ECREA16-Abstract

295

Friday, November 11

1 4 : 3 0 – 1 6 : 0 0

GEC PS

Poster session

PS 062

‘No More Birthday Greetings on my FacebookWall, Please’: Four Years Later. User Representations of Social Media Platforms and Their

Integration in Everyday Practices: A Longitudinal Approach

F. Comunello

, S. Mulargia

Lumsa University, Humanities, Roma, Italy

Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

‘Proper’usage of social media platforms, as socially perceived, derives from the negotiation between each platform’s affordances and constraints (Norman,

2013), user perceptions, and social usage norms. While existing literature on social network sites has mainly focused on single platforms, or on the com‑

parison between platforms, we adopt a media ecological approach (Barnes, 2008) in this paper, and consider the variety of platforms that people use

in their everyday lives. When selecting the platforms where to pursue specific purposes, with regard to different contexts and interlocutors, along with

the communication style to adopt, people follow specific media ideologies and idioms of practice (Gershon, 2010). While idioms of practice are built and

negotiated collectively, they are not universally shared among a specific population. This contribution further develops a research project we presented at

the Ecrea Conference 2012, adopting a longitudinal perspective. We first created 4 focus groups in 2012 involving high school students aged 18–20 living in

Rome (Italy). As norms and practices seemed to be changing rapidly over time, we decided to replicate the study in 2015 and 2016, adding 6 additional focus

groups involving university students living in the same city and born in the same years as the first respondents. Among our research questions: − Do young

people have a precise representation (ideology) of the peculiarities of different digital platforms? − Do they perceive some platforms as more appropriate

for specific tasks, contexts, or relational patterns? − How are such representations built and shared among their peer groups? −What are the motivations

for such perceived differences? − Do such representations change over time? If so, how? In conducting the focus groups, we offered different scenarios such

as birthday greetings, a huge disagreement with a friend/acquaintance to be faced, etc., and asked respondents how they would act in such situations.

After the respondents spontaneously introduced social media platforms, usage experiences, misunderstandings related to different media ‘ideologies’, and

appropriate/inappropriate usage patterns were also discussed. Results show that young people both follow group-specific norms and more individualized

usage patterns. All of our respondents have a clear picture of what can be defined as an appropriate use of digital platforms in relation to specific purposes,

contexts, tie strength, etc. Among the dimensions that have been used to motivate such perceived differences are: publicity, communicative bandwidth,

synchrony vs. asynchrony, investment, etc. Furthermore, shared usage norms change rapidly over time, and the diffusion of‘new’platforms (e.g. Whatsapp,

or Instagram) which were not widespread when we realized the first focus groups, comes with specific media ideologies, and reconfigures the whole (per‑

sonal) media ecology. References Barnes, S. B. (2008). Understanding social media from the media ecological perspective. In E. A. Konijn, S. Utz, M. Tanis,

& S. B. Barnes (Eds.), Mediated Interpersonal Communication (pp.14–33). New York: Routledge. Gershon, I. (2010). The breakup 2.0. Disconnecting over

new media. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Norman, D. (2013). The design of everyday things: Revised and expanded edition. New York: Basic Books.

PS 063

Evaluating Online Information: What Makes People Trust and Distrust

L. Dedkova

, H. Machackova

Masaryk University, Institute for Research on Children- Youth and Families, Brno, Czech Republic

With the spread of human-computer interaction, the question of assessment of trustworthiness of online information has become an important issue

(Metzger & Flanagin, 2008). People rely more and more on the information communicated online – however, its credibility may vary tremendously, ranging

from intentional lies to genuine and helpful information posted by experts. Thus, there is a crucial question of how internet users evaluate trustworthiness

of the information posted online. This study focuses specifically on trustworthiness in a form of trusting beliefs (McKnight et al., 2002), i.e. the perception

and assessment of the information trustworthiness, and we examine these beliefs in relation to the online message, specifically an information about anti‑

virus software posted online. Further, we distinguish between two components of the assessment of trustworthiness: trust and distrust (or suspicion), since

recent research emphasizes that trust and distrust do not have to be polar opposites in one continuum but rather should be viewed as conceptually different

(Cho, 2006; Ou & Sia, 2010; Kim et al. 2008). Prior research has identified many factors which might influence the evaluation of the trustworthiness or cred‑

ibility of online information (Beldad, de Jong, & Steehouder, 2010; Metzger, 2007; Wang & Emurian; 2005). These include features connected to the text,

to the information authorship, or the website on which the information is posted. Our goal is to examine the assessed effect of several features connected

to online information and find out how specific groups of youth differ in their assessment of trust and distrust online. To fulfill this goal, we utilize data

from 613 Czech university students (19–28 years old, 53% females) who filled up online questionnaire in university PC lab. Respondents were instructed

to imagine they are looking for best internet security software to secure their personal computer and to report how their decision to dis/trust presented

information would be affected by the features pertaining to the text, the author, and the website. The survey system randomly assigned two conditions:

approximately half of respondents evaluated the features’ effect on their trust and the other half effect on their distrust. Responses were measured on

6-point scales ranging from (1)“would not affect my dis/trust at all”to (6)“would absolutely increase my dis/trust”. The survey also measured respondents’

individual characteristics including gender, online expertise, disposition to trust, impulsivity, and need for cognition, which are used to identify and explain

the differences in the assessment of trust and distrust. The results showed different patterns of this assessments and diverse links to the individual charac‑

teristics of the youth. The differences are further discussed.