Facebook

The aim of the present study is to investigate and compare the choice of language used in an online platform (Facebook) and during offline communication with reference to a family member, a friend, and an acquaintance in the same multilingual speech community. As part of this study, a structured sociolinguistics questionnaire was administered to 38 multilingual postgraduate students. This is followed by interviewing selected focus group to elicit more information on various factors that influence their language behavior. The major finding of this study is that apart from family circle, a majority of multilingual users in India prefer to use English for Facebook private communications only among friends and acquaintances while Mother tongue is the dominant language use for offline communications.

Given the immense shifts the social networking sites and applications have brought about, a considerable number of researchers in the field of communication studies have turned to study different aspects of social media usage and factors influencing it. This study gathered data from 33318 US non-institutionalized citizens over 18 including 17079 females and 16239 males; they were members of web panelists of Pew, and their answers revealed that a majority of this online participants used a kind of social media. The results of this study revealed women use social media more than men, and religious people more than non-religious people. In addition, the results indicated that married people are the least users of social media in comparison with other marital groups. Our results showed that all demographics are significantly related to social media usage. But this significance can be somehow misleading because of weak practical effect sizes. Except for marital status and age Cramer’s V values are too small and their significance may have nothing to say but sensitivity to the degree of freedom.

In Internet-based social networks, the nodes have the most pivotal role in the processes and outcomes of the networks. Whether they pay attention to a message in the network or ignore it defines the fate of the message. One message is shared and re-shared by millions of users and another is left forgotten. The current study tries to shed light on one aspect of the role of the users in a social network: How are people different in the types of messages to which they pay attention? Some 500 Facebook users were interviewed and a creative method were used to find the public Facebook messages on which they had commented. Then, the researchers coded the data into different categories and carried out statistical analyses looking for significant relations between the types of Facebook users and the types of messages on which they commented. The results of the study include 21 significant relations, suggesting that the approach taken by this study can be promising and if completed by several other studies it could help us find local and universal patterns that affect the flow of information. With enough knowledge on social networks we must be able to design specific messages, for specific groups of people.

The social contract has been about rights and responsibilities in human societies. Facebook and its role in manufacturing and sustaining a global social contract, a new “we” is clearly one of the research areas that needs more attention. A new “we” is coming of age in the new age of connectivity and communication with a new outlook toward responsibility and rights at individual and collective levels. Facebook purports to build a new world based on connection and communication which is based on progress and prosperity. However, a fundamental factor and feature of Facebook that needs attention and more research is that people and users are becoming increasingly lonely, separated and independent from each other in this process while connecting and communicating with one another. This new social contract and “we” thus have the new features of the relationship between the human agency and his/her social structures. Cyberspace is the product of human agency and clearly creates and sustains a specific social structure. This research seeks to study the relationship between human agency, changing technical tools of communication and connection and emerging and evolving social structures and social contracts. Bandura’s “social cognitive theory” (2006) rejects a conflict and dichotomy between agency and social structure. As agency helps to build new social structures after destroying the old ones these new structures create and sustain a new social contract and “we” with a new sense of responsibility, obligations, and rights.

Agovernmentshouldusesocialmediaforcommunicatingwithitscitizen.Theengagement index score is one of the methods for assessing the rate of governmental success in using social media as a tool in establishing interactive relationships with its citizen. In general, the engagement index score is obtained by calculating the number of posts, number of likes and comments, and so forth on a single social media account. Therefore, we propose an integrated engagement index score for three social media: Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. In this work, we carry out a study for local governments in Indonesia. The engagement index score was adopted from the previous research. However, we modified the formula to get a better distribution score.Our modified formula generates the same ranking sequences with previous research.Also, Facebook and Youtubes’ reaction are considered in this work to analyzes the quality of sentiments to a Facebook fan page and Youtube channel of localgovernments.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate speech acts performed by Iranian EFL learners on the social network of Facebook in their interaction with their teacher and with their peers in response to divergent and evaluative questions. A page was constructed for the students in order to provide the opportunity for their answering divergent and evaluative questions posed by the researchers. A total of 240 comments including 1680 speech acts were collected from five EFL students during an academic semester. Content analysis of the collected data revealed that participants primarily used expressive speech acts in response to divergent questions and directive speech acts in response to evaluative questions. The results also revealed differences in using emoticons regarding the difference in power relations between the teacher and students. Further findings and implications are discussed in the paper.

This paper looks at how Muslim women with an Iranian background and now living in Canada perform their identity through wearing the hijab. This was achieved by observing the behavior of six members of this community on Facebook using Erving Goffman’s stigmatization theory. The observation reveals that women who wear the hijab are more likely to identify themselves as Muslim-Canadian while those who have abandoned the hijab after immigration are more likely to identify themselves as Iranian-Canadian. Moreover, the results show that while Goffman’s theory is very useful in trying to understand the stigmatization of the veil after the 9/11 attacks as well as other extremists’ attacks, the pressures that this created on Muslim women, as well as the behavior of some women in dropping the veil in order to ‘pass’ such stigmatization, his theory is of limited use in understanding the more complicated performance of women who kept their hijab in spite of the challenges they faced.

Given a limited understanding of post-COVID customer behavior on social media, this paper seeks to identify consumer behavioral patterns on Facebook and Instagram in the post-COVID era. The research explores all the inner and outer features that might affect the way consumers think or act in the post-COVID era. Hence, a qualitative approach has been adopted to have a more comprehensive and current understanding. The research begins by identifying pertinent factors shaping consumer behavior through an extensive review of existing literature. To refine and validate these factors, the study employs the fuzzy Delphi method, a research technique that involves seeking consensus among a panel of experts. The findings of the research illuminate 24 distinct factors, organized into five main dimensions: contextual, social, content, technological, and product. Notably, the study underscores the significance of product-related factors, technological advancements, content quality, and social interactions in shaping post-COVID consumer behaviors. The product-related factors hold the most substantial influence over consumer behaviors, followed by technological considerations, content quality, and social interactions. Managers should prioritize quality assurance and strategic product categorization. Emphasizing these aspects in product positioning can significantly influence consumer behavior on social media platforms.