Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Reconfiguring Digital Citizenship: Civic Hacking, Data Activism, And Democracy Platforms In South Korea, Danbi Yoo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on ‘civic tech’, the global phenomenon of tech-based voluntary action of citizens emerging with the rise of the culture of openness and sharing and initiatives of open government data. What does the ‘civic’ of civic tech mean? And what makes civic tech democratic and democratizing? These questions have been rarely asked or conveniently understood with Western-based theories and cases of tech-oriented civic actions. Combining critical studies of technology and civic engagement with the emerging scholarship of digital citizenship, I use the concept of digital citizenship as a heuristic tool to examine how digital and data technologies intervene …

Three Essays On The Political Economy Of Cultural Production And Creative Labor, Luke Pretz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the relationships between capital, cultural production, and creative labor. Essay one theorizes the basis for the intensification of pop music stardom following the introduction of on-demand streaming technology. Prior to the emergence of on-demand streaming, record labels and broadcasters had a mutualistic relationship, wherein the near cost-free music provided by record labels formed the basis for radio broadcasts, which in turn formed the basis for the consumption of that music. Following the emergence of on-demand streaming the mutualistic relationship was ruptured. Broadcasters, in the form of streaming platforms, transitioned to the cost-efficient cultivation of masses of highly …

Enacting A Critical Media Production Pedagogy, James D. Swerzenski

Doctoral Dissertations

This project draws upon earlier calls—particularly in the critical pedagogy, critical media literacy, and cultural production fields—to outline a teaching approach that balances technical media production practices and critical media studies. I refer to this synthesis as critical media production pedagogy. This blending of critical analysis and technical skill, I argue, is especially important at the university level where my research is focused, as students in these courses will likely enter industry fields in which they can influence culture on a mass level. Creating opportunities for a media theory/production synthesis enables students to translate critical ideas beyond the academy and …

The Impact Of #Metoo On Reasons For Sexual Assault Disclosure, Cheryl H. Tien

Doctoral Dissertations

Sexual assault is a long-standing widespread problem. Yet, despite the high prevalence of sexual assault, it is the most underreported crime of all crimes reported to the police (Bureau of Justice, 2018). The #MeToo movement has had a significant impact on the way in which sexual assault survivors disclose their experiences and the reasons they disclose. Disclosure appears to be an important factor in survivors’ healing from their assault, with increasing coping, greater attachment to others, and positive growth cited as effects of disclosure provided that the response to the disclosure is positive to the survivor (Ahrens & Aldana, 2012; …

We're All Friends Here: Examining Transparasocial Interaction On Twitch And Its Effects On Strategic Communications, Alexander Edward Carter

Doctoral Dissertations

In this paper, the author examines advertising on the video game live streaming platform, Twitch. Using a 2 (presence/absence of Transparasocial Interaction) x 2 (presence/absence of self-disclosure by the streamer), this study seeks to gain a better understanding of community perceptions of influencers, and advertising on the Twitch platform, a subject that is only recently becoming a topic of interest for advertising scholars.

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 …

A Postfeminist Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Red Bull Sponsored Female Action Sports Athletes’ Digital Media Representation, Charli Celine Kerns

Doctoral Dissertations

This study applies a multimodal discourse analysis to social media content produced by Red Bull Media House. The aim of the research is to determine what postfeminist sensibilities discourses are used and how in the framing of the female action sports athletes the energy drink company sponsors. Specifically, Instagram posts, YouTube videos, and the biographical web pages about the 23 athletes were analyzed using multimodal discourse analysis. The findings revealed that while action sports have the potential to disrupt dominant discourses around femininity in sports contexts, ultimately Red Bull repackaged the discourses into different narratives.

Makerspace Models And Organizational Policies For Technological Inclusion, Christine Olson

Doctoral Dissertations

In the early part of the 21^st Century, discourses about the “Creative Economy” rose to prominence resulting in educational, economic, and policy initiatives supporting what became known generically as “makerspaces.” As interdisciplinary sites where arts, technology, design, and entrepreneurship meet, makerspaces were heralded as transformational organizational models for learning and innovation. This dissertation explores the social arrangements opened and foreclosed by makerspaces through ethnographic case studies of how different institutions introduced and adapted makerspace models from 2013-2019. Using a communicative ecology approach (Foth & Hearn, 2007), this study interrogates the structures and practices that shape participant experience of these …

The Effectiveness Of Point-Of-View-Video Modeling On Improving Social And Communication Skills, Beyza Alpaydin

