Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
14.2 Related Works on Social Media
Kawaura et al. (
1998
) identified three main groups of motivation for beginning to
keep an online diary: motivation to express one's own thoughts, an instrumental
motivation (e.g., making it easier to update information, or generating more traffic
on a website), and a 'conformable' motivation (i.e., users may start an online diary
due to influences from others).
Miura (
2005
,
2007
) analyzed blog authors' intentions to continue blog-writing
and identified three kinds of benefits to blog authors: benefits to self, benefits to
relationships with others, and benefits to information-handling skills (Miura
2007
).
Miura surveyed blog authors and divided them into two groups based on
characteristics of their blogs. One group is the 'database oriented blogger', who
emphasizes sharing information and knowledge with a community. The other is the
'diary oriented blogger', who values expressing him- or herself, and maintaining
closer relationships with others. For both types of bloggers, interactions with others
affect their intentions to continue blog-writing. Additionally, benefits to
information-handling skills are important to database oriented bloggers, but not to
diary oriented bloggers (Miura
2005
).
Heckner et al. (
2009
) studied information behavior in social tagging systems.
According to their study, there are two motivations for tagging: personal informa-
tion management for one's own use, and resource-sharing with others. Although
these two motivations are important, users of Flickr and YouTube tend to focus
more on sharing information and the users of Delicious and Connotea have
tendencies toward personal information management.
Research on Wikipedia users (Glott et al.
2010
; Schmidt et al.
2010
) has found
that almost 31 % of users contribute to Wikipedia as an author, editor, or adminis-
trator. Based on self-reported data, the most common motivation behind
contributing to Wikipedia is the user's feeling that “I like the idea of sharing
knowledge and want to contribute to it.” The second most common motivation is
“I saw an error I wanted to fix.” On the other hand, the most popular reason for not
contributing is “I don't think I have enough information to contribute.” The second
most common reason is “I am happy just to read it; I don't need to write it.” Most
users who do not currently contribute stated that they would contribute if “I knew
there were specific topic areas that needed my help.”
14.3 Human Flesh Search
Human flesh search (HFS)
is a literal
translation of
the Chinese phrase
“RenRouSouSuo” (
人肉捜索
), which means “searching by human power.” Gener-
ally, HFS refers to cooperation in order to
nd particular information by a large
number of Internet users. In many cases, the target of HFS is a particular person
who has committed an illegal or immoral act. For this reason, HFS is sometimes
called an 'Internet man hunt' or a 'cyber witch hunt'.
