporary western societies. Health data sharing is increasing with the growth of Information and Communication Technology platforms devoted to the collection of personal health and genomic data. However, the sensitive and personal nature of health data poses ethical challenges when data is disclosed and shared even if for scientific research purposes. With this in mind, the Science and Values Working Group of the COST Action CHIP ME ‘Citizen's Health (...) through public-private Initiatives: Public health, Market and Ethical perspectives’ identified six core values they considered to be essential for the ethical sharing of health data using ICT platforms. We believe that using this ethical framework will promote respectful scientific practices in order to maintain individuals’ trust in research. We use these values to analyse five ICT platforms and explore how emerging data sharing platforms are reconfiguring the data sharing experience from a range of perspectives. We discuss which types of values, rights and responsibilities they entail and enshrine within their philosophy or outlook on what it means to share personal health information. Through this discussion we address issues of the design and the development process of personal health data and patient-oriented infrastructures, as well as new forms of technologically-mediated empowerment. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 1, Page 39-50, January 2022. Internet users’ comments in online spaces have attracted researchers’ attention in recent years. Although this data is typically publicly available, its use requires careful consideration so as to not cause harm to the users, while complying with the terms and conditions of the online spaces. However, the Ts & Cs and researchers’ ethical considerations may sometimes be in conflict. I faced such a conflict when I conducted discourse analysis (...) of online discussions that were sourced from a public online learning platform owned by a private company. In this article, I reflect on how I navigated the Ts & Cs and copyright law, taking users’ likely expectations into consideration when deciding whether to seek informed consent and anonymize content. I employed an ‘attribution with anonymization’ method to acknowledge users for their comments while safeguarding their confidentiality. Given the variety of online spaces and research methods, ethical decision-making must be a contextualized process that requires researchers to consider the nature of the online platform and the potential experience of the users, rather than simply following guidelines or Ts & Cs. (shrink)

Instagram is currently the social media platform most associated with online images, but images from other platforms also can be collected and grouped, arrayed by similarity, stacked, matched, stained, labelled, depicted as network, placed side by side and otherwise analytically displayed. In the following, the initial focus is on Instagram, together with certain schools of thought such as Instagramism and Instagrammatics for its aesthetic and visual cultural study. Building on those two approaches, it subsequently focuses on other web (...) and social media platforms, such as Google Image Search, Twitter, Facebook and 4chan. It provides demonstrations of how querying techniques create online image collections, and how these sets are analytically grouped through arrangements collectively referred to as metapictures. (shrink)

Jerkish speech on online platforms is at risk of being overlooked as a result of being comparatively insignificant next to the existence of explicit hate speech or other online harms. In this paper I approach online jerkish speech from a republican perspective. I discuss two ways in which republicans can account for jerkish speech. First, jerkish speech could amount to micro-domination, referring to instances of domination that are relatively inconsequential by themselves but problematic when considered in (...) aggregate. Second, jerkish speech can be considered an instantiation of systemic domination, where groups and members are structurally subordinated. I briefly discuss the role of regulatory bans on jerkish speech, before suggesting that Suzanne Whitten’s proposal for critical civility—as an appropriate answer to jerkish speech in online environments—might be too demanding. This might be alleviated by leveraging the role of online platforms. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic literature review of empirical studies into online platforms for political participation. The objective was to diagnose the relationship between different types of digital participatory platforms, the real possibilities of participation generated by those initiatives and the impact of such participation on the decision-making process of governmental representatives. Design/methodology/approach A systematic literature review was conducted using pre-defined terms, expressions and criteria. A total of 434 articles from 1995 (...) to 2015 were gathered from the Web of Science database. And, 32 studies were selected from those articles for meta-synthesis, and the cases investigated were evaluated according to the e-participation ladder model. Findings The results indicated that online political participation worldwide remains timid both in quantity and quality. We have witnessed the growth of a kind of “rhetorical participation” promoted by policy-makers and the rise of a “participatory despotism”, in which only the privileged partake, while the majority remains silent. Practical implications The solutions found to promote increased participation and ensure its effectiveness ranged from shaping the platform design in accordance with citizens’ capacities and interests to a need for profound political–administrative change, which includes the world’s public agencies adopting a more transparent, inclusive and collaborative approach to decision-making. Originality/value This paper proposes a systematic review, mapping the studies on online platforms for political participation, analysing the questions, methods and conclusions found by the authors and evaluating each case study with a participation ladder. (shrink)

