Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Communication and Media Studies not elsewhere classifie'

Summary This thesis explores how massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), as an exemplary new media form, disrupt practices associated with more conventional media. These intensely social games exploit the interactivity and networks afforded by new media technologies in ways that generate new challenges for the organisation, control and regulation of media. The involvement of players in constituting these games – through their production of game-play, derivative works and strong social networks that drive the profitability of the games – disrupts some of the key foundations that underlie other publication media. MMOGs represent a new and hybrid form of media – part publication and part service. As such they sit within a number of sometimes contradictory organising and regulatory regimes. This thesis examines the negotiations and struggles for control between players, developers and publishers as issues of ownership, governance and access arise out of the new configurations. Using an ethnographic approach to gather information and insights into the practices of players, developers and publishers, this project identifies the characteristics of the distributed production network in this experiential medium. It explores structural components of successful interactive applications and analyses how the advent of player agency and the shift in authorship has meant a shift in control of the text and the relations that surround it. The integration of social networks into the textual environment, and into the business model of the media publishers has meant commerce has become entwined with affect in a new way in this medium. Publishers have moved into the role of both property managers, of the intellectual property associated with the game content, and community managers. Intellectual property management is usually associated with the reproduction and distribution of finished media products, and this sits uneasily with the performative and mutable form of this medium. Service provision consists of maintaining the game world environment, community management, providing access for players to other players and to the content generated both by the developers and the other players. Content in an MMOG is identified in this project as both the ‘tangible’ assets of code and artwork, rules and text, and the ‘intangible’ or immaterial assets of affective networks. Players are no longer just consumers of media, or even just active interpreters of media. They are co-producing the media as it is developed. This thesis frames that productiveness as unpaid labour, in an attempt to denaturalise the dominant discourse which casts players as consumers. The regulation of this medium is contentious. Conventional forms of media regulation – such as copyright, or content regulation regimes are inadequate for regulating the hybrid service/publication medium. This thesis explores how the use of contracts as the mechanism which constitutes the formal relations between players, publishers and developers creates challenges to some of the regimes of juridical and political rights held by citizens more generally. This thesis examines the productive practices of players and how the discourses of intellectual property and the discourses of the consumer are mobilised to erase the significance of those productive contributions. It also shows, using a Foucauldian analysis of the power negotiations, that players employ many counter-strategies to circumvent the more formal legal structures of the publishers. The dialogic relationship between players, developers and publishers is shown to mobilise various discursive constructions of the role of each. The outcome of these ongoing negotiations may well shape future interactive applications and the extent to which their innovative capacities will be available for all stakeholders to develop.

This thesis explores the social processes through which technological change and technologies themselves are negotiated in everyday life. I look to interpersonal communication as a site of such negotiation and focus on the networked practices that extend from mobile telephones, personal computers, and online social platforms. The management of everyday life and interpersonal relationships are shaped by practices of communication management that work through the use of these technologies. I extend and inflect the phenomenological approach to co-presence in interpersonal communication, also reassessing notions of time, for the context of constant networked connection. Drawing from divergent theoretical approaches for understanding technology, an entry point for this thesis was formulated through social interaction. A grounded qualitative approach was used to engage with individuals’ experience of interpersonal communication across everyday domains and contexts of activity. A selection of 35 participants was asked to complete two in-depth interviews, thinking-aloud tasks, and a communication diary. The empirical findings are explored from three perspectives. First, individuals’ relationships to communication tools as objects in an everyday environment are understood for the perceived temporal pressures and a need for networked connection. Second, individuals’ management of those pressures is explored through their imposition of individually controlled barriers to interaction, through which domains of activity are managed by communication practices as relational domains, developing a form of networked awareness between individuals. Third, I examine the forms of negotiation taking place through the interdependency of individual practices, captured by notions of authenticity and perceptions of technologies, as well as a discourse about technology that is enacted through practice rather than communicated through content, what I call meta-communication. I conclude that the negotiated use and role of technologies in interpersonal relationships has implications for the negotiation of wider social changes to the role of technology and to everyday life itself.

