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This paper aims to examine social media communication that may consist of a database for online research and may create an online imagined community that follows special language symbols and shares common beliefs in a similar way to Anderson’s imagined communities.

Well-known databases were searched in the available literature for specific keywords which were associated with the imagined community, and methodological tools such as online interviews, content analysis, archival analysis and social media.

The paper discusses the use of multiple measures, such as document and archival analysis, online interviews and content analysis, which may derive from the online imagined community that social media create. Social media may in fact provide useful data that are available for research, yet are relatively understudied and not fully used in communication research, not to mention in archival services. Comparison takes place between online community’s characteristics and traditional communication research. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social media’s use of special language requirements may categorise discussion of these potential data, based on specific symbols, topical threads, purposeful samples and catering for longitudinal studies.

Social media have not been fully implemented for online communication research yet. Online communication may offer significant implications for marketers, advertisers of a company or for an organisation to do research on or for their target groups. The role of libraries and information professionals can be significant in data gathering and the dissemination of such information using ICTs and renegotiating their role.

The theoretical contribution of this paper is the examination of the creation of belonging in an online community, which may offer data that can be further examined and has all the credentials to do so, towards the enhancement of online communication research. The applications of social media to research and the use by and for information professionals and marketers may in fact contribute to the management of an online community with people sharing similar ideas. The connection of the online imagined community with social media for research has not been studied, and it would further enhance understanding from organisations or marketers.

Purpose – With an acknowledgement to Benedict Anderson's seminal writings on “imagined communities,” this paper examines several meanings and uses of the concept of imagination: theoretical, methodological, and substantive.

Methodology/approach – Application of these meanings are illustrated from eight qualitative researches, combining direct observations, interviews, participant observation, and document analysis.

Findings – Data are drawn from diverse settings, such as undocumented migrant communities, terrorism, Native American communities, collaborative divorce, nationalism, mass killers, players of video games, and genocide, to illustrate the potential uses and meanings of imagination.

Originality – These diverse researches illustrate the potential empirical and research contributions of these ideas.

The growth of online communities and social media has led to a growing need for methods, concepts, and tools for researching online cultures. Particular attention should be paid to polarizing online discussion cultures and dynamics that increase inequality in online environments. Social media has enormous potential to create good, but in order to unlock its full potential, we also need to examine the mechanisms keeping these spaces monotonous, homogenous, and even hostile toward some groups. With this need in mind, I have developed the concept and theory of othering online discourse (OOD).

This chapter introduces and defines the concept of OOD and explains the key characteristics and different attributes of OOD in relation to other concepts that deal with disruptive and discriminatory behavior in online spaces. The attributes of OOD are demonstrated drawing on examples gathered from the Finnish Suomi24 (Finland24) forum.

The paper aims to examine how employees influence their employer’s brand by applying Taylor’s (1999) six segment message strategy wheel in an employee influencer context.

The research uses a content analysis of employees’ public social media posts – including captions and images – to analyze the message strategies employees use to promote their employers.

While ego and social were popular message strategies in both the images and captions, the findings evidence the varying message strategies employees use in text-based versus image-based messages. Four “imagined audiences” of employee influencers are identified: current customers, prospective customers, current employees and prospective employees.

The research provides insight into how employees act as influencers in building their employer brand on social media.

A unique measurement tool is developed that can be used by companies and future researchers to decode employees’ online communications.

This research contributes to theory and practice in the following important ways. First, the research provides a modernization of an existing framework from an offline setting to an applied industry context in an online setting. Second, this research focuses on a subtype of social media influencer, the employee influencer, which is an underdeveloped area of research. Third, a unique measurement tool to analyze text-based and image-based social media data is developed that can be used by companies and future researchers to decode employees’ online communications.

Purpose – Urban youths’ agency to represent their realities through media has been largely unexplored in the youth development literature. In this qualitative case study of an after-school youth media program in the Bay Area, expressions of youth agency and the role of audiences are explored during the process of producing videos for public consumption.

Methodology – As participant observer of 14 ethnically diverse youth participants aged between 15 and 18 years over 18 months, I documented (a) the kind of agencies participants engaged in and (b) the impact of live and imagined future audiences on youths’ creative processes. Analyses of field notes, semi-structured interviews, and media projects were conducted using thematic analysis to inductively generate emerging categories.

