Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Cinema Studies, Burak Turten

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

PREFACE

Cinema Studies is a comprehensive book that, is hoped, will provide students and researchers with film studies and other persons interested in cinema with a useful reference book on film analysis and, where relevant, the different discussions surrounding that. The contributors analyze some films using ideas and concerns from modernism, cinematographic narrative, ideology, propaganda, migration, nomadism, and the sense of revenge. The book provides new insights into films and turns the discussion towards recent research questions and analyses, representing and constituting in each contribution new work in the discipline of film text analysis.

Therefore, each chapter of this book, …

Social Media As A Tool For Evangelism Among Youth And Young Adults, Trisney Bocala

Student Research

This research aims to answer the question of which social media platforms youth prefer and what types of content they prefer. Using data collected from a quantitative survey, this research seeks to identify the most-used social media platforms and most appealing formats of content so that Seventh-day Adventist churches, media organizations, and digital missionaries can more effectively utilize social media as a tool for evangelism among youth, defined as 15 to 24 years of age.

The Uncanny Swipe Drive: The Return Of A Racist Mode Of Algorithmic Thought On Dating Apps, Gregory Narr

Publications and Research

As algorithmic media amplify longstanding social oppression, they also seek to colonize every last bit of sociality where that oppression could be resisted. Swipe apps constitute prototypical examples of this dynamic. By employing protocols that foster absent-minded engagement, they allow unconscious racial preferences to be expressed without troubling users’ perceptions of themselves as non-racist. These preferences are then measured by recommender systems that treat “attractiveness” as a zero-sum game, allocate affective flows according to the winners and losers of those games, and ultimately amplify the salience of race as a factor of success for finding intimacy. In thus priming users …

Expanded Cinema: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition [ Table Of Contents], Gene Youngblood

Cinema & Media Studies

Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category.

First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic tools. Long considered the Bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftieth-anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world.

A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film …

Professors’ Perspectives On Truth-Seeking And New Literacy, Zachary W. Arth, Darrin J. Griffin, William J. Earnest

Journal of Media Literacy Education

New media and new literacy are essential in our contemporary paradigms of education and communication research. Though truth-seeking is one of the primary objectives inherent in higher education, the process for students may be less clear than it may be for trained academics or professors. The current study sought to explore how professors recommend that students seek truth in the information age. Relying on an assignment from a communication course, this study examined responses from student-led interviews with professors from across the U.S. and categorized trends in their recommendations for students. Overall twelve themes taken from advice on student truth-seeking …

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

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 …

The Curated Chronicles Of The American Family: An Ideological Analysis Of The Love Taza Blog, Elizabeth Radley

Master's Theses

Named one of the top ten influencers of parenting by Forbes, Naomi Davis of the family-lifestyle Blog, Love Taza has transformed her family chronicles into a successful Internet business with an extensive following ("Top Influencers of 2017: Parenting"). This thesis examines the content of Love Taza to understand what messages Naomi communicates to her readers and how her readers may be receiving those messages. Using a sample of 600 posts from 2012-2017, a quantitative analysis was conducted to determine the type of content being presented. According to the findings, the majority of the posts included sponsored content and the most …

A Political Ecology Of Information: Media And The Dilemma Of State Power In China, Michael L. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I employ a Weberian concept of social power in order to theorize the challenges posed by, and the varieties of state response to, the dilemma of state power: the need of all states to empower societies with social capacities that may, in turn, threaten state interests. Through a comparison of traditional and new forms of media in China, I show that rather than posing qualitatively new types of challenges to authoritarian states, new media exacerbate the dilemma of state power. They do so because along each of three dimensions of social control, new media shift the relationship …

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 …

Making An Audience: An Analysis Of Making A Murderer, Bree Ann Trisler

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Steven Avery was released from prison on September 11, 2003, after serving 18 years for a sexual assault he did not commit. Avery was back behind bars in merely two years for a different crime, the murder of 25-year-old Teresa Halbach (Demos & Ricciardi, 2015). This multifaceted story is the focus of the Netflix true-crime series Making a Murderer, a serialization that became “a word-of-mouth true-crime phenomenon” (Itzkoff, 2016) upon its release on December 18, 2015. In this thesis, I aimed to reveal the meanings audience members derived from Making a Murderer and to connect these meanings to the new …

Choosing To Choose: The Impact Of Technology On Choice, Aaron J. Alford

Channels: Where Disciplines Meet

The development of modern technology has increasingly focused on efficiency over expression. Interfaces limit and scale down human choice and expression. Entertainment and communication now use interfaced technology for even basic human expression, artificially limiting the number of potential choices to the options presented by the interface. The logic of technology has become a totalizing phenomenon, bringing all areas of human life under it purview. According to Heidegger, Ellul, and Flusser, the result of this development is a different way of being-in-the-world for humans. The traditional man has been the constant in production and communication, which the medium and technology …

Rté And The Coverage Of Northern Ireland On Television News Bulletins In The Early Years Of The Troubles, Gareth Ivory

Irish Communication Review

No abstract provided.

