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Communication Technology and New Media Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Communication Technology and New Media
Can Cooler Heads Prevail? New Media Technology And Affective Polarization, Brian Kendall Watson
Can Cooler Heads Prevail? New Media Technology And Affective Polarization, Brian Kendall Watson
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Are new media technologies stirring up negative partisan feelings in the American public? Can researchers find ways of using new media tools to reduce affective polarization? Relying on a series of experiments featuring online newsfeeds and social media discussions, this dissertation seeks to answer these questions by testing the influence of partisan news and political discussions in realistic Internet environments. Two custom news “portals” (2016, 2018) expose participants to actual partisan news content. Two Facebook discussion experiments (2017, 2019) randomly assign participants to start real political discussions on their personal social media accounts, using discussion-initiation strategies designed to reduce partisan …
Appropriating Play: Examining Twitch.Tv As A Commercial Platform, Charlotte Panneton
Appropriating Play: Examining Twitch.Tv As A Commercial Platform, Charlotte Panneton
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This thesis critically analyzes Twitch.tv, a gaming-oriented, online live-streaming site. Viewing the site as a ‘lean platform’ (Srnicek, 2017), it analyzes many aspects of Twitch’s business operations, including ownership structure, video game industry affiliations, use of data, and the monetization of user activity. This analysis then identifies three major areas of concern arising from these operations: the tendency toward monopolization in the gaming industry and its peripheral activities; the intensification of audience commodification; and, the tendency to turn professional streamers into precarious creative labourers. All of these implications point to a growing need for concerted labour organization. The goal of …