This study examines how different uses of social network sites (SNS) and mobile phones (MP) to communicate with friends and business associates are related to the acquisition of job-related information, job mobility, and entrepreneurial intentions, using social capital as its main theoretical lens. To this end, a nationally representative, random digit dialing (RDD) survey was conducted in Singapore. Path analyses show that SNS interactions with friends are positively related to both bonding and bridging social capital. The former is linked with greater job mobility, the latter with entrepreneurship, and both are associated with more job-related information. SNS interactions with business contacts are directly positively related to job-related information and entrepreneurship. For mobile phones, interactions with friends are positively related to social capital, job information and entrepreneurship. Professional networking is associated with more bridging social capital, job information and job mobility. Bonding capital is found to be linked with greater job mobility, while bridging capital has a positive relationship with both entrepreneurship and job mobility.
In most of the world, the current trend in information technology is for open data movement that promotes transparency and equal access. An opposite trend is observed in China, which has the world's largest Internet population. The country has implemented sophisticated cyber-infrastructure and practices under the name of The Golden Shield Project (commonly referred to as the Great Firewall) to limit access to popular international web services and to filter traffic containing 'undesirable' political content. Increasingly, tech-savvy Chinese bypass this firewall and use Twitter to share knowledge on censorship circumvention and encryption to collectively troubleshoot firewall evasion methods, and even mobilize actions that border on activism. Using a mixed mythological approach, the current study addresses such networked knowledge sharing among citizens in a restricted web ecosystem. On the theoretical front, this study uses webometric approaches to understand change agents and positive deviant in the diffusion of censorship circumvention technology. On policy-level, the study provides insights for Internet regulators and digital rights groups to help best utilize communication networks of positive deviants to counter Internet control.
This paper examines the diffusion of smartphones with a special emphasis on the diffusive interactions between Apple iOS and Google Android in a global context. Since the two mobile platforms were first introduced in the market, the use of smartphones has skyrocketed, suggesting that the dramatic diffusion of smartphones may be explained in part by the growth and competition of these two platforms. To study this, an extended Bass model is applied to a data set of quarterly smartphone sales between 2008 and 2013 for 15 countries. Our findings suggest that the innovation effect was more salient for iOS than for Android in developed countries, whereas the imitation effect was more striking for Android than for iOS in developing countries. Furthermore, our results from the co-diffusion model suggest that the diffusion of Android negatively affected by the diffusion of iOS, but not vice versa.
This paper explores some of the ways in which social games - games played with others through social network sites such as Facebook - are situated within the everyday. It argues that social games are more than just games; they perform a range of interactive and integrative functions across and within people's lives and therefore need to be investigated as such. Social games en-able spaces for and practices of creative expression, and identity management. They also form a mechanism through which relations can be enacted and maintained across and outside of the game environment. This argument requires the researcher to consider the panoply of ways in which people integrate social games within their lives and everyday practices. Part of a larger project, this paper explores some findings from an exploratory survey of Australian game play-ers about their management and integration of game play within the everyday with a particular focus on gender.