Doctoral Dissertations

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurobiological disorder with symptoms that affect individuals’ social interaction capabilities, their verbal and nonverbal communications, and the repertoires of activities and interest. These deficits in social and communication skills directly or indirectly influence the individual with ASDs’ lives. Therefore, many interventions have been developed to increase social and communication skills for individuals with ASD. Video modeling (VM) is one of the effective interventions in teaching social communication skills for children with ASD. There are multiple variations of VM interventions. One of the forms of VM intervention is point-of-view video modeling (POVVM) that has …

Class, Gender, And Mediated Labor Activism In Globalizing China, Siyuan Yin

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation analyzes the relationships between mediated labor activism and the formation of counter-hegemonic forces in contemporary China. As China becomes a seemingly ideal model to justify the normalization of global capitalism, this study seeks to demonstrate how resistance from disenfranchised groups can challenge hegemonic power. Rural-to-urban migrant workers, who have been among the most disadvantaged groups since China’s economic reform of the 1980s, suffer from institutionalized discrimination, economic exploitation, and social exclusion. Approaching the analysis from an intersectional feminist lens, I explore the politics and possibilities of working-class resistance in searching for a just and equal China. Based on …

Cultural Practices And Social Formations In A Reforming Society: The Transnational Fandom Of European Football In China, Yuan Gong

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the Chinese fandom of European male football and its relation to the formation of the Chinese urban middle class. I use online and offline ethnography, critical discourse analysis and textual analysis to examine the socio-cultural roots, technological conditions, and political implications of Chinese fans’ transmedia practices. My findings are twofold. First, I argue for the articulation between the European football fan identity and the subject of urban middle class emerging from the post-Maoist social restructuring. This articulation is reflected from these fans’ active reading of the European football text and their access to European football as conditioned …

Movement Media, Energy Activism, And The Politics Of Hometown In The Anti-765kv Power Transmission Tower Struggle Of Miryang In South Korea, Su Young Choi

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues for expanding a practice approach to media combined with cultural studies to address the continuing problems of technological deterministic tendencies in the field of alternative, radical and citizen’s media research. Applying this approach specifically, this study offers the concept of movement media as an organized set of practices that creates spaces of action to connect what is separated and mediate cultures for social change. Drawing on twelve months of online and off-line fieldwork, the dissertation develops an ethnographic account of movement media in the Miryang environmental struggle against the Korea Electronic Power Corporation’s 765,000-voltage transmission line construction. …

Modeling The Consumer Acceptance Of Retail Service Robots, So Young Song

Doctoral Dissertations

This study uses the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) and domestication theories as the underlying framework of an acceptance model of retail service robots (RSRs). The model illustrates the relationships among facilitators, attitudes toward Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), anxiety toward robots, anticipated service quality, and the acceptance of RSRs. Specifically, the researcher investigates the extent to which the facilitators of usefulness, social capability, the appearance of RSRs, and the attitudes toward HRI affect acceptance and increase the anticipation of service quality. The researcher also tests the inhibiting role of pre-existing anxiety toward robots on the relationship between these facilitators and attitudes …

The Net Generation At Work: Younger Employees’ Understanding Of Productive/ Counter-Productive Information Across Communication Channels, Whitney Lauren Tipton

Doctoral Dissertations

Organizations are increasingly implored to engage in communicative accommodation based on employees’ generational cohort. While previous research has found generational differences in workplace values, empirical evidence has not supported the popular claim that younger generations prefer more technological communication than their older colleagues. Using media richness theory (MRT), social presence theory (SPT), and channel expansion theory (CET) as a framework, this dissertation analyzes the responses of 382 Net Generation-aged (18-27 years old) participants to questions related to communication channel preference, information type, channel familiarity, and productivity/counter-productivity at work. Significant differences were found between communication channels across five types of common …

Women, Convergent Film Criticism, And The Cinephilia Of Feminist Interruptions, Rachel L. Thibault

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the ways in which female film critics practice film criticism in the convergent age. In original research drawn from ethnographic interviews with eight female film critics and bloggers as well as textual, historical, and reception analyses of criticism, this dissertation argues that women who write film criticism in the convergent era are not only writing from a space of marginalization based on the patriarchal dominance of the film industry, but also face a series of obstacles through gendered and discursive conflicts that are unique to writing online and which do not exert the same impact on male …

The On-Screen Water Cooler: Effects Of Televised User-Generated Comments On Cognitive Processing, Social Presence, And Viewing Experience., Jaclyn Ann Cameron

