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While cyberbullying has been recognized as a critically important social problem, a void remains regarding the role of digital media. To address this gap, we propose the social-ecological model of cyberbullying, an expanded model that builds on Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory (EST) and expands Swearer and Espelage's social-ecological model of bullying. A strength of the proposed model is the addition of the digital context as a new ecology in the everyday lives of youth, which is closely interconnected with all the other systems. Furthermore, the model incorporates digital-specific factors within each ecological system of the original EST model. This provides scholars with a holistic model that they can test, finetune, and expand. A practical implication of the model is that it can guide the creation and implementation of effective and age-appropriate cyberbullying prevention and intervention approaches because it considers in the chronosystem life phases, life transitions, historical events, and crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This paper aims to understand the adoption of e-books and e-readers by persons aged sixty and above. This includes an investigation into where seniors are in the stages of e-book adoption. Method: Data were collected through semi-structured interviews in a mid-size city in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Analysis: Interviews were transcribed, and coded using grounded theory. Rogers's model of the innovation-decision process was used to inform the data analysis process. Results: The results show three key factors affecting adoption: longing for materiality, technology confidence, and technology exploration. While seniors are interested in e-books and e-readers, see many benefits to their use, and are curious about how they function, the majority perceive this technology as being primarily appropriate for younger generations. Conclusion: The findings have implications for our understanding of the diffusion of innovations amongst the senior population and the development of services geared toward them. E-books and e-readers are technologies that could prove beneficial, aiding with issues related to both portability and convenience. However, e-books do not allow for the sharing of books that this population is accustomed to, and many of them are still on the fence about fully adopting this tool into their reading practices.

In 2017, the #MeToo movement garnered international attention when millions of people used it to share experiences of sexual violence via social media. Through an analysis of 570 tweets randomly and purposively sampled within the first 24 hours of the movement, we were interested in answering the following questions: (1) What emotions are present in #MeToo tweets?; and (2) What are the vernacular practices in the #MeToo movement, and how do they convey affect? Through applying Robert Plutchik (2000) structural model of emotion, we were able to identify a wider range of emotions evident in feminist hashtag campaigns than has previously been identified and analyse their varied functions. Furthermore, we show how the difficulty in narrating personal experiences of violence and sharing discernible emotions via this hashtag fed into four vernacular practices, which we argue stimulate affect. Thus, the article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of two often conflated concepts—emotion and affect—and their different roles within #MeToo. The article ultimately shows how a movement such as #MeToo can be highly affective, even when participants disclose very little emotion or detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from a thematic analysis of 960 tweets for English, 960 tweets for German, and 753 tweets for Mandarin, this article explores how the #MeToo movement was taken up and used in different ways in the first 12 months. The article achieves this by drawing on the concept of platform vernacular, identifying three new, at times overlapping, vernacular practices: spotlighting, interconnectivity, and meta conversations. We argue that these vernacular practices function more than simply as the dominant "grammars of communication" in #MeToo but connect individual experiences of sexual violence to broader political structures such as patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, and racism. Yet, as our analysis uncovered, while the vernacular practices enabled #MeToo to be politicized, these systems of oppression were not always challenged, but at times, reinforced. As such, while previous research has shown how (affective) vernacular practices shape what we know and feel about sexual violence, this article highlights how vernacular practices fundamentally shape how the public contextualizes and (mis)understands sexual violence as a political issue. Overall, the article contributes to scholarship in the field of new media, feminism, and communication by showing how hashtags are taken up by the public in different ways and how shared vernacular practices emerge across languages, even when the content, focus, or rhetoric may diverge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In "Star Trek," Scotty suggests that Transwarp beaming is "like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet, whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse." The study of social media faces similar challenges because new tools are developed at a rapid pace and existing tools are constantly being updated with new features, policies, and applications. Users tend to migrate, in often unpredictable ways, to new tools as well as to adopt multiple tools simultaneously, without showing consistent media preferences and habits. As a result, for scholars it sometimes feels as if the social media landscape changes too quickly to fully grasp and leaves scholars permanently lagging behind. The authors argue in this article that beyond the ebb and flow of everyday events and seemingly idiosyncratic usage, trends exist underlying long-term trajectories, persistent social practices, and discernible cultural patterns. The goal of this article on persistence and change in social media is to take the findings from the articles compiled in this special issue and extend these claims with an eye toward the aspects of social media that may persist for years, if not decades. They hope that their discussion of social media practice will provide an overarching framework from which future research can draw. (Contains 1 note.)

Users have adopted a wide range of digital technologies into their communication repertoire. It remains unclear why they adopt multiple forms of communication instead of substituting one medium for another. It also raises the question: What type of need does each of these media fulfill? In the present article, the authors conduct comparative work that examines the gratifications obtained from Facebook with those from instant messaging. This comparison between media allows one to draw conclusions about how different social media fulfill user needs. Data were collected from undergraduate students through a multimethod study based on 77 surveys and 21 interviews. A factor analysis of gratifications obtained from Facebook revealed six key dimensions: pastime, affection, fashion, share problems, sociability, and social information. Comparative analysis showed that Facebook is about having fun and knowing about the social activities occurring in one's social network, whereas instant messaging is geared more toward relationship maintenance and development. The authors discuss differences in the two technologies and outline a framework based on uses and gratifications theory as to why young people integrate numerous media into their communication habits. (Contains 3 tables.)

Although out-of-class communication enhances students' learning experience, students' use of office hours has been limited. As the learning infrastructures of the social sciences and humanities have undergone a range of changes since the diffusion of digital networks, new opportunities emerge to increase out-of-class communication. Hence, it is important to investigate the role of cyberinfrastructures as valuable alternatives or supplements to existing infrastructures in the learning process. This paper proposes that virtual office hours can be a form of cyberinfrastructure that provides new possibilities for student-faculty interaction. We examine students' perceptions of instant messaging as a tool for offering virtual office hours and enhancing student-faculty interaction. Students report that instant messaging is a useful tool for virtual office hours because of its convenience, interactivity, and ease of use. While students only made limited use of it when it was actually offered as an alternative to regular office hours, it represents an important new avenue for interaction. We outline reasons for students' limited use of instant messaging for virtual office hours and discuss a series of barriers and potential solutions.