Marko M. Skoric

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at City University of Hong Kong

This study examines the phenomenon of politically motivated selective avoidance on Facebook in the context of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement protests in 2014. We conceptualize selective avoidance as individual choices that users make to shield themselves from undesirable dissonant views by removing unwanted information and breaking social ties tha...

One of the democratic promises of social media relies on the expectation that citizens will be exposed to more diverse sources of information and will consequently be more likely to encounter views that challenge their beliefs and opinions. Still, recent evidence suggests that although social media may increase exposure to difference, citizen also...

This study examines the political implications of social media through the lens of digital disconnectivity. Specifically, it focuses on politically motivated unfriending and examines its influence on individuals’ political engagement, namely political expression and information consumption on social media. Furthermore, considering the importance of...

This study examines citizen’s use of social media during the political crisis triggered by the Catalan Referendum. More specifically, we seek to shed more light on Catalan citizens’ (dis)engagement on social media, examining what citizens did and did not do on social media, who they avoided and/or unfriended, and the implications of such behaviours...

This study examines whether disconnective practices on social media such as unfriending could constitute a form of selective avoidance and investigates its boundary conditions. To do so, we study whether, to what extent, and under which conditions exposure to disagreement on social media predicts politically motivated unfriending. Specifically, we...

The relationship between movement participation and subsequent vote intention is a central topic in political science. Empirical studies present an ambiguous pattern, with one showing a mobilization argument, while the others suggest movement will substitute formal voting and lead to disengagement. The rise of clicktivism has added further complexi...

News organizations face mounting challenges in the social media era. This study, informed by the Normalization Process Theory, examines how social media metrics are embedded into the news production routines across Greater China, mapping journalists’ coherence (making sense of), cognitive participation (engaging with), collective action (adapting w...

This study examines alternative media (i.e., graffiti) use in contesting the public sphere in the context of the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests. Utilizing the observation method and a theoretical framework of (hybrid) mediation opportunity structure we demonstrate that the protesters have utilized graffiti and street art as the circuit for messages of...

This study examines alternative media (i.e., graffiti) use in contesting the public sphere in the context of the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests. Utilizing the observation method and a theoretical framework of (hybrid) mediation opportunity structure we demonstrate that the protesters have utilized graffiti and street art as the circuit for messages of...

Does the adoption of digital media platforms affect the success of environmental movements? We address this question by using a representative sample of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) from Hong Kong and examining the linkages between their digital media adoption and reach and their level of success. Guided by the agenda settin...

This study theorized that active political expression on social networking sites (SNS) facilitates political disagreement since it diversifies one’s communication network, which likely leads to political incivility. Additionally, individuals’ social identity might condition this indirect relationship. Relying on a two-wave panel survey in Hong Kong...

Under COVID-19, there is an increasing demand for collecting health information from citizens by the government. It is commonly argued that there is a positive relationship between trust and willingness to disclose data. This finding has rarely been tested in the context of public health emergencies—for example, during COVID-19, when governments cl...

This study compares two adjacent remote valleys in the Himalayas of Pakistan, which only differ in terms of the availability of internet access. Using a unique methodological approach, combining a natural experiment design and an interview method, we explore the role of serendipitous exposure and interfaith contact on social media in relation to th...

This study examines the effects of political/cultural beliefs and situational perceptions on public support for government surveillance amidst COVID-19, using a representative survey conducted in Hong Kong. Our results indicate that situational responses (i.e. privacy trust and self-efficacy) balance against each other in mediating the effects of p...

Los primeros estudios sobre redes sociales respaldaban visiones optimistas en relación con su impacto positivo en el desarrollo del capital social, y relacionaban su uso con la exposición a puntos de vista más diversos y a un mayor compromiso con la sociedad. Sin embargo, recientemente, los investigadores empezaron a analizar los comportamientos as...

This study examines the phenomena of political unfriending and content removal on social media in three Western democracies—France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We seek to understand the role of crosscutting discussion, confrontational discussion style, and ideological extremity in triggering unfriending and content removal on social...

