HIGH POINT, N.C., May 12, 2016 – High Point University assistant professor of strategic communication Dr. Sojung Claire Kim recently published her collaborative research on the role of mobile phones and social media on political participation in the peer-reviewed journal Communication and the Public.
This research systematically tests the relationships between the use of Twitter and Facebook on mobile phones and political conversation with offline and online political participation.
Kim, with collaborators from DePaul University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found different effects of mobile Facebook and Twitter use among individuals in Colombia, which could offer practical implications for creating mobile app-based social media strategies for effective political and civic participation.
“Our findings indicate that Twitter use via mobile phones tends to encourage online and offline political participation as well as online expressive communication,” says Kim. “On the contrary, mobile Facebook use is only associated with online expressive communication. These findings suggest a mobile Twitter effect, such that unlike social networking sites like Facebook, public social media apps such as Twitter, facilitate the consumption of real-time political news and content, extending socially mediated publicness into the realm of mobile communication.”