Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Humanity Amid Innovation: Exploring Our Relationship To Technology, Sarah Durkee

Senior Theses and Projects

This thesis examines the impacts of technology on fundamental aspects of human nature and experience. Drawing on the works from Kant, Turing, Arendt, Benjamin, and Freud, it explores how rapid technological change is redefining human reason, intelligence, and creativity in the digital age. The first chapter analyzes whether modern online communication platforms realize or undermine Kant's vision of an enlightened public sphere fostering free discourse and critique. It argues that prioritizing engagement over substantive debate, these digital realms corrode the depth of interaction essential for cultivating human reason. The second chapter explores the pursuit of artificial intelligence as a reproduction …

Revenge Of The Nerds: Tech Masculinity And Digital Hegemony, Benjamin M. Latini

Doctoral Dissertations

Revenge of the Nerds provides a cultural history of the evolution of white nerd masculinities in American culture through interpretations of a wide variety of texts and representations using the methods of literary studies and American studies. The dissertation is organized around four overlapping stages of nerd masculinity based on changes in technology and their effects on culture, as well as white male nerds’ efforts to remain culturally relevant and gain the benefits of being close to hegemonic masculinity. The four nerd types are the computer nerd, the gamer, the gatekeeper nerd, and the maladaptive nerd which reflect the following …

The Ilm Industrial Complex: Star Wars And Vfx In The Digital Age, Jane Baldwin

CMC Senior Theses

This paper proposes an expansion of Tom Gunning’s seminal theory of the “cinema of attractions.” Advancements in visual effects (VFX) technologies—such as the rise of George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and the advent of the digital age, among others—necessitate a more rigorous, updated understanding of effects as objects of media study. Using the Star Wars franchise as an analytical center, I aim to bring the subfield of effects study closer to compatibility with the ever-evolving VFX landscape.

The Man In The Fiber Optic Cable: A Short Film, Lucas Cunningham

Pomona Senior Theses

A man runs through a fiber optic cable.

The Digital Extreme: Cinema's Reality Crisis In A Nostalgic Age, Lucas J. Dvorsky

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the trajectory and legacy of two streams of filmmaking born in the 1990s: extreme film and the digital film, which eventually fuse into the digital extreme film, a watershed moment of postmodern filmmaking. I analyze the rise of the digital extreme, probing its disturbing aesthetic, its grainy, blurry glitches, dark, mundane reality and connections to fear, surveillance and nostalgia. Looking at filmmakers as disparate as pop-culture mainstays like Martin Scorsese, breakout directors like Jane Schoenbrun, avant-garde artists like Michael Snow, and arthouse auteurs such as Catherine Breillat and Olivier Assayas, I consider what the moment of …

Lumira, Taylor Ann Magon

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

As LAES moves into the new Frost Center, we want to showcase the capabilities of its Expressive Technology (ET) Studios space with an interactive experience in hopes to collaborate, innovate, and spark ideas for the future of the program.

Some Notes On Birds: Language And Attention In The Age Of Social Media, Aimee Lamoureux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology, social media, and its affiliated distractions are now an ever-present part of our daily lives. Attention is a commodity, one which tech companies value because it delivers them bigger and bigger profits. Their products are intentionally designed to be additive, to demand more and more of our time and attention throughout our day. However, attention is not simply a commodity, but the way in which we connect with the external world and attend to our everyday experience. The world that we create in the mind is the world that ends up forming the reality of our everyday lives. Complex …

War Of The Moon, Bibiana Medkova

Masters Theses

Space, in the post-World War context, was the new frontier of ‘global’ dominion. Space Race of the 1950s was a competition to signal technological capability and military strength. The objective of War of the Moon is to unpack the motivation for Moon race in 1950s. What did countries have to gain politically, economically, socially and technologically by conquering space and landing on the moon. At what cost? Who financed it, and where did the labor, land, and raw materials sourced come from. And how it was used to accomplish said landing. Space security is a massive aspect of all current …

Little To Be Gained From Dth Without Prior Industry Regulations, Syeda Raza-E-Masooma

MSJ Capstone Projects

In absence of proper legislation prohibiting monopoly & vertical integration of satellite companies and TV channels, DTH TV will cause more harm than good to media in Pakistan. DTH might finally come to Pakistan – legally. It seems a possibility now, a far-fetched one but nevertheless a possibility. It might be noteworthy, that it is already on its way out in our neighboring India, being taken over by mobile apps.