Online News And Changing Models Of Journalism, Brian Trench, Gary Quinn

Irish Communication Review

The move to Internet news publishing is the latest in a series of technological shifts which have required journalists not merely to adapt their daily practice but which have also – at least in the view of some – recast their role in society. For over a decade, proponents of the networked society as a new way of life have argued that responsibility for news selection and production will shift from publishers, editors and reporters to individual consumers,

New Media As Social Facts: Researching As Shaping The Digital Landscape, James Cornford

Irish Communication Review

The emergence of new media (or digital media, or perhaps even ‘the new economy’) has certainly had some salutary effects on media studies. The advent of the Web has raised (or re-raised) a whole set of interesting questions for those concerned with researching various aspects of the media from those concerned with political economy and industrial organisation to those concerned with reception, interpretations and texts. Digital media frequently appear, even in the most sober accounts, to be some unstoppable tidal wave of change, a complex and multi-layered landscape moving so fast that researchers can only rush to try to keep …

Not A Stitch Out Of Place: Assessing Students’ Attitudes Towards Multimodal Composition, Jeanne Law Bohannon

Jeanne Law Bohannon

This article traces a brief history of multimodal composition practices in the field of writing studies. It frames writing instruction through the theoretical lens of democratic pedagogy and presents the works of key composition scholars. The author then describes a mixed methods research study, conducted with first-year students on the STEM campus of a state comprehensive university. Students participated in a survey that asked their attitudes towards multimodal writing assignments, digital literacies, and learning outcomes. The author draws conclusions about the effectiveness of multimodal composition based on students’ responses and provides supplemental information on the types of assignments and examples …

Cultural Resiliency And The Rise Of Indigenous Media: Book Review Of "The New Media Nation: Indigenous Peoples And Global Communication" By Valerie Alia, Derek Moscato

Journalism Faculty Publications

Valerie Alia’s book, The New Media Nation: Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012, 270 pp.), points the way to major communication breakthroughs for traditional communities around the world, in turn fostering a more democratic media discourse. From Canada to Japan, and Australia to Mexico, this ambitious and wide-reaching work examines a broad international movement that at once protects ancient languages and customs but also communicates to audiences across countries, oceans, and political boundaries. The publication is divided roughly into five sections: The emergence of a global vision for Indigenous communities scattered around the world; government policy …

Not A Stitch Out Of Place: Assessing Students’ Attitudes Towards Multimodal Composition, Jeanne Law Bohannon

Faculty and Research Publications

This article traces a brief history of multimodal composition practices in the field of writing studies. It frames writing instruction through the theoretical lens of democratic pedagogy and presents the works of key composition scholars. The author then describes a mixed methods research study, conducted with first-year students on the STEM campus of a state comprehensive university. Students participated in a survey that asked their attitudes towards multimodal writing assignments, digital literacies, and learning outcomes. The author draws conclusions about the effectiveness of multimodal composition based on students’ responses and provides supplemental information on the types of assignments and examples …

Mediatization In The Arab World: A Cross-Cultural Comparison Of New Media Use, Julie B. Wiest, Nahed Eltantawy

Anthropology & Sociology Faculty Publications

New media (including online and cellular technologies) are being embraced around the world, and younger people have led the way in their adoption. These technologies have spread particularly quickly in the Middle East as a result of innovations in satellite, cellular, and Internet technology. In addition, the Arab Spring was a major milestone for new media adoption in the Middle East and helped define appropriate uses for these technologies. Although they have been used for activism and expression, evidence suggests that these are not (or perhaps are no longer) the primary uses of these technologies among young Arabs. Drawing on …

Jihad In The Global Village: Al-Qaeda's Digital Radicalization And Recruitment Campaign, Katie Cannata

