4. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - Faculties submissions

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    The experiences of COVID-19 related lockdown and social media usage among the youth in Vosloorus, Mfundo Park, Gauteng
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Dlamini, Lindokuhle Sibahle; Ndimande-Khoza, Nomhle; Langa, Malose
    This research sought to understand how the COVID-19 lockdown affected young people from the Vosloorus Township as well as their social media usage throughout the lockdown. The study targeted seven individuals, both male and female, through semi-structured interviews to gain rich data for this research. The research used a qualitative approach that allowed the researcher to adequately document these individuals’ life experiences in a naturalistic and interpretive way. Additionally, the interpretive phenomenological approach (IPA) which allowed the researcher to get an in-depth understanding of how the research participants understand or interpret their world, more especially how they describe their personal experiences. The findings have shown that young people from townships have suffered significantly from the impact of the pandemic. They experienced notable psychological distress at the hands of the military and police who were sent to maintain order in the townships during the lockdown. They were forced to adapt to a new way of life which included letting go of traditional burial rituals. The social distancing measures meant that the majority of the population could not express their final goodbyes to relatives who have passed on in order to control the rate of infection. Furthermore, the social recession had a more devastating impact on these young people as they naturally thrive under social interaction for their growth and developmental trajectory. The lack of social and/or physical interaction with peers affected not only their growth, but it also affected their academic performance. Social media became the only digital tool they relied on for any form of learning and communication with peers, relatives as well as educators. Although social media provided these young people with some form of connection to the outside world, it became an eminent threat to their overall welfare. The spread of fake news about the virus caused a lot of confusion, chaos, emotional and psychological stress among these young people.
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    The experiences of COVID-19 related lockdown and social media usage among the youth in Vosloorus, Mfundo Park, Gauteng
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Dlamini, Lindokuhle Sibahle; Langa, Malose
    This research sought to understand how the COVID-19 lockdown affected young people from the Vosloorus Township as well as their social media usage throughout the lockdown. The study targeted seven individuals, both male and female, through semi-structured interviews to gain rich data for this research. The research used a qualitative approach that allowed the researcher to adequately document these individuals’ life experiences in a naturalistic and interpretive way. Additionally, the interpretive phenomenological approach (IPA) which allowed the researcher to get an in-depth understanding of how the research participants understand or interpret their world, more especially how they describe their personal experiences. The findings have shown that young people from townships have suffered significantly from the impact of the pandemic. They experienced notable psychological distress at the hands of the military and police who were sent to maintain order in the townships during the lockdown. They were forced to adapt to a new way of life which included letting go of traditional burial rituals. The social distancing measures meant that the majority of the population could not express their final goodbyes to relatives who have passed on in order to control the rate of infection. Furthermore, the social recession had a more devastating impact on these young people as they naturally thrive under social interaction for their growth and developmental trajectory. The lack of social and/or physical interaction with peers affected not only their growth, but it also affected their academic performance. Social media became the only digital tool they relied on for any form of learning and communication with peers, relatives as well as educators. Although social media provided these young people with some form of connection to the outside world, it became an eminent threat to their overall welfare. The spread of fake news about the virus caused a lot of confusion, chaos, emotional and psychological stress among these young people.
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    YouTube: Video Commercialization, Value Creation and Identity
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2021-12) Dlamini, Gabby Sipho; White, Hylton
    Social media has been blamed for promoting unrealistic flashy lifestyles and an increase in influencer brand marketing. The outcome of this is said to put extreme pressure on individuals to maintain a certain lifestyle to the detriment of their self, promoting a performance of life rather than real life experiences, resulting in the breakdown of social bonds. Yet social media platforms such YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and many others are growing at considerable rates, despite all the critiques. The thesis overall questions how YouTube vloggers turn the intangible value of activities in everyday life into monetary income by attracting online audiences to their vlogs. The research is located as part of transformations taking place in late capitalism, that used to characterise the organisation of labour and, therefore, society in nineteenth and twentieth-century iterations of modern capitalist society; and the changing concepts of “private” and “public” that are described as part of the technological development and integration into our everyday lives. This thesis traces the changing structures and relationships between YouTube, YouTubers and viewers as the economy of YouTube has continued to grow. Whilst influencer brand marketing and social media reach are popularly viewed as detrimental to the individual and society, this thesis argues against this general view. Instead, I argue that in the wake of influencer marketing and the financial economies, embedded within YouTube and other social media, new ways of being and belonging are being negotiated. This thesis, using ethnographic data, focuses on these new ways of being and belonging by explaining how ideas of value, suspicion, affect, and digital footprint are factors in creating online community ties and online identities that continue inside and outside of the online space.
