Discuss about the Issues in Information Behaviour on Social Media.
Social media has developed into an application which has encroached every sphere of our lives and is having major impacts on our ways of living, playing, socialising, learning and working. It provides a rich environment along with golden opportunities which assist in the analysis of information behaviour. The primary reason for this is the large amount of information in various forms such as images, videos and text are being stored in repositories that are accessible to the public and also in the consumers’ personal devices (Williamson et al., 2012).
The social networking sites are very popular in the contemporary world and almost 10% of the total time which is spent on the internet is on the SNS. Sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace provide the users with the social links and also a network of professionals while platforms such as YouTube as well as Flickr help the users to share their content (Centola, 2010). It is essential to study the information behaviour of the users who connect by using the above platforms as this will provide assistance in evaluation of the performance of the systems that are existing so that improvements can be brought about in their site designs and policies of advertising designing can be developed. Additionally, finding accurate models with respect to user behaviour about sharing of information on the SNS will assist in viral marketing. It will also help in the analysis of the way in which the workload of the social networks is providing assistance in the redesigning of the internet traffic. This in turn helps in the creation of the internet infrastructure of the next generation and also the content distribution systems. These are the reasons for choosing this topic for literature review.
Information behaviour is considered to be an area that consists of a wide variety of behaviour of the users with relation to the information systems. It also includes the information which takes into account areas such as “information need generation” which leads to the information creation, information seeking, information sharing, management, assessment, encounter, giving and also using. Hence, the analysis of information behaviour and its various aspects is conducted in the context of the different tasks in day to day life. These are researched in terms of usage of the social media.
Social Media is a concept that is much broad and comprises a wide variety of internet applications which help in providing strong support to the social communication which takes place between the people. Hence, its focus is primarily on the distinct type of interaction among the users, creation of online relationships as well as communities and content that is user generated (Turban et al., 2011).
The definition of social media is also given as the content that is user generated and arises due to the social interaction that is taking place online. It has also been called as “consumer generated media’ by certain researchers (Blackshaw & Nazzaro, 2004) as it is an illustration of a number of new resources related to online information which are being initiated, developed, circulated and also used by the consumers whose main intention is to inform as well as educate one another about the brands, personalities, products and issues. Information behaviour is therefore depicted by the user generated content.
It has been pointed out by research that the social networking sites are used by almost 73% of the adult internet users (Duggan & Smith, 2013). Out of these adult users, several of them were using the Facebook but various other social networking sites were used by 50% of them. Regarding the characteristics of the people who use the social media many researchers have indicated that a clear distinction exists in the nationality, age as well as gender of the users. There is greater likelihood of young users using the SNS. Their frequency of use is also higher and the number of friends that they have on the SNS is more in comparison to that of the older users (Pfeil et al., 2009). Undergraduates were also found to use SNS more often in comparison to graduates and have more friends (Park, 2010). Women also use SNS more and have greater number of friends when compared to men (Moore & McElroy, 2012). As per the survey, Instagram as well as Twitter are used more by women than by men while sites such as blogs, YouTube and sites related to user review are used more by men (Kim et al., 2014). Women make use of SNS for maintaining relationships whereas men use SNS for developing new contacts (Muscanell & Guadagno, 2012) (Lin & Lu, 2011). Other characteristics that impact SNS use are psychological as well as social factors like personality types and risks perceived (Cha, 2010).
As per the various researches, human sources are the information sources that are the most preferred. These sources are associated with information about daily life showing that SNS are perceived to be more as information sources on daily life instead of being sources that are formal (Sin & Kim, 2013). As per the research, only humans give information such as opinions, recommendations and advice (Dugan et al., 2008). Both localised and current information is usually provided by the users (Steinfield et al., 2009). Surveys also revealed that the people using Facebook had less likelihood of finding information via their Facebook network but they considered the information provided by the site was useful. Information that was encountered was more than what was being sought (Lampe et al., 2012). Interacting with friends was more on social networking while news sharing was more on sites like Twitter (Williamson et al., 2012). Socialising as well as networking was found to be the key purpose of SNS while for discussions, asking questions, providing response to questions and sharing information voluntarily was more on online forums (Savolainen, 2011).
The type of information behaviour which is favoured on the SNS is that related to daily life, asking as well as monitoring, browsing, opportunistic information being acquired, sharing, giving and publishing of information, voluntarily taking up of intermediary roles by the users, forwarding information after summarising it, behaviour related to social information, developing information communities along with information being used and evaluated. Thus, SNS have provided the researchers with an opportunity for developing holistic understanding with relation to information behaviour (Kim, 2014). The ratio of posts that are informational and socio-emotional is thus dependent on the kind of social media, topic as well as the community of the user.
Online behaviour in case of SNS can be classified as behaviour that is interactive and behaviour that is non interactive. Interactive behaviour was classified still further into –
“Hostile interactive behaviour” which comprises flaming, trolling, spamming as well as cyber rape
“Collaborative non informational behaviour” consisting of behaviour that is humorous, neutral and empathetic
“Collaborative informational behaviour” which includes announcement, group project, query and responses to it
Hostile type of behaviour is supposed to be unproductive and memorable. They give a range of information that leads to widening of views. Hence, “informational hostile behaviour” as well as “non-informational hostile behaviour” form the further divisions of hostile behaviour (Irvine-Smith, 2010).
The forums related to discussions on investment have more posts that are information oriented and lesser number of posts which are social or hostile whereas the forums that are political have higher number of hostile posts (O’Connor & Rapchak, 2012).The researchers are able to study three kinds of information behaviour from the content on the social media. They consist of the information use, integration of information and information behaviour which is critical. There is an interconnection which exists between them for instance if evaluative comments are posted by a certain user while responding to what has been posted by another user, the resultant can be a discussion which might led to other users also contributing information in relation to that. The following posts might try to make out sense from that information for collating the best possible answer.
Investigations of certain researchers have indicated the presence of biases as well as weakness in the information behaviour. These are mostly found on the political social as well as the financial media sites. The posts which are related to discussions on the financial forum reflected that a confirmation bias is shown by the investors in the collection and also the use of the information which had been posted. Investors possessing a stronger confirmation bias were found to be very confident, they had expectations of high performance, traded very often and realised returns which were low (Park, 2010).
The different types of interactive behaviours demonstrate the attempts which the users make for integrating information and synthesising the knowledge. Knowledge synthesis according to several studies is authoritative, distributed as well as undiscovered public knowledge. Information integration is often needed for arriving at a decision specifically in circumstances which are ambiguous and where there are doubts over the information available. Information integration takes place in cases where the user puts in efforts of making their identity socially as well as through self perception (Case, 2010).
Conclusion
The social media rise has heralded a new era in the research on information behaviour. However, a review of literature on issues in “information behaviour on social media” shows that research is still in a nascent stage. Till now researchers have been able to find clear differences in nationalities, gender and age and also in their purpose as well as frequency of using the social media, choice of the sites related to the social media, kinds of information that is posted and the number of friends that the users have online. The time has come for identifying characteristics of the use of social media that are more fine grained. These need to be found for various nationalities, communities and age ranges and multi-nation comparisons also need to be conducted. An in-depth analysis of the demographic factors, psychological, social, technological and also motivational factors that affect social media usage patterns is also required. There is also a requirement of studying specific issues related to everyday life and the ways in which their saliency differs in accordance to the life stage of a person, community and situation.
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