Have no fear, your smartphone is here – Nomophobia among internet users

The use of smartphones has become ubiquitous for large parts of the population in Europe. As smartphones are also commonly used to access social network sites, we decided to take a look at the use of smartphones in the latest waves of our longitudinal study. We first asked our respondents whether they own a smartphone. Out of the 1330 person who participated in the 6th wave of our survey, 72.8% reported that they currently own a smartphone. The share of smartphone owners slightly increased in wave 7 with 76.5% of the sample reporting ownership. Continue reading

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Longitudinal study: Fotosharing sites become more popular; only small changes in the overall use of social networking sites

As the data from the 5th wave of our longitudinal study are in, we decided that it’s time to look at the development of social media use over time. Similar to what we saw in the data from the first two waves (see previous post), the overall patterns of social media use remain quite stable. Around 71% of the respondents use social networking sites (SNS) for private purposes, while the share of people who use SNS for professional purposes is approximately 24%. Continue reading

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First journal paper published!

We are happy to announce that our first project paper, titled as “Emotional Responses of Browsing Facebook: Happiness, Envy, and Tie Strength), is now published in Computers and Human Behavior (download here)!

The paper examines the emotional responses (both positive and negative) of browsing Facebook, and how these are influenced by tie strength (relationship closeness between the reader and poster).

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Social Media Workshop in Berlin

Social Media Workshop: Scientific Research from Brain to Behavior is an interdisciplinary workshop on social media research, organized by Dar Meshi and Fenne große Deters hosted at the Freie Universität Berlin. This year was a mix of intriguing talks from psychology, communication science, and social neuroscience. The workshop was excellent, with friendly atmosphere, and plenty of opportunities to discuss current research.

Sonja Utz presented ReDefTie and some insights from our longitudinal data. The talk was followed by an interesting and lively discussion. Ana presented a poster with some descriptive data from the Ambient Awareness study. The slides and poster are available under Presentations.

(photos via @nicolemuscanell)

 

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International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) 2014

ICWSM 2014 took place at the University of Michigan, in sunny Ann Arbor, with chairs Eytan Adar @eytanadar and Paul Resnick @presnick. For me and quite a few others, this was a first time at this conference, so I would like to share some general impressions (for a more complete overview see the conference website and preface).

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Longitudinal study, wave 2: Facebook users read more and post less; motivations for twitter usage change

2678 respondents participated in the second wave of the longitudinal study. Social media use in general has not changed much. Most popular were still social network sites for private use (73.1%), followed by social media for business, such as Linkedin (24%). Only 14.8% engaged in microblogging.

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PhD position available

The announcement for the second PhD position is out! We are looking for someone with a (research) master in social or media psychology, communication science or a related discipline who is going to examine the emotional benefits of social media use.
More information on the procedure http://www.iwm-kmrc.de/www/stellenangebote/anzeige.html?kind=wissenschaftlich&dispname=Stellen#ausschreibung1042

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