Social Media: Culture, Identity, and Inclusion

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    Mobile phones use by urban refugees in South Africa: Opportunities and challenges
    ( 2018-01-03) Bisimwa, Kasky ; Brown, Irwin ; Johnston, Kevin
    The utilization of mobile phones is increasingly seen as a crucial means of reducing inequalities and ensuring people’s inclusion in society. Yet, an understanding of the factors affecting the use of mobile phones remains inadequate. Drawing from Sen’s capability approach and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the findings suggest that mobile phone use affords valuable capabilities to the users. However, the generation of these capabilities is contingent on power relations in the social field - between social structures and individual’s agency. In South Africa, the capabilities of empowerment that urban refugees can generate through mobile phone use are either enhanced or hindered by interrelated factors, namely the affordances of mobile phones, socio-environmental factors, and personal factors. This paper contributes to the theory in the field of Information Systems by proposing a dynamic framework with precise constructs for theorizing and explaining the mechanisms and social practices that shape mobile phone use and the capabilities for empowerment.
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    A Socio-contextual Approach in Automated Detection of Cyberbullying
    ( 2018-01-03) Tahmasbi, Nargess ; Rastegari, Elham
    Cyberbullying is a major cyber issue that is common among adolescents. Recent reports show that more than one out of five students in the United States is a victim of cyberbullying. Majority of cyberbullying incidents occur on public social media platforms such as Twitter. Automated cyberbullying detection methods can help prevent cyberbullying before the harm is done on the victim. In this study, we analyze a corpus of cyberbullying Tweets to construct an automated detection model. Our method emphasizes on the two claims that are supported by our results. First, despite other approaches that assume that cyberbullying instances use vulgar or profane words, we show that they do not necessarily contain negative words. Second, we highlight the importance of context and the characteristics of actors involved and their position in the network structure in detecting cyberbullying rather than only considering the textual content in our analysis.
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    The New Agora: Social Media as a Vector for Sign Language as a Language of Culture, Identity and Inclusion of the Deaf
    ( 2018-01-03) Guimarães, Cayley ; Fernandes, Sueli
    Sign Languages (SL) are necessary for the intellectual development of Deaf children. They are complete linguistic system used by the Deaf Culture for education, communication, creation and dissemination of knowledge. Arbitrarily forbidden for more than 100 years, the lack of SL artifacts is now a major problem the Deaf: there are few loci where they can interact in their own language (i.e. there are few media in SL). The recent growth in social media (virtual applications that allow the user to create and share their own content) has provided a new vector for the use of SL (whether in real time, or separated in space and time) and value SL as a Language of culture, identity and inclusion. The research surveyed Deaf students of a Bachelors program in Linguistics and shows that social media has become a new Agora for the Deaf Culture.
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    Introduction to the Minitrack on Social Media: Culture, Identity, and Inclusion
    ( 2018-01-03) Levinson, Nanette ; Cogburn, Derrick L. ; Vodanovich, Shahper