Global social media, local context

Abstract

Purpose – Social media connect individuals in different geographical location and allow people of different political and cultural backgrounds to discuss and participate in events that occur in distant corners of the globe. But, this does not suggest that social media promote homogeneous globalization. Rather, the local and its interactions with the global or regional views remain a powerful force in the realm of social media. The purpose of this paper is to take on the local/global factors in the social media service Twitter and analyzed the keyword-captured Chinese language tweets relating to the 2012 presidential election in Taiwan. Design/methodology/approach – Language code usage was used to sort out the community origins of Chinese language tweets relating to the election, given that distinct types and codes of Chinese characters are used within each political border. Community-specific patterns of communication were identified by cross-correlating language styles, tweeting frequency and participating users. Social network analysis was used to further characterize the local factors in the global social media. Findings – The authors found that the language styles and character types can be used to identify the regions to which the users belong. The authors were able to identify community-specific patterns of communication and reconstruct a social network that exhibits local characteristics. Originality/value – The results demonstrate that language code can be used to identify the community origin of Chinese tweets. This will enable fine-grain content-based analysis of the Chinese language social media.

Twitter and Political Campaigning

“…Most studies identify Twitter usernames in the tweets to reconstruct communication networks (cf. Ausserhofer and Maireder 2013;Cheng and Chen 2014). Even though we know that many of the tweets are not directed to anyone in particular, the subset of directed tweets to and from politicians may help us to understand political communication during election campaigns (Figure 3).…”

The challenges of Web accessibility: The technical and social aspects of a truly universal Web

“…Accessibility of government information and services can be critical to special needs users as government services have, over the period of least the last decade (Wintour, 2010;Hermana and Silfianti, 2011;Ghazal, 2012;Song, 2014), progressively been moving to the Web as a source of information, policy, forms and inquiry. Along with core service provision to citizens, governments have also embraced both asynchronous and synchronous online platforms to communicate policy (Tsimonis and Dimitriadis, 2014), platform (Chen, 2008;Church, 2010;Cury, 2011;Gibson and McAllister, 2011) and electoral messages to a national audience (Naim, 2009;Cury, 2011;Lev-On, 2012;Cheng and Chen, 2014). Whilst YouTube is a primary example of an asynchronous media channel whereby government can present a controlled and managed message for citizens and the media to consume after the fact, other environments offer a more synchronous, two way modality where communication is in response to queries and events emanating from with the community.…”