Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Identifying Youth Appeals In Alcohol Alternative Social Media Content Through Framing, Melina Oneal

West Chester University Master’s Theses

Proposed regulations for alcohol advertising prevent beverage companies from targeting people under the legal drinking age. However, similar regulations for alcohol alternative beverages are less explored, which could allow alcohol alternative products to create awareness for alcoholic beverages among youth. Alcohol alternatives beverages, including no-alcohol and low-alcohol products, are increasing in popularity and can function as compliments to alcoholic products to decrease the total alcohol volume consumed or as substitutes for alcoholic products. Framing theory can be operationalized through the Content Appealing to Youth Index, an index of content elements found in research literature to be appealing to youth, to …

English Learners In Nyc, Raquel Neris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

English Learners in NYC is a Digital Humanities project that intersects Migration Studies and Foreign Language Learning Studies by presenting a podcast series about the learning experience of international students in English as a Second Language (ESL) programs at English schools in New York City. The project aims to provide visibility to the educational migration in this specific context and to promote a discussion on how international students and educators can reimagine their teaching and learning experience. It also aims to reveal ESL schools' challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic and how they incorporated digital technologies during and after this event. …

Navigating Through World’S Military Spending Data With Scroll-Event Driven Visualization, Hong Beom Hur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Catching up with the current geopolitical event is more important than ever these days. Anti-western nations like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea constantly challenge the world order set by the United States and its close allies. As a result, the world has seen a rise in military spending consecutively for the last several years. This data visualization project aims to provide an easy-to-read summary of military spending data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for hotly conflicted regions: East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Scroll-event-driven visualization implemented using Scrollama.js and D3.js combines text, map, and data …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

Metamorphis, Luca Lee Sobarzo Faust

Theses and Dissertations

Web3D interactive experience that explores time, communication, and transformation, from a personal storytelling perspective. Hosted on a web platform, the experience displays three environments: Metamorphis, Cuir AI, and Hain. These spaces propose a fragmented narrative that seeks to interrogate both the characters and the viewer’s perception on the linearity of time

Source Credibility And Trust Of Media Information Based On Gender Of Reporter, Madison R. Urse

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

An experiment was used for this study to explore if the gender of a reporter impacts perceived source credibility and thus trust in information. Previous research has shown how gender biases can affect how topics are covered, reported on, perceived and marketed in the journalistic world. Modern media and newsrooms are meant to mirror reality as they convey information to the public, yet women continue to be gatekept out of reporting on certain types of news. Further, changes in the mode of delivery of news are also impacting the journalism landscape. Thus, this study employed a digital stimulus to explore …

The Great Resignation: A Content Analysis Of News Sources' Portrayals Of The Covid-19 Labor Shortage., Mackenzie Williams

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

When workers left the labor market in large numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic, proclamations of a labor shortage emerged extensively throughout the news. In this study, I analyze the coverage of the worker shortage among three news sources with different political orientations. Several themes emerged from analyzing a total of 75 articles. The findings showed that the perspective shown in the article, the cause of the labor shortage, restaurant worker portrayal, support of solutions, and opinion of the labor shortage all differed based on the political identity of the news source. This research supports previous findings that show there is …

Digital Indigeneity: Digital Media's Uses For Identity Formation, Education, And Activism By Indigenous People In The Northeastern United States, Virginia A. Mclaurin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to examine the types of digital media being produced in the Northeastern United States, its content, the goals and motivations of its creators, the processes underlying Indigenous digital media creation, and the desired and projected audiences of Indigenous digital artists and content creators. Resulting findings from this study illuminate long histories of Indigenous use of digital media tied to digital media's development in Indigenous lands. I argue that Native people have been producers and influencers in film and later, digital media, and have underwritten digital production due to its development on Indigenous lands. Through interviews and media …

Queer And Trans Prison Voices: A Podcast Archive On Prison Abolition, Josefine Ziebell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is located at the intersection of Critical Prison Studies, Gender Studies, Sound Studies, and American Studies. It highlights the importance of sonic modes of anti-carceral resistance by featuring the recorded voices of incarcerated people through the creation of a sonic archive of prison writings. By integrating that sonic archive into the podcast medium, this project functions as a digital archive for incarcerated voices, consisting of two tracks: a collection of short-spoken readings by queer and transgender incarcerated authors, and podcast-style interviews with activist scholars, organizations, and sound artists working towards prison abolition. In this paper, I establish …