Science and technology studies is famous for questioning conceptual and material boundaries by following controversies that cut across them. However, it has recently been argued that in research involving online platforms, there are also more practical boundaries to negotiate that are created by the variable availability, visibility, and structuring of data. In this paper, I highlight a potential tension between our inclination toward following controversies and “following the medium” and suggest that sometimes following controversies might involve going “against (...) platforms” as well as with them. I will illustrate this dilemma through an analysis of the controversy over the coverage of the Fukushima disaster on English language Wikipedia, which concerns boundaries between expert and lay knowledge but also the social and technical functioning of Wikipedia itself. For this reason, I show that following the controversy might mean making use of less formatted and less obvious data than Wikipedia normally provides. While this is not an argument against the use of automated digital research tools such as scrapers, I suggest that both quantitative and qualitative researchers need to be more willing to tweak their approaches based on the specificities of the case. (shrink)

Regardless of the increasing research attention paid to peer-to-peer accommodation worldwide, our understanding of consumer experiences across different languages and cultures is limited. Extant research tends to support the view that consumer experiences are homogeneous, while overlooking possible cultural divergence across cultures. To fill this gap, this study uses a cross-cultural perspective based on genre analysis and cross-cultural rhetoric study to compare English and Chinese reviews about users’ peer-to-peer accommodation experiences in two popular platforms in China, Airbnb and Xiaozhu. (...) Through analyzing 584 online reviews, we found similar moves in both sets of data, including reviews about the accommodation and about the host, expressing feelings, and making a recommendation. However, we found significant differences in expressing these moves in communication styles. We found that there was a stronger sense of a close and family- like relationship between the guest and the host in the Chinese reviews, while English reviews stressed the importance of space and privacy. (shrink)

We present a novel model of individual people, online posts, and media platforms to explain the online spread of epistemically toxic content such as fake news and suggest possible responses. We argue that a combination of technical features, such as the algorithmically curated feed structure, and social features, such as the absence of stable social-epistemic norms of posting and sharing in social media, is largely responsible for the unchecked spread of epistemically toxic content online. Sharing constitutes (...) a distinctive communicative act, governed by a dedicated norm and motivated to a large extent by social identity maintenance. But confusion about this norm and its lack of inherent epistemic checks lead readers to misunderstand posts, attribute excess or insufficient credibility to posts, and allow posters to evade epistemic accountability—all contributing to the spread of epistemically toxic content online. This spread can be effectively addressed if people and platforms add significantly more context to shared posts and platforms nudge people to develop and follow recognized epistemic norms of posting and sharing. (shrink)

The framework of the ‘social ontology of the internet’ is applied to music recommendation platforms. Those websites provide individual suggestions of music to users, creating new dynamics of taste that are no longer based on human-to-human interaction and verbalized judgments. An exemplary analysis of three platforms shows that different conceptions of musical tastes are represented by technical systems: situational emotional preferences, a formalist aesthetics, and social proximity based on tastes. The platforms share certain assumptions about the ontology (...) of musical entities and of course the constitutive act of recommending. We discuss how this act can be ascribed to technical systems. Theses on the platforms’ effects on the social structure of musical tastes are developed. (shrink)

In recent years, several Vygotskian computer-based learning activities (VCBLAs) were designed in the context of (mathematics) education and implemented on Moodle platform. However, Moodle does not allow users to visualize all chats on a single browser page, and they are forced to open multiple browser windows and switch among them very frequently. This paper describes the features of a plugin for Moodle, called “Quick Chat,” which allows to manage in a single browser window both the narrative flow of a VCBLA (...) and all chats. Some results of an experimentation with PhD students, engaged in solving two mathematical tasks, are shown. (shrink)

Reviving the somewhat forgotten notion of ‘secondary orality’, this paper conceptualizes online conspiracism as a creative, if monstrous, response to the attention economy of social media. Combining classic literature on oral cultures and current research on online subcultures, this paper takes conspiratorial folklore seriously and develops a program of research into its features and into its surprising adaptation to the attention regime of digital media.

To address the problem of frequent dishonest transactions by online shopping platform merchants, we developed monopoly and competitive platform pricing models based on two-sided market theory, which introduce consumer information levels. This article analyzes the incentives of the platforms to improve consumer information levels in platform pricing strategies. Monopoly online shopping platforms aim to maximize profits. The higher the consumer information level is, the lower the fees charged to merchants; this can lead to increased platform profits. (...) The charging of consumers depends on cross-network externalities. Competitive online shopping platforms also aim at maximizing profits. Under the circumstance that the number of consumers remains the same, the higher the consumer information level is, the more merchants the platforms will attract. This reduces bilateral user fees, and platform profits will be lower. From the perspective of consumer information level, the article analyzes the impact of monopoly and competitive platforms adopting return measures to improve the level of consumer information on platform pricing, number of bilateral users, and profits. (shrink)