From the Cradle to the Grave: A Novel and Exegesis is concerned with maternal infanticide. This is, however, a somewhat inflammatory and perhaps misleading statement. While it is concerned with the infanticidal mother, she is in this instance largely an icon, a way into an exploration of diverse aspects of motherhood, especially negative ideas about mothers and mothering. It would be more precise to say that this thesis is concerned with the paradoxical Childless Mother. Both the novel and exegesis circle around ideas about parenting that seek to confront traditional assumptions about the connections and differences between good and bad mothering. The exegesis - From the Cradle to the Grave - does this through a discussion of various aspects of culture, which produce and are produced by mothering practices. In particular it engages with childcare literature, medical and legal engagements with women and children, and myth and fairy tales. The novel - The Bone Flute - is another exploration of the paradoxical nature of motherhood. While the exegesis seeks to draw together some of the material and historical truths of mothering, the novel addresses another kind of truth; through various narrative devices it seeks a different type of engagement with the lived realities of women. Both texts ask questions about the nature of maternity and its relationship to femininity. Both attempt to come to terms with the paradoxical status of mothers without children. The exegesis is an explication of the research processes, the reflections and considerations that preceded and accompanied the writing of The Bone Flute. It seeks to make explicit the tangled web of reading and thinking that informed the writing of a novel - from initial impulse to final draft. The exegesis is not, however, an explicit explanation of how the novel was written. Rather the two texts existed (and exist) symbiotically - each inciting and reflecting upon the other. While the exegesis explores the material

A number of theories suggest that participatory arts based approaches have the potential to contribute to development and social change. However, the nature of participation and participative approaches is multi-layered and complex, and critics have voiced concern for depicting participatory art initiatives in an oversimplified, uncriticised positivistic manner. The danger of such assumptions lay in the risk of manipulation, where non-genuine participation could contribute to the reinforcement of oppressive power structures and the dominating hegemony. This study explores the intersection of art, participation and development, and further aims to discuss the process of identifying the emancipatory possibilities and limitations of participatory art for development and social change. Using a combination of a constructivist case study approach and critical discourse analysis, two participatory art organisations are analysed with the intention to define each organisations’ understanding of the nature of participatory art, and further how this is reflected in the implementation of their work. The findings suggest that both organisations, to a certain degree, communicate an understanding of participation that reflect previous theories on genuine participation. Additionally, the findings suggest that this understanding is reflected in the practical work of the organisations.

This study deals with finding a way to enable citizen-led urban innovation through technology while concentrating on various aspects of controversial city developments. Therefore the literature concerning this topic is first investigated and current online systems designed for citizens to engage in city development decisions explored. In addition, literature, approaches and systems related to conflict resolution are also presented and discussed. By means of applying multiple design cycles, including several user studies, an online platform for citizens to elaborate controversial ideas for the city together was developed. These design cycles were focused on first finding a suitable process to elaborate on ideas and find consent. The process implementing this is tested during two workshops that portray the procedure that would be realised on the platform. Findings after each workshop are used to revise the process. In order to design a user interface that could implement such a process first an expert focus group was asked to brainstorm solutions for multiple design questions. Considering this input two platform mock-ups were created and shown to participants to receive feedback. A final prototype of the online platform was then implemented and tested in a final user study. During this study participants elaborated an idea together to test the whole resulting product, while being able to use the online platform in an in the wild setting. In spite of discovering how dependent the usage of the platform is on its users, the feedback received for the general idea of using an online platform to elaborate on ideas and find consent was overall positive.

From January 2016 until August 2021, at least 436 women or girls have been deliberately murdered in Spain by men. Non-intimate femicide (and, particularly, murder committed by complete strangers to the victim, to which this study refers as “stranger femicide”) has historically been, and still is, the most covered type of femicide in the media. This is also the case in the Spanish press, and more specifically, El País, the most read media outlet in the country. This thesis examines how El País framed Diana Quer’s case, the most high-profile, intensively covered femicide case in Spain in the past 5 years. It will also examine which ethical problems the reporting presented. From a feminist perspective and through a mixed-method approach of content analysis and frame analysis, this study examines 86 articles corresponding to the two informative peaks of Diana Quer’s case coverage. The periods go from August to October 2016, the first two months of her disappearance, and from December 2017 to January 2018, the 15 days following her killer’s arrest and crime confession. The findings reveal that the coverage in El País constructed a victimization iconography with DQ’s case that engendered cautionary tales and failed to address femicide as a social issue. The reporting also presented a series of critical ethical problems calling for a reformation of femicide reporting guidelines.

The impact of athlete activism online remains understudied in academic scholarship. To gain a better understanding for fan response to athlete activism online, this study examines the patterns in perception and response among sports fans with respect to politically-charged content posted online by professional athletes. The purpose of this study is to use this understanding of fan response to help athletes and their representatives manage fan reaction to athletes’ politically-charged content. By examining fan response to politically-charged content, this study suggests principles for eliciting positive impact, fostering open discourse, and promoting awareness through social media. Patterns in perception and response among sports fans with respect to politically-charged content posted online by professional athletes were examined through in-depth interviews conducted with sports fans between the ages of 18 and 30 who follow the profiles of professional athletes on social media. An understanding of the potential benefits and drawbacks of athletes’ use of social media for social movements has been gained through an analysis of the emergent themes among perception and response patterns revealed by study participants. The emergent themes of this study inform recommendations for professional athletes posting politically-charged content online. The findings of this study suggest that athletes who post politically-charged content online should do so with their goals and audience in mind. Knowing their goals as well as their audience grants athletes the ability to frame their content accordingly, rendering them more likely to receive positive responses to the politically-charged content they post. Based on the findings of this study, athletes who frame politically-charged content as a narrative highlighting their lived experience and employing appeals to emotion and humor yield the most positive responses from otherwise uninterested or hostile fans. The insights gained from this study stand to fill the gap in existing literature surrounding athlete activism online.

