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The purpose of this paper is to develop a measurement scale for assessing the quality of dialogic conversations among companies and digital publics in social media. Dialogic conversations are defined as sequences of communicative actions and counteractions taken by social actors for different purposes based on specific linguistic choices and characterised by diverse communicative approaches and the role played by the involved parties.

A multidimensional scale for measuring dialogic conversations is developed from relevant literature concerning dialogue and public engagement in the fields of corporate communication, public relations, management studies and conversation analysis. The scale is built on three main dimensions: organisation turn-taking, sequencing of conversation, repair strategies and procedures. A pilot study was conducted to purify it from irrelevant variables.

Results of the pilot study show a general good level of reliability for the majority of the proposed variables for Facebook but not for Twitter. This may indicate that Facebook is a more dialogical forum than Twitter.

This is the first study proposing a systematic measurement of the dialogue orientation of online conversations that takes into consideration the role of language and communicative actions. The proposed measurement offers corporate communication managers a concrete tool for evaluating the quality of their online communications and for identifying those areas of their online communication that need improvement.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to making higher education, particularly online education, more relevant and inspiring by orienting it toward the pragmatics and aesthetics of knowing. This paper also demonstrates the relevance of cybernetics and cybernetic thinking in education today.

The author's general strategy is to connect processes of knowing to the purpose of education, thus providing an organizing principle for the design and practice of online education. Nontrivial conversation and aesthetic experience are combined in a cybernetic complementarity, conceptualized as the processes that foster understanding. This serves the purpose of education, defined here as developing an understanding of how knowledge is constructed and fostering ways of knowing that are creative and complex.

Because the world has become increasingly complex, ambiguous, and pluralistic, the type of thinking needed to act and interact in the world must also be complex, e.g. creative, adaptive, relational, and empathetic. Research shows that this type of thinking is brought forth by aesthetic experience and nontrivial conversation. Combining these as processes of knowing provides a non-dogmatic way of orienting education toward student-centered constructivist learning.

Connecting nontrivial conversation and aesthetic experience as processes of knowing is an original contribution to education literature. This is also an exemplar of generating a cybernetic complementarity for conceptual modelling in education design. Anyone interested in how online education can extend efforts to transform higher education so it may better facilitate thinking in ways that are creative and complex will find this paper valuable.

Web 2.0 and the social networks have changed how organizations interact with their publics. They enable organizations to engage in symmetric dialogic communications with individuals. Various organizations are increasingly ­using different social media to enhance their visibility and relationships with their publics. They allow them to disseminate information, to participate, listen and actively engage in online conversations with different stakeholders. Some social networks have become a key instrument for corporate communication. Therefore, this chapter presents a critical review on the organizations’ dialogic communications with the publics via social networks. It puts forward a conceptual framework that comprises five key dimensions including ­“active presence,” “interactive attitude,” “interactive resources,” “responsiveness” and “conversation.” This contribution examines each dimension and explains their effect on the organizations’ dialogic communication with the publics. Hence, this contribution has resulted in important implications for corporate communication practitioners as well as for academia. Moreover, it opens future research avenues to academia.

Misinformation (i.e. information identified as false) spreads widely and quickly on social media – a space where crowds of ordinary citizens can become leading voices – during a crisis when information is in short supply. Using the theoretical lenses of socially curated flow and networked gatekeeping frameworks, we address the following three aims: First, we identify emergent opinion leaders in misinformation-related conversations on social media. Second, we explore distinct groups that contribute to online discourses about misinformation. Lastly, we investigate the actual dominance of misinformation within disparate groups in the early phases of mass shooting crises.

This paper used network and cluster analyses of Twitter data that focused on the four most prevalent misinformation themes surrounding the El Paso mass shooting.

A total of seven clusters of users emerged, which were classified into five categories: (1) boundary-spanning hubs, (2) broadly popular individuals, (3) reputation-building hubs, (4) locally popular individuals and (5) non-opinion leaders. Additionally, a content analysis of 128 tweets in six clusters, excluding the cluster of non-opinion leaders, further demonstrated that the opinion leaders heavily focused on reiterating and propagating misinformation (102 out of 128 tweets) and collectively made zero corrective tweets.

These findings expand the intellectual understanding of how various types of opinion leaders can shape the flow of (mis)information in a crisis. Importantly, this study provides new insights into the role of trans-boundary opinion leaders in creating an echo chamber of misinformation by serving as bridges between otherwise fragmented discourses.

This study uses a phenomenology method to investigate the experiences of married Muslim women while having romantic conversations via online dating sites during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sixteen participants were selected via purposive sampling, and the data were gathered through semi-structured interviews. The results confirm that resistance to Islamic marriage limitations is the underlying reason accounting for Muslim women's romantic chat. However, “premarital experiences in virtual space” and “chat as a remedy for loneliness” create the causal conditions of romantic chat, and “experience of family restrictions” and a “sense of freedom” provides the foundation for an online romantic chat. It is worth noting that those who voice a sense of “unhappy marriage” and “husband's sexual coldness” are more likely to turn to sex chat during the COVID-19 pandemic. The consequences of digital romantic conversations for married Muslim women are “chat addiction” and “feeling a sense of betrayal.”

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 purpose of this paper is to explore in depth the special context and unique life experience of the online dating site and provide insights regarding an interpretation of virtual cohabitation model.

This study uses netnography, online interviews and the physical travel of researchers to the field for field participation and observations. The combination of netnography and online interviews combines online and offline studies to achieve more consistency in the data collection, analysis and other processes. In-person participation in observations makes the research more realistic. The combination of these qualitative methods is helpful in achieving a more comprehensive and accurate research process.

The findings of the study can be classified into a three-stage situational context approach, which is presented in the form of propositions. Finally, the insight of the virtual cohabitation context model was developed, namely, motivation (including escapism, hedonic gratification and autonomous), showing off and psychological compensation, stimulation and fantasies, emotions (including impulsiveness, emotions and desires), over-control and low self-control, behavioral control, gratification and dependence and love trap (including sex transactions and consumption traps).

The theoretical contribution of this study is to establish an interpretation of virtual cohabitation model and ten related propositions.

This paper seeks to understand how users determine credibility in the internet environment from a conceptual level and the implications of these new methods of credibility determination on internet tools (primarily software) and services.

The author first examines the underlying reasons for increased dependence on the internet for information, using electronic commerce as a starting point. The central concept of “information self‐sufficiency” is introduced and then examined through the lens of the internet and conversation theory.

The author finds that users are shifting from more traditional “authority” methods of credibility determination, where users cede determinations to trusted third parties, to a “reliability” approach where users seek commonalities and coherence among multiple information sources. This has led to an increased pressure for participation and openness at all levels of the internet.

Studies on users and credibility must better account for often invisible technical factors.

Libraries must take into account a greater need for participation and technical fluency when dealing with patrons, particularly in information literacy programs and instruction.

This paper presents a large‐scale conceptual approach to credibility on the internet. It seeks to inform current approaches to the subject nested in communications and instruction with the unique technical environment of the internet.

In order to understand how specific communities might develop over time, it is important to take into account how the broader phenomenon of online consumer communities is itself situated in a bigger social context. As a whole, online communities can be seen as micro-social groups (Maffesoli, 1996) that exist at the “forgotten” level in consumer research (Bagozzi, 2000). This micro-social level, between individual and macro/cultural levels, is the level at which interactions and communications between people take place (Cova & Cova, 2002).