Information technology & media sociology in a (still) pandemic world

The current period of disruptive social change is inextricably bound up with new means and modes of communication, information, and media streams. The Communication, Information Technologies & Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS) locates these factors at the center of our collective interests, investigating them through a plethora of methods, theories, and empirical cases. Each year, CITAMS runs a special issue in ICS showcasing select works presented at the previous year's American Sociological Association conference and the affiliated Media Sociology preconference. Papers in the 2022 CITAMS Special Issue reflect a social context defined by a prolonged global pandemic and wrought by democratic uncertainty. Across these social circumstances, technology and media loom large. Simultaneously, everyday life continues and classic CITAMS scholarship sustains relevance for the ways people interact, construct identity, consume, and mobilize. All of this and more are contained in the pages of this year's Special Issue, from which readers can get a sense of what CITAMS has to offer and consider how their own work may fit within the broad CITAMS umbrella. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The mediating role of social media fatigue on social media usage behaviour of the ageing society during the COVID-19 pandemic

At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, research on social media in the Malaysian context focused on its benefits and overlooked its drawbacks. To investigate this, we looked at an ageing society whose psychological health was severely affected during the pandemic. This study developed a model based on the Stressor-Strain-Outcome (SSO) framework that predicts factors that prompt passive social media use in Malaysia's ageing society during the COVID-19 pandemic. Convenient sampling was utilised to collect responses from 389 Malaysian older adults through an online survey. The direct effects of stressors, including information overload, communication overload, complexity, privacy, and fear of missing out on the strain of social media fatigue, and indirect effects on the outcome of passive social media use were investigated. For the assessment of the study model, partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was applied. Out of 11 hypotheses, four direct and three indirect hypotheses were accepted. The study findings did not support the direct and indirect effects of privacy and fear of missing out on social media fatigue and passive social media use, respectively. Findings reveal complexity as the more significant factor influencing social media fatigue, and indirectly, contributing towards the passive use of social media. This study contributes to understanding how social media interaction affects an ageing society during the pandemic lockdown. Despite widespread interest in this field, research on ageing populations concerning social media effects and pandemics is still in its early stages in Malaysia. The study's conclusion offers a thorough examination of its limitations and provides valuable recommendations for future research endeavours. © SEARCH Journal 2023.

Social media use, psychological well-being and physical health during lockdown

In efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19, many countries have implemented a variety of lockdown and quarantine measures. With substantially reduced face-to-face interactions, many people may have relied heavily on social media for connection, information, and entertainment. However, little is known about the psychological and physical health implications of social media use during strict lockdown. The current study investigates the associations of social media use with psychological well-being and physical health among Wuhan residents (N = 1214). Our findings showed that non-COVID related self-disclosure was positively associated with psychological well-being, while COVID related information consumption and sharing were negatively associated with psychological well-being. Further, more generic use of social media was associated with lower psychological well-being, which in turn related to more somatic symptoms. Quarantined people used social media more frequently than non-quarantined people. Importantly, the negative association between social media use and psychological well-being was significantly stronger for quarantined people than unquarantined people. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Information, Communication & Society is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

The evolution of consumers' demand for hotels under the public health crisis: opinion mining from online reviews

This research aims to grasp the evolution of consumer demand and improve the resilience of the hotel industry under the public health crisis (COVID-19). Online reviews of 7,679 hotels in 10 cities were collected from Ctrip, China's major online hotel platform. Then, we applied opinion mining and time evolution to mine the change in consumer demand before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings show that some consumer demands (e.g. epidemic safety) will change during the outbreak period. However, during the nonoutbreak period, users were more concerned about their own check-in experience (e.g. hotel facilities, front desk services). This article provides new ideas for identifying the dynamic value of online reviews. We suggest that businesses focus on ensuring hotel safety during the crisis period. The results contribute essential theoretical and practical significance to the hotel industry's crisis management during public health crises.

