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Posted: "Is media good or bad for us?" I am asked when I introduce myself as a media psychologist. It reminds me of my son who asked: "Mommy, is this world good or bad?" "It is what you make it to be," I said. "Then I want to make it good," was his reply.

When you've joined the ranks of the "rich and famous," remember that your commitment to being a good corporate citizen is what has set you far apart from those who remain unfulfilled through just accumulating....

Social media sites have taken over our lives. It's hard to even imagine that 10 years ago there was no Facebook or Twitter! 15 years ago people were actually waiting to hear from each other because even email wasn't that common. How did social media actually influenced our life and the society in general?

WASHINGTON (WNEW) - With over 73 percent of online adults now using a social networking site, social media has dramatically impacted the world in both positive and negative ways. It has left many people to wonder how and if social media can mentally affect people.

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are promoted in the healthcare sector as a means of generating and sharing knowledge and improving organisational performance. However CoPs vary considerably in the way they are structured and operate in the sector. If CoPs are to be cultivated to benefit healthcare organisations, there is a need to examine and understand their application to date. To this end, a systematic review of the literature on CoPs was conducted, to examine how and why CoPs have been established and whether they have been shown to improve healthcare practice.

Continued improvements in occupational health can only be ensured if decisions regarding the implementation and continuation of occupational health and safety interventions (OHS interventions) are based on the best available evidence. To ensure that this is the case, scientific evidence should meet the needs of decision-makers. As a first step in bridging the gap between the economic evaluation literature and daily practice in occupational health, this study aimed to provide insight into the occupational health decision-making process and information needs of decision-makers.

Objective: The introduction of Canada's Medicare in 1966 established precedence for a universally accessible and equitable healthcare system. Although Canada has been a leader in building the foundations of socialized medicine, it has stalled short of fulfilling a vision promulgated by its architects of a system that operates on a continuum of care. The aim of this review was to examine whether the expansion of publicly funded services under the Canada Health Act would be an economically and socially viable policy option.

This study examines how information and communication technologies - mobile phone, social networking websites, blogging, instant messaging, and photo sharing - are related to the diversity of people's social networks. We find that a limited set of technologies directly afford diversity, but many indirectly contribute to diversity by supporting participation in traditional settings such as neighborhoods, voluntary groups, religious institutions, and public spaces. Only one internet activity, social networking websites, was related to lower levels of participation in a traditional setting: neighborhoods. However, when direct effects were included, the total influence of social networking services on diversity was positive. We argue that a focus on affordances of new media for networked individualism fails to recognize the continued importance of place for the organization of personal networks: networks, that as a result of the persistent and pervasive nature of some new technologies, may be more diverse than at any time in recent history

Twitter, the popular microblogging site, has received increasing attention as a unique communication tool that facilitates electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). To gain greater insight into this potential, this study investigates how consumers' relationships with brands influence their engagement in retweeting brand messages on Twitter. Data from a survey of 315 Korean consumers who currently follow brands on Twitter show that those who retweet brand messages outscore those who do not on brand identification, brand trust, community commitment, community membership intention, Twitter usage frequency, and total number of postings.

The rapid diffusion of "microblogging" services such as Twitter is ushering in a new era of possibilities for organizations to communicate with and engage their core stakeholders and the general public. To enhance understanding of the communicative functions microblogging serves for organizations, this study examines the Twitter utilization practices of the 100 largest nonprofit organizations in the United States. The analysis reveals there are three key functions of microblogging updates-"information,""community," and "action." Though the informational use of microblogging is extensive, nonprofit organizations are better at using Twitter to strategically engage their stakeholders via dialogic and community-building practices than they have been with traditional websites. The adoption of social media appears to have engendered new paradigms of public engagement.

In cemeteries, we do not remember our dead privately or quietly, as for example, in prayers. Instead, we do so publicly and visibly, so that what we do (or do not do) can be noticed by the public. But how do we remember and commemorate our dead at public cemeteries? Based on mixed-methods analyses of the markers for the dead at cemeteries in a religiously relatively homogeneous (namely, Catholic) region, three recent socio-cultural evolutions are identified and analyzed: (1) the construction of idiosyncratic markers and the accompanying emergence of individualized identities, (2) the emphasis on embodied modes of remembrance, and (3) the increasing visibility of voluntary social commitments and strong ties. Overall, the findings presented here point to the growing diversification of our ways of publicly remembering and commemorating the dead.

In cemeteries, we do not remember our dead privately or quietly, as for example, in prayers. Instead, we do so publicly and visibly, so that what we do (or do not do) can be noticed by the public. But how do we remember and commemorate our dead at public cemeteries? Based on mixed-methods analyses of the markers for the dead at cemeteries in a religiously relatively homogeneous (namely, Catholic) region, three recent socio-cultural evolutions are identified and analyzed: (1) the construction of idiosyncratic markers and the accompanying emergence of individualized identities, (2) the emphasis on embodied modes of remembrance, and (3) the increasing visibility of voluntary social commitments and strong ties. Overall, the findings presented here point to the growing diversification of our ways of publicly remembering and commemorating the dead.

Through a content analysis of 225 nonprofit organizations' Facebook profiles, the current study examines the impact of cultural orientation when it comes to American, Chinese, and Turkish nonprofit organizations' behavior and communication patterns in the social media sphere. Specifically, the research explored how organizations disclose information about themselves and those managing their Facebook presence, promoting organizational news and accomplishments, and stakeholder engagement in relation to their context, performance, and collectivist/individualist natures, respectively. The study found mixed support for the impact of traditional cultural expectations indicating that the global connectivity of social media may be contributing to blurred cultural boundaries in favor of a virtual culture that promotes the global community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] .