Digital Commons Network^™

#Notyourcostume, #Notyourmascot And #Nothappy: New Generation Of Native American Activists Use Social Media To Protest Cultural Misappropriation, Jaclyn Anglis

Capstones

My project profiles Simon Moya-Smith, a Brooklyn-based activist for Native American rights. He, alongside other young Native Americans, protests against the ubiquitous cultural misappropriation of Native American culture by people who are not Native by using social media like Twitter and Instagram to send his message to a broader audience now than Native Americans were ever able to reach before to speak out against misappropriation. This misappropriation includes offenses such as wearing a headdress as a fashion statement, using a Native American based mascot and dressing up like a Native American for Halloween. While activists like Moya-Smith are certainly not …

The Fashion Of Frill: The Art Of Impression Management In The Atlanta Lolita And Japanese Street Fashion Community, Chancy J. Gatlin

Anthropology Theses

The Atlanta Lolita and Japanese Street Fashion Community is a multifaceted fashion community that developed in the early 2000s. The majority of the members wear Lolita fashion which is a fusion of Victorian era dress, Rococo costume, and various Japanese street fashions. Lolita fashion developed on the streets of Tokyo Japan in the 1990s and has since spread across the world. The Atlanta Lolita and Japanese Street Fashion Community heavily relies on the building and maintenance of impressions by its members. In this thesis, I analyze face-to-face and virtual community organization, fashion, and photography to illustrate how members of the …

Blogs, Books, & Breadcrumbs: A Case Study Of Transmedial Fairy Tales, Kristy Gilbert Stewart

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding transmedial storytelling is particularly important to fairy-tale studies. Monomedial views have long been unable to account for all of fairy tale tradition. Although the form originated in oral culture, it has long been a liminal, hybrid form that retains aspects of orality even while its principal mode of transference for some time has been something other than face-to-face communication. Transformations and adaptations across different media and contexts has resulted in a system of fairy-tale tradition that is massively intertextual and transmedial. No one medium can claim primary control over the fairy-tale tradition. Throughout time, oral tellings have inspired literary …

Social Media Marketing For The Medical Industry: Best Practices To Avoid Legal And Ethical Issues, Jessica Padilla

Journalism

This study analyzes the best social media practices for medical industry professionals and the proper and ideal uses for social media. It analyzes the public relations functions of social media—relationship building, reputation management, and crisis communication. With the constant rise of social media as a widely-used medium for marketing comes increased potential for damage to a medical business’ reputation, loss of medical licensing, or lawsuits if practitioners do not act within the lines of legal and ethical standards. Medical offices must have an online presence to remain relevant and build and keep relationships with new and current patients. This study …

Use Of Social Media By Indiana Principals And Superintendents, Robert Stephen Griffin Jr.

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the use of social media by Indiana K-12 principals and superintendents. The use of social media has become prevalent both as a social and professional tool. The social media movement has evolved quickly over the past five years; however, schools and school districts have been slow to effectively utilize this tool out of fear, apprehension, and ignorance. The opportunity to explore social media as a professional tool by educational leaders was opportune and timely as this tool becomes a multi-purpose tool in today’s society. Descriptive statistics, independent sample t test, and one-way …

Mistress Or Hero? Corruption Reports On Sina Weibo And The Construction Of Chinese Femininity, Yin Wu

Theses - ALL

This qualitative textual analysis study focuses on two Chinese women who were previously sexually involved with the corrupted officers and later reported these officers to authorities. As a Chinese version of Twitter, Sina Weibo is a powerful social networking and communication tool for their reports. The study analyzes the posts and comments available on Sina Weibo about the identity of these women and how hegemonic Chinese femininity is performed, maintained, and challenged. These discussions may reflect the potential cultural, ideological, and socioeconomic factors that can influence the construction of contemporary Chinese femininity, providing the picture of how social media and …

Consumer Perceptions Of A Brand's Social Media Marketing, Taylor Michelle Smith

Masters Theses

This project seeks to inform corporate marketing efforts, as well as add to the growing body of literature on social media marketing. The purpose of this project is to assess consumer perceptions of a brand’s social media marketing. Participants were obtained from the PetSafe® brand Facebook fan page, and a total of 195 respondents completed all measures and were included in the study. The results show that brands must be actively engaging their consumers via social media in order to compete in a competitive marketplace. Engagement can be promoted through entertaining and interactive posts, useful and relevant content, word of …

Participatory Democracy In The Chinese Cyber World: Case Studies From Weibo, Duyi Li