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    Regularized Deep Neural Network for Post-Authorship Attribution
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Modupe, Abiodun; Celik, Turgay; Marivate, Vukosi
    Post-authorship attribution is the computational process of determining the legitimate author of an online text snippet, such as an email, blog, forum post, or chat log, by employing stylometric features. The process consists of analysing various linguistic and writing patterns, such as vocabulary, sentence structure, punctuation usage, and even the use of specific words or phrases. By comparing these features to a known set of writing pieces from potential authors, investigators can make educated hypotheses about the true authorship of a text snippet. Additionally, post-authorship attribution has applications in fields like forensic linguistics and cybersecurity, where determining the source of a text can be crucial for investigations or identifying potential threats. Furthermore, in a verification procedure to proactively uncover misogynistic, misandrist, xenophobic, and abusive posts on the internet or social networks, finding a suitable text representation to adequately symbolise and capture an author’s distinctive writing from a computational linguistics perspective is typically known as a stylometric analysis. Additionally, most of the posts on social media or online are generally rife with ambiguous terminologies that could potentially compromise and influence the precision of the early proposed authorship attribution model. The majority of extracted stylistic elements in words are idioms, onomatopoeias, homophones, phonemes, synonyms, acronyms, anaphora, and polysemy, which are fundamentally difficult to interpret by most existing natural language processing (NLP) systems. These difficulties make it difficult to correctly identify the true author of a given text. Therefore, further advancements in NLP systems are necessary to effectively handle these complex linguistic elements and improve the accuracy of authorship attribution models. In this thesis, we introduce a regularised deep neural network (RDNN) model to solve the challenges that come with figuring out who wrote what after the fact. The proposed method utilises a convolutional neural network, a bidirectional long short-term memory encoder, and a distributed highway network to effectively address the post-authorship attribution problem. The neural network was utilised to generate lexical stylometric features, which were then fed into the bidirectional encoder to produce a syntactic feature vector representation. The feature vector was then fed into the distributed high-speed networks for regularisation to reduce network generalisation errors. The regularised feature vector was then given to the bidirectional decoder to learn the author’s writing style. The feature classification layer is made up of a fully connected network and a SoftMax function for prediction. The RDNN method outperformed the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall on the majority of the benchmark datasets. These results highlight the potential of the proposed method to significantly improve classification performance in various domains. Again, the introduction of an interactive system to visualise the performance of the proposed method would further enhance its usability and effectiveness in quantifying the contribution of the author’s writing characteristics in both online text snippets and literary documents. It is useful in processing the evidence that is needed to support claims or draw conclusions about the author’s writing style or intent during the pre-trial investigation by the law enforcement agent in the court of law. The incorporation of this method into the pretrial stage greatly strengthens the credibility and validity of the findings presented in court and has the potential to revolutionise the field of authorship attribution and enhance the accuracy of forensic investigations. Furthermore, it ensures a fair and just legal process for all parties involved by providing concrete evidence to support or challenge claims. We are also aware of the limitations of the proposed methods and recognise the need for additional research to overcome these constraints and improve the overall reliability and applicability of post-authorship attribution of online text snippets and literary documents for forensic investigations. Even though the proposed methods have revealed some unusual differences in author writing style, such as how influential writers, regular people, and suspected authors use language, the evidence from the results with the features extracted from the texts has shown promise for identifying authorship patterns and aiding in forensic analyses. However, much work remains to be done to validate the methodologies’ usefulness and dependability as effective authorship attribution procedures. Further research is needed to determine the extent to which external factors, such as the context in which the text was written or the author’s emotional state, may impact the identified authorship patterns. Additionally, it is crucial to establish a comprehensive dataset that includes a diverse range of authors and writing styles to ensure the generalizability of the findings and enhance the reliability of forensic analyses. Furthermore, the dataset used in this thesis does not include a diverse variety of authors and writing styles, such as impostors attempting to impersonate another author, which limits the generalizability of the conclusions and undermines the credibility of forensic analysis. More studies can be conducted to broaden the proposed strategy for detecting and distinguishing impostors’ writing styles from those of authentic authors when committing crimes on both online and literary documents. It is conceivable for numerous criminals to collaborate to perpetrate a crime, which could aid in improving the proposed methods for detecting the existence of multiple impostors or the contribution of each criminal writing style based on the person or individual they are attempting to mimic. The likelihood of numerous offenders working together complicates the investigation and necessitates advanced procedures for identifying their individual contributions, as well as both authentic and manufactured impostor contents within the text. This is especially difficult on social media, where fake accounts and anonymous profiles can make it difficult to determine the true identity of those involved, which can come from a variety of sources, including text, WhatsApps, chat images, videos, and so on, and can lead to the spread of misinformation and manipulation. As a result, promoting a hybrid approach that goes beyond text as evidence could help address some of the concerns raised above. For example, integrating audio and visual data may provide a more complete perspective of the scenario. As a result, such an approach exacerbates the restrictions indicated in the distribution of data and may necessitate more storage and analytical resources. However, it can also lead to a more accurate and nuanced analysis of the situation