Rumor response strategy and rumor behavioral intention: The mediating roles of anxiety on Chinese social media during COVID-19

While social media has grown in popularity in today's society, and has facilitated the dissemination of accurate and valuable information, it also raises the equally pressing concern of rampant proliferation of rumors and false news. The recent global outbreak of COVID-19 witnessed the explosion of fake and misleading health rumors in social media. Governments are tasked with providing the public with the right information to influence their behavior and engagement in emergency decision-making and optimally address the risks of rumor influence. Therefore, it is important to choose an appropriate response strategy in a rumor-induced health crisis. This study has two main objectives: to identify effective rumor response strategies by the government to stem the spread of rumor during a health crisis, and to examine the role of anxiety in this process using the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT). Online quasi-experimental data was collected from 245 Chinese participants who were exposed to a false social media rumor that potato chips could spread COVID-19 and were randomly assigned to one of three rumor response strategies (denial, refute or attack). According to the one-way ANOVA results, the effect of the refute response on rumor-related behavior is the most positive, whereas the effects of denial and attack are not significantly different. The results of the mediation model using PROCESS Macro reveal that anxiety partially mediates the relationship between rumor response strategies and rumor-related behaviors (rumor dissemination intentions and behavior intention to consume products);the refute strategy reduces public anxiety and has a positive effect on public behavioral intentions. This study is relevant to COVID-19 rumor research with regard to government rumor response strategies on social media using data-based descriptive and quantitative analysis. © SEARCH Journal 2023.

Everyday Virtuality: A Multimodal Analysis of Political Participation and Newsworthiness

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, digital interactions ceased to be "just another form of communication”;indeed, they became the only means of social interaction, mediated and driven by information and communication technologies (ICTs). Consequently, working in a digital context switched from being a phenomenon to be studied to the primary means of socializing and the primary workspace for researchers. This study explores four different methodologies to question how discursive interactions related to power and newsworthiness may be addressed in digital contexts. The multimodal approach was reviewed through the affordances of critical discourse analysis, issue ownership and salience, morphological discourse analysis, and protest event analysis. It starts by theoretically addressing concepts of multimodality and phenomenology by focusing on the implications of both perspectives. It examines publications and interactions in digital contexts in Ecuador from March 2017 to December 2020 within three political phenomena. The results of the analysis of these publications and interactions suggest that when analyzing political participation and newsworthiness, the virtual becomes a subjective space. Moreover, qualitative research is one of the primary ways to combine multimodality with other forms of discourse analysis. This paper concludes that perceptions, practices, and meanings assigned to social online representations can be better analyzed through multimodality, which tackles the intertwined characteristics of virtual discourses. © 2023 by the authors.

Neighbourhood governance, citizen initiatives and media application: Investigating community group buying during Shanghai's COVID lockdown

Academic debates highlight bureaucratic steering of crisis governance in authoritarian China. Nonetheless, the crisis response from the bottom up has been less represented. To address this lacuna, we explore how citizens initiate the crisis response in the neighbourhood by investigating Community Group Buying (CGB) during the 2022 pandemic lockdown in Shanghai. We qualitatively analyze the narratives of Chinese stakeholders, to get insight into the dynamics, components and implications of CGB. This study indicates that facing urgent needs and the failure of institutional response system, community residents leveraged social media to bond together to purchase essentials in bulk during the lockdown. The components of CGB involve: constructing online interactive spaces, creating community conventions, forming leadership, optimizing CGB procedures, legitimizing CGB by social media promotion. CGB favoured neighbourhood ties and advanced civic participation and increased the reciprocal interaction of the state and society and the responsiveness of policy practitioners to public demands during crises. However, local disagreements eroded volunteerism and citizens' initiatives in neighbourhood governance to some extent. Our study will not only deepen global audiences' understanding of spontaneous neighbourhood governance in authoritarian China, but also contribute neighbourhood-level solutions for responding to the future crises globally.

Social Transformations in India, Myanmar, and Thailand: Volume II: Identity and Grassroots for Democratic: Progress

This book explores the multifaceted obstacles to social change that India, Myanmar and Thailand face, and ways to overcome them. With a collection of essays that identify common challenges and salient features affecting diverse communities, this volume examines topics from subnational and local perspectives across the peripheries. The book argues that identity-based divisions have created a system of oppression and political contention that have led to conflicts of different kinds, and hence serving as the common cause of different social issues. At the same time, such issues have created space for marginalized groups around the world to call for change. The volume recognizes that social transformation comes into being through an active process of deconstructing and reconstructing shared norms and ideas. The contents in this book are thus centered around two focuses: The impacts of identities and grassroots. Both of these aspects are at the heart of each country's transformations towards democracy, peace, justice, and freedom. Under this framework, the chapters cover a diverse range of common issues, such as, minority grievances, gender inequality, ethnic identity, grassroots power in alliance-making towards community peace, recovery and resilience, digital freedom, democracy assistance and communication, and bridging multiple divides. As identity-based cleavages are daily lived experiences for individuals and communities, it requires grassroots initiatives and alliances as well as democratic communication to tackle obstacles at the root. Ultimately, the book convinces readers that social transformations must begin at the individual to communal level and local to national level. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.

