Internet Services and Social Networks in the Greek Academia

Abstract

In just a decade social networks and social media have gained considerable stake in the Internet market, with most of the users being online, communicating and creating the user-generated Web. The literature has examined in numerous ways the engagement of the users in those services but only a few large-scale studies have been conducted in Greece. Using a sample of 5922 academicians, personnel and students from all the Greek Universities and Research Institutes, this paper examines the adoption of major social networking sites and internet services in relation with the participants’ experience in the Academia in years, level of education, academic knowledge field, gender, internet connection type and electronic device most frequently used. The taxonomy framework of social machines (Smart et al., A taxonomic framework for social machines. In: Social collective intelligence: combining the powers of humans and machines to build a smarter society. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 51–85, 2014) is used to organize the discussion about the results. The study shows a strong correlation between the SNSs used simultaneously by the participants, whereas there is also correlation of the years of experience in the Academia with specific SNSs. There is also high level of mobile internet usage in all the groups of the study which is correlated with the usage of specific SNSs.