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    The impact of social media marketing on perceptions of brand knowledge : The case of the government employees’ pension fund (GEPF)
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Dandala, Gcinasonke; Chalombe, Nakuze
    The goal of the research was to examine the effect of social media marketing activities on brand knowledge, defined as brand awareness and brand image (Keller, 1993).The social media activities selected as independent variables for this purpose were firm generated content (FGC) and consumer engagement (CE). The study was conducted within the context of the Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF), Africa’s largest pension fund by assets under management. The population of the research was comprised of GEPF clients defined as members, pensioners and beneficiaries all of whom have a direct interest in the communication activities of the GEPF. The clients were required to have personal accounts on the social media platforms of Facebook and/or Twitter in order to be part of the study. The quantitative research method was used, with research data obtained via an online questionnaire shared on two carefully identified private Facebook groups. A total of 188 followers from the groups fully completed the survey. Multiple regression analysis using SPSS was then used to analyse the collected data. The results of the study confirmed that the social media marketing activities of firm generated content and consumer engagement have a significant and positive effect on the attributes of brand awareness and brand image. Furthermore, the study indicated that consumer engagement has a more significant impact on the variables than firm generated content. The study enhances the gaps in research regarding the impact of social media activities on brand knowledge as articulated by Zahoor and Qureshi (2017) that there is still considerable scope to quantify the relationships between social media marketing and the dimensions that comprise customer-based brand equity.
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    Social media online privacy in South Africa: The case for blockchain technology innovation
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Pinto, Edward Philip Beja Abegao; Sethibe, Tebogo
    In today's society, it has become nearly impossible to exist without an online presence on some form of social media platform. These platforms have become an integral part of our daily lives, serving as avenues for maintaining relationships and facilitating connections. However, the extensive use of social media exposes users to various privacy concerns and malicious activities. Furthermore, the generation of vast amounts of personal data on these platforms raises questions about data ownership, control, unauthorized data utilization, and constant user activity tracking. Over recent years, concerns surrounding privacy, risks, and exposure on social media have escalated, particularly regarding issues such as data ownership, control, unauthorized data usage, and user activity tracking. Social media users have increasingly expressed the view that platforms are making incremental security improvements without fully addressing users' genuine concerns, which may impact their economic models. This research paper seeks to explore whether blockchain technology can offer a solution to the privacy concerns raised by users of social media platforms. It evaluates the characteristics of blockchain technology in addressing the privacy- related issues associated with traditional social media platforms. The paper begins by establishing a foundational understanding of blockchain, privacy, and the role of social media platforms in today's society. The research identifies the challenges faced by everyday social media users as part of defining the research problem.
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    The impact of interactive social media advertising on brand resonance in South Africa
    (2020) Qutywa, Pinda
    Interactive Social Media advertising offers our population many benefits, whether it be entertainment, news, education, customer service or even networking. Social media is changing the rules of branding. Brands can be noticed with smaller investments as they can tap into social media to amplify their brand message. The ever-evolving impact of social media on branding is shifting the very essence of brand management. Social media binds together communities that once were geographically isolated. Insights from various social networks enable marketers to understand what customers want, and when they want it, how they want to experience it and who they want to experience it with, all of which will enable messaging that they want to hear. On the World Wide Web, the brand is the experience and the experience is the brand. Although branding has been a subject of research for many years, the subject of social media is new and emerging, therefore the scope of research has widened, creating opportunities to expand on existing knowledge and theory. Largely, research specific to brand advertising and brand resonance has not incorporated social media particularly in the emerging market context such as South Africa. There is a lack of academic research revealing how social media, advertising and brand resonance interconnect in the South African skincare market context. The purpose of this study was to investigate influence of social media advertising interactivity on brand resonance. The brand resonance construct is measured from the perspective of its four dimensions namely, loyalty, attachment, community and engagement. An online survey was administered to 3,000 respondents. Out of that, 1959 completed the survey in full. The respondents were regular users of social network sites and they were sourced mainly from university students, a smaller percentage of the group consisted of university staff and other members of the public. Data was analyzed using the R-software version 3.6.3, to determine if the items correlate with their unique constructs. The conceptual model elements were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis. The study showed that interactive social media advertising has a positive and significant impact on brand loyalty, brand attachment, brand community and brand engagement. The study gives marketers insights into how to effectively use social media as an advertising medium, but most importantly how to use social media to create brand resonance.