A cultural digital jury : a multi-essay exploration of cancellation events, user motivations to participate, and the resulting information asymmetry's economic effects
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Katelyn Lee Walls (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Hamid Nemati
Abstract: This dissertation is a multi-essay collection that aims to develop an in-depth conceptualization of recent cultural phenomenon, fueled by widespread use of social media, known as "cancel culture". In this dissertation, we explore the cancellation event, examine users’ motivations in participating in such events, and investigate any information asymmetry that results from them and their effects on a company’s financial performance. We address each of these examinations with the respective methods: a systematic literature review and rendering, a logistic generalized linear model, and a generalized linear model regression. In the first paper, we discovered eight components that make up a working framework of a cancellation event. This working framework includes Judgment, Social Media Engagement, Morality, Collective participation, Emotion, Social Norms, Power, and Accountability. In the second paper, we find factors that drive people to engage in cancellation events, like ambient awareness, morals, message framing, and social capital calculus. The new construct, Social Capital Calculus, has the potential to advance our understanding of cancellation events because we obtain a more nuanced perspective on social capital by shedding light on how users' influence and diversity of information intertwine to shape online conversations and collective perceptions. In our final essay, we find several interesting findings. Firstly, initial tweets sentiment and influence scores of tweets in a cancellation event impact the company's response, suggesting user sentiment guides company communication strategies. Secondly, high topic entropy (unfocused discussion), amplified by information asymmetry, negatively affects stock prices. Overall, this dissertation provides a comprehensive understanding of cancellation events through a novel framework, explores user motivations with a new construct ('Social Capital Calculus'), and identifies information asymmetry's moderating effects on company responses and stock prices. These findings offer valuable insights for companies, users, and researchers studying this online phenomenon and its impact.
A cultural digital jury : a multi-essay exploration of cancellation events, user motivations to participate, and the resulting information asymmetry's economic effects
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Created on 5/1/2024
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Dissertation
- Language: English
- Date: 2024
- Keywords
- Cancel Culture, Information Asymmetry, Social Activism, Social Media, Stock Market, User Motivations
- Subjects
- Cancel culture
- Moral panics
- Internet $x Social aspects