Purpose – Does the same news item on three different online news platforms, namely: newspapers, blogs and video news, impact each of perceived source credibility, likeability, content believability and attitude toward a message, differently? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – An experimental approach conducted among university students is adopted. Findings – The psychometric properties of the instruments used are supported. Results showed that source credibility did not differ for the three platforms, indicating that respondents (...) did not find one platform less credible than another. However, differences were observed on each of content believability, likeability and attitude toward the message. Online newspapers scored highest in all of these. Blogs came second in both content believability and likeability, while video news came second in attitude toward a message. Research limitations/implications – A number of limitations are noted. In particular, generalisability of findings to all youths in the country and beyond must be done with extreme caution. Practical implications – The results suggest that the medium does change the message and online newspapers as a platform retain an advantage despite the arrival of alternative new media platforms, represented by blogs and video news. The latter emerges as the least effective indicating that respondents appear to prefer reading their news. Originality/value – The paper uses an experimental approach and robust measures to compare news platforms across a number of elements in the communication process among a strong user segment. (shrink)

The Covid-19 virus appeared very fast around the globe and caused many damages to all of us. It caused many troubles in different fields such as: economics, business, factories, education etc. Many institutions around the world faced challenges and tried to find solutions. But the most difficult challenge was about online teaching; most of the countries suggested many strategies and methods to teach students and learners through distinctive materials and online platforms. It was suggested to use (...) class='Hi'>online programs as Google Classroom, Google Meet, Skype, Zoom and many other technological tools in order to help learners to continue with their studies. Using online platform in our country was very demanding because of many factors that influenced all of us. Although many teachers from different schools used many devices during the pandemic, ZOOM was the main one. Teachers had different experiences and challenges during their teaching process through online platforms. They had many problems especially in the assessment and evaluation part; it was very difficult to evaluate learners through technology instruments and grading them correctly. This study is about teachers’ experience with the ZOOM platform, to discover if teachers had difficulties with online teaching during the pandemic. This case study's outcomes present valuable information to the teachers and future researches because there is a limited number of studies in this field. (shrink)

This article investigates the claims and complexities involved in the platform-based economics of health and fitness apps. We examine a double-edged logic inscribed in these platforms, promising to offer personal solutions to medical problems while also contributing to the public good. On the one hand, online platforms serve as personalized data-driven services to their customers. On the other hand, they allegedly serve public interests, such as medical research or health education. In doing so, many apps employ a (...) diffuse discourse, hinging on terms like “sharing,” “open,” and “reuse” when they talk about data extraction and distribution. The analytical approach we adopt in this article is situated at the nexus of science and technology studies, political economy, and the sociology of health and illness. The analysis concentrates on two aspects: datafication and commodification. We apply these analytical categories to three specific platforms: 23andMe, PatientsLikeMe, and Parkinson mPower. The last section will connect these individual examples to the wider implications of health apps’ data flows, governance policies, and business models. Regulatory bodies commonly focus on the safety and security of apps, but pay scarce attention to health apps’ techno-economic governance. Who owns user-generated health data and who gets to benefit? We argue that it is important to reflect on the societal implications of health data markets. Governments have the duty to provide conceptual clarity in the grand narrative of transforming health care and health research. (shrink)

The scientific article is devoted to the actual problem of scientific interaction of scientists all over the world by developing the representation of a scientific journal on the Internet. This article describes the status of managing a scientific journal in the digital world. Modern software platforms intended for automation of preparation and publication of electronic scientific journals are presented. The analysis and comparison of several software platforms. The advantages of using open source journal systems are given. The choice (...) of OJS3 platform is substantiated and a short generalized algorithm for its use is outlined. (shrink)

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating how social networking platforms fare as epistemic environments for human users. I begin by proposing a situated concept of epistemic agency as fundamental for evaluating epistemic environments. Next, I show that algorithmic personalisation of information makes social networking platforms problematic for users’ epistemic agency because these platforms do not allow users to adapt their behaviour sufficiently. Using the tracing principle inspired by the ethics of self-driving cars, I operationalise it (...) here and identify three requirements that automated epistemic environments need to fulfil: (a) the users need to be afforded a range of skilled actions; (b) users need to be sensitive to the possibility to use their skills; (c) the habits built when adapting to the platform should not undermine the user’s pre-existing skills. I then argue that these requirements are almost impossible to fulfil all at the same time on current SN platforms; yet nevertheless, we need to pay attention to these whenever we evaluate an epistemic environment with automatic features. Finally, as an illustration, I show how Twitter, a popular social networking platform, will fare regarding these requirements. (shrink)

