Electronic Hive Minds on Social Media: Emerging Research and Opportunities

Book excerpt: Researchers have harnessed the flood of personal information and opinions shared on social media platforms in a variety of ways. People communicate not only what they imagine they are purposely sharing but also unintentionally leak information, which allows others to glimpse a sense of the subconscious and unconscious at a macro level. Electronic Hive Minds on Social Media: Emerging Research and Opportunities explores various research techniques to profile the electronic hive mind around social topics as expressed on various modalities of social media, from human, bot, and cyborg social media accounts, and proposes new research methods for harnessing public data from social media platforms. Highlighting topics such as knowledge sharing, swarm intelligence, and social psychology, this publication is designed for researchers, social psychologists, practitioners, and students in marketing, communications, mass media, and similar fields.