Digital and Social Media

Digital and social media (DSM) have established their importance to society, being an important venue for work and play, entertainment and education, news and politics. Email, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram are preferred modes of contact; changes to these platforms create ripples of concern and adaptation. Streamed music and video have replaced physical media such as CDs or DVDs and are infringing on other channels. Online information sources compete with and threaten traditional news media, with profound societal impact. These trends were amplified by the COVID–19 crisis but are continuing strongly even as the crises abates. For instance, movie ticket sales in the United States have recovered, but to only 2/3 their pre-COVID volume; the box office take is dwarfed by streaming and gaming subscriptions. Understanding developments in DSM and their implications is thus a critical challenge for researchers and the public.

To address this challenge, the Digital and Social Media (DSM) track covers a broad range of topics, disciplines and approaches, bringing together researchers to share and discuss cutting-edge research. This year, the track includes 60 papers organized into 11 minitracks.

Four minitracks gather research on different types of digital or social media.

Mediated Conversation: studies of digitally-persistent conversation and its implications for diverse forms of human interaction that raises new socio-technical, ethical, pedagogical, linguistic and social questions; and that suggests new methods, perspectives, and design approaches for these systems. The two papers in this minitrack address the stability of climate change deniers’ disinformation networks and media attention and news framing during the COVID-19 era.

Games and Gaming: digital games and sociality, e.g., papers investigating sociability, social practices, communities, use of social affordances or other related social dimensions. The eight papers in this minitrack explore a range of topics, e.g., ways of making games more accessible, behavior in cooperative games, the sense of place in games and the mental health impacts of dark participation in games.

Streaming Media in Entertainment: fosters understanding of the production and usage of, and user participation in social live streaming services. The paper in this minitrack asks if synchronicity of emotion between steamers and viewers influences consumption.

Digital and Social Media in Enterprise: studies of the use of social media in organizations, along with the opportunities and challenges addressing issues related to the role of enterprise social media in work. The two papers in this minitrack address effects of using the Metaverse and information sharing on an enterprise microblogging platform.

Generative AI and AI-generated Contents on Social Media: New this year, this minitrack examines the technology, applications and potential benefits and negative impacts of the use of artificialintelligence- generated content, considering diverse stakeholders. The two papers in this minitrack address detection of machine generated Tweets and international student use of an AI writing assistant.

Two minitracks advance methodology for research on DSM.

Data Analytics, Data Mining and Machine Learning for Social Media: research that brings together DSM and data analytics, data mining and machine learning, including quantitative, theoretical and applied approaches. The twelve papers in this minitrack span a broad range of topic, including several papers on misinformation, such as spread of COVID conspiracies, techniques for detecting depression and approaches to user modelling and detecting attitudes.

Applying Netnographic Research in the System Sciences Context—Insights, Illustrations, and Intersections: New this year, this minitrack features papers that develop, conceptualize, use, and adapt netnography, the application of ethnographic approaches to phenomena represented through digital traces. The four papers in this minitrack feature the approach applied to Zoom, privacy, crisis management and participation action research.

Finally, the papers in four minitracks examine a particular phenomenon or related phenomena as it or they unfold in the setting of DSM.

Decision Making in Online Social Networks: explores, extends and challenges existing knowledge of decision making in online social communities and networks. The four papers in this minitrack investigate the impacts of media complexity, and decisions about online product reviews, dating apps and posting behaviour on Reddit.

Culture, Identity and Inclusion: interrogates how social media are being adopted in diverse communities and the new norms and practices that emerge from this use, with a focus on culture and identity. The six papers in this minitrack address topics such as feelings about photo retouching, course group work, knowledge sharing in online communities and artificial intelligence assistants in e-commerce.

Critical and Ethical Studies of Digital and Social Media: addresses two themes: 1) critical interrogations of the role of DSM in supporting existing power structures or realigning power for underrepresented or social marginalized groups, and 2) ethical issues associated with doing research on DSM. The seven papers in this minitrack address these topics in settings ranging from misinformation to digital safe spaces to dating apps to online reviews.

Social Media Influencers and Influencing: New this year, this minitrack invites research that examines the impact and influence of social media influencers on society and the rise of virtual influencers. The twelve papers in this minitrack cover diverse topics, including impacts of social media features on influencers, influencers in settings such as crypto, climate change denial and peer-topeer lending, and outcomes such as brand experience, consumer engagement, and creator mental health.

Looking across the minitracks, the ever-growing power of social media data for answering pressing social question is apparent in many of the papers. A welcome observation is the increasing diversity of social media platforms and real-world settings being studied, with the recognition that life is increasingly mediated by these technologies. In sum, the track offers a home for research on diverse types of DSM, in diverse settings, with diverse methods and examining diverse phenomena, but joined by an interest in these novel media.

Kevin Crowston
School of Information Studies
Syracuse University
crowston@syr.edu