Pessimistic impulses: Twitter messages are 25% more negative if they are published via a smartphone rather than another device.
Can a smartphone really become an extension of oneself? A British-American study suggests it is a possibility after having observed that tweets published from mobile phones were 25% more negative than those that are published via other devices, especially during the morning or evenings.
Mobile phones have considerably changed the way we interact with the world. This fact led a team of researchers from Goldsmiths, University of London (Britain), Bowdoin College in Maine (United States) and the University of Maine to investigate whether Twitter messages published from smartphones contained more egocentric terms than if they were published from other devices.
For their investigation, the researchers collected and studied 235 million tweets issued from North America over a period of six weeks in 2013.
In order to observe and understand several word-associations used in the messages, the researchers relied on the Implicit Association Test used in social and cognitive psychology. A number of terms like "me", "my" or "mine" were associated with egocentricity whereas other terms like "pain", "sadness" or "agony" were correlated to negativity. The team also observed the frequency with which users tweeted and if their messages were published from a mobile phone or computer.
The results published in the Journal of Communication, suggest that Twitter messages are 25% more negative if they are published via a smartphone rather than another device. Tweets are particularly negative when they are posted in the mornings or late at night.
According to the researchers, narcissistic tendencies increase depending on the time of day, at the end of a work or school day for instance. The study revealed that users' Twitter posts were less preoccupied with themselves on weekends, and the least egocentric on Sunday mornings.
Regarding the content of the tweets analysed, the team did not find that mobile tweets were particularly gendered and found that Twitter messages tended to employ words traditionally associated as masculine.
"Very little work has been done comparing how our social media activities vary from mobile to non-mobile," explained Dhiraj Murthy, co-author of the study. "And as we increasingly use social media from mobile devices, the context in which one uses social media is a critical object of study." — AFP Relaxnews
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