Using social media such as Facebook, Xing or Twitter has become part of everyday life for many people. Social media help people to maintain and extend their social networks. Social relationships are (semi-)publicly displayed; social contexts collapse and members from different groups receive the same information. This information is usually displayed in so-called feeds, short messages often presented out of context. At the same time, social media explicitly ask for information sharing and present incentives for sharing by displaying activity in profiles. Social media thereby influence with whom and how people share information and knowledge. The junior research group Social Media is thus mainly interested in how social media affect (professional) knowledge exchange.
Next to the cognitive component – knowing who knows what – the emotional component, namely trust in the interaction partner, plays a major role in professional knowledge sharing. The junior research group studies these cognitive and emotional processes often in professional settings, e.g., on business networks such as Xing or LinkedIn, but also in online experiments. The group also examines how visualizations can help people to process complex volumes of data and to make better decisions. The results from these studies are relevant for the praxis field knowledge work with digital media.
Many people are nowadays permanently connected with their network via smartphones and other digital media. The junior research group also studies how the changed communication patterns (e.g., many short, rather mundane messages instead of longer and more intimate conversations) affect social relationships and emotions.