Customer citizenship behavior has attracted widespread attention from scholars due to its capacity of enabling enterprises to gain competitive advantages of low costs and high efficiency by giving full play to the initiative of customers. Based on the S-O-R Model, we have established the theoretical model to study the influence imposed by social support of online travel platform enterprises on customer citizenship behavior against the backdrop of the sharing economy. This research tests the fitting of the theoretical model and (...) its fundamental hypotheses using 626 samples acquired from the investigation with SPSS26.0 and AMOS25.0. Results indicate that the social support has a positive influence on customer citizenship behavior. Social support could have a positive influence on positive emotions. Social support has no significant negative effect on negative emotions. Positive emotions have a positive influence on customer citizenship behavior. Negative emotions have a negative influence on customer citizenship behavior. Positive emotions play a mediating effect in the positive influence of social support on customer citizenship behavior. Social support could have a positive influence on customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction has a positive influence on customer citizenship behavior. Customer satisfaction plays a mediating effect in the positive effect of social support on customer citizenship behavior. Positive emotions and customer satisfaction play a chain mediating effect in the positive effect of social support on customer citizenship behavior. (shrink)

In this article we examine commodification and marketisation of genetic testing by companies offering direct-to-consumer genetic testing to the general public through online platforms in Hong Kong. Recently, offers of genetic testing have expanded from scientific and clinical genetic settings to general medicine and non-medical domains. The wider availability of tests, however, has raised concerns about the currently available scientifically proven utility of these tests. Using theme-oriented discourse analysis, we analyse the specific discursive modalities through which the DTC (...) companies in Hong Kong make inflated claims about the value of genetic tests to pursue their marketing agenda. We show that in this way the companies are selling ‘more’ than specific products to consumers: they are selling ‘hope’ and ‘increased autonomy’, that is, an opportunity to buy commodities online that promise consumers control of their health and wellbeing. (shrink)

BackgroundThis pilot study aims to test the usability of the iACTwithPain platform, an online ACT-based intervention for people with chronic pain, to obtain information on which intervention and usability aspects need improvement and on expected retention rates.MethodsSeventy-three Portuguese women with chronic pain were invited to complete the first three sessions of the iACTwithPain intervention assess their quality, usefulness and the platform’s usability. Twenty-one accepted the invitation. Additionally, eight healthcare professionals working with chronic medical conditions assessed the platform and the (...) intervention from a practitioner’s point of view.ResultsThis study presented a considerable attrition rate (71.43%) among chronic pain participants, with six completers. There were no significant differences in demographic or clinical variables between dropouts and completers except for completed education (participants who dropped out presented less education than completers). Reasons for dropout were related to difficult personal events occurring during the time of the intervention, lack of time, or having forgotten. There seemed to be an overall satisfaction with both the intervention, its contents and form of presentation of information, and the platform, concerning its design, appearance, and usability. Real image videos were preferred over animations or audio by chronic pain participants. Healthcare professionals emphasized the appealing and dynamic aspects of the animation format.ConclusionThis study informs the ongoing improvement of the iACTwithPain platform and provides valuable information on aspects researchers should consider while developing online psychological interventions for chronic pain. Further implications are discussed. (shrink)

Built on the integrated theoretical framework of antecedents of flow and expectation confirmation model, this research investigates the way flow experience drives the online students’ intention to engage in online English teaching platforms. This study focused on the online students engaged in online English learning platforms in Taiwan. A total of 500 online students were selected. An online survey was conducted with the help of a marketing research agency located in Taiwan. According (...) to the results, the online students’ flow experience was found to be in a significant relationship with continuous intention. The antecedents, including perceived enjoyment, challenge, and situational involvement, were found to be in a positive relationship with flow experience; however, confirmation and perceived vividness did not have significant effects on the flow. Furthermore, flow and confirmation were found to be in a significant relationship with perceived usefulness and satisfaction. Moreover, perceived usefulness was found to be in a significant relationship with satisfaction and continuous intention. Lastly, satisfaction was found to be in a significant relationship with continuous intention. Finally, the questions proposed in this research with their empirical findings offer profound understanding for establishing a well-devised online English learning platform that can motivate online learning. These results and managerial implications for online English language platforms are innovative and significant in practice. (shrink)

This paper has 3 main goals: (1) to clarify the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI)—along with algorithms more broadly—in online radicalization that results in ‘real world violence’; (2) to argue that technological solutions (like better AI) are inadequate proposals for this problem given both technical and social reasons; and (3) to demonstrate that platform companies’ (e.g., Meta, Google) statements of preference for technological solutions functions as a type of propaganda that serves to erase the work of the thousands of (...) human content moderators and conceal the harms they experience. I argue that the proper assessment of these important, related issues must be free of the obfuscation that the ‘better AI’ proposal generates. For this reason, I describe the AI-centric solutions favoured by major platform companies as a type of obfuscating and dehumanizing propaganda. (shrink)