Master's Theses

This thesis discusses features of citizen communication on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform, and its relationship to participatory democracy in China. Weibo is a complex social space due to the interplay of different forces and social actors. On the one hand, Weibo provides the space for bottom-up political participation: it expands the horizontal discursive space where plural discourses coexist and interact; provides a social sphere where counter-discourses are created; a space where the culture of resistance is formed; and serves as an alternative source for information. On the other hand, the vertical political control of the state, and the …

Integrating Social Media In The Development Of A Special Event Population Dynamics Model, Kelly Michelle Sims

Masters Theses

With society’s increasing participation in social media, scientists now have access to new sources of data that reflect our daily activities in space and in time. Such data are plentiful and, more notably, at an unprecedented granular level. The ability for users to capture and express their geolocation through their phones’ global positioning system (GPS) or through a particular location’s hashtag or Facebook Page provides a great opportunity for modeling spatiotemporal population dynamics. High resolution population models and databases for episodic special events can be extremely useful for enhancing emergency management and response. This research assesses the feasibility of improving …

Social Media In The Church, Derick Ray Mckinney

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project examines the effectiveness of social media in the church. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have the potential to shape the way the world communicates. Many churches have even begun utilizing social media in their ministry efforts. They publicize, pray, encourage, and promote events, all using social media. This paper argues that Bible believing churches can effectively use social media to communicate to their members by announcing upcoming events, sharing audience specific information, and knowing the best time to post on these sites. This project shows a social media strategy implemented into New Heights Church in …

Rugby's Rise In The United States: The Impact Of Social Media On An Emerging Sport, Benjamin James Kocher

Theses and Dissertations

In this study, the grounded theory approach was used to conduct a qualitative study about the effects the media has on rugby players in the United States. This study involved in-depth interviews with American-born-and-raised rugby players from the top rugby colleges and universities in the United States. These interviews helped identify the role played by traditional and social media in encouraging new players to begin playing the sport of rugby. Results showed that traditional media did not play a large role in bringing out new players in the United States. However newer, social media played a much larger role. New …

Social Media And Young Adult's Well-Being, Clayton Howard

Master's Theses

Social media has become an integral part of young adult’s lives today. It has moved well beyond simple entertainment, and now can have a profound effect on many areas of functioning. The current study examines various aspects of well-being to see if there is a connection between social media use and global well-being. The participants for this study were 217 undergraduate students from Fort Hays State University. Participants completed a survey designed to measure overall well-being and broad aspects of overall well-being that included the Public Health Surveillance Well-Being Scale (PHS-WB), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), the Relationship Assessment Scale …

Social Media & College Admissions: An Analysis Of Facebook's Role In College Admissions & Higher Education Marketing, Michael Dooney

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

College admissions offices have developed and evolved to include increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for recruiting classes sufficient for meeting the financial needs of their respective institutions, and social media has rapidly become a popular tool for admissions offices in their efforts to meet enrollment goals. However, while social media is now used by practically every admissions office in the United States, little research exists that examines how universities use social media in this context. This qualitative study examines the use of a private Facebook group at a private university and incorporates observational study of the Facebook group and interviews with administrators. …

Evaluating The Reverse 9-1-1 System In Santa Clara County: Does The Process Work?, Areej M. Sadhan

Master's Projects

In times of crises, emergency first responders need an effective system of communication to notify the public, to organize evacuation, and to direct evacuees to shelters and hospitals around the affected areas. This research focuses on the “Reverse 911” alert system used by Santa Clara County and asks key questions about its efficiency: ‘Is it the only alert system used to communicate with the public during crises?’ ‘Is it a reliable tool?’ ‘Should Santa Clara County improve its emergency communication?’ ‘Can we be sure the community is notified on time and well directed to safety?’

The legislative intent of Reverse …

Disrupting Infrastructure: Social Media And Accessing Digital Publics, Carolyn K. Grant

Open Access Theses

This thesis investigates infrastructural barriers to effecting change through social media participation. Though social media is said to hold "democratic potential" by enabling open access to the digital public sphere, in reality it is often still the most privileged voices that get heard. Even in success cases of the power of social media like the Arab Spring, situational contexts lead to particular infrastructural access points that are not universally transferable, and still tend to favor mainstream perspectives. Barriers to amplifying marginalized voices include inadequate systems for digital memory and sharing algorithms that promote the visibility of the already visible. These …

