Advanced web technologies enable consumers can create and exchange the content in various social media platforms (SMPs). As an interactive communication channel, SMPs serve as a new and updated form of online community where consumers and companies benefit from each other. Due to its minimal threshold in cost and skills necessary for accessing these SMPs, consumers use SMPs to acquire information in addition to seeking for socialization, which affect a purchase decision making process (Wang, Yu, and Wei, 2012). With various benefits of using SMPs among consumers, product reviews and photos posted by the customers in SMPs perform as an emerging type of endorsement to other users of SMPs. Individuals who actively share and disseminate the such product/service related-contents often become micro-celebrities among SMPs users. According to DiSilvestro (2016), customers no longer trust advertising created by brands, but they prefer to reply on reviews via SMPs, and in fact, 67% of consumers visit SMPs to reviews generated by other customers. In this regard, increasing number of brands tries to find influential micro-celebrities to build positive brand image and provide meaningful customer engagement which potentially increase sales in the end (Khamis, Ang, and Welling, 2016). Despite the increasing popularity of SMPs and influencers to brands, marketers struggle to measure their returns on investment, such as customer retention and increased customer lifetime value (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010). Thus, a focal interest of this study is the role of a sense of community in building participants’ positive relational outcomes for a given brand that implementing the promotional activities via SMPs (Hudson et al., 2016).

Social media-based brand community becomes an important information channel strategy for marketing firms. Despite the growing academic interest in the issue, little knowledge exists on how social media-based brand community (hereafter SMBBC) could influence consumer brand evaluation. Accordingly, this study attempts to remedy the literature gap by integrating the community integration model, engagement in the OBC or SMBBC, and consumer brand evaluation to propose a conceptual model for investigating the effect of SMBBC environment on consumer brand evaluation. This study collected data from 402 respondents experienced in using SMBBC. The result revealed that SMBBC identification and company identification have a positive impact on brand engagement; whereas brand identification has a positive effect on SMBBC engagement, peer identification has a positive influence on company identification. In addition, both brand engagement and SMBBC engagement are found to benefit corporate brand equity and corporate reputation, respectively.

This paper focuses on the social implication of new media art, which has evolved with the advance of technology. To understand the notion of human- computer interactivity in media art, it examines the meaning of “cybernetics” theory invented by Norbert Wiener just after WWII, who provided “control and communication” as central components of his theory of messages. It goes on to investigate the application of cybernetics theory onto art since the 1960s, to which Roy Ascott made a significant contribution by developing telematic art, utilizing the network of telecommunication. This paper underlines the significance of the relationship between human and machine, art and technology in transforming the work of art as a site of communication and experience. The interactivity in new media art transforms the viewer into the user of the work, who is now provided free will to make decisions on his or her action with the work. The artist is no longer a god-like figure who determines the meaning of the work, yet becomes another user of his or her own work, with which to interact. This paper believes that the interaction between man and machine, art and technology can lead to various ways of interaction between humans, thereby restoring a sense of community while liberating humans from conventional limitations on their creativity. This paper considers the development of new media art more than a mere invention of new aesthetic styles employing advanced technology. Rather, new media art provides a critical shift in subverting the modernist autonomy that advocates the medium specificity. New media art envisions a new art, which would embrace impurity into art, allowing the coexistence of autonomy and heteronomy, embracing a technological other, thereby expanding human relations. By enabling the birth of the user in experiencing the work, interactive new media art produces an open arena, in which the user can create the work while communicating with the work and other users. The user now has freedom to visit the work, to take a journey on his or her own, and to make decisions on what to choose and what to do with the work. This paper contends that there is a significant parallel between new media artists’ interest in creating new experiences of the art and Jacques Rancière’s concept of the aesthetic regime of art. In his argument for eliminating hierarchy in art and for embracing impurity, Rancière provides a vision for art, which is related to life and ultimately reshapes life. Rancière’s critique of both formalist modernism and Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern view underlines the social implication of new media art practices, which seek to form “the common of a community.”