Adapting gross motor movement to match the tempo of auditory rhythmic stimulation is a complex skill with a long developmental trajectory. Drumming tasks have previously been employed with infants and young children to measure the emergence of rhythmic entrainment, and may provide a tool for identification of those with atypical rhythm perception and production. Here we describe a new protocol for measuring infant rhythmic movement that can be employed at scale. In the current study, 50 two-year-olds drummed along with the (...) audiovisual presentation of four steady rhythms, using videos of isochronous drumming at 400, 500, 600, and 700 ms IOI, and provided their spontaneous motor tempo by drumming in silence. Toddlers’ drumming is observed from video recordings made in participants’ own homes, obtained via the Lookit platform for online infant studies. We use OpenPose deep-learning model to generate wireframe estimates of hand and body location for each video. The vertical displacement of the hand was extracted, and the power and frequency of infants’ rhythmic entrainment quantified using Fast Fourier Transforms. We find evidence for age-appropriate tempo-flexibility in our sample. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of a fully digital approach to measuring rhythmic entrainment from within the participant’s home, from early in development. (shrink)

This is the English (and extended version) of an interview originally published in Estonian in October 2018. In the interview, Simpson summarizes a particular way of defending the practice of no-platforming. The varying appeal of different defences of the practice in different socio-historical contexts (i.e. the UK/US versus a post-Soviet country such as Estonia) is discussed also.

Education is a field that evolves constantly in relation to the changes in the society and the needs of its beneficiaries, taking over and adapting functional models from other fields. The quality of education of today’s generations has a direct impact on the future, as tomorrow's adults need to have strong key competences, but also transversal competences needed in a dynamic and competitive labour market. Thus, the knowledge society implies opening up the education system to other social sectors, exploiting the (...) paradigm of student-centred education, harnessing technology and virtual environments to create authentic learning and training contexts. Within this framework, educational coaching can be a means through which the individual potential of the learner can be discovered and optimised, with multiple benefits in personal, academic and professional terms. In order to achieve academic success, students need to know themselves, set short-, medium- and long-term goals and objectives, develop skills and competences in autonomous learning, communication, self-motivation, creative and critical thinking, emotion management etc. Through coaching activities, students can benefit from academic support and help in the process of self-discovery and personal development, optimising personal potential, collaborating and creating educational communities that share common goals and values. Placing the teacher in the position of a coach, this can contribute to the development of a multifaceted perspective related to the role of the teacher in the contemporary school, as a student’s partner in the process of his or her education. The present paper aims to explore students’ perceptions concerning the need for coaching activities in their academic life and to identify the students’ main needs and directions for optimizing actions and interventions. (shrink)

Given the importance of data safety for psychology, the present study investigated the influence of data leaking scandal on campus customers’ financial consumption behaviors at intelligent tourism platforms in China, and explored the roles that individual characteristics play in this process by focusing on a set of participants from colleges. Data were collected through sending out an online questionnaire, where respondents were asked to finish a series of questions about their background information, their trust, future consuming intention, and (...) defensive behaviors toward intelligent platforms. After they finished these questions, a short description about an online tourism platform leaking customers’ personal information was presented to the respondents, following which they were asked to report about their future consuming intentions and defensive behaviors again. In total, 236 participants of college students and teachers were recruited. Paired samples mean comparison showed that after the stimulus was presented, the respondents had a significant decrease in future financial consumption intention, and a significant increase in defensive behaviors toward online tourism platforms due to risks perceived. Multiple regression analysis was conducted subsequently to investigate individual characteristics that may account for part of the decrease in consuming intention. Results showed that, customers with higher level of trust and monthly income, as well as older customers, tend to experience higher level of decrease in consuming intention, and increase in defensive behaviors. These findings highlighted the importance of online tourism platforms guaranteeing data security of their customers. (shrink)

Continuance intention to online learning platforms has received increased attention in recent years, and media richness has been found to be an important antecedent influencing user retention. However, there is insufficient research on the mediating and moderating mechanism underlying this relation. The purpose of this article is to investigate the positive association between three dimensions of media richness and user continuance intention, the mediating role of social presence in the relationship between three dimensions of media richness and continuance (...) intention, and the moderating role of need for cognition in the relationship between three dimensions of media richness and social presence. We conduct a survey questionnaire with a sample of 368 users from online learning platforms and use structural equation modeling. The results indicate that the model proposed has a high explanatory power of continuance intention to online learning platforms and give support to the moderating role of the need for cognition. The study highlights the crucial role these technological-environment-related variables have in relation to virtual user experience and their continuance intention. Furthermore, this study shows the significance of differentiated online course design to foster users’ social presence according to user types. (shrink)