Spatial And Temporal Patterns Of Geo-Tagged Tweets, Yue Li

Open Access Theses

With over 500 million current registered users and over 500 million tweets per day, Twitter has caught the attention of scientists in various disciplines. As Twitter allows users to send messages with location tags, a massive amount of valuable geo-social knowledge is embedded in tweets, which can provide useful implications for human geography, urban science, location-based service, targeted advertising, and social network studies. This thesis aims to determine the lifestyle patterns of college students by analyzing the spatial and temporal dynamics in their tweets. Geo-tagged tweets are collected over a period of six months for four US Midwestern college cites: …

The Use Of Social Media As A Communication Tool By International Development Organizations: A Case Study Of The United Nations Children’S Fund (Unicef) In Egypt, Inas Taha Abbas Hamad

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates to understand how the United Nations development organizations in Egypt can manage social media as a communication tool to achieve their development objectives. A case study of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Egypt, is introduced. Using the Excellence Theory in Public Relations developed by Grunig (2002), this study examines how social media can contribute to the strategic management of the organization, rather than being a messaging, publicity, and media relations function. Through a content analysis of a number of social media pages of the UN organizations in Egypt, and in-depth interviews with four senior communication officers …

Global Citizenship Through The Eyes Of The Grade Seven Elementary Students: A Case Study, Eva Jaberi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This case study in Southwestern Ontario, Canada explores 22 grade seven students' perceptions about global citizenship, their stance as global citizens and the sources that students draw upon for global learning. Using the Global Citizenship framework and existing theories in the field, this exploratory case study addresses the lack of empirical enquiry in the literature, revealing the roles of schools, the media/social media and the family in shaping emerging global citizens. This study provides evidence that students relate being Canadian to being global citizens. Their global learning mainly happens outside of school. The majority of participants reflect the passive form …

Social Media Use: A Critical Analysis Of Facebook's Impact On Collegiate Efl Students' English Writing In Thailand, Tharinee Kamnoetsin

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In this technology era, a new trend of using Social Media or Social Networking Sites (SNSs) has been recently highlighted. Social media influences people’s lives in many aspects including education and English language learning. The purpose of this study is to examine whether using Facebook online impacts the type (formal or informal) of English EFL students use for in-class writing or not, as well as to understand the students’ perceptions on how the use of Facebook helps to facilitate or inhibit their English writing skills.

The study was conducted by using qualitative research methods to explore EFL college students’ writing …

How Are Teenage Students In A Private Christian School Using Social Media And What Are The Implications For Education?, Kimberly K. Beavers

Master of Education Research Theses

The purpose of this study was to research this question in a private Christian high school, “How are teenage students using social media and what are the implications for education?” The definition(s) of social media are provided, along with a qualitative research study, illustrating the information concerning the participants in a private Christian high school, relating the research findings to previous compiled literature reviews concerning incorporating social media in a high school educational classroom. The methods, instrumentation, and procedures used are described. The results provide agreements and disagreements from the influence of social media. The analysis section of the research …

Modeling The Dynamics On The Effectiveness Of Marketing Mix Elements, Mallik Greene

Business Administration Dissertations

The objective of this study is to conduct a marketing mix modeling to measure the effectiveness of past marketing activities on the product sales using a time-varying effect model (TVEM) approach. The longitudinal intensive data for this study has come from a large ice cream manufacturer in USA. Traditionally, static regression models have been used to measure the effectiveness of marketing mix variables to predict sales. And, these models used to find the time independent effect of the covariate on the dependent variable. On the other hand, a dynamic model such as time-varying effect model takes time into consideration. Researchers …

Opinion Mining Of Sociopolitical Comments From Social Media, Swapna Gottipati

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Opinions are central to almost all human activities by influencing greatly the decision making process. In this thesis, we present the problems of mining issues, extracting entities and suggestive opinions towards the entities, detecting thoughtful comments, and extracting stances and ideological expressions from online comments in the sociopolitical domain. This study is essential for opinion mining applications that are beneficial for policy makers, government sectors and social organizations. Much work has been done to try to uncover consumer sentiments from online comments to help businesses improve their products and services. However, sociopolitical opinion mining poses new challenges due to complex …

Toward A Uses And Gratification's Model Of Twitter, Philip Ryan Johnson

Theses - ALL

This study proposed a uses and gratifications model of Twitter, an internet medium and micro-blog--a platform with both mass and interpersonal communication features for sending short messages to others. A survey was conducted among 242 Twitter users to test the model, including a standard investigation of gratifications sought and gratifications obtained of Twitter usage. In addition, expectations and availability of usage behaviors from McLeod and Becker's (1981) uses and gratifications model were examined. In the model, expectations were conceptualized as user expectations of satisfaction and operationalized as the difference between users' gratifications sought and gratifications actually obtained. Usage behavior availability …

