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This paper focuses on the blurring boundary between the “human self” and the smartphone, using interviews with 60 heavy smartphone users. The interview responses reveal three types of self-extension via the smartphone— functional extension, anthropomorphic extension, and ontological extension. Smartphone users assert that their phone has become an indispensable part of their self and thus influences their identity and sense of being in both positive and negative ways.

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Drawing upon Bandura’s self-efficacy theory, this study conceptualizes “social media news efficacy” and examines how news efficacy connects perceived news overload on social media to news avoidance and social filtering. Findings from a two-wave panel survey of South Korean adults show that news overload is significantly related to a decrease of news efficacy, which in turn increases news avoidance on social media. The analysis also finds that news efficacy mediates the positive link between perceived news overload and social filtering over time.

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Social media allow users not only to read news, but also to evaluate, reconstruct, and share it. This study conceptualizes curatorial news use via social media as an important news use behavior, which involves evaluating the existing news, adding new values by reconstructing it, and then sharing it with other social media users. An analysis of survey data from 650 South Korean adults shows that curatorial news use on social media has a significantly positive association with political knowledge, internal political efficacy, and offline and online political participation. The interaction of social media news use and curatorial news use is also significantly associated with high levels of political knowledge and political participation.