Using tweets posted with #SOPA and #PIPA hashtags and directed at members of Congress, we identify six strategies constituents employ when... Show moreUsing tweets posted with #SOPA and #PIPA hashtags and directed at members of Congress, we identify six strategies constituents employ when using Twitter to lobby their elected officials. In contrast to earlier research, we found that constituents do use Twitter to try to engage their officials and not just as a “soapbox” to express their opinions. Show less
Twitter is increasingly becoming a medium through which constituents can lobby their elected representatives in Congress about issues that... Show moreTwitter is increasingly becoming a medium through which constituents can lobby their elected representatives in Congress about issues that matter to them. Past research has focused on how citizens communicate with each other or how members of Congress (MOCs) use social media in general; our research examines how citizens communicate with MOCs. We contribute to existing literature through the careful examination of hundreds of citizen-authored tweets and the development of a categorization scheme to describe common strategies of lobbying on Twitter. Our findings show that contrary to past research that assumed citizens used Twitter to merely shout out their opinions on issues, citizens utilize a variety of sophisticated techniques to impact political outcomes. Show less
I used the motivation concept from activity theory to derive a fundamental notion of why workers at nonprofit organizations (NPOs) use social... Show moreI used the motivation concept from activity theory to derive a fundamental notion of why workers at nonprofit organizations (NPOs) use social media sites. This study rejects the notion that practitioners are not taking full advantage of social media sites by not using every available feature and engaging in dialogic communication. Existing work relies too extensively on the dialogic model of communication and frequently focuses on only top-tier NPOs, ignoring the context in which smaller NPOs operate and producing recommendations that are of little practical value. To investigate this issue, I reviewed existing best practices as portrayed in NPO social media strategy guides, and used the principles of activity theory to survey practitioners at human services NPOs in Chicago. I collected data on user motivation for using Facebook and Twitter by asking users to review past posts on these sites and describe their purpose in posting this information. Using this information, I trained an automated text classifier to classify a large corpus of posts based on four types of motivations: soliciting, promoting, sharing, and credit-giving. This dissertation builds off recent studies that question existing wisdom on “effective” use of social media by NPOs and argues for an expanded consideration of user agency and intent when using social media. Ph.D. in Technical Communication, May 2017 Show less
Sponsorship: Amazon Web Services Education Grants Program Data presented in a CSCW 2014 paper titled Tweet Acts: How Constituents Lobby... Show moreSponsorship: Amazon Web Services Education Grants Program Data presented in a CSCW 2014 paper titled Tweet Acts: How Constituents Lobby Congress via Twitter. Libby Hemphill and Andrew J. Roback. 2014. Tweet acts: how constituents lobby congress via Twitter. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing (CSCW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1200-1210. DOI=10.1145/2531602.2531735http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2531602.2531735 Show less
