A study of social interaction during mobile information seeking

Abstract

With the increasing importance of social media in people's lives, more mobile applications have incorporated features to support social networking activities. These applications enable communication between people, using features such as chatting and blogging. There is, however, little consideration of the collaboration between people during information seeking. Mobile applications should support the seeking, sharing, confirming, and validating of information systematically to help users complete their tasks and fulfill their information needs. To support information seeking, especially collaboratively as a group, there is a need to understand people's social interaction behavior. Using tourism as a domain, we conducted a diary study to look into tourists' social interaction during information seeking. Further, based on the diary study findings and current research, we describe a set of triggers that lead to collaboration for each step in the information-seeking process. Here we present the social collaboration patterns between tourists and the people around them. Further, based on a diary study and current research, we describe a set of triggers that lead to collaboration for each step in the BIG6 information-seeking process.

Tourists' social interactions on social media during a group trip planning

“…Our finding confirms Tan and Goh (2015) that tourists interacted with people who had relevant experiences to seek a wide range of information in travel planning.…”

“…The following quote exhibited such interactions:

“ I [mem#1] contacted with my friend who visited Melbourne before to find the best way [by road or flight] to travel to Melbourne. I [memr#2] also contacted with my friend [another person] to have more information about best way, car renting and location of hotel so that we can compare our information [gathered by all] for making the right decision .”

Our finding confirms Tan and Goh () that tourists interacted with people who had relevant experiences to seek a wide range of information in travel planning.…”

“…Information shared by experienced tourists on social media is perceived as similar to recommendations provided by friends, families or even like‐minded people (Wang & Fesenmaier, ) and thus, considered as a trustworthy source of information. Tan and Goh () found that individual tourist interacted with people around him/her to fulfill information needs; such social interactions with both immediate and extended social circles were found to affect tourists' decisions at the destination. However, these studies did not present an in‐depth analysis of the contributions of social interactions on social media in group trip planning.…”

Mobile phones for development

“…As the concept mobile phone continues to lack sustained inquiry of information studies, the few studies of information studies that focus on mobile phonerelated topics cannot help but replicate behavioural and cognitive paradigms of information. To illustrate, Tan and Goh (2015) argued, "mobile applications should support the seeking, sharing, confirming, and validating of information systematically to help users complete their tasks and fulfill their information needs" (p. 2031). It follows that information and its new digital products such as mobile phones are taken to be a commodity, utility, or fetish of task-centric behaviours and systems (Ilahiane and Sherry, 2008;Lugo and Sampson, 2008).…”

Making recommendations by integrating information from multiple social networks

“…However, these cross-domain recommendation systems focus solely on matching items and have not considered users' preferences across available platforms. There are also recommendation methods that aim to combine multiple features, such as past preferences on items, social relations among users [11], location and temporal information, e.g., [12][13][14][15], and [16]. To the best of our knowledge, even though these works use multiple features at once, none of them employs data from multiple sources.…”