Through a combination of semi-structured expert interviews, desk research, attendance and records of fintech talks and seminars, and a survey of 1170 Hong Kong residents, this reports provides key insights on data protections, innovations and perceptions particularly in the domain of fintech in Hong Kong.

This study examines how different ways of presenting information about the ecological threats stemming from the use of disposable plastics may affect people's willingness to reduce their use. To test our hypotheses, we used a 2 × 3 × 2 between-subjects experimental design, utilizing a sample of 1001 Hong Kong residents. The independent variables te...

In this article, we examine how a loosely knit, mediated community in the massively multiplayer online game EverQuest II rapidly coalesced to carry out collective action in response to a request to help a terminally ill child. We examine the factors that motivated hundreds of people to donate their time, expertise, and in-game resources to people t...

This article examines citizens' use of the Internet as a popular feedback mechanism, and argues that it can help improve institutional performance. Specifically, it assesses the relationship between Internet penetration rate and public service delivery across 31 first-level administrative divisions in People's Republic of China from 1997 to 2014. A...

This study analyzes different methodological approaches followed in social media literature and their accuracy in predicting the general elections of four countries. Volumetric and unsupervised and supervised sentiment approaches are adopted for generating 12 metrics to compute predicted voteshares. The findings suggest that Twitter-based predictio...

This study examines Chinese environmental nongovernmental organizations’ (ENGO) use of a microblogging platform Weibo and the factors that contribute to sharing of their messages. By employing the Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM) of information processing and through a content analysis of ENGOs’ Weibo posts, the study finds that the posts that have...

In recent years, many studies have used social media data to make estimates of electoral outcomes and public opinion. This paper reports the findings from a meta-analysis examining the predictive power of social media data by focusing on various sources of data and different methods of prediction; i.e., (1) sentiment analysis, and (2) analysis of s...

This study examines predictors of environmental engagement among Chinese citizens, paying particular attention to their leadership qualities and their news and social media use. Using a measure of environmental engagement that incorporates both activist (petitions, protests) and consumerist behaviors (boycotting and buycotting), we find that self-p...

This study was conducted to examine the factors that affect the media visibility of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGO) in China. Specifically, we examine the ways in which environmental advocacy and media use behaviors are related to the level of attention an ENGO receives from news media. Using data derived from a content analysis...

This article examines citizens’ use of the Internet as a popular feedback mechanism, and argues that it can help improve institutional performance. Specifically, it assesses the relationship between Internet penetration rate and public service delivery across 31 first-level administrative divisions in People’s Republic of China from 1997 to 2014. A...

This study introduces and evaluates the robustness of different volumetric, sentiment, and social network approaches to predict the elections in three Asian countries – Malaysia, India, and Pakistan from Twitter posts. We find that predictive power of social media performs well for India and Pakistan but is not effective for Malaysia. Overall, we f...

This study examines how the uses of news media and social media are linked to environmental activism and consumerism. The analysis of survey data from Hong Kong (N = 1,047) demonstrates positive relationships between news media use and these two types of environmental engagement. Findings also reveal that political use of social media is positively...

The Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government Asia 2016 presents papers that cover the latest developments in digital governance and politics. The integration of digital information and communication technologies in citizens' everyday lives sustainably changes the interaction with governments. Politics already embraces digital and mobile techn...

This study analyzes the increasing presence and capabilities of wearable computing devices in the cornucopia of personalized digital data. We argue that the institutional data practices typical of Google Glass will pose policy challenges and herald yet another dramatic shift to personalized data marketing. We also highlight the characteristics of G...

This meta-analytic study reviews empirical research published from 2007 to 2013 with an aim of providing robust conclusions about the relationship between social media use and citizen engagement. It includes 22 studies that used self-reported measures of social media use and participation, with a total of 116 relationships/effects. The results sugg...

This study analyzes different methodological approaches followed in social media literature and their accuracy in predicting the general elections of four countries. Volumetric and unsupervised and supervised sentiment approaches are adopted for generating 12 metrics to compute predicted voteshares. The findings suggest that Twitter-based predictio...

This study reviews and analyzes the published empirical research on the role of social media in promoting political expression and participation in Confucian Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. In addition to providing a narrative review of the literature, our analyses show clear numerical estimates of the relation...