Social media is impacting the practice of public relations inmany different ways, but the focus of this dissertation is on the power of big data from social media to identify and assess the relationship that stakeholders have with the organization. Social media analytics have tended to measure reactions to messages, rather than the strength of the relationship, even though public relations is responsible for building strong relationships with the organization’s stakeholders. Yet, social media provides insight into the conversations that stakeholders have with other stakeholders about the organization and thus can reveal insight into the quality of the relationship they have with the organization.

This dissertation examines the relationship between legislation and advocacy as forms of professional communication and interrogates their influence on mental health in the United States. Through a case study of one mental health nonprofit’s advocacy materials and interactions with the legislative process, this dissertation demonstrates the entanglements between legislation and advocacy materials and how their circulation impacts mental health outcomes at the national, state, and local levels. I use two major research strategies to conduct my case study: 1) structured interviews with staff members from the nonprofit’s national, Indiana state, and local offices and 2) a qualitative analysis of mental health legislation at the federal, state, and local levels, as well as the nonprofit’s advocacy materials using Rhetorical Ecologies and Assemblage Theory as the primary theoretical frameworks. My findings suggest that, although both the organization and legislative bodies in the United States have some hierarchal tendencies, they function more like a rhizomatic, multilevel assemblage that is constantly evolving and growing as a result of the communicative interactions among its various components. This is due largely in part to the organization’s grassroots structure, which enables staff and supporters from the state and local levels to affect change within and beyond the organization. Although components at the federal/national level have the most significant affects across the assemblage, my findings demonstrate how state and local components can disrupt or deterritorialise the assemblage to create new “lines of flight” or “flows” that expand the assemblage (DeLanda, 2006, 2016; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Fox & Alldred, 2015).

The findings and conclusions generated from this dissertation have several implications for mental health advocacy organizations, Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) pedagogy, and the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) and the broader field of Rhetoric and Composition. For advocacy organizations, it provides a framework for tracking the potential material impacts of advocacy initiatives and legislation. For TPC pedagogy, it enables instructors to frame professional genres as components of a larger assemblage or organizational/institutional system, rather than as static artifacts. Finally, for RHM and Rhetoric and Composition, it provides a methodology for engaging in institutional and systems research that can be adapted to other rhetorical contexts.

The prevalence of social media in political campaigns are changing the face of politics in the United States and abroad. The rapid pace at which this change is occurring demands inquiry into the previously unexplored area of unconventional political campaign messaging practices on social media. Investigation of Donald Trump’s use of tweets as rhetorical strategy in the discursive space of Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign revealed a bypass of traditional media and its source verification processes. This circumventing of mainstream media channels facilitated Trump’s deployment of an unchecked ‘broken system’ narrative alleging government corruption

and a rigged system. Trump’s tweet discourses tapped into existing feelings of disenfranchisement and disaffection felt by a self-identified politically marginalized segment of society. This study

investigates how social media use in political campaigns can serve as a public sphere for contestation of social and political norms. An interdisciplinary theoretical frame comprised of Feenberg’s critical theory of technology, McLuhan’s media ecology, Fraser’s counterpublic spheres, and Iser’s implied reader offer new understandings about the power of anti-establishment discourses and a hybrid discursive space to destabilize governing institutions and redefine social and political identities. Study of Trump’s tweets as rhetorical strategy granted insights into the social and political capacity of alternative truth to undermine the political process. Further, it uncovered the power of social media to awaken and leverage existing political identities for personal political gain.

Videogames have been historically known for causing negative mood states in players, but there is still more research to be done about the potential for videogames to alleviate these induced negative mood states. Using an online repeated measures survey design, participants were asked to play a game with an impossible difficulty curve unbeknownst to them. They were then instructed to play one of three casual videogames (CVGs). It was hypothesized that increased levels of competency and autonomy would lead to a decrease in participants’ negative mood state as per Self-Determination Theory. In addition, the act of playing CVGs was also predicted to decrease participants’ negative mood state as per Mood Management Theory. To test for this, participants were asked questions regarding their feelings of competency, autonomy, and overall mood state throughout the experiment. Support was not found for competency and autonomy helping alleviate negative mood states, but support was found for CVGs and their healing potential towards negative mood states. The implications of these results as well as the potential for future research is discussed.