Doctoral Dissertations

Social television combines traditional television viewing and interactions with social media to create a phenomenon that connects otherwise autonomous viewers through a shared viewing experience. This dissertation explores one type of social television: on-screen user-generated comments. Although the practice spans multiple television genres, little is known about its effect on viewers’ cognitive processing of the media, perceptions of the social presence of other viewers, or the viewers’ experience of the media. Two experimental studies explored the effects of on-screen user-generated comments on cognitive processing of the media message, the effect of manipulating the content of on-screen user-generated comments and individual …

Mashup Archeology: A Case Study In The Role Of Digital Technology In Cultural Production, Zachary Mcdowell

Doctoral Dissertations

Through examining the phenomena of the musical mashup against the backdrop of the contemporary American legal and economic situations, this work explores the complicated role of digital technology in contemporary cultural production and how it helps to constitute an agency of the contemporary digital subject, oriented towards participation and access. This research comes together in four parts, first weaving together against an understanding of the cultural and technical background as well as the legal and social backdrop that helped to birth the mashup, setting the stage for understanding the different powers at play. Secondly, through considering the construction and determination …

The Formation Of Youth-Led Participatory Networks In Urban Bangladesh: A Case Study Of The Bgreen Project, Fadia Hasan

Doctoral Dissertations

Through the lens of a participatory action research platform that I founded called The BGreen Project (BGreen), my research explores networked political economic connections that were developed as a result of this academic-community initiative. BGreen was a participatory action research platform that connected urban high school, college, university youth in an assortment of participatory/deliberative activities in the fields of education and environment. With their ongoing engagement in the participatory network called BGreen, Bangladeshi youth are negotiating their affiliation to diverse political economic structures (for example, their educational institutions) in creative ways and forging innovative methods of transformative participation as …

Social Systems And Psychic Confluence: Flash Mobs, Communications, And Agency, Nicholas John Hauman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation involves two components: 1) an analysis of the history of flash mobs including detailed descriptions of specific flash mobs and 2) an exploration of what this analysis elucidates concerning the interaction between individuals and social structure. By focusing on the flash mob as a form of communication, the dissertation displays how the flash mob has communicated multiplicitously through various social systems (e.g. art, mass media, economy, politics) to achieve various and often divergent ends. Within this larger understanding of the interaction between flash mobs and social structure this dissertation also finds, through an application of Luhmannian systems theory, …

Democratic Potential For A Multiplicity Of Public Spaces: A Content Analysis Of Media-Hosted Discussion Boards, Bryan M. Baldwin

Doctoral Dissertations

Since their inception, online discussion boards have intrinsically appealed to proponents of deliberative democracy, and those appended to Web-based news sources have been recognized as possessing the potential – whether realized yet or not – to engender meaningful discussions by engaged citizens on a range of public issues. In contrast, ardent critics of such forums contend they are merely raucous and unstructured repositories of expressions reflecting the darker side of human nature (e.g. incivility, vulgarity, ad hominem attacks, racism, homophobia, etc.). This study assessed the deliberative quality of online postings made over a two- month period and affiliated with four …

How Technology Interacts With Emerging Adulthood Psychosocial Developmental Tasks: An Examination Of Online Self-Presentation And Cell Phone Usage, Samantha Lynn Gray

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation outlines three distinct, yet interrelated, projects aimed at understanding the role of technology in relation to emerging adulthood developmental tasks: individuation & identity development. The first paper provides a context for understanding the developmental tasks of emerging adulthood, and the role that technology may serve in relation to those developmental tasks. This brief review of the literature on emerging adulthood developmental tasks provides a solid theoretical background and history for the theoretical premises proposed for the respective studies included in this dissertation. The second project is an empirical investigation that seeks to understand how the task of identity …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

The Cable Network In An Era Of Digital Media: Bravo And The Constraints Of Consumer Citizenship, Alison D. Brzenchek

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation takes a historiographical approach to the evolution of cable television over thirty years. Case analysis of archival data is used to trace the trajectory of the Bravo cable network from 1980 through 2010. My dissertation is a vital contribution to critical cultural studies, feminist studies, citizenship studies, and media history because it historicizes the role branding, commodification, and convergence played in Bravo’s evolution from a highbrow arts programmer guided by bourgeois consumer citizenship, to a affluent lifestyle network guided by nouveau riche consumer citizenship. My combination of production studies and political economic analysis gives visibility to the interpenetrating …

News And The Public Sphere: The Boston Marathon Bombing In The New York Times And Le Figaro, Ioana Alexandra Coman