With the widespread adoption of social media in many Asian societies, these platforms are increasingly used in a variety of ways to promote civic and political aims but such uses are shaped by various stakeholders and contexts of use. In this special issue, four papers on Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and China-Australia present highly contextualized...

This study followed the online activity on Twitter during Pakistan’s landmark 2013 General Election, also hailed as Pakistan’s first Twitter election, which marked the first ever transfer of power between two elected civilian governments. This election saw the unexpected emergence of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), the political underdog which foll...

This study examines how different uses of social network sites (SNS) and mobile phones (MP) to communicate with friends and business associates are related to the acquisition of job-related information, job mobility, and entrepreneurial intentions, using social capital as its main theoretical lens. To this end, a nationally representative, random d...

This study examines how different uses of social network sites (SNS) and mobile phones (MP) to communicate with friends and business associates are related to the acquisition of job-related information, job mobility, and entrepreneurial intentions, using social capital as its main theoretical lens. To this end, a nationally representative, random d...

This chapter gives an overview of the literature examining the effects of online gaming, focusing primarily on the unintended consequences of online game play, including aggression, civic and political engagement, and the effects related to health, gender, identity, and sexuality.

PART I Reconceptualizing Citizenship 1. Sampling from the civic buffet: Youth, new media and do-it-yourself citizenship Kjerstin Thorson 2. Buying in or tuning out: The role of consumption in politically active young adults Lucy Atkinson 3. Civic Engagement of Youths during their Transition to Adulthood Roseanne Scholl 4. Social Media and Youth Par...

To explore what helps and hinders long-term online community cohesion, a once strong but now withered 7-year-old guild in the online game EverQuest 2 was studied using mixed methods. It was found that the guild faced stresses on five distinct yet interrelated levels: personal, subgroup, guild, game, and company level. Strong intragroup ties can aid...

This study examines the implications of the predicted big data revolution in social sciences for the research using the Triple Helix (TH) model of innovation and knowledge creation in the context of developing and transitional economies. While big data research promises to transform the nature of social inquiry and improve the world economy by incr...

This study examines how the Chinese government adapts to the challenges posed by information and communication technologies (ICTs) by strengthening state capacity. Using secondary data, we quantitatively examine the relationship between ICT infrastructure and usage, public service delivery, and political control across 30 first-level administrative...

The 2013 Pakistan General Election was as a democratic milestone in the nation's troubled political history which also witnessed the rise of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI, under its leader Imran Khan), from its marginal status to a formidable political status. This study focuses on the first ever Twitter campaign by Pakistani political parties to m...

Social networks, which have almost become part of our daily lives, have established new communication structures and behaviors in society. While citizens and businesses have already extensively used social networks for years, governments continuously increase their interest in the new communication technologies. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and...

This special issue showcases innovative scholarly works examining the role of social and mobile media in the formation and/or transformation of democratic citizenship in some of the most populous and economically powerful countries in Asia—China, India, Japan and South Korea.

This study examines the impact of gender and social resources on how people use social network sites (SNS) and mobile phones to network in a Confucian culture. Analyses of survey data from Singapore showed that males use mobile phones or SNS for professional connections more frequently than females. The use of SNS or mobile phones to contact friend...

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs) are spaces of socialization and relationship formation and maintenance. This qualitative study seeks to understand how MMO players delineate the boundary between play and life when it comes to their game-originated romance. A typology of players was devised to understand players' constructions...

This research examines the implications of social media use for political engagement among young people in Singapore. The project included a qualitative analysis of a student protest, followed by a national survey of young Singaporeans. The findings suggest that social media use is positively related to traditional political participation, while al...

This study examines the phenomenon of cyberbullying on Facebook and how it is related to school bullying among secondary school students in Singapore, aged 13–17. We also focus on generic use of Facebook and risky Facebook behaviors as the predictors of cyberbullying and victimization on Facebook. 1676 secondary students, from two secondary schools...

