The insight that it is the medium that affects a society and not the content which is delivered over that medium, is not new by far, thus "the medium is the message" (McLuhan 1967). In contemporary industrial societies, the share of user-generated information consumed everyday over the internet...

Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One...

The Social Cloud framework leverages existing relationships between members of a social network for the exchange of resources. This thesis focuses on the design of coordination mechanisms to address two challenges in this scenario. In the first part, user participation incentives are studied. In...

E-Learning, Web 2.0 Mikrolernen und Wissensmanagement verändern die betriebliche Weiterbildung grundlegend und bestimmen zunehmend die betrieblichen Lernwelten. Sie beginnen die traditionelle Weiterbildung mit Seminaren und Workshops zu ergänzen oder gar abzulösen.Für Betriebsräte sind...

The Internet has enabled new forms of large-scale collaboration. Voluntary contributions by large numbers of users and co-producers lead to new forms of production and innovation, as seen in Wikipedia, open source software development, in social networks or on user-generated content platforms as...

Changes in communication technology have allowed for the expansion of data collection modes in survey research. The proliferation of the computer has allowed the creation of web and computer assisted auto-interview data collection modes. Virtual worlds are a new application of computer...

We study a consumer boycott on cottage cheese that was organized in Israel on Facebook in the summer of 2011 following a steep increase in prices after price controls were lifted in 2006. The boycott led to an immediate decline in prices which stayed low more than three years after the boycott....

This dissertation presents the design, development and evaluation of the Social Set Visualizer, an innovative Visual Analytics software tool, that expands upon a novel set-based approach to Big Social Data Analytics for large-scale datasets from social media platforms such as Facebook. Over the...