Really do university students believe that facebook is a useful tool to mobilizing people both online and offline around social causes?

The use of information and communication technologies pervades our lives. A specific type of social media that is playing a crucial role in this upsurge of participation in cyber-collective social movements (CSMs) is the social networking sites (SNS). We employ an extended model from the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) as our theoretical framework to understand student perceptions of SNS use expectations (performance expectancy and effort expectancy), social acceptance (social influence), and their perceptions about resource availability (facilitating conditions) for expressive social participation. This extended model introduces social variables (SNS mobilization effort and offline civic participation) that researchers have identified as important in explaining behaviors. In doing so, it advances a model of how activities in the online domain can ‘spill’ over to the offline domain. We have provided empirical support for the applicability of UTAUT to the expressive participation in CSMs via a survey of 214 SNS users. Our results confirm that expectancy and social influence significantly affect student intentions to use SNS for expressive participation in CSMs. Likewise, SNS mobilization effort emerged as a strong significant predictor of both intention and the use of SNS for expressive participation, but not for offline civic participation. Last, the use of SNS for expressive participation was a significant predictor for offline civic participation, which suggests that users who publicly express their socio-political opinions in SNS are more likely than others to participate in demonstrations.

Really do university students believe that facebook is a useful tool to mobilizing people both online and offline around social causes? from Juan D Borrero

Hyperlink Formation in Social Bookmarking Systems: Who is Who Online?

Social bookmarking systems attract researchers in information systems and social sciences because they offer an enormous quantity of user-generated annotations that reveal the interests of millions of people. In this paper, we explore a different viewpoint to gain an understanding of the social bookmarking systems.

Using data crawled from a large social tagging system we argue that the prominence of a website, as measured by its status or public recognition, also determines its centrality.

To test this hypothesis we predict the indexes of authority and other measures of centrality via Social Network Analysis. We also use Gephi to visualize the networks, and analyze the structure.

The results discussed in the paper come from a sample of 61,043 taggings that involved 3,668 users and 4,913 bookmarked websites from a specific Social Network Sites, Delicious, on the subject of globalization of agriculture.

We find that mass media companies have a competitive advantage in attracting links and user attention.

Hyperlink Formation in Social Bookmarking Systems: Who is Who Online? from Juan D Borrero