Game On, Theresa Loong

Theses and Dissertations

Game On is a 25-minute documentary about game designer Brenda Romero, a successful woman in a male-dominated industry. Brenda, whose career spans over thirty-five pioneering years, has contributed to almost fifty game titles, developing innovative video and board games. How is her life a game space?

Fast Glass: Modernity, Technology, And The Cinematic Lens, Allain Daigle

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation tells a cultural history of how lenses became cinema lenses. While lenses are essential for film production, we know very little about the early history of cinema lenses. Rather than just focusing on which lenses were used on certain movies, I historicize how lens production became an industry. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, lens production shifted from an artisanal craft to a commercial industry. By looking at how companies created lenses for film production and projection, I expand early film history to account for the creative work of opticians, engineers, advertisers, and distributors. In more specifically focusing …

Recipe For Disaster, Zac Travis

MFA Thesis Exhibit Catalogs

Today’s rapid advances in algorithmic processes are creating and generating predictions through common applications, including speech recognition, natural language (text) generation, search engine prediction, social media personalization, and product recommendations. These algorithmic processes rapidly sort through streams of computational calculations and personal digital footprints to predict, make decisions, translate, and attempt to mimic human cognitive function as closely as possible. This is known as machine learning.

The project Recipe for Disaster was developed by exploring automation in technology, specifically through the use of machine learning and recurrent neural networks. These algorithmic models feed on large amounts of data as a …

The Attention Crisis Of Digital Interfaces And How To Consume Media More Mindfully, Kristen M. Liu

Scripps Senior Theses

Digital forms of media are monopolizing individuals' attention spans, utilizing visual strategies that demand our interactions. Throughout the history of media technology, mediums have become increasingly immersive, presenting more information than ever before. The user interface designs of digital platforms can damage our ability to focus and distribute attention in meaningful ways. Through analysis of our digital media consumption, this capstone project ultimately proposes mindful practices that help us lead more balanced lives and thrive in the digital age. The second half of this capstone project is a digital zine with digital illustrations, animations, and editorial-style articles. The digital zine …

Dolls Who Speak: Sex Robots, Cyborgs And The Image Of Woman, Victoria E. Pihl Sorensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the emerging phenomenon of sex robots from a feminist materialist perspective. I explore the current scholarly and popular debates on sex robots, and suggest a reading of sex robots in their machinic, literary and cinematic expressions to move beyond the moral-ethical impasse that seems to dominate sex robot discussions. Employing Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Myth” on a methodological and theoretical level, I argue for an interdisciplinary approach to studying sex robots, which proceeds carefully so as to avoid contributing to sex panic, and which thinks critically about what it might mean to assess sex robots from a feminist …

Industrial Stagecraft: Tooling And Cultural Production, Jennifer A. Hambleton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The tooling of theatrical spectacle requires collaboration between stagecraft technicians and designers in an increasingly globalized and standardized manufacturing process. While hand skills are still used and remain useful, digital fabrication and other tools are now incorporated in labour processes in scenery manufacturing workshops, altering collaborative work in complex ways. This thesis is an inquiry into the epistemological role of software and digital fabrication tools in stagecraft practices and explores how the politics of craft labour intersect with material practices in media production labour. The technical aspects of the fabrication of theatrical spectacles and display environments, the way objects are …

21st Century Film Criticism: The Evolution Of Film Criticism From Professional Intellectual Analysis To A Democratic Phenomenon, Asher Weiss

CMC Senior Theses

Film criticism has changed since its inception and will continue to change moving forward. The evolution of film criticism has largely been a story of the shift from an elite field of intellectual exploration by a few knowledgeable experts to a democratic phenomenon where expert analysis is aggregated and averaged, and the lines are blurred between true expertise and the random opinions of the masses. This paper will address the transition from the birth of film criticism to its popularization through the 90s, to what it has become today. By exploring the nature of film criticism historically and reviewing the …