Japanese University Students Usage of Global Networks During the Pandemic

This research study provides a case study of how the COVID-19 pandemic affected Japanese university students' views and attitudes on international topics and motivations for living and working abroad. During the pandemic, digital information, including social media, played a promi-nent role in how these students interacted and kept up with the news. We surveyed 204 students at a private university in Tokyo to help under-stand how the landscape of internationalization changed during the unique circumstances brought about by the pandemic. © 2023 James Nicholas Publishers.

Stronger than partisanship and motivated reasoning: news exposure and news frames predicting US state-level preventive behaviours against COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has become a partisan issue rather than an independent public health issue in the US. This study examined the behavioural consequences of motivated reasoning and framing by investigating the impacts of COVID-19 news exposure and news frames, as apparent through a Latent Dirichlet topic modelling analysis of local news coverage, on state-level preventive behaviours as understood through a nationally representative survey. Findings suggested that the media effects on various preventive behaviours differed. The overall exposure rate to all COVID-19 news articles increased mask-wearing but did not significantly impact other preventive behaviours. Four news frames significantly increased avoiding contact or avoiding public or crowded places. However, news articles discussing anxiety and stay at home order triggered resistance and countereffects and led to risky behaviours. ‘Solid Republican' state residents were less likely to avoid contact, avoid public or crowded places, and wear masks. However, partisan leanings did not interfere with the impact of differing local COVID-19 news frames on reported preventive behaviours. Plus, statements regarding pre-existing trust in Trump did not correlate with reported preventive behaviour. Attention to effect sizes revealed that news exposure and news frames could have a bigger impact on health behaviours than motivated reasoning.

What are People in Bali Doing in Pandemic: Understanding the Shape of Health Behavior and the Pitutur Tua

In the early occurrence of the Covid-19 pandemic, Indonesian and the world regarded Bali having a unique mechanism. Balinese or Bali residents are assumed excellently immune or difficulty infected from Covid-19. Interestingly, Balinese do not show overwhelmed panic as occurs in other areas although the Covid-19 cases in Bali are not low. There are various reasons why Balinese's actions to protect their health consider beliefs, religion, and culture. This paper is a survey of the Balinese's distinctive perception and behavior to face Covid-19. The information was gained from comments, opinions, and information about typical behavior posted on mass media and social media. The main source of the information was the WhatsApp groups of Banjar community (60 people), Bali academicians (76 people), Hindu organization alumni (113 people), and Bali medical staff (30 people). This study collected the information and conversations during early months of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 when the Covid-19 cases skyrocketed and the government implemented the Community Activities Restrictions Enforcement (PPKM). This study concludes that the belief in the power of nature makes the sincerity and acceptance more easily appear. Moreover, tradition strengthens the trust. Support in social life also increases cooperative actions to the rules or advices of the Bali government and the custom village assembly to protect society from the pandemic.Copyright © 2021 Muslim OT et al.

Exploring Social Media for Early Detection of Depression in COVID-19 Patients

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused substantial damage to global health. Even though three years have passed, the world continues to struggle with the virus. Concerns are growing about the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of infected individuals, who are more likely to experience depression, which can have long-lasting consequences for both the affected individuals and the world. Detection and intervention at an early stage can reduce the risk of depression in COVID-19 patients. In this paper, we investigated the relationship between COVID-19 infection and depression through social media analysis. Firstly, we managed a dataset of COVID-19 patients that contains information about their social media activity both before and after infection. Secondly, We conducted an extensive analysis of this dataset to investigate the characteristic of COVID-19 patients with a higher risk of depression. Thirdly, we proposed a deep neural network for early prediction of depression risk. This model considers daily mood swings as a psychiatric signal and incorporates textual and emotional characteristics via knowledge distillation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms baselines in detecting depression risk, with an AUROC of 0.9317 and an AUPRC of 0.8116. Our model has the potential to enable public health organizations to initiate prompt intervention with high-risk patients. © 2023 ACM.

