Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?: Visualizing Extreme Wealth, William Mahoney Luckman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The word “billion” is a mathematical abstraction related to “big,” but it is difficult to understand the vast difference in value between one million and one billion; even harder to understand the vast difference in purchasing power between one billion dollars, and the average U.S. yearly income. Perhaps most difficult to conceive of is what that purchasing power and huge mass of capital translates to in terms of power. This project blends design, text, facts, and figures into an interactive narrative website that helps the user better understand their position in relation to extreme wealth: https://whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website/

The site incorporates …

Capitalizing On Language: The Political And Economic (Re)Circulation Of A National Imaginary, Joseph L. Flores

Communication ETDs

In interrogating a political propaganda campaign carried out on social media platforms, I argue that the political economic practices of platforms, fueled by an (inter)action of human networks and technological networks, underscore the significance of communicative tactics, the strategic use of language, and user labor that drive political and economic projects. In an analysis that focuses on the discourse of memes used to support a Trump national imaginary, the dissemination of its content and the construction of meaning via user labor on social media platforms, intensifies, strengthens, and emboldens political projects and platform logics that affectively buttress political propaganda.

The …

Digital Capitalism Today: It Industry-Led Public Private Partnerships In A Northeastern School, Paige Mustain

Masters Theses

There has been considerable zeal regarding the democratizing promises of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This belief has resulted in the proliferation of ICT development initiatives in education through public private partnerships. However, there are critical scholars who caution against an overly celebratory perspective of ICTs and expose the ways in which they may be contributing to the exacerbation of existing inequalities. This thesis was inspired by Dan Schiller’s book, Digital Capitalism (1999) with the purpose of examining how digital capitalism is evident today.

'Digital capitalism' refers to the relationship between politics, economics, and technology that explains the shift in …

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 …