Findings – Themes included an agentive sense of self-efficacy, commitment, and responsibility, as well as perceived contributions to local audiences and an emerging collective identity. The youth demonstrated their increased sense of a social or civic duty to realistically represent youth of color to familiar and unfamiliar audiences.

Implications – This case study demonstrated how one youth media organization fostered agency through youth authorship, production, distribution, and local community dialogue. By documenting the impact of audiences from conception to public reception, this study provides valuable insight into the agentive process of publicly “performing” a commitment to complete a social change video project.

Contribution – This chapter underscores the value of performance within youth development programs and the critical component of audiences as one form of authentic assessment in order to foster individual and collective agency.

The advent of Web 2.0 technologies invites educators to fundamentally rethink the systems we choose to manage our courses. Although many scholars have examined the democratizing functions of online and hybrid learning (Hall, 1999; Kibby, 2006; McCormick, 2006) and offered case studies of successful social media integration (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2009), a need exists to theorize about how faculty and students actually envision the changing role of learning technologies, particularly the LMS and now social media, in their everyday education. Grounded in critical pedagogy and building from a brief history of the learning management system and new media learning technologies, we examine which features have been most beneficial to the shared learning experience between faculty and students. Through this discussion we provide a working model of a re-imagined learning technology platform that integrates the best tools of the LMS with the more shared, democratizing features of social media in common use among today's students and faculty. We envision a shift from that of a management system to a dynamic platform built from the ground-up to integrate traditional course technologies such as grade books and testing, with the open, collaborative nature of social media. Toward this end, the chapter includes examples of combining Wordpress, Buddypress, and Twitter into a tri-fold approach that reaches beyond the physical classroom walls to build a community of learning where students are the educators via content creation and critical analysis of cultural institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how visual aesthetic referents used in branding can help foster a transnational imagined community (TIC). The authors use brands embedded with Middle Eastern visual aesthetics as a research context. As such, the study aims to examine how Middle Eastern non-figurative art is used by non-Middle Eastern brands to foster an imagined Middle Easternness.

Through a critical visual analysis, the authors apply a visual social semiotic approach to Middle Eastern art canons to better understand the dimensions of transnational imagined communities.

The study finds and discusses six sub-dimensions of Middle Easternness, which compose two overarching dimensions of TIC, namely, temporal and spatial. These sub-dimensions provide brand managers and designers with six different ways to foster transnational imagined communities through the use of visual aesthetic referents in branding.

This research identifies the specific visual sub-dimensions of brands that enable transnational communities to be imagined.

Understanding the visual aesthetic sub-dimensions in this study provides brand managers with practical tools that can help develop referents that foster transnational imagined communities in brand building to achieve competitive advantage and reach a transnational segment.

Prior studies have primarily focussed on how visual aesthetics help in understanding issues related to national identity. In contrast, this paper examines the use of visual aesthetics in branding from a transnational perspective.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the gendered ideas and ideals attached to an imagined ideal Entrepreneur in a post-industrial rural community in Sweden. While research has not yet clearly explained how the ideal entrepreneur is constructed, the result, i.e. the gendered representations of entrepreneurs, is well-researched. Previous results indicate a prevalent portrayal of entrepreneurship as a predominantly masculine construct characterised by qualities such as self-made success, confidence and assertiveness.

Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in a community that is attempting to re-brand itself through garden tourism. Through inductive reasoning, this study analyses the gendered ideas and ideals regarding the community’s imagined ideal Entrepreneur who is to help the community solve its problems.

This study finds that the community forges the Entrepreneur into an imagined masculine ideal as holy, a saviour and a god and is replacing its historical masculine ironmaster with a masculine Entrepreneur. This study develops forging as a metaphor for the construction of the masculine ideal Entrepreneur, giving the community, rather than the entrepreneur himself, a voice as constructors. From social constructionism, this study emphasises how gendered ideas and ideals are shaped not only by the individual realities but more so in the reciprocal process by the realities of others.

The metaphor of forging adds an innovative theoretical dimension to the feminist constructionist approach and suggests focusing on how the “maleness” of entrepreneurship is produced and reproduced in the local. Previously, light has been shed on how male entrepreneurs perform their identities collectively; the focus of this study is on the social construction of this envisioned Entrepreneur within a rural community. The development of forging thus contributes as a way of analysing entrepreneurship in place. The choice of an ethnographic study allowed the authors to be a part of the real-life world of community members, providing rich data to explore entrepreneurship and gender.