The Impact of Subscription Reciprocity on Charitable Content Creation and Sharing: Evidence from Twitter on Giving Tuesday

Social broadcasting sites have grown from an information diffusion channel to a public medium that facilitates public conversations of charitable social movements. Two mechanisms foster user participation in charitable social movements: content creation and content sharing. Users can create original content to express their attitude of giving and promote their most valued nonprofit organizations, enriching the depth of the conversation. They can also share others’ content to expedite the diffusion of high-quality content, expanding the breadth of the discussion. This paper investigates the impact of reciprocal and nonreciprocal followees (i.e., a followee is an account to which other users subscribe) on followers’ decisions to create and share content. Analyzing the charitable movement of Giving Tuesday on Twitter, we find that original charitable content creation is prompted by reciprocal followees’ participation but not nonreciprocal followees’ participation in this movement. We also find that charitable content sharing is evoked by both reciprocal and nonreciprocal followees, with nonreciprocal followees having a greater impact. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Literary Reviews and the Reception of Manuscript Culture

Chapter 2 examines how literary reviews engaged in debates about what should appear in print. As reviewers encountered large quantities of published literary writing, some of which had identifiable origins in sociable manuscript culture, they faced both a practical problem – how to keep up with the rising tide of new publications – and an ethical dilemma – how to respond to the proliferation of print. Did the large increases in literary print publication (and the increasing number of authors entering print) signal a decline in taste and a degeneration of literary standards, or the enlightened progress of society and the improvement of literary taste? This chapter compares the reviewing practices and editorial policies in the Edinburgh Review, which was outspoken in its criticism of the publication of manuscript writing, and the Annual Review, which was tolerant of all literary productions. Specifically, it finds that the Edinburgh constructed print as a public medium and, by necessary contrast, manuscript as a private one, a division that came to be understood as intrinsic to script and print, rather than what it was, a product of an ideological dispute, fought in part in the pages of the literary reviews.

Social Media among Medical Students and Personnel Here to Stay

Social media is no longer new, even in the professional medical world. It is an established and relatively public medium, and all users would do well to understand the risks associated with it. Medical personnel—whether medical student or staff physician—must familiarize themselves with it to ensure positive outcomes. As with other technologies, best practices will evolve with time, but existing and ongoing research can establish working use guidelines.

Community Networking, an Evolution

Over the years, “community networking” has evolved and contributed toward what has become known as “social media,” with many exciting and novel ways we can all be interconnected. The author relates how she followed a vision for community networking and how, as the Internet was becoming a public medium, she felt a calling to do all that she could so that everyone – regardless of their educational background, income level, employment status, ethnicity, gender or any other “classification” – could have the same opportunity to learn about and shape and benefit from this emerging technology. The paper details how she worked with people from communities across Colorado (e.g., Telluride, Boulder, Southern Ute Tribe) to develop innovative community applications of the then-nascent Internet technology, how participants shared what they learned with people from other communities, and how she eventually co-led the creation of an international Association for Community Networking.

Resemblance After Photography

Resemblance did not come naturally to photography. Soon after it became a public medium in 1839, photography’s ability to produce resemblant images—and therefore portraits—was widely challenged. Proponents of photography quickly responded to those challenges by developing more complex concepts of the new medium. This article argues that photography played an important part in evolving debates on resemblance. It also maintains that resemblance, far from being the “epistemological obstacle” it was deemed by theoreticians in the twentieth century, was exceptionally fertile for early photographic theory.