Browsing by Subject "Social network"
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Item Bowling online : smartphones, mobile messengers, and mobile social games for Korean teen girls(2014-12) Seo, Hogeun; Strover, SharonDue to their arduous schedules, Korean high school students have little time to socialize with their peers face-to-face. Because of this, socializing in online environments is important to them. Using smartphone applications, Korean high school girls are creating their own cultural practices as they socialize. However, media repeatedly report concerns about adolescents’ excessive use of smartphones, and the public has begun to worry about children’s media dependence. In exploring these phenomena, I pose four research questions: 1) what do smartphones mean to South Korean high school girls? 2) How do South Korean high school girls socialize through mobile messengers, such as Kakao Talk, and how are these activities related to their social capital and social networks? 3) How do South Korean high school girls socialize through mobile social games connected to mobile messengers, and how are these activities related to their social capital and social networks? 4) How is Korean high school girls’ attachment to smartphones related to smartphone addiction? For this research, I conducted focus group interviews with 23 Korean high school girls about their smartphone use. The findings of this research revealed that 1) South Korean high school girls established an exceptional attachment to smartphones; 2) interviewees were complementing the deficiency of offline socializing by establishing alternative online communities through smartphone messengers, and these social behaviors were increasing their bonding social capital; 3) Korean high school girls were interacting with their strong ties through mobile social games, and the interactions with their weak ties were limited and superficial; and 4) Korean high school girls were at risk for smartphone addiction in accordance with the existing criteria for media addiction.Item Large-scale network analytics(2011-08) Song, Han Hee, 1978-; Zhang, Yin, doctor of computer scienceScalable and accurate analysis of networks is essential to a wide variety of existing and emerging network systems. Specifically, network measurement and analysis helps to understand networks, improve existing services, and enable new data-mining applications. To support various services and applications in large-scale networks, network analytics must address the following challenges: (i) how to conduct scalable analysis in networks with a large number of nodes and links, (ii) how to flexibly accommodate various objectives from different administrative tasks, (iii) and how to cope with the dynamic changes in the networks. This dissertation presents novel path analysis schemes that effectively address the above challenges in analyzing pair-wise relationships among networked entities. In doing so, we make the following three major contributions to large-scale IP networks, social networks, and application service networks. For IP networks, we propose an accurate and flexible framework for path property monitoring. Analyzing the performance side of paths between pairs of nodes, our framework incorporates approaches that perform exact reconstruction of path properties as well as approximate reconstruction. Our framework is highly scalable to design measurement experiments that span thousands of routers and end hosts. It is also flexible to accommodate a variety of design requirements. For social networks, we present scalable and accurate graph embedding schemes. Aimed at analyzing the pair-wise relationships of social network users, we present three dimensionality reduction schemes leveraging matrix factorization, count-min sketch, and graph clustering paired with spectral graph embedding. As concrete applications showing the practical value of our schemes, we apply them to the important social analysis tasks of proximity estimation, missing link inference, and link prediction. The results clearly demonstrate the accuracy, scalability, and flexibility of our schemes for analyzing social networks with millions of nodes and tens of millions of links. For application service networks, we provide a proactive service quality assessment scheme. Analyzing the relationship between the satisfaction level of subscribers of an IPTV service and network performance indicators, our proposed scheme proactively (i.e., detect issues before IPTV subscribers complain) assesses user-perceived service quality using performance metrics collected from the network. From our evaluation using network data collected from a commercial IPTV service provider, we show that our scheme is able to predict 60% of the service problems that are complained by customers with only 0.1% of false positives.Item Privacy paradox or bargained-for-exchange : capturing the relationships among privacy concerns, privacy management, self-disclosure, and social capital(2014-12) Hsu, Shih-Hsien; Johnson, Thomas J., 1960-The dissertation seeks to bridge the gap between privacy and social capital on SNS use by bringing the essential elements of social networking, privacy concerns, privacy management, self-disclosure, and social capital together to examine their complex relationships and the daily challenges every SNS user faces. The major purposes of this dissertation were to revisit the privacy paradox phenomenon, update the current relationships among privacy concerns, self-disclosure, and social capital on Facebook, integrate these relationships into a quantitative model, and explore the role of privacy management in these relationships. The goal was realized by using Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk to test a theoretical model that used survey