A Dark Reflection Of Society: Analyzing Cultural Representations Of State Control In Black Mirror, Carl Russell Huber

Online Theses and Dissertations

Recognizing the importance of visual criminology and media studies in contemporary academic criminal justice studies, I attempt to contribute to the field by analyzing three themes found in Channel 4’s Black Mirror in relation to cultural fears of state control and the progression of technology. The themes, including state power and coercion, the spectacle of punishment, and panoptic surveillance, are placed in a popular criminological framework in order to examine the attitudes and beliefs of the culture in which they were produced and for whom they are intended. I conclude that Black Mirror provides a social commentary on the themes …

We Are Cells Living In The World While The World Lives In Us, Tara Law

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What has been called the Anthropocene epoch is the first period of time in which human activities and technological advances have measurably contributed to climate changes. It is common to live in the shadow of industrial architecture. The landscapes we live in and the changes to our air, soil, and water quality are interconnected. Our bodies are made up of cells moving through the world, but the world also moves through us. I’m interested in how our environment changes us and what we can do to change our environment.

An exploration of book forms and by extension the many forms …

Centralized, Decentralized, Distributed: Disruptive Technology In Distance Education From "Sunrise Semester" To Present-Day Moocs, Rosanna Flouty

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lessons from early academic television courses from the 1950s guide an assessment of current disruptive technologies that shape Massive Open Online Courses (known as MOOCs) and other informal online learning opportunities today. This dissertation explores some of the unique contributing factors that led to the creation of Sunrise Semester (1957-1982), a popular network television program co-produced by New York University and CBS that offered college credit to viewers. Despite the fact that the show aired at dawn and rarely included one-on-one interactions with professors, Sunrise Semester aired for nearly twenty-five years and attracted a devoted viewership of over two million …

On The Internet By Means Of Popular Music: The Cases Of Grimes And Childish Gambino, Kristopher R. K. Ohlendorf

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What is the internet? It began as a military research experiment, but the internet has since become a sweeping cultural phenomenon. One of the most prevalent areas of the internet’s cultural dominance is in popular music, and this thesis addresses how the internet is being understood and discussed by popular music artists. I study the works of Grimes and Childish Gambino, two popular music artists who grew up alongside the internet’s rise to cultural dominance and explicitly address this experience as an integral component of their lives and works. I look specifically at discourse surrounding Grimes’ “post-internet” music and Childish …

The Struggle To Be Heard: Toronto's Postproduction Sound Industry, 1968 To 2005, Katherine E. Quanz

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation examines how economic and technological changes shaped the sounds of Canadian cinema, from the modern industry’s founding in the late 1960s to the widespread adoption of digital editing software in the early 2000s. By focusing on the labour and craft practices that coalesced in Toronto’s postproduction companies, I argue that such practices engendered a critical shift in the sonic style of Canadian film sound. Whereas fiction films initially featured a sonic style developed by the National Film Board of Canada for documentary production, filmmakers eventually adopted a style strongly identified with Hollywood cinema. Although it is tempting to …

Digital Identity And Performance:How Student Identity Construction Can Be Influenced Through Digital Social Media And Expressed Through Theatrical Performance, Mindy M. Nelsen

Theses and Dissertations

Adolescents and teens are surrounded by a myriad of influences that affect how they see and present themselves. Contemporary communication for these young people frequently happens in an online forum through digital social media. The primary purpose of this master's thesis is to examine the affect of digital social media on adolescent and teen identity construction and perception of self and other. Further research was performed to identify how that identity can be expressed through theatrical performance. The first chapter is a review of current literature, theory and practice of those within the educational paradigm who are trying to incorporate …

Leaving In The Past: The Role History Plays In Video Games, Joseph Fordham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

How can something considered by many within academia as childish or a waste of time be potentially useful in presenting or even studying history? Not only has the video game industry grown into one of the largest forms of media in the world, but these games are also finding use as a training aid for the military and major companies, as an advertising medium, and, most importantly, as a tool for teaching. As developmental capabilities improve with new generations of graphics hardware, video games are turning towards the recreation of real-world and historical events. This drive towards realism and accuracy …