This experiment examined cultivation effects resulting from a repeated, longerterm exposure to a violent video game, Grand Theft Auto IV. Over a period of three weeks, participants in the treatment condition played a violent video game in a controlled laboratory setting for a total of 12 hours. Following this period, participants completed a questi...

The eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government (JeDEM) is a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal (ISSN: 2075-9517) published twice a year. It addresses theory and practice in the areas of eDemocracy and Open Government as well as eGovernment, eParticipation, and eSociety. JeDEM publishes ongoing and completed research, case studies and project descri...

Social media plays an important role in the process of political engagement, especially in societies where significant constraints over traditional media and participation still exist. Little is known about how social media use is related to these constraints. This study examines how citizens' perceptions of government control predict social media...

Increasingly, consumers are searching online for health information. This rise in Web searching for health calls for a theoretical approach that explains the problems associated with consumers’ use of search engines for health information retrieval. In this context, this paper provides an exploratory framework for understanding problematic search e...

Given the popularity of new media platforms such as social network sites and video games and their increasingly central role in the social life of teens and young adults, we seek to examine their impact of social capital, particularly regarding the establishment of new types of social ties. This study examines whether the use of Facebook and playin...

The importance of cultivating political engagement among youth has been widely discussed and its value for a well-functioning democratic society reaffirmed by numerous scholars. This study seeks to understand the relationship between the use of emerging platforms for online sociability and entertainment and political participation among young Singa...

Given the increasingly dominant role of video games in the mainstream entertainment industry, it is no surprise that the scholarly debate about their impact has been lively and well attended. Although >100 studies have been conducted to examine the impact of violent video games on aggression, no clear consensus has been reached, particularly in ter...

This paper is a qualitative examination of the participatory potential of social media, focusing on a student-organized protest against censorship in Singapore. While the debate regarding the impact of new media on politics is well-documented, few studies have explicitly detailed the process of online civic mobilization in terms of its contribution...

Online shaming is a phenomenon where citizens engage in social policing by shaming transgressions via the Internet. It has been argued that the proliferation of new communication networks and digital recording devices could bring about a new paradigm for ensuring conformity to social norms through the self-regulation of society. Incorporating liter...

In 1961, Daniel Boorstin introduced the concept of 'pseudo-events', or false realities, which he said had been flooding the American press. Four decades later, testing his concept on the Philippine press, this study finds that his observation still holds true. This exploratory study, using content analysis of 2330 news articles and a survey of 100...

Scholars have long been interested in the overlap between electronic communication systems and international affairs. New communication systems have brought an expectation for greater information flow and connection across geographical boundaries when compared to the systems that came before them. This study continued this longstanding scholarly in...

A ban on political podcasting during the General Elections 2006 in Singapore was justified by the Singaporean government on the grounds that the new medium had a greater power to influence voters than traditional modes of political discourse. A between-subjects controlled experiment was conducted to test whether podcasts of political speeches had a...

The aim of this study is to assess the relationship between video gaming habits and elementary school students' academic performance. More specifically, we seek to examine the usefulness of a distinction between addiction and high engagement and assess the predictive validity of these concepts in the context of scholastic achievement. Three hundred...

This study is an empirical investigation of problematic instant messaging (IM) use among university students in Singapore. It adapts Caplan's (2005) theoretical framework of problematic Internet use (PIU) to the context of problematic IM use by linking pre-existing human dispositions to cognitive-behavioral symptoms and negative outcomes of imprope...

This comparative study explores cultural differences between two Asian societies, Singapore and South Korea, and argues that they have had an impact on the political uses of new communication technologies as well as on the patterns of their regulation and control. It is suggested that among other factors, the rise of Christianity and Protestantism...

Research on violent video games suggests that play leads to aggressive behavior. A longitudinal study of an online violent video game with a control group tested for changes in aggressive cognitions and behaviors. The findings did not support the assertion that a violent game will cause substantial increases in real-world aggression. The findings a...

This study tests 2 competing theoretical models that attempt to understand the roles that broadband Internet plays in society. The linear model posits that the gains or harms introduced by the Internet via narrowband will further increase with the adoption of broadband. On the contrary, the differential gains model proposes that changes stemming fr...