Evaluation on College Students' Anxiety and Social Media Usage during Shanghai Closure

As COVID-19 mutates, the highly infectious omicron mutants (BA. 5.2., BF. 7) tension shrouded China. Given the internet information explosion and youth social media addiction, observing the mental impact on college students during the 2022 Shanghai closure is worthwhile. A pilot survey study was conducted to explore the anxiety levels of college students during the closure. The sample size was limited to 101 second-year college students. In addition to demographics, the survey involved the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale, self-perceived COVID-19 anxiety, frequency of COVID-19 information reception, number of social media accounts, and number of electronic devices. Though 68.4% of students equipped with two electronic devices (N = 95) exceeded the students with only one electronic device, a Chi-square test showed that students with only one electronic device had the highest anxiety index (mean = 50). Further, the Kruskal-Wallis test indicated that the number of electronic devices affected the students' anxiety level (p = 0.027) while social media membership did not (p = 0.565). As a result, it was suggested that social media usage and pandemic information inputs among college students were significant concerns that required special attention from the government, schools, teachers, and families.

Hashtag framing and stakeholder targeting: An affordance perspective on China's digital public diplomacy campaign during COVID-19

Social media platforms such as Twitter provide opportunities for governments to connect to foreign publics and influence global public opinion. In the current study, we used social and semantic network analysis to investigate China's digital public diplomacy campaign during COVID-19. Our results show that Chinese state-affiliated media and diplomatic accounts created hashtag frames and targeted stakeholders to challenge the United States or to cooperate with other countries and international organizations, especially the World Health Organization. Telling China's stories was the central theme of the digital campaign. From the perspective of social media platform affordance, we addressed the lack of attention paid to hashtag framing and stakeholder targeting in the public diplomacy literature. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Information Technology & Politics is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Effect of WeChat group management on blood pressure control rate and drug compliance of hypertension patients during the epidemic of coronavirus disease 2019.

Objective To explore the effect of WeChat group management on blood pressure control rate and drug compliance of hypertension patients during the epidemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) . Methods A total of 428 consecutive patients with essential hypertension in our outpatient department from Jan. 2020 to Dec. 2020 were enrolled and randomly divided into experimental group and control group with a ratio of 1 : 1. There were 214 patients in the experimental group, 110 males and 104 females, with an average age of (55.48+/-6.11) years. There were 214 cases in the control group, 108 males and 106 females, with an average age of (56.52+/-5.19) years. WeChat groups were established for the 2 groups separately. Information on education, supervised medication and lifestyle of hypertension was provided to the patients in the experimental group through WeChat, while no active intervention was given to the control group. The blood pressure control rate and medication possession ratio (MPR) were calculated at 1, 3, 6 and 12 months of intervention, and the differences between the 2 groups were compared. Results There were no significant differences in the blood pressure control rate (91.12%195/214 vs 90.65% 194/214, 86.67%182/210vs 89.62%190/212or MPR (0.90+/-0.03 vs 0.90+/-0.05, 0.85+/-0.04 vs 0.88+/-0.03) between the 2 groups at 1 or 3 months of intervention (all P>0.05). At 6 and 12 months, the blood pressure control rate (81.73%170/208vs 88.57%186/210,75.12%154/205vs 85.99%178/207) and MPR (0.74+/-0.04 vs 0.87+/-0.05, 0.58+/-0.05 vs 0.85+/-0.03) of patients in the experimental group were significantly higher than those in the control group (all P<0.05). Conclusion During the COVID-19 epidemic, WeChat group management of hypertension patients by doctors could improve patients' blood pressure control rate and drug compliance and strengthen patients' self-management ability.Copyright © 2022, Second Military Medical University Press. All rights reserved.

Readwell: A Book Recommender Android Application with a Point-of-Sales System

The COVID-19 pandemic has given people much free time. With this, the researchers want to encourage these people to read instead of scrolling through social media. A barrier to reading for many people is not knowing what to read and disinterest in popular books that they would find when they search online. The existing websites that encourage book reading rely on social networking for their recommendations, while the collaborative filtering algorithms applied to books do not exist in the mobile application form. Readwell is a book recommender Android app with a Point-of-Sales System created using Java, Python, and SQLite databases. The information regarding the books was web scraped from the Goodreads website. It aims to apply the more efficient collaborative filtering algorithm to an accessible mobile application that allows users to directly buy the books they are interested in, thus encouraging the reading and buying of books. The researchers created unit test cases to validate the different functionalities of the application. © 2022 IEEE.

