Death on the digital landscape: a preliminary investigation into the grief process and motivations behind participation in the online memoriam.

Increasingly, individuals are bonding and maintaining relationships online. These digital representations of ourselves allow us to connect with others in ways previously not possible. One behavior that is growing in online presentations of self is grieving after the death of an individual in our social network. This work investigates the outcomes of online grieving from a transcorporeal communication model perspective, and draws conclusions on the outcomes of online grief behaviors.

Click to "like" organ donation: the use of online media to promote organ donor registration.

CONTEXT: Efforts to promote organ donation have traditionally relied on mass-mediated or interpersonal communication to promote donor registration. Despite its popularity, the use of online media has yet to be carefully evaluated as a platform to promote organ donation. OBJECTIVE: To describe results of an intervention to promote donor registration that relies solely on online media to communicate to target audiences. DESIGN: For 3 years, 6 campaigns were implemented in 3 different online media formats. SETTING: Online media formats included (1) traditional online advertising, (2) student seeders' social networking sites campaigns, and (3) challenge campaigns. PARTICIPANTS: Online media campaigns primarily targeted college-aged individuals.Intervention-Each campaign directed individuals to the dedicated project website, where they could access educational material about donation and request a donor registration card. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Unique website visitors, webpages viewed per site visit, time spent on site, and organ donor cards requested/received were tracked in relation to each online media format. RESULTS: Traditional online advertising offered greater message exposure but failed to result in a higher proportion of website visitors who registered their donation intentions. Use of student seeders (ie, motivated students who promote donation by using social networking sites) and challenge campaigns resulted in greater attention to the project website, donor card requests, and subsequent returns. Additional research is recommended to reveal the effect of combining 2 or more varying online media formats within a single campaign.

Contingencies of self-worth and social-networking-site behavior.

Social-networking sites like Facebook enable people to share a range of personal information with expansive groups of "friends." With the growing popularity of media sharing online, many questions remain regarding antecedent conditions for this behavior. Contingencies of self-worth afford a more nuanced approach to variable traits that affect self-esteem, and may help explain online behavior. A total of 311 participants completed an online survey measuring such contingencies and typical behaviors on Facebook. First, exploratory factor analyses revealed an underlying structure to the seven dimensions of self-worth. Public-based contingencies explained online photo sharing (ß = 0.158, p < 0.01), while private-based contingencies demonstrated a negative relationship with time online (ß = -0.186, p < 0.001). Finally, the appearance contingency for self-worth had the strongest relationship with the intensity of online photo sharing (ß = 0.242), although no relationship was evident for time spent managing profiles.