In this chapter, I explore how experiences of social belonging might emerge and be sustained in online communities, drawing from the work on rituals by Randall Collins. I argue that rather than viewing mediated interactions in terms of whether they are suitable substitutes for face-to-face interactions, we should consider mediated encounters in their own right. This allows us to recognize the creative ways that people can create rituals in a mediated setting and thus support and create a sense of (...) belonging with others online. I also highlight how some online platforms not only support online rituals but that they are well-positioned to create and circulate collective symbols (or sacred objects) of groups and, thus, can continue to scaffold and sustain on-going feelings of belonging. (shrink)

"I am delighted to offer my highest praise to Dean Cocking and Jeroen van den Hoven's brilliant new book, Evil Online. The confrontation between good and evil occupies a central place in the challenges facing our human nature, and this creative investigation into the spread of evil by means of all-powerful new technologies raises fundamental questions about our morality and values. Cocking and Van den Hoven's account of the moral fog of evil forces us to face both the demons (...) within each of us as well as the demons all around us. In the end, we are all enriched by their perceptive analyses." —Phil Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Stanford University Principal Investigator, Stanford Prison Experiment "The internet offers new and deeply concerning opportunities for immorality, much of it shocking and extreme. This volume explains with great insight and clarity the corrupting nature of the internet and the moral confusion it has produced. It will play a vital role in the growing debate about how to balance the benefits of the internet against the risks it poses to all of us. Evil Online is an excellent book." —Roger Crisp, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford We now live in an era defined by the ubiquity of the internet. From our everyday engagement with social media to trolls on forums and the emergence of the dark web, the internet is a space characterized by unreality, isolation, anonymity, objectification, and rampant self-obsession—the perfect breeding ground for new, unprecedented manifestations of evil. Evil Online is the first comprehensive analysis of evil and moral character in relation to our increasingly online lives. Chapters consider traditional ideas around the phenomenon of evil in moral philosophy and explore how the dawn of the internet has presented unprecedented challenges to older theoretical approaches. Cocking and Van den Hoven propose that a growing sense of moral confusion—moral fog—pushes otherwise ordinary, normal people toward evildoing, and that values basic to moral life such as autonomy, intimacy, trust, and privacy are put at risk by online platforms and new technologies. This new theory of evildoing offers fresh insight into the moral character of the individual, and opens the way for a burgeoning new area of social thought. A comprehensive analysis of an emerging and disturbing social phenomenon, Evil Online examines the morally troubling aspects of the internet in our society. Written not only for academics in the fields of philosophy, psychology, information science, and social science, Evil Online is accessible and compelling reading for anyone interested in understanding the emergence of evil in our digitally-dominated world. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of Digital Content Marketing on a Mixed Reality training platform environment with the consideration of online purchase intention through social media. E-commerce today encounters several common issues that cause customers to have reservations to purchase online. With the absence of physical contact points, customers often perceive more risks when making purchase decisions. Furthermore, online retailers often find it hard to engage customers and develop long-term relationships. In this (...) research, a Structural Equation Model is proposed to examine the efficacy of DCM from both immediate and long-term OPI. The results examine whether adopting DCM on an MR training platform environment through social media brings positive results in OPI. Empirical research was carried out through online questionnaires collected in 2021 and 2022. A total of 374 questionnaires were qualified for data analysis in this study, conducted with IBM SPSS and AMOS. The results imply that DCM is critical to stimulating both immediate and long-term OPI. The immediate OPI is positively affected by increasing perceived value through MR in DCM. Regarding the long-term OPI, increased customer engagement with DCM under MR environment can cultivate brand trust and significantly affect the long-term OPI. (shrink)

Through structural analysis of 8-year tag networks from online knowledge-sharing platforms, this study finds that, with the scale of tag networks growing quickly, the growth trend of number edges indicates that tag network follows densification law. The clustering coefficient and the average shortest path of the network show that the rapid growth of network size does not bring about the compartmentalization of the knowledge network, and the degree distribution of tag networks shows a truncated power-law distribution. According to (...) the structural characteristics of the tag network, this study proposes a tag network model based on the BA model. Based on the preference attachment, the triadic closure mechanism is employed to construct the edges between the old nodes, which revises the limitation that the BA model only connects edges between old and new nodes. The results show that the simulation model matches the actual tag network structure well. The generation mechanism of the tag network model provides a reference for understanding the knowledge construction process of the online knowledge-sharing platform to a certain extent. (shrink)

