The social networking population continues to expand at a phenomenal pace. Nevertheless, the question of how an organization gets people to spend long periods of time on a particular social networking website as well as return to its website is becoming an increasingly important question. Is it technological sophistication of the website or the social aspect that is most important? This study a...

The use of social networking sites in organizations continues to increase year over year. While much research has focused on the social tools and their benefits, there has been comparatively little research done on the impact these systems have on employees. The current research focuses on the use of social networking systems in the organization, and the perception formed by users of the profil...

With the increasing popularity of social networking sites, research has begun to investigate the implications for youth development, with concern for possible negative effects on their relationships and well-being. But for youth who feel somewhat marginalized, these sites could be important sources of social support. Accordingly, our study sought to examine the relations between sexual minority...

This article explores the growing use of social networking among contemporary students and researchers in education. It is argued that social networking systems exhibit many of the characteristics of complex systems, such as self-organization and far-from-equilibrium conditions. This article, therefore, contends that curriculum development in the near future will be deeply impacted by social ne...

Drawing from the Uses and Gratifications Theory, this study examined the Gratification Sought and the Gratification Obtained from using Social Networking Sites among Iranian, Malaysian, British, and South African higher education students. This comparison allowed to drawing conclusions about how social networking sites fulfill users’ needs with different cultures. Data were collected through a ...

Open Network Learning Environments (ONLE) are online networks that afford learners the opportunity to participate in creative content endeavors, personalized identity projections, networked mechanism management, and effective collaborative community integration by applying Web 2.0 tools in open environments. It supports social interaction by integrating User-Generated Content, Participatory Web...

This study empirically investigated the influence of technology acceptance model factors, social influence factors and demographic factors on the adoption of social networking technologies in the workplace. More than half of the surveyed respondents reported using instant messaging, Facebook or both at work for business-related or personal-related purposes. Results of a discriminant analysis su...

This research aimed to explore types of online social capital (bridging and bonding) that the Emiratis perceive in the context of social networking site (SNS) usage. A snow-ball sample of 230 Emiratis from two Emirates, Abu Dhabi and Dubai was used. The results showed that WhatsApp was the most frequent SNS used by the respondents. Also, a significant correlation of the intensity of social netw...