Wattpad As An Online Medium For Contemporary Folklore, Alisha Tess Helton

Online Theses and Dissertations

This project focuses its discussion within the discipline of folklore by identifying Wattpad.com as a contemporary medium of online folkloric content. Wattpad provides its users with a text-based—and sometimes multimodal—means of communication via its interface that mimics traditional communication as we know it—a means founded in orality, literacy, and the archive. Wattpad users are creating new folktales that are nuanced with elements from Wattpad’s archive, which characterizes contemporary online folklore in a way that has not been fully explored. This project serves to identify the past and present discourses that inform such a discussion while also explaining the intricacies of …

Una Visión Holística De La Memoria Digital Sobre El Conflicto Armado En Las Narrativas Digitales Del Centro Nacional De Memoria Histórica De Colombia, Talia Mendez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The connective turn marks the contemporary memory boom. The omnipresence of digital media is a provocation that makes us wonder about the relationships and connections of memory with the past, present and future in the digital world (Hoskins 9).

Using a conceptual analysis based on the idea of the connective turn, this thesis shows how the National Center of Historical Memory of Colombia has been addressing the message of memory of the armed conflict through the case study of the digital narratives of the "Digital Specials", and how the message is transmitted in their Instagram profile.

The study reflects the …

Visualizing Tedx Events: Ten Years Of “Ideas Worth Spreading”, Antonios Liamis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I have always been fascinated by how ideas are spread. Often, ideas are chosen to serve an immediate purpose, and there is an expectation that the choice will matter only insofar as it serves to achieve the desired goal. However, once an idea takes off, it becomes sufficient in itself to disseminate its message. When I first heard about the rubric “Ideas Worth Spreading” in connection with Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) conferences, I had an emotional response because I was always trying to get involved in those three categories. My fascination with the question of what makes some ideas …

Using Engaged Rhetorical Methods To Understand And Inform Collaborative Decision Making About Dams And Restoration In The Penobscot River Watershed, Tyler Quiring

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

How do we understand what to do with rivers and dams? How might rhetoric, the ancient study of persuasion, inform and shape this understanding as it relates to river restoration practices? Ecological approaches to rhetoric provide ways for engaging in decision making about dams and river restoration. In this dissertation I present three projects that bring media discourse analysis, reciprocal case study, and cross-cultural digital rhetoric to sites of collaborative decision making about dams and rivers in the Penobscot River watershed (Maine, USA). In this place, the prominent Penobscot River Restoration reconfigured several hydroelectric dams to improve fish passage and …

Its Skin Is My Skin, Bryan Page

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text examines the complexity of attempting to empathize with bodies that are vastly othered from my own. This broad yet nuanced subject crosses epistemological boundaries and complicates the dualities between both the mind and body, and between the corporeal and the virtual. My desire to better understand the conditions of another’s experience originates from a painful traumatic loss which caused me to feel isolated and incomplete. In response to this suffering, I long to emotionally connect with other beings and create artwork that attempts to bridge the qualia of individual experience.

I am interested in the capacity (or lack …

Resisting Industrial Food Systems On The Web: How Non-Profit Organizations Use Digital Technology For Sustainability Education, Aleksandr Segal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the link between how community-based organizations use digital tools with the fundamentally resistance-based philosophy that these organizations have at the core of their mission. It aims to uncover how non-profit organizations (NPOs) that work in community development through food and agriculture use digital tools, and how their digital communication strategies relate to issues of resistance to neoliberalism and industrialization in the food and agriculture sectors.

