Social Media Platforms as a Tool for Sharing Emotions. A Perspective upon the National Security Agencies

Abstract

Emotions importance increases even more in the context of the national security agencies. Since their mission is to protect and defend the citizens against attacks and also to provide leadership and justice services to other agencies and partners, the aim of the information they post on social media should be twofold: on the one hand, it should reflect the attitudes, values and beliefs, supported by the institution, and on the other hand, it should have an impact on citizens feeling of security. But, do they manage to meet these demands? Are they focusing on impressing the audience or they concentrate on sharing specific emotions? Is it a marketing strategy or a knowledge strategy? Starting from these, the purpose of this research is to set a nexus between emotions and the use of social media by the national security organizations. In other words, we aim (i) to determine the main types of emotions, (ii) to establish whether these are shared within the social media platforms, (iii) to identify the purpose for which the national security organizations use social media, (iv) to determine whether social media could serve as Ba for the national security organizations. In order to achieve these objectives, we employ an ethic approach and develop a longitudinal study based on quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The results prove that social media platforms may serve as Ba since they appear as a shared space which fosters individual and collective knowledge creation and sharing. The national security agencies use social media platforms for combining the classical four types of Ba: originating Ba (it shares its emotions, feelings and thoughts through its posts), interacting Ba (through the generated reactions and comments, it ensures the development of shared models and the conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge), cyber Ba (by fostering the virtual interaction among its followers) and exercising Ba (by facilitating the creation of new emotional, spiritual and cognitive knowledge).