Translating Knowledge Of Autism Spectrum Disorders To Action Through Tool Development And Exploration, Rebecca A. Garcia

All Dissertations

Translational processes are needed to move research development, methods, and techniques into clinical application. The knowledge to action framework organizes this bench to bedside process through three phases including: research, translation, and institutionalization without being specific to one disease or condition. The overall goal of this research is to bridge gaps in the translational process from assay development to disease detection through a mixed methods approach. A literature review identifies gaps associated with intestinal permeability and autism spectrum disorders. Mining social media related to autism and GI symptoms captures self-reported or observed data, identifies patterns and themes within the data, …

Non-Learning Semantic Analysis For Context Discovery And Sentiment Estimation: Transportation Application, Himanshu Verma

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With enormous amount of linguistic data present on web, text analysis has become one of the major fields of interest today. This field includes sentiment analysis, information retrieval, text document classification, knowledge based modeling, content similarity measure, data clustering, words prediction/correction, decision making etc. Managing and processing such data has vital importance. The field being quite broad, our focus is mainly on transportation related social media(Twitter) data extraction, text categorization/classification which can be further sub-divided into concept discovery, word sense disambiguation and sentiment analysis to analyze performance of existing transportation system worldwide. Concept discovery is the method of extracting the …

We Can Lie About How We Met: Msm Identity On Geo-Social Networking Applications, Levi Lindsey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Location-based applications (geo-social applications) gained popularity in 2010, for individuals to meet others around them with similar interests. These applications have become extremely popular within the MSM community (men who have sex with men) but have had limited success for other communities. Geo-social networking apps offer a unique opportunity for individuals to present their identities in a limited manner in order to meet other users. This research looks at how such identities are experienced, performed, and assembled digitally and why. Using a qualitative approach, I conducted 10 in-depth interviews with users of the geo-social networking application, Grindr, regarding how they …

Revisiting The Spiral Of Silence In A Social Media Environment: Egypt’S 2014 Presidential Election As A Case Study, Heba T. Saleh Elshahed

Theses and Dissertations

With the advent of the Internet and anonymous features of online media, users have established novel platforms to voice their opinion freely without fear of negative feedback. This thesis explores the application of a long-standing public opinion theory– the spiral of silence by Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann–within the prevalent Social Networking Sites (SNS), particularly Facebook. When applying spiral of silence to online mediated environment, it seems intuitive that the lack of verbal cues and anonymity offered would serve to undermine the fear of isolation and restlessness that results in unwillingness to express minority views. This research contributes to understanding how the spiral …

Policing Cyber Bullying: How Parents, Educators, And Law Enforcement Respond To Digital Harassment, Ryan Broll

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Some prior research has emphasised how adults ought to address cyber bullying, yet little is known about how they actually prevent and respond to digital harassment. This study addresses this gap in the literature by exploring the formal and informal “policing” of cyber bullying by a network of security actors: parents, teachers and school administrators, and the public police. Data were collected through a mixed methods research design consisting of semi-structured qualitative interviews with eight parents, 14 teachers, and 12 members of law enforcement (n = 34) and quantitative surveys completed by 52 parents.

Drawing upon nodal governance theory as …

Women's Stories Of Breast Cancer: Sharing Information Through Youtube Video Blogs, Jenna Kressler

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent chronic diseases among North American women. Individuals need accessible and reliable health information for self-care and self-health promotion. Increasingly, individuals are contributing to and accessing information about cancer, using interactive online resources such as YouTube. The purpose of this research was to investigate the personal YouTube video blogs of women with breast cancer and their portrayed messages. This study used a narrative inquiry to examine the video blogs of four women with breast cancer. The women talked about having cancer as a transformative experience. Information about breast cancer from healthcare providers was …

The Lived Experience Of Young Adult Burn Survivors' Use Of Social Media, Marie S. Giordano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to illuminate the meaning of social media use by young adult burn survivors. Five females and four males, aged 20-25, who sustained burns > 25%, were interviewed. Van Manen's (1999) phenomenological methodology provided the framework for this study. The meaning of the context of the lived experience is described in the five essential themes of identity, connectivity, social support, making meaning, and privacy. These young adult burn survivors, having experienced the traumatic effects of a burn during adolescence, use social media as a way of expressing their identity, while being cautious about privacy. Part …