This research discusses the impact of the perception of video images and online word of mouth on tourists’ travel intentions. A survey of 390 users who watched travel videos on short-video platforms was conducted using structural equation modeling. The results are as follows. First, the perception of video images can significantly affect tourists’ intention to visit the destinations. Second, as a mediating variable, online word of mouth can enhance the positive effects of the perception of video images (...) on tourists’ travel intentions. Third, gender had a positive moderating effect, which was particularly obvious in the relationship between the perception of video images and online word of mouth. This research provides a theoretical basis for the utility of tourism-related short videos, which can help stimulate tourists’ intention to visit promoted destinations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Understanding is a demanding epistemic state. It involves not just knowledge that things are thus and so, but grasping the reasons why and seeing how things hang together. Understanding, then, typically requires inquiry. Many of our inquiries are conducted online nowadays, with the help of search engines, forums, and social media platforms. In this paper, I explore the idea that online inquiry easily leads to what I will call online illusions of understanding. Both the structure (...) of online information presentation (with hyperlinks, shares, retweets, likes, etc.) and the operation of recommender systems and the like make it easy for people using them to form the impression that they are conducting inquiry responsibly, whereas they are in fact fed with irrelevant information, or, even worse, falsehoods, misinformation, disinformation, or outright conspiracy theories. (shrink)

Online social networking has deeply penetrated university campuses, influencing multiple aspects of student life. Standing from a pedagogical perspective, this study investigates how university students’ OSN engagement affect their learning outcomes. Drawn upon social learning theory, this study proposes that OSN engagement help university students’ establishing the self-efficacy belief, achieving social acceptance and acculturation with environment, and these attributions further lead them to attain positive learning outcomes which are shaped by self-esteem development, satisfaction with university life, and the grade (...) point average based performance. Results from a survey accompanied by focus group discussions support these embedded self-conceptualization and social learning in OSN. This study contributes to the extant research on OSN for learning by highlighting the role of OSN for the whole person development, especially the students’ self-conceptulization and psychological well-beings. The revealed mediating mechanisms also adds values to social learning theory and imply the design foci of e-learning activities and applications. (shrink)

Higher education curricula are developed based on creating conditions for implementing many professional and universal competencies. In Russia, one of the significant competencies for a modern specialist is business communication in oral and written forms in the Russian language and a foreign language. Therefore, teaching students to write in a foreign language is one of the modern requirements for young specialists’ professional training. This article aimed to study the tools of online communication that are used in teaching foreign languages. (...) The article presents the results of an empirical study and analysis of factors of application of online communication technologies in foreign languages teaching, synchronous and asynchronous means used in online learning, and the advantages of integrating online communication tools into the educational process of teaching a foreign language. The study of the advantages and disadvantages of educational platforms is based on an analysis of information and online communication technologies used in the educational process. Based on the example of teaching a foreign language, the article shows how online communication platforms are involved in the educational process. Furthermore, the teachers’ and students’ opinions are presented on how online platforms are convenient. The survey involved 928 first-year students and 76 foreign language teachers of Volgograd State University (Volgograd), Linguistics University of Nizhny Novgorod (Nizhny Novgorod), Tomsk Polytechnic University (Tomsk), Ural Federal University, named after the first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin (Ekaterinburg). It was revealed that the integration of online communication tools has positive effects on the formation and development of written communication skills. (shrink)

Choice is a sine qua non of contemporary life. From childhood until death, we are faced with an unending series of choices through which we cultivate a sense of self, govern conduct, and shape the future. Nowadays, individuals increasingly experience and enact consumer choice online through web-based platforms such as Yelp.com, TripAdvisor.com and Amazon.com. These platforms not only provide a sprawling array of goods and services to choose from, but also reviews, ratings and ranking devices and systems (...) of classification to navigate this landscape of choice. This paper suggests a radical reconsideration of platform architectures and design features to consider how they reconfigure and respecify choice, ‘choosers’, and choice-making practices. Platforms are not simply cameras that present choice and enable comparisons between different options, but are more akin to engines that govern, drive and expand choice, configuring users within particular discourses, practices and subjectivities. In making sense of the entangled trajectories of consumer choice, platform architectures and Big Data, I suggest that ‘hyper-choice’ emerges as a condition of the contemporary platform-driven web. I examine hyper-choice not only in terms of the relationship between platforms and a growing abundance of choice, but more importantly how platforms reconfigure choice in ways that go beyond and fundamentally challenge existing understandings of what choice is, who and what is involved in producing knowledge about choice, and what it means to be a ‘chooser’. (shrink)

COVID-19 has caused significant damage globally, including tourism. This study adopts the quantitative research method, selects 588 samples from tourists watching short videos to investigate the antecedents and effects of parasocial interaction between tourists and short video tourism Vloggers, and analyses them with partial least squares. Based on parasocial relationship theory, this study investigates the antecedents of parasocial relationships between tourists and short video tourism Vloggers and their willingness to share short video tourism. Results show that the consistency of values, (...) entertainment motivation, and emotional engagement positively impact the parasocial relationships between tourists and short video tourism Vloggers and affect the online sharing intention through the parasocial relationship. The consistency of values can directly affect sharing intention. As an intermediary variable, parasocial relationship positively impacts value congruence, entertainment motivation, emotional engagement, and sharing intention. This study introduces parasocial relationship into the research of tourism short video Vloggers, which enriches the literature. Furthermore, this introduction provides new marketing strategies and suggestions for the sustainable development of tourism. (shrink)

