This post is dedicated for our Assignment 2 on CMC
Following are the concise version of both Task 1 & Task 2
The original copy of all files related with this assignment can be downloaded by clicking these icons:
Task 1:
Summary of Research Article
•Title: Audience design in Twitter: Retweeting behavior between informational value and followers’ interests
•Authors’ Name: Anja Rudat,Jürgen Buder, Friedrich W. Hesse.
•Journal: Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 35, Year 2014, pp.132–139
Purpose of study
•To examines the criteria that influence the forwarding of information in microblogging systems such as Twitter.
•To test whether and how two different kinds of criteria (contextual criteria and message inherent-criteria) interact in influencing selection decisions of sharing information with others
Statement of Problems
•How does awareness information about the audience interacts with the news topic of the tweet and with informational value regarding their influence on the selection decision on what items to retweet?
•Does the information about the audience would affect the interacts with the news topics and informational value regarding their influence on the selection on what items to retweet?
Methodology
•60 participants German-speaking students whom age ranged from 19 to 30 years.
•Participants were asked about their average knowledge about Twitter and their average usage of Twitter.
•A laboratory experiment used to explore the effect of awareness information, topic, and informational value on retweeting.
Materials Used:
•The materials consisted of 36 fictive tweets about a wide range of news topics based on real German tweets.
•There are eight news factors and subsumed them into two groups that need to be observed: Controversy, Negative Consequences, Relevance, and Unexpectedness (high informational value), and Aggression, Personalization, Prominence, and Proximity (low informational value).
•Half of the material consisted of tweets about educational news, whereas the other half consisted of tweets about non-educational news
•The first set (high value set) contained all tweets that conveyed news factors with high informational value, whereas the second set (low value set) contained all tweets that conveyed news factors with low informational value.
•The created tweets were not longer than 140 characters each and looked like real tweets as they were presented in a simulated Twitter environment.
•Retweeting was measured dichotomously, with 0 indicating not retweeted, and 1 indicating retweeted.
•Each participant was randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions (guiding awareness or non-guiding awareness condition).
•The researchers measured retweeting by the participants’ choice of retweeting a tweet or not. To do this, the participants had to decide after reading the tweets, which tweet they wanted to retweet to their followers. Participants received different information about their fictive followers.
Findings
•The participants selected mostly that information for retweeting that conveyed the news factors Relevance, Controversy, Negative Consequences and Unexpectedness. These are high informational value.
•Participants from both conditions (guiding and non-guiding) showed the same retweeting behaviour regarding informational value which means there is no interaction effect of awareness information.
Findings
•They found an interaction effect of awareness information and found a main effect of informational value, indicating that high informational value news factors led to more retweeting than low informational value news factors
•Users who are provided with guiding awareness information adapt their communication behavior regarding the topic of the retweeted messages.
•Awareness information should have guidance in order to achieve an adaptation of the communication behavior.
•Message-inherent criteria such as informational value still remain important for the actual selection decision which information to share with others.
Discussion
•The main effect of informational value, indicating that high informational value new factors led to more retweeting than low informational value which might be strong and stable.
•Out of all available messages about a relevant topic, people still chose tweets with high informational value news factors over tweets containing news factors with low informational value.
•It would not have been possible to compare the retweeted and non-retweeted items outside the room.
•Participants were mainly students whom had rather low experiences with Twitter.
•It would be helpful to additionally investigate whether the effect would also replicable with participants with more experienced with Twitter.
Comments
•The article shows that through the criteria of meaning of the message, it is still an important factor to be considered when retweeting the tweets. People should know their limitations when it comes to giving information to other people. It is crucial to know whether the message is informational or non-informational to the people so that it could benefits to the users (tweeters).
Part 2:
A Study on Maxims in Conversational Ethics on Football through Twitter
Corpus: Twitter; Football tweets
Framework: The Maxims in Conversational Ethics
Objectives:
•To analyse Twitter conversations based on its adherence to the four maxims of conversation proposed by Grice (1975).
