Online Calling Cards and Professional Profiles in Cybersecurity From Social Media

Demand is very high for people to work in various cybersecurity professions and ceteris paribus that demand may well continue into the near term. While there are more formal trails for employment, such as higher-educational pathways, performance in cybersecurity competitions, participation in professional conferences, and social media presentations may all offer less conventional paths into cybersecurity hiring. Through a convenience sample across a number of social media platforms and bottom-up coding, this work explores some aspects of cybersecurity professional profiles (“calling cards”) available on the open Social Web and what may be learned about respective skills and capabilities from these glimmers of the person(s) behind the profiles. These profiles are assessed based on a 2x2 axis with focuses on (1) target skills and (2) personhood attributes. From these analyses, some tentative insights are shared about the cybersecurity calling cards and how informative they may be for recruitment and retention of cybersecurity workers.

Self-Presenting Virtually for Remote Social Influence

On the Social Web, social influencers have outsized effects on their peer followers and can influence worldviews, political decisions, aspirations, lifestyles, and buying-and-selling behaviors for varying periods of time. Social influencers attain their influence based on various factors (or combinations): the sharing of insider knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) or information; entertainment; charisma, personality, appearance, communications; engaging storytelling; social identity building for the followers; and parasocial relationship building. This work explores how social influencers self-present to attract and maintain a mass-scale remote audience in a competitive virtual popularity game. This explores “peer lessons” about social influence by masters, based on observed strategic and tactical communications from social video, in a particular target domain, namely survival in the more remote reaches of Alaska.

Hand-to-Mouth Survival in an Extended Pandemic

In a time of a pandemic, people withdraw in order to social distance to protect themselves against infection. The industries that rely on people interacting in close proximity—the service industries, air travel, and other fields—lose their customers almost overnight, and then they lose their employees. Money and jobs become much more scarce almost simultaneously. Meanwhile, saddled with debt and scarce emergency savings, with a pandemic dragging on now for over a year, with dysfunctional government and little stimulus, many Americans are struggling with debt, homelessness, hunger, pressured social relationships, and other challenges. This work explores some available and recent peer-to-peer personal finance advice on the Social Web (in English) on several social platforms to assess their applicability in a challenging historical moment.

For Children in and out of Class During a Pandemic

In a pandemic, when schools have either closed, gone “blended” or “hybrid” (part-in-person and part-online), or gone fully online, teachers have to master online teaching quickly. At these moments, various online and published resources are referred to and used as guides. Some are willing to offer open-shared learning resources on the Social Web. This work involves an environmental scan of open-shared learning resources for pre-K12 and K12 on (1) an online teaching repository/referatory, (2) slideshow-sharing site, and (3) a social video sharing site. This includes bottom-up thematic coding of the journalistic literature (of COVID-19 and children), a review of the available recent open learning resources, and analytical observations about how to improve the available contents.

Performative Eating as Edutainment on YouTube

On the Social Web, on the leading social video sharing site YouTube, some of the most popular videos (with millions of views each) show “performative eating,” described here as “consuming food as a form of entertainment.” The performances occur in various locales and in various ways: Mukbang eating shows and their derivatives show individuals, pairs, groups, and families in feats of food and drink consumption. ASMR (autonomous [auto] sensory meridian response) eating videos show individuals and small groups eating copious amounts of food with an emphasis on listening pleasures. In restaurants, individuals and small groups take on (un)timed eating challenges. Outdoors, persons harvest food and prepare it, or they hunt wildlife and butcher the kill and prepare the animal proteins. Travel eating occurs in various locations around the world, with a focus on local specialties. The common denominator in these are spectacle. Viewed another way, performative eating videos are a form of edutainment, with positive and negative lessons.

“Hard” High-Investment Adult-Age Adventure Play in the Off Hours

Globally, adults engage in various forms of high-investment adventure play in their leisure. Sometimes, these are complementary to their careers, their self-identities, and their social circles. This type of adventure play requires investments in learning, KSA (knowledge, skills, and abilities) development, social network development, time, moneys, reputation, and other costs. It may involve some level of risk-taking. This work explores this niche space of “hard” adventure play as expressed on the Social Web as a type of peer-shared teaching and learning, with a focus on “luxury geocaching” as the activity.

The role of loneliness in university students’ pathological Internet use – a web survey study on the moderating effect of social web application use

The present study investigated the role of social web application use in the association between loneliness and pathological Internet use. A sample of university students (n = 445) completed an online survey of their loneliness and Internet use, including an assessment of pathological Internet use level. Based on existing theory and empirical findings, loneliness was expected to be indirectly associated with pathological Internet use through social-compensatory Internet use motives. The strength of this indirect effect was hypothesized to be moderated by levels of social web application use. Results pointed to the specificity of social-compensatory use motives in mediating loneliness effects on pathological Internet use, while the size of these effects was moderated by quantity of social web application use. Findings suggest that lonely people with higher levels of social web activity show a stronger social-compensatory use orientation, which translates to higher levels of pathological Internet use. Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed and several suggestions for future studies are made.