The key role played by online platforms in the neo-intermediation of the public debate requires a review of current tools for mapping the digital information ecosystem, highlighting the political nature of such an analysis: Starting from a synoptic overview of the main models of platform governance, we try to understand whether the ongoing European shift towards the Limited Government Regulation (LGR) model will be able to counterbalance the “systemic opinion power” of the giant platforms and restore the (...) “health” of the digital information ecosystem. A close analysis of the European Digital Services Act (DSA) has highlighted some limitations in achieving its goals, because of the features of the LGR on the one hand, and the disruptive features of the algorithmic neo-intermediation phenomenon on the other. Thus, we suggest a tripartite regulatory model, that can be defined as “neo-editorial accountability.” However, increasing users’ critical algorithmic awareness is an essential prerequisite for implementing the suggested template, and mitigating an outstanding effect of the LGR model: the normalization of the ideological assumptions underlying informational capitalism. (shrink)

The internet is a major part of our lives today. This applies to politics as well, and accordingly, the question of whether it is possible to realize democracy on the internet has arisen. Using the arguments of Hannah Arendt, the paper aims to determine what online democracy should look like. It is argued that the internet's decentralized structure is advantageous because it facilitates the implementation of the Arendtian system of political councils. Due to the character of online political (...) platforms – mainly social media – these political councils should ideally revolve around shared issues that simultaneously create the common world on the internet. At the same time, clear rules need to be laid down for the functioning of these online political councils. Based on Arendt's arguments, it is claimed in the paper that these rules include the principles of mutual promises and covenants on the issues themselves. It is also argued that because Arendt emphasizes the role of appearing in the public sphere, the process of authentication – that is, verifying that there is a concrete person with a physical body behind each online account that wants to actively participate in a particular online political council – is required. (shrink)

Privacy is a critical challenge for corporate social responsibility in the mobile device ecosystem. Mobile application firms can collect granular and largely unregulated data about their consumers, and must make ethical decisions about how and whether to collect, store, and share these data. This paper conducts a discourse analysis of mobile application developer forums to discover when and how privacy conversations, as a representative of larger ethical debates, arise during development. It finds that online forums can be useful spaces (...) for ethical deliberations, as developers use these spaces to define, discuss, and justify their values. It also discovers that ethical discussions in mobile development are prompted by work practices which vary considerably between iOS and Android, today’s two major mobile platforms. For educators, regulators, and managers interested in encouraging more ethical discussion and deliberation in mobile development, these work practices provide a valuable point of entry. But while the triggers for privacy conversations are quite different between platforms, ultimately the justifications for privacy are similar. Developers for both platforms use moral and cautionary tales, moral evaluation, and instrumental and technical rationalization to justify and legitimize privacy as a value in mobile development. Understanding these three forms of justification for privacy is useful to educators, regulators, and managers who wish to promote ethical practices in mobile development. (shrink)

Losing a close relative or friend is a traumatic event for anyone, especially for children and adolescents. This article investigates the motives and patterns of children’s and adolescents’ interpersonal online communication on bereavement platforms. A qualitative content analysis of two different youth bereavement platforms illuminates how one common feature is the verbalization and illustration of missing support in the offline world. The substantial usage of social network platforms can be considered an extension of children’s and adolescents’ (...) personal social environment. Furthermore, topics on bereavement platforms ultimately go beyond grief, as children and adolescents also include emotions such as hope, gratitude and cohesiveness. Communication within online bereavement communities thus enables a process known from offline communication as transformation from a loss-oriented to restoration-oriented coping. (shrink)

Coordinated inauthentic behaviours online are becoming a more serious problem throughout the world. One common type of manipulative behaviour is astroturfing. It happens when an entity artificially creates an impression of widespread support for a product, policy, or concept, when in reality only limited support exists. Online astroturfing is often considered to be just like any other coordinated inauthentic behaviour; with considerable discussion focusing on how it aggravates the spread of fake news and disinformation. This paper shows that (...) astroturfing creates additional problems for social media platforms and the online environment in general. The practice of astroturfing exploits our natural tendency to conform to what the crowd does; and because of the importance of conformity in our decision-making process, the negative consequences brought about by astroturfing can be much more far-reaching and alarming than just the spread of disinformation. (shrink)