Tweets, Death, and Rock 'n' Roll
Date
2018
Authors
Xu, Xinyuan
Nurmikko-Fuller, Terhi
Nunes, Bernardo
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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Abstract
This paper introduces a new line of investigation into Social Media
Mourning (SMM), the act of individual and collective grieving on
social media. Previous research has analysed this behaviour as a
response to a death within a family unit or amongst a group of
friends.We report on SMM in the context of the death of a celebrity.
We present a comparative analysis of two social media platforms,
Twitter and Sina Weibo (henceforth ’Weibo’). Uniquely, we have
also sought to understand the feelings and attitudes of social media
users who do not engage in SMM, but inevitably encounter the
posts of others. This was accomplished through online surveys
in both English and Chinese, representing the majority language
groups of each platform.
We have critically evaluated the theoretical frameworks of slacktivism,
information cascades, and herd behaviour, and found herd
behaviour to be the most applicable lens for understanding our specific
case study: SMM centred on the death of Chester Bennington,
an American singer-songwriter best known as the lead vocalist for
the group Linkin Park.
Through a mixed method approach combining qualitative and
quantitative analyses, we discovered that Twitter users, who are
more likely than Weibo users to actively mourn the death of a
celebrity by posting on social media, are also more likely to be
emotionally affected by it.Weibo users, on the other hand, are more
willing to see the content of mourning the death of a celebrity, but
being more emotionally distanced, viewing SMM postings simply as
news. Finally, although SMM is a manifestation of herd behaviour
in our case study, we also point to an example where the power of
the masses was successfully harnessed for real world effect.
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Source
WebSci '18 Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science
Type
Conference paper
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Restricted until
2037-12-31