How Trust in Authority and Trust in Networks Relates to Verification and Sharing Behaviours: COVID-19 Health Information Sharing on WhatsApp

Messaging platforms like WhatsApp are some of the largest contributors to the spread of Covid-19 health misinformation but they also play a critical role in disseminating credible information and reaching populations at scale. This study explores the relationships between verification behaviours and intention to share information to users that report high trust in their personal network and users that report high trust in authoritative sources. The study was conducted as a survey delivered through WhatsApp to users of the WHO HealthAlert chatbot service. An adapted theoretical model from news verification behaviours was used to determine the correlation between the constructs. Due to an excellent response, 5477 usable responses were obtained, so the adapted research model could be tested by means of a Structural Equation Model (SEM) using the partial least squares algorithm on SmartPLS4. The findings suggest significant correlations between the constructs and suggest that participants that have reported high levels of trust in authoritative sources are less likely to share information due to their increased behaviours to verify information. © 2023 IEEE.

Investigation of high school students' motivation for physical activity participation and eating attitude levels during the COVID-19 period

The aim of this study is to determine the motivation of high school students to participate in physical activity and their eating attitude levels during the COVID-19 period as well as to examine the relationship between the two variables. In addition, it was also determined whether the motivation for participate in physical activity and eating attitudes differ according to gender, weekly exercise, spending time with technology, family communication times, and participation in exercise during and before the pandemic. A total of 576 high school students, including 406 girls and 170 boys, participated in the study. "Motivation Scale for Participation in Physical Activity (MSPPA)", "Eating Attitude Test (EAT-40)" and "Personal Information Form (KBF)" were used as data collection tools. Data were evaluated using correlation, multiple linear regression, MANOVA and t-test analysis techniques. It was concluded that the motivation of the students to participate in physical activity was moderate, and they did not have eating disorders. It was observed that physical activity motivation did not predict eating attitude, but there were positive and low relationships between sub-factors in relational dimension. According to gender, it was determined that the eating attitudes of female students were more positive than male students. It has been found that the motivation to participate in physical activity is higher for those who exercise before and during the pandemic than those who do not. Consequently, it can be said that during the COVID-19 process, high school students' motivation to participate in physical activity is at a moderate level, and their eating attitudes are generally not at the level of behavioral disorders.

COVID-19 Vaccine: Knowledge and Acceptance among Obstetric Population in Garhwal Region of Uttarakhand

Background: Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) poses expectant mothers to a higher risk of serious complications and mortality. Following a risk-benefit review, a number of governmental and professional bodies from across the globe recently approved the COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy. Aim(s): This study aimed to investigate knowledge, actual acceptance, and concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine among the obstetric population. Material(s) and Method(s): Participants were selected from among the expecting women who came for antenatal checkup during the study period (October 1, 2021-November 30, 2021). About 150 pregnant women who met the inclusion criteria and consented were recruited into the study. Data related to socio-demographic and clinical characteristics as well as knowledge, actual acceptance, and concerns about COVID-19 vaccine were collected through in-person interviews using a prestructured questionnaire. The SPSS version 23 was used to analyze data. The association between the attitude (acceptance and hesitance) of participants toward the COVID-19 vaccine and their sociodemographic and clinical profile was found by Fisher's exact test. Result(s): The actual acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine among expecting women was 52.0%. The primary motive for accepting COVID-19 immunization was to protect the fetus, followed by the protection of one's own health. A significant association was found between COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and the level of education, socio-economic status, and presence of comorbidities. The leading causes for vaccine reluctance were concerns about the efficacy and safety of the vaccines and lack of awareness about their usage during pregnancy. Conclusion(s): Multifaceted activities are required to promote the effectiveness and safety profile of the COVID-19 vaccine as well as disseminate knowledge about its usage during pregnancy. Clinical significance: Unlike numerous other studies that have investigated the accepting attitude only, the present one has investigated the actual COVID-19 vaccine uptake among the obstetric population.Copyright © The Author(s).