Using a foundation of existing literature on food and agriculture, climate change and waste management, critical theory, and technology in pedagogy, this thesis will contextualize how non-profits resist neoliberal regimes of de-traditionalization …

Breaking Through The Echo Chamber: Teaching Students To Use Technology For College Research And Global Citizenry, Kaitlin Drake

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Preparing high school students for college level courses is vital to their success in higher education. Information literacy and digital literacy are necessary skills for college students in order to conduct their research for their classes. My own research was a compilation of scholarly articles and books focused on digital literacy, information literacy, and the issues surrounding these terms to understand what today’s students need in the classroom to succeed as young researchers. Search engines like Google operate under a facade of being an unbiased source. In reality, they are a for profit company whose search results go through an …

Software Of The Oppressed: Reprogramming The Invisible Discipline, Erin R. Glass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers a critical analysis of software practices within the university and the ways they contribute to a broader status quo of software use, development, and imagination. Through analyzing the history of software practices used in the production and circulation of student and scholarly writing, I argue that this overarching software status quo has oppressive qualities in that it supports the production of passive users, or users who are unable to collectively understand and transform software code for their own interests. I also argue that the university inadvertently normalizes and strengthens the software status quo through what I call …

The Vanishing Line, Jacopo Mazzoni

Graduate School of Art Theses

This thesis is an exploratory effort to bridge the rift that political and monetary powers created between art and technology. In my practice, these socio-political motivations are exposed through the creation of non-utilitarian inventions that use different technologies as charged metaphors. I research mass media language and construct interactive pieces while borrowing strategies from the entertainment industry to make environmental, social, and political issues more palatable than documentary films or raw data could. In my work, technology is regarded as a semidivine entity with supernatural powers that can both elevate and reduce the human experience. My work functions differently according …

Social Media: On Tech-Caves, Virtual Panopticism, And The Science Fiction-Like State In Which We Unwittingly Find Ourselves, Michael Major

Theses

Making use of three historic philosophical thought experiments, this paper blends psychological perspectives with philosophical reasoning to show how social media is corrupting our perception of reality, the result of which is ultimately detrimental to society as a whole. This is accomplished by first using Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to analyze and discuss the ways in which social media is limiting humanity’s access to real knowledge. Next, Michel Foucault’s analysis of punishment in its social context, Discipline and Punish, is used to discuss the ways in which social media is adversely affecting our behavior. Finally, Robert Nozick’s “Experience …

Consuming Digital Debris In The Plasticene, Stephen R. Parks

Theses and Dissertations

Claims of customization and control by socio-technical industries are altering the role of consumer and producer. These narratives are often misleading attempts to engage consumers with new forms of technology. By addressing capitalist intent, material, and the reproduction limits of 3-D printed objects’, I observe the aspirational promise of becoming a producer of my own belongings through new networks of production. I am interested in gaining a better understanding of the data consumed that perpetuates hyper-consumptive tendencies for new technological apparatuses. My role as a designer focuses on the resolution of not only the surface of the object through 3-D …

Modernizing A Podcast Media Organization Via Social And New Media Rebranding Methods, Randi A. Hair

Journalism

The following study and subsequent public relations campaign is intended to explore the difficulties, opportunities, caveats and all facets of transitioning a traditional travel media organization to new media. It unearths the pitfalls/barriers that naturally occur and aggregate over time when an organization or journalist (specifically “Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer” in this scenario) has not adapted nor altered their practices for changing common practices in the media industries. In this campaign, journalist Thomas Wilmer is seeking to increase his podcast audience and digital presence.

The research conducted for this study is two-fold. Firstly, the research demonstrates best practices …

Digital Mindfulness: An Emerging Field Of Inquiry And Practice, Sherri Henderson

Mindfulness Studies Theses

This two-part paper explores digital mindfulness as an emerging field of inquiry and practice into the integration of technology and contemplative practices. The first part surveys the growing research on the effects of technology on health and well-being. Investigating Buddhist teachings leads to a more balanced and aware approach towards integrating mindfulness with the digital world. Digital mindfulness encourages meaningful engagement while online. It also encourages thoughtfulness, awareness and intention. Digital mindfulness also reshapes and encourages conversations in our homes, schools, and proposes digital responsibility and digital citizenship. The second part of the paper proposes a framework for a workshop …

Literacy Revolution: How The New Tools Of Communication Change The Stories We Tell, Molly Gamble

