UMass Boston

The following research areas represent my ongoing work. For historical works that are more traditional, refer to my Google Scholar

1. Contemporary Social Media Phenomena

This line of research dissects the structural problems of today’s platforms, emphasizing opinion manipulation, cyberbullies, and attention economy.

• Opinion Manipulation: Studies reveal the credibility crisis of social media data, showing how bots, paid commentators, and algorithms distort discourse and compromise information reliability.

• Cyberbullies and Collective Psychology: My work analyzes opinion suppressions, online witch-hunts, and emotionally charged group aggression, illustrating how mainstream values mutate into digital violence.

• Traffic (流量）Logic and the Attention Economy: Research critiques the dominance of clicks and virality as the primary value metric, exposing how algorithms fuel anxiety, self-labeling, and distorted identity.

As I value practice in this field, representative works are mainly social media posts at this stage.

2. De-Stereotyping Academia

How will AI impact society? From academia's angle, my studies identify the limitations of the current academic system while exploring AI-era alternatives for research and dissemination.

• Journals and Peer Review: Analyses identify inefficiencies, opacity, and over-reliance on traditional metrics (e.g., paper count), calling for reforms to restore meaningful scholarly value.

• Academic Labor and Inequality: Research highlights exploitation, structural inequities, and the erosion of passion under evaluation regimes. Within the Information System (IS) field, I rethink the boundary policing within IS, advocating inclusivity and resisting narrow gatekeeping.

• AI-Driven Research Frameworks: Models like MindStream and the Cross-Platform Differential Feedback Method use AI and social media to accelerate iteration, identify echo chambers, and promote open knowledge

Representative works: MindStream Framework

3. Decentralized Autonomous Non-Profit Organization (DANPO)

This stream develops DANPO (Decentralized Autonomous Nonprofit Organization) as an alternative to profit-driven logics, guided by social capital and collective wisdom.

• Conceptual Foundations: DANPO redefines success beyond profit, emphasizing social capuital, trust, and collective intelligence.

• Community Practice: Real-world examples like the Boston DANPO Book Club show how decentralized cultural networks thrive without central leadership, financial incentives, or market control.

Representative works: DANPO: Mechanism and Social Experiment

4. Buddhism, Metaphysics, and Beyond-Science Inquiry

This research engages Buddhist philosophy, meditation, and alternative epistemologies to expand the boundaries of inquiry.

• Buddhism-inspired scholarship: Studies apply emptiness and non-self to rethinking academic identity, life purpose, and resonance.

• Meditation, Consciousness, and Multi-Level Reality: Work combines contemplative practice with frameworks like NECV (Non-Empirical Consistency Validation) to push beyond empiricism.

• Cross-Disciplinary Reflections: Buddhist and metaphysical insights are used to critique AI, scientific reductionism, and narrow rationalism, offering pluralistic visions of knowledge.

Representative work: Non-Empirical Consistency Validation: An Epistemic Framework for Knowledge Beyond Science

PhD, University of Arizona

BE, Tsinghua University, China

Selected Publications:

Park, H., Jiang, S., Lee, O. K. D., and Cheung, L. 2024. "Exploring the Attractiveness of Service Robots in the Hospitality Industry: Analysis of Online Reviews," Information System Frontier (26:1), pp. 41-61.

Liu, X., Lin, S., Jiang, S., Chen, M. and Li, J. 2023. "Social Support Acquisition in Online Health Communities: A Social Capital Perspective, " Internet Research (33:2), pp. 664-695.

Jiang, S., Liu, X., Chi, X., Chen, M. 2022. "Effect of Writing Styles on Social Support in Online Health Communities: A Theoretical Linguistic Analysis Framework," Information & Management (59:6), pp.  1-11.

Lee, O. K. D., Jiang, S. Hyun, Y., and Jeong, H. 2022. "The Roles of Information Technologies in Crises: A Review and Conceptual Development of IT-Enabled Agile Crisis Management," Communication of the Association for Information Systems (50:1), pp. 32-57. 

Jiang, S. 2021. "Understanding Authors' Psychological Reactions to Peer Reviews: A Text Mining Approach," Scientometrics (126), pp. 6085-6103.

Liu, X., Jiang, S. (equal contribution), and Chi, H. 2020. "Examining Patterns of Information Exchange and Social Support in a Web-Based Health Community: Exponential Random Graph Models," Journal of Medical Internet Research (22:9), pp. e18062.

Jiang, S., Hua, X., and Parviainen, R. 2020. "How Do Popular Online Streamers Influence Viewers' Purchase Intention? Evidence from a Mobile Game Campaign on YouTube," Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing (7:4), pp. 332-343.

Jiang, S., and Chen, H. 2019. "Examining Patterns of Scientific Knowledge Diffusion Based on Knowledge Cyberinfrastructure: A Multi-dimensional Network Approach," Scientometrics (121), pp. 1599-1617.

Yu, S., Zhu, H., Jiang, S., Zhang, Y., Xing, C., and Chen, H. 2019. "Emoticon Analysis for Chinese Social Media and E-commerce: The AZEmo System," ACM Transaction on Management Information Systems (9:4), pp. 1-22.

Jiang, S., and Chen, H. 2016. "NATERGM: A Model for Examining the Role of Nodal Attributes in Temporal Social Media Networks," IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (28:3). pp. 729-740.

Jiang, S., Gao, Q., and Chen, H. 2014. "The Roles of Sharing, Transfer, and Public Funding in Nanotechnology Knowledge Diffusion Networks," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (66:5), pp. 1017-1029.

Jiang, S., Chen, H., Nunamaker Jr J., and Zimbra D. 2014. "Analyzing Firm-specific Social Media and Market: A Stakeholder-based Event Analysis Framework," Decision Support Systems (67), pp 30-39.