Doctoral Dissertations

The current dissertation explores the online mediatization of the Boston Marathon bombing crisis by an American newspaper (The New York Times) and a French one (Le Figaro) and their publics’ reactions to it. The research was conducted along two main analysis axes: (1) the main frames and themes through which the journalists and the publics gave meaning to the event, and (2) the characteristics of the online public spheres therefore created. The comparative perspective on the journalistic frames showed a strong tendency of homogenization, as the same main frames appeared in both analyzed newspapers. However, the …

Online Social Networking Sites: Meaning Of Sns's To Gay Men From Non-Accepting Families, Richard Tazz Curry

Doctoral Dissertations

The role of technology can be argued as changing the social landscape for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals. A 2009 survey of LGBTQ adults revealed over 70% of individuals self-reported using the Internet as their primary means of information seeking (Bond, Hefner, & Drognos). While traditional venues still exist for LGBTQ individuals in exploration of personal and sexual identities, the Internet serves as one distinguishing difference: anonymity. This study utilizes in-depth interviews, (N=15), to explore the experiences of gay men, from non-accepting families, who use online social networking sites (SNS) to reshape their perception of the world …

Personality Traits And Motivations For Usage Of Online Social Network Sites Among College Freshmen, Jason Paul Rieger

Doctoral Dissertations

Millions of people worldwide log onto social network sites (SNS) every day. Some users have positive experiences while others have negative experiences. The functionality of any given SNS is the same for each user, but the choice of how and when to use certain features leads each user to have different experiences. This study utilized a uses and gratifications framework to help understand what gratification expectations affect the usage of SNS among college freshmen in their first semester. Additionally, the research explored a possible link between individual personality traits of freshmen and gratification expectations as well as a link between …

Activating Parents’ Persuasion Knowledge In Children’S Advergames: Testing The Effects Of Advertising Disclosures And Cognitive Load, Nathaniel Joseph Evans

Doctoral Dissertations

This study focused on parents of children between the ages of 7 to 11 and their ability to recognize and understand a children’s advergame as advertising. Using the theoretical framework of the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM), this study experimentally tested the effects of advertising disclosures and cognitive load on parents’ activation of persuasion knowledge in children’s advergames and parents’ attitudes toward children’s advergames. In addition, this study examined how parents’ individual trait differences in persuasion knowledge and mediation of their children’s Internet use potentially influenced their persuasion knowledge in children’s advergames as well as their attitudes toward them. By conducting …

The Role Of Computer Mediated Technologies (Cmts) In Scientific Collaboration In Kuwait, Abdalaziz Aldaihani

Doctoral Dissertations

This study focuses on a component of computer-mediated communicated which is labeled computer mediated technologies (CMTs) and is composed of the latest group of internet technology and digital media including social networking, Web2.0, Smartphone and Videoconferencing. The computer mediated technologies (CMTs) have the potential to facilitate scientific collaboration between scientists from north and south.

This dissertation is a quantitative study that investigates the relationship between CMT use and collaboration, CMT use and research productivity, scientific collaboration and research productivity in Kuwait and the digital divide between developing and developed countries. This study answers the following questions: (1) To what degree …

Complex Adaptive Systems Theory Applied To Virtual Scientific Collaborations: The Case Of Dataone, Arsev Umur Aydinoglu

Doctoral Dissertations

This study is the exploration of the emergence of DataONE, a multidisciplinary, multinational, and multi-institutional virtual scientific collaboration to develop a cyberinfrastructure for earth sciences data, from the complex adaptive systems perspective. Data is generated through conducting 15 semi-structured interviews, observing three 3-day meetings, and 51 online surveys. The main contribution of this study is the development of a complexity framework and its application to a project such as DataONE. The findings reveal that DataONE behaves like a complex adaptive system: various individuals and institutions interacting, adapting, and coevolving to achieve their own and common goals; during the process new …

Generational Perceptions Of Productive/Unproductive Information Received From Management Through Different Communication Channels, Eva Lynn Cowell

Doctoral Dissertations

This exploratory study identified generational preferences for receiving information from management through different communication channels and determined if age predicted productivity for productive and unproductive information received through different communication channels. This is the first study to empirically examine the relationship between age cohorts, communication channel preferences, information categories, and productivity. Sample participants worked as Extension agents at a major land-grant university. The four generations represented in the sample utilized multiple communication channels and were geographically dispersed throughout the state. The survey was administered electronically and completed by 204 (74%) of the eligible 275 employees in the organization. Independent Samples …