Understanding Social-Media-Facilitated Mobilization Through Network Mental Models: An Exploratory Analysis of Emergent, Network-Level, Coordinated Team Functioning
Open Access
- Author:
- Weirman, Samantha
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- November 11, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Peter Kent Forster, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Peter Kent Forster, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Fred Fonseca, Committee Member
Donald Richard Shemanski, Committee Member
S. Shyam Sundar, Outside Member
Michael David Mcneese, Special Member
Mary Beth Rosson, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- network mental models
mental model
situation awareness
outlier detection
interrupted time series analysis
uses and gratifications
social-media-facilitated mobilization
collective action
mobilization
coordination
teamwork - Abstract:
- Modern technology has fundamentally changed the way individuals and groups organize and share information for mobilization. Specifically, social networking sites empower individuals, facilitate unification of like-minded parties, and serve as communication and coordination mechanisms before, during, and after protests and demonstrations. In this manner, social media has played an important role in the mobilization of people for a myriad of political protests and social movements in recent history. Improving situation awareness related to mobilization efforts can enhance decision-making for those who are attempting to mobilize or those who are tasked with managing the safety and security of people involved in, or affected by, ensuing collective action. Given the normalization of social media in everyday life and the frequency with which it is leveraged for action, situation awareness relating to instances of contemporary mobilization efforts depends on an understanding of the relationship between online engagement and offline collective action. This dissertation attempted to explicate this relationship through its proposal of a network mental model construct and consideration of social-media-facilitated mobilization as affordance-enabled, coordinated team functioning. This research integrated traditional understanding of mobilization with frameworks from team science to offer a more comprehensive analysis of collective action in the digital age. The conducted study had an exploratory research design that leveraged interruption detection and time-lagged cross-correlation techniques. It used an adapted model of teamwork effectiveness as a framework to test the theoretical foundation of the proposed network mental model against real world Twitter data and corresponding estimates of daily participation in related, offline collective action. Ultimately, this study revealed a clear relationship between online engagement and offline behavior that was activated by emotionally charged catalyst events and partially mediated by coordination associated with network mental models. Additionally, results suggest a network’s perception of Twitter and its value as a mobilizing tool is informed by network mental models and the uses and gratifications of platform-specific affordances. Further, this research demonstrated the validity of consulting indicators of online coordination in social media data to improve situation awareness related to offline events.