How Can The Concept Of Vicious Cycle Be Applied To Social Media In Communication Studies?:

Abstract

Due to the growth of the Internet Technology, more users rely on information in the Internet than in the traditional media and information sharing has become more common among the Internet users. As people tend to rely more on the information sources from the Internet, they tend to become weak in terms of judging the importance of the issues in the society and also having less self-perception towards a specific issue. Although there are previous researches that studied about the information diffusion and more studies are focusing on the rumor spread these few years, however, there are yet any studies introducing the term of ‘vicious cycle’ in information sharing on social media in communication studies. Therefore, this study aims to find out how can the term of ‘vicious cycle’ be applied to information sharing on social media in communication studies and to combine the results from previous studies in order to reorganize the factors that has influence towards users’ information sharing intention and behavior through meta analysis method. Total of 45 samples were used in analyzing the result and by employing meta analysis method, this study is able to reorganize the factors that has influence towards information sharing intention and behavior based on two pre-defined categories: user-related and content related. Many of the factors used in previous studies has been categorized into sub-categories and were renamed in order present a clearer result. It is found that ‘User’s Network’, ‘User’s Role’, ‘Social Influence’ and ‘Activeness’ among the user-related factors and ‘Content-generated Feeling’ and ‘Information Credibility’ among the content-related factors are the factors that were commonly used by previous researchers to examine user’s information sharing intention and behavior. Based on the findings, previous researchers are found to have focused on studying rumor and misinformation spread on social media these few years. The results of meta analysis in this study showed that vicious cycle in information sharing on social media can happen with the existence of rumor, misinformation or negative messages, users’ intention to share or reuse information and the actual reposting behavior of users. As the healthy information sharing activity can become harmful through any influences in the process of information sharing, therefore, it is very important to view the process of information sharing as a cycle instead of one-way process. The vicious cycle of sharing negative or false information that is related to disaster events may cause the users to receive wrong information and a negative mindset about the disaster, which further affects the users mental and emotional state, causing fear in the users regarding the disaster. Due to the limitation of having smaller samples in this study, in addition to the results generated from meta analysis have lower preciseness, there’s a need to study the factors organized in this study to find out their relationship with information sharing and how can they relate to vicious cycle in future study.