data from 522 respondents. The findings from the dissertation show the impact of the structural factor—Facebook social network intensity and diversity—and the impact of individuals’ self-disclosure on Facebook on their perceived bridging and bonding social capital. This dissertation employed various measurements of key variables to update the current status of the privacy paradox phenomenon—the disconnection between privacy concerns and self- disclosure on social media—and found the break of the traditional privacy paradox and the existence of the social privacy paradox. Findings also show that private information about personal information, thoughts, and ideas shared on Facebook become assets in using Facebook and accumulating social capital. Meanwhile, higher privacy concerns reduce the level of self-disclosure on Facebook. Therefore, privacy concerns become a barrier in Facebook use and in accumulating social capital within these networks. This dissertation further examined the mediating role of privacy management to solve the dilemma. Findings confirmed that privacy management is important in redirecting the relationships among privacy concerns, self-disclosure, and social capital. People who have higher privacy concerns tend to disclose fewer personal thoughts and ideas on Facebook and miss the opportunity to accumulate social capital. However, when they employ more privacy management strategies, they are more willing to self-disclose and thus accumulate more social capital on Facebook networks. Lastly, the proposed integrated model examined through SEM analysis confirms the delicate relationships among the social networking characteristics, privacy concerns, privacy management, self-disclosure, and social capital.Item Social network influence on relational termination and renewal(2013-12) Hansen, Ryan Nicholas; Dailey, René M.This study’s focus was on individuals who are currently in romantic relationships or who were in one within the past six months. The goal of the study was to learn more about the relationship between the perceived difficulty of renewing a recently terminated relationship or terminating a current romantic relationship and social network closeness, integration, and levels of perceived support for the relationship from network members. The findings for this study support the prediction that an individual’s perceived difficulty of terminating an intact relationship was positively related to their levels of closeness with their partner’s social network members, the individual’s partner’s closeness with the individual’s social network members, and the perceived support for the relationship from network members.Item Social network site use, social capital, and acculturation : a comparative study of Facebook and Renren.com use by Chinese international students in the United States(2012-08) Li, Xiaoqian, active 21st century; Straubhaar, Joseph D.; Straubhaar, Joseph D.; Chen, WenhongFacebook is the dominant SNS for American students in the United States, and Renren.com is heavily used by Chinese students in China. Chinese international students in the United States are likely to use both the host and home SNSs to keep in touch with their friends in the host and home countries. The purpose of the study is to explore the similarities and differences between host and home SNS use among Chinese international students in the U.S. This study compares their use of Facebook and Renren.com with respect to intensity and patterns of use. It explores how these student sojourners in the U.S. use the two SNSs to build up and maintain their social networks and social capital and how their levels of acculturation to American host culture and maintenance of Chinese home culture are associated with their SNS use. Quantitative data collected through a survey of 212 Chinese international students at the University of Texas at Austin was analyzed to address these research questions. The findings suggest that Chinese international students use Renren.com more intensively than Facebook and prefer Renren.com to Facebook for the purposes of communication and information seeking. They are more likely to use Renren.com than Facebook to interact with Chinese friends whether in the U.S., in China, or in other parts of the world. The intensity of Facebook and Renren.com use were found to be positively associated with bridging social capital, but neither of the two is associated with bonding social capital. Only the intensity of Renren.com use was found to have a positive relationship with maintained social capital. Furthermore, the levels of acculturation to host culture are associated with the intensity of Facebook use, while the levels of maintenance to home culture are associated with the intensity of Renren.com use.Item SportMingles sports social network for iOS(2012-12) Huang, Frank Mintzu; Aziz, AdnanWe live in a post-PC era with mobile devices on the rise. We can witness a growing number of applications that utilize the mobility of such devices to create applications that make our lives more efficient and connected. In the United States alone, millions of Americans play sports each year starting from middle school through college. With social media on the rise, there is a need for an application that takes advantage of the technologies incorporated in mobile devices with the ability to connect athletes in an area to one another. There is currently a lack of a social network application in the sports category of the Apple App Store. Therefore, this report describes how an iOS mobile application for a sports social network is designed, developed, and deployed. Specifically, we will explore in depth the iOS framework, user stories and requirements, the design and development of the client and backend application, and the tests and results.