•To determine which maxim(s) is highly adhered and which maxim(s) is least adhered by the users in Twitter conversation.
Methods:
•The method of random sampling the tweet with the topic of football, random conversations were taken out of different populations based on various main twitter accounts with its respective reply(s).
•A total of 10 conversations consisting of 38 tweets were gathered and organized accordingly.
•The tweets is evaluated based on the four maxims of conversation as defined by Grice (1975)
The data is presented in a table and ticked according to its adherence to the four different maxims (Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner).
The first maxim is the maxim of quantity where the speaker gives the proper amount of information needed by the other party, not excessive and not inadequate.
The second maxim is the maxim of quality where the user’s words are authentic and true, not based on things they believe to be false or faulty.
The third maxim is the maxim of relation where the dialogue must be related to the ideas or questions posed by the previous speaker.
The fourth maxim is the maxim of manner where ambiguity is avoided and the dialogue can convey the intended message without confusion.
Findings
•A total of thirty eight tweets are collected from Twitter for the purpose of this study.
•The most adherence by the users is the maxim of manner with a total of 36 calculated tweets adhering to the maxim.
•The maxim of quantity displayed a total of 17 out of 38 tweets
•Maxim of quality exhibited a total of 26 tweets abiding to the rules of this maxim
•Maxim of relevance fall short with only 21 shows relation with the previous tweets they responded to.
Conversation 1
Piers Morgan @piersmorgan 14h
Everton's biggest win against Arsenal in 25 years. It's over. #WengerOut
Replies
@kas_riz 14h
“@piersmorgan: Everton's biggest win against Arsenal in 25 years. It's over. #WengerOut”
Lol he tweets Wenger out every time they don't win
paul johnson @welshmantom 14h
@piersmorgan keep Wenger in its so so funny this time every year, fans all around the country would miss the comedy of football that is afc
Chris Lloyd @ChrisLloydTV 14h
@piersmorgan do me a favour Piers, your opinion changes more than the English weather. If we beat Wigan you'll be back on Wenger's bandwagon
Discussion
Maxim of quantity
•Wordings should be brief and contain the intended meaning and some of the writers give out too many information which are unnecessary.
•Most of the users invalidated this maxim in order to taunt, annoy, or tease the fans of other teams.
•Instead of giving out informational tweets to the public, the users mostly manipulate this medium for their personal objective.
•Example, Conversation 6.
Maxim of quality
•Most of them tweet about the things that are based on facts and truth while only few actually posted on non-factual matters (i.e assumptions and jokes).
•Refering to Conversation 1
•A display of inconsistency in maxim of quality can be referred to Coversation 9
•The 140 characters limitation which is unique to Twitter has also restraint the users to use as much words as they wish. In the case of giving out information and idea, it depends on the creativity of the users to convey one’s intended messages as concise as possible.
Maxim of Relevance
•In this case, what usually comes after a question should be an answer to the question. Twitter users exhibited a considerable amount of adherence to maxim of relevance.
•In the Internet medium especially Twitter, it is most often hard to maintain coherency of the conversation due to its limited space and the constant flowing of new messages and information.
•The needs for brevity in messages also restraints the users from having a proper conversation among one another.
•Interaction do exist in the Twitter world but the conversation only withold a short expanse of lifetime. Refer to Conversation 4
Conclusion
•It can be concluded that most of Twitter users adhere to maxim of manner due to the limitated number of words allowed to be used in one particular tweets.
•Football is a topic that revolves around factual information. Although most of the main tweets are based on truth and facts to give the public information, news and updates on football, the replies are mostly subjective and personal in nature.
•Most of the users uses Twitter as the platform to mock each other without offering an new information. Majority of them talk about football for personal pleasure and expressing their stand on the matter.
This research possesses several limitations which can be improved in future research by other researches. The corpus of the study is only limited to five-page Twitter conversation which is very small to represent the bigger population. Future researchers may use more samples in order to make the study more accure and representative. It is also recommended that future study to expand the research into other field of topics with perhaps even wider expanse of corpus.
No comments:
Post a Comment