Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sanchez-Martin, Pablo, Utz, Sonja, Valera, Isabel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17776
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911814468501504
author Sanchez-Martin, Pablo
Utz, Sonja
Valera, Isabel
author_facet Sanchez-Martin, Pablo
Utz, Sonja
Valera, Isabel
contents Ambient awareness refers to the ability of social media users to obtain knowledge about who knows what (i.e., users' expertise) in their network, by simply being exposed to other users' content (e.g, tweets on Twitter). Previous work, based on user surveys, reveals that individuals self-report ambient awareness only for parts of their networks. However, it is unclear whether it is their limited cognitive capacity or the limited exposure to diagnostic tweets (i.e., online content) that prevents people from developing ambient awareness for their complete network. In this work, we focus on in-wall ambient awareness (IWAA) in Twitter and conduct a two-step data-driven analysis, that allows us to explore to which extent IWAA is likely, or even possible. First, we rely on reactions (e.g., likes), as strong evidence of users being aware of experts in Twitter. Unfortunately, such strong evidence can be only measured for active users, which represent the minority in the network. Thus to study the boundaries of IWAA to a larger extent, in the second part of our analysis, we instead focus on the passive exposure to content generated by other users -- which we refer to as in-wall visibility. This analysis shows that (in line with \citet{levordashka2016ambient}) only for a subset of users IWAA is plausible, while for the majority it is unlikely, if even possible, to develop IWAA. We hope that our methodology paves the way for the emergence of data-driven approaches for the study of ambient awareness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_17776
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring the Boundaries of Ambient Awareness in Twitter
Sanchez-Martin, Pablo
Utz, Sonja
Valera, Isabel
Social and Information Networks
Human-Computer Interaction
Methodology
Ambient awareness refers to the ability of social media users to obtain knowledge about who knows what (i.e., users' expertise) in their network, by simply being exposed to other users' content (e.g, tweets on Twitter). Previous work, based on user surveys, reveals that individuals self-report ambient awareness only for parts of their networks. However, it is unclear whether it is their limited cognitive capacity or the limited exposure to diagnostic tweets (i.e., online content) that prevents people from developing ambient awareness for their complete network. In this work, we focus on in-wall ambient awareness (IWAA) in Twitter and conduct a two-step data-driven analysis, that allows us to explore to which extent IWAA is likely, or even possible. First, we rely on reactions (e.g., likes), as strong evidence of users being aware of experts in Twitter. Unfortunately, such strong evidence can be only measured for active users, which represent the minority in the network. Thus to study the boundaries of IWAA to a larger extent, in the second part of our analysis, we instead focus on the passive exposure to content generated by other users -- which we refer to as in-wall visibility. This analysis shows that (in line with \citet{levordashka2016ambient}) only for a subset of users IWAA is plausible, while for the majority it is unlikely, if even possible, to develop IWAA. We hope that our methodology paves the way for the emergence of data-driven approaches for the study of ambient awareness.
title Exploring the Boundaries of Ambient Awareness in Twitter
topic Social and Information Networks
Human-Computer Interaction
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17776