This study proposes a social and emotional disclosure model for understanding the mechanism that explains sharing intimate information on social media (Twitter). Previous research has indicated that some aspects of social, emotional, and attitudinal information processing are involved in disclosure of intimate information. However, these factors have been considered in isolation. This study proposes and tests a theoretically grounded model that brings all of these factors together by combining individual and group social media behaviors and online information processing in the realm of online social movements. The core explanatory model considers the impact of peer response, emotional evaluation, personal relevance, issue orientation, and motivation to post online on intimate information disclosure online. A path analysis building on four Poisson multiple regressions conducted on 28,629 #MeToo tweets evaluates the relationships proposed in the explanatory model. Results indicate that emotional evaluation and motivation to post online have direct, positive impacts on online disclosure. Other factors such as peer response, issue orientation, and personal relevance have negative direct relationships with online disclosure. Motivation to post online mediates the effects of emotional evaluation, issue orientation, and personal relevance on online disclosure while issue orientation mediates the effect of personal relevance on motivation to post online. This study offers findings that have use for practitioners interested in hashtag virality and to social media users interested in social influence and online information sharing.

Suicide holds an ambivalent position in contemporary social and cultural contexts. It questions what it means to live and die, yet provides no clear-cut answers about death or dying, life or living. This thesis explores some of the ways suicide has been understood and represented, to demonstrate that knowing suicide is dependent not only on what suicide means, but also on how meanings of suicide become part of knowledge. Knowing suicide is not a matter of responding to it as self-evident, transparent, neutral and obvious, but rather is implicated in social processes and norms central to how knowledge gains intelligibility. Guided by poststructuralist, postmodernist, feminist and postfeminist philosophies, the thesis takes up gender and gendering as its central focus, to interrogate how knowledge about suicide becomes knowledge. Critically examining a wide variety of textual sources, it argues that suicide is principally rendered as a masculine, and even a masculinist, practice. Knowing suicide today is anchored in suicidology - the study of suicide - and maintained by institutional sites of practice including sociology, law, medicine, psy-knowledge and newsprint media, each of which is analysed here. Suicide as masculine and masculinist practice is invoked through multiple, often-contradictory and inextricably linked readings of gender, even while claiming homogeneity. Its gendered foundations can however be made to appear gender-neutral, even when actually gender-saturated. The twin gender movements of neutrality and repleteness are in fact crucial to the knowing of suicide. The thesis establishes that knowing suicide can never occur outside discourse. Even more importantly, how suicide enters discourse cannot be thought outside gender. The body matters to the production of deeply problematic understandings of agency, intent and violence, on which the production of suicide as masculine and masculinist depends. It becomes clear that such dependence rests not only on gender, but also on race and sexuality, as conditions of its knowing. The thesis suggests that further attention be given to the production and maintenance of highly reductive and limiting homogenous truth claims in suicide - truth claims that validate and privilege some interpretations of suicide, at the expense of rendering others less legitimate and serious. If the processes and practices of interpreting suicide become a site of permanent debate, they are more likely to challenge the ways in which masculinist ways of knowing render, and limit, the intelligibility of suicide.

In the information era, e-learning is considered as one of the means to increase the global competitiveness of a nation. Before e-learning is largely implemented in education system, it is important to assess the e-learning readiness of a society. However, previous research always focus on measuring the e-learning readiness of commercial organisations and tertiary institutions, leaving a huge research gap on the use and readiness of e-learning in primary and secondary schools. This thesis developed a model for identifying e-learning readiness levels of teachers in Hong Kong schools, with the aim of creating a general model which could be transferred to other countries which are less developed than Hong Kong, yet which all share common Asian cultures. This was a multi-stage research project, incorporating model building and empirical testing of a model based on the existing academic literature, through questionnaire surveys to both in-service and pre-service teachers triangulated by series of in-depth interviews.

The land-grant university system was founded in the 19th century as a public means to help improve people’s everyday lives. A century and a half later, the challenges that the public faces to live a quality life are constantly changing, creating a need for the land-grant system to respond and adapt to continue to fulfill its mission. While the literature contains a wealth of conceptual papers addressing the role and mission of land-grant universities, relatively few papers could be found that reported empirical data or proposed and tested metrics for public engagement constructs. The current study sought to address this void in the literature through the investigation of factors influencing Indiana residents’ level of interest in engaging with Purdue University. Mail survey methods were used in which up to three contacts were made with adult members of 4,500 Indiana households identified through address-based sampling. Stratified random sampling was employed to ensure adequate rural household participation for other project purposes. Usable responses were received from 1,003 households representing 87 Indiana counties for a total response rate of 26%.