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

The transmission of culture depends upon every generation reconsidering what it means to be literate. The way we consider ourselves to be a literate species is changing, which puts us at a unique turning point in human history. Verbal literacy, or the ability to read and write, is slowly being replaced by visual literacy as a primary tool for human communication. As a culture, we tend to underestimate the creative ferment of our increasingly visual world. The linear, structured pathways of traditional literacy are shifting towards a creative and participatory pursuit of unstructured information that emphasize dimensional thinking. The acceleration …

Dialogic Communication And Public Relations Websites: A Content Analysis Of The Global Top 250 Pr Agencies, Charles C. Akwari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Past research has shown that dialogic communication has essential characteristics that foster two-way communication between organizations and their stakeholders. This study investigates how public relations firms incorporate the principles of dialogic communication on their websites. The top and bottom 50 websites from the Holmes report on Top 250 Global PR agency rankings were content analyzed. Kent and Taylor’s (1998, 2003) five principles of dialogic communication were applied to find out if public relations firms incorporate the principle of dialogic communication effectively on their websites, provide relevant information for stakeholders and prospective clients, and if there are differences between PR rankings …

Thiscollegestory.Com: How Interactive Writing Media Influenced The Way First-Year Students Made Sense Of Their College Transition, Philip Kreniske

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on insights from Bakhtin (1986) that demonstrated the significance of writing as an interaction, and building on recent developments in narrative analysis that offer insights into narrator’s sense making processes (Daiute, 2014; Lucic, 2013); this research explores how freshmen in an educational opportunity program used interactive writing media to make sense of their transition to college. The exploration involved three main questions and each question concerns students’ development over time:

• First, did college students’ writing in two different media (blogs and word-processed text) differ and did these differences change over time?
• Second, how did the narrators and audience interact …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Navigating The Social Landscape: An Exploration Of Social Networking Site Usage Among Emerging Adults, Kristen Colbeck

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study explores how emerging adults (Arnett, 2000) in their first- and second-year of undergraduate study make use of social networking sites (SNSs) for their day-to-day sociality. This study compares emerging adults’ use of Facebook, which is the most popular and widely used SNS among this particular demographic, to increasingly popular SNSs Twitter and Instagram. This project seeks to discover how the use of different SNSs supplements, changes, or replaces the use of Facebook, considering social capital exists on each platform, and if and how each sites’ uses and gratifications differ. This study employs face-to-face semi-structured interviews to pursue the …

Social Media & Audience Participation In Regard To Television, Jean Marie Mcbride

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Jean McBride

Major: Communications: Radio/TV Broadcasting & Mass Media Production

Project Sponsor: Dr. Sylvia White

Number of Project Credits: 3

Social Media & Audience Participation in Regard to Television

The purpose of my honors project was seeing if social media had an influence on television show ratings and popularity by incorporating audience participation. Especially in regards to television shows that have been around for years, I was interested to see if television ratings went up when using Twitter compared to when they did not use Twitter to increase viewers and audience participation. I surveyed forty-nine collegiate women between the ages …

"Warning: This Is A Must Read": Participation And Disruption In Social Artifacts And Spaces, Angela M. Harrison Eng

English Theses & Dissertations

As I show in three separate case studies, content, technology, and participant relationships are key components in the design of social artifacts and spaces. One study highlights the invention and evolution of content across multiple spaces. The second shows content used as leverage for authority. The last case study examines the relationship between content and technological interfaces and how disruption may not always be successful.

All of these components make up what I refer to as disruption. Disruption describes participant acts that are executed to change existing power-based structures of information sharing. Using the insights gained from this research, I …

The User Experience Of Participation: Tracing The Intersection Of Sociotechnical Design And Cultural Practice In Digital Ecosystems, David L. Jones

English Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation, I combine methods from Technical Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, and User Experience Design to trace the social and creative practices of social web participants. Using actor network theory, I explore the concept of participation as social and creative practice that demands coordinative knowledge work enacted within a cultural space. Leveraging the insight gained from this research, I develop the user experience of participation as a research and design methodology that privileges the movement of people and information in order to structure and re-structure social connections.

I explore this methodology through three intersections between people and technology. …