Expressing identity socially involves a balance between conformity and innovation. One can adopt existing labels to express belonging to a certain community or introduce new labels to express an individual sense of identity. In such a process of co-creation, the existing identity labels of a community shape one’s sense of identity, while individual expression changes that of a community. Social media has introduced new opportunities to study the expression of collective identity. Here we study the group behavior of individuals defining their identities with hashtag self-labels in their Twitter profiles from mid-2017 through 2019. These timelines of personal self-labeling show behavior incorporating innovation, conservation, and social conformity when defining self. We show that the collective co-labeling of popular concepts in the context of identity, such as #resist and #maga, follow the dynamics of a modified Yule-Simon model balancing novelty and conformity. The dynamics of identity expression resemble the collective tagging processes of folksonomies, indicating a similarity between the collective tagging of external objects and the collective labeling of ourselves. Our work underpins a better understanding of how online environments mediate the evolution of collective identity which plays an increasingly important role in the establishment of community values and identitymore »
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10171240
- Journal Name:
- CSCW’19 Companion
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 106 to 110
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
Abstract -
Introduction Social media has created opportunities for children to gather social support online (Blackwell et al., 2016; Gonzales, 2017; Jackson, Bailey, & Foucault Welles, 2018; Khasawneh, Rogers, Bertrand, Madathil, & Gramopadhye, 2019; Ponathil, Agnisarman, Khasawneh, Narasimha, & Madathil, 2017). However, social media also has the potential to expose children and adolescents to undesirable behaviors. Research showed that social media can be used to harass, discriminate (Fritz & Gonzales, 2018), dox (Wood, Rose, & Thompson, 2018), and socially disenfranchise children (Page, Wisniewski, Knijnenburg, & Namara, 2018). Other research proposes that social media use might be correlated to the significant increase in suicide rates and depressive symptoms among children and adolescents in the past ten years (Mitchell, Wells, Priebe, & Ybarra, 2014). Evidence based research suggests that suicidal and unwanted behaviors can be promulgated through social contagion effects, which model, normalize, and reinforce self-harming behavior (Hilton, 2017). These harmful behaviors and social contagion effects may occur more frequently through repetitive exposure and modelling via social media, especially when such content goes “viral” (Hilton, 2017). One example of viral self-harming behavior that has generated significant media attention is the Blue Whale Challenge (BWC). The hearsay about this challenge is that individuals at allmore »
-
Abstract Mass communication over social media can drive rapid changes in our sense of collective identity. Hashtags in particular have acted as powerful social coordinators, playing a key role in organizing social movements like the Gezi park protests, Occupy Wall Street,
#metoo , and#blacklivesmatter . Here we quantify collective identity from the use of hashtags as self-labels in over 85,000 actively-maintained Twitter user profiles spanning 2017–2019. Collective identities emerge from a graph model of individuals’ overlapping self-labels, producing a hierarchy of graph clusters. Each cluster is bound together and characterized semantically by specific hashtags key to its formation. We define and apply two information-theoretic measures to quantify the strength of identities in the hierarchy. First we measure collective identity coherence to determine how integrated any identity is from local to global scales. Second, we consider the conspicuousness of any identity given its vocabulary versus the global identity map. Our work reveals a rich landscape of online identity emerging from the hierarchical alignment of uncoordinated self-labeling actions. -
Recent research on conspiracy theories labels conspiracism as a distinct and deficient epistemic process. However, the tendency to pathologize conspiracism obscures the fact that it is a diverse and dynamic collective sensemaking process, transacted in public on the web. Here, we adopt a narrative framework to introduce a new analytical approach for examining online conspiracism. Narrative plays an important role because it is central to human cognition as well as being domain agnostic, and so can serve as a bridge between conspiracism and other modes of knowledge production. To illustrate the utility of our approach, we use it to analyze conspiracy theories identified in conversations across three different anti-vaccination discussion forums. Our approach enables us to capture more abstract categories without hiding the underlying diversity of the raw data. We find that there are dominant narrative themes across sites, but that there is also a tremendous amount of diversity within these themes. Our initial observations raise the possibility that different communities play different roles in the collective construction of conspiracy theories online. This offers one potential route for understanding not only cross-sectional differentiation, but the longitudinal dynamics of the narrative in future work. In particular, we are interested to examinemore »
-
As people increasingly work different jobs, the responsibility of building long-term career satisfaction and stability increasingly falls more on the workers rather than individual employers. With technologies playing a central role in how people choose and access employment opportunities, it is necessary to understand how online technologies are shaping career development. We bring together leading human-computer interaction researchers, industry members, and community organizers, who have worked with systems and people across the socio-economic spectrum during the career development process. We will discuss research on the role of online technologies in career development, including but not limited to topics in crowd work, social media sites, and freelance work sites.