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Following America’s “War on Terror,” al-Qaeda and its affiliates became highly decentralized in terms of organizational and media operations. Though mass media outlets continue to play a significant role in drawing attention to al-Qaeda’s transnational campaign, Salafi Jihadists have recently begun to rely on new media for purposes of legitimization and promotion. The Internet serves as a suitable platform for these groups’ media objectives since it is inherently anonymous and absent of censorship. Most importantly, the Internet facilitates al-Qaeda in reaching a global audience, which is made evident by the growing amount of Salafi Jihadist media that is translated or …

And The (Fourth) Wall Came Tumbling Down: The Impact Of Renegotiating Fan-Creator Relationships On Supernatural, Alena Karkanias

Summer Research

This paper explores the unique relationship that has developed between the fans and creators (encompassing writers, producers, directors, crew, and particularly actors) of the television show Supernatural. Since early in its run, fans of the show have interacted avidly with each other and the show’s creators on social media platforms, and at conventions, working together to create charities, support each other in fights against mental illness and other personal struggles, and celebrate the show and their relationship with humor and compassion. However, these interactions have also raised questions about ownership, influence, and input on the show, particularly concerning the fate …

Introduction: What Is New And Digital Media?, Thomas Kenny Mphil, Jamie N. Cohen Ma

Faculty Works: DH & NM (2010-2019)

First edition

The word media, the plural term for medium, covers a broad spectrum describing communications through television, film, radio, and print. Media require a viewer, a listener, a reader, or a spectator to carry any effect whatsoever. In our rapidly advancing hypermedia landscape of the present, where all traditional media have become singular on the screen-based Internet, the reader, viewer, and listener can participate as as well and truly use media as communication. Technology has inevitably transformed our traditional media into a multitude of interactive platforms, now read and listened to on mobile devices, tablets, e-readers, flat screens, and …

The Core Concepts: Fundamental To Media Literacy Yesterday, Today And Tomorrow, Tessa Jolls, Carolyn Wilson

Journal of Media Literacy Education

“New media” does not change the essence of what media literacy is, nor does it affect its ongoing importance in society. Len Masterman, a UK-based professor, published his ground-breaking books in the 1980’s and laid the foundation for media literacy to be taught to elementary and secondary students in a systematic way that is consistent, replicable, measurable and scalable on a global basis – and thus, timeless. Masterman’s key insight was that the central unifying concept of media education is that of representation: media are symbolic sign systems that must be decoded. This paper explores the development and the application …

Episode 10: Matt Rizzo, Thomas Kenny Mphil

Podcasts - Streaming

Professor Tom Kenny speaks with Matt Rizzo (alumnus & former employee) during the first episode of the Fall 2014 semester. This episode also features a clip from the student work Witness by Jess Schaefer which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc_o5TG2T0A

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 …

The Writing Is The Wall: Expanding The Means Of Communication With Multimodal Approaches To Teaching Composition, Matthew Williams Schering

All Student Theses

As the paradigm of communication shifts into the digital realm, it seems only logical that instructors’ pedagogical approaches to teaching writing should shift as well. Though there is still much merit to teaching tradition approaches to composition, are there more modern methods that could be employed to teach communication in a contemporary setting? This thesis shall examine the role that new media can play in a multimodal composition course, as new media seems to be the most effective way to teach rhetorical communication skills in a modern setting. By looking at new media elements, such as podcasts, wikis, and images, …

Public Interest In Climate Change Over The Past Decade And The Effects Of The ‘Climategate’ Media Event, William R. L. Anderegg, Gregory R. Goldsmith

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Despite overwhelming scientific consensus concerning anthropogenic climate change, many in the non-expert public perceive climate change as debated and contentious. There is concern that two recent high-profile media events—the hacking of the University of East Anglia emails and the Himalayan glacier melt rate presented in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—may have altered public opinion of climate change. While survey data is valuable for tracking public perception and opinion over time, including in response to climate-related media events, emerging methods that facilitate rapid assessment of spatial and temporal patterns in public interest and opinion could …

Review: The Media Ecosystem: What Ecology Can Teach Us About Responsible Media Practice, Ju-Pong Lin

Journal of Media Literacy Education

No abstract provided.

New Media Business Models, Where Content And Commerce Collide: Strategies And Ethical Considerations For Success In A New Media World, Aryn Bea Sanderson

Journalism

Media practitioners are finding themselves at a crossroads. Due to increasing digitalization and decreasing funding for so-called traditional outlets, “new media” forms have emerged and, with those, new economic models to generate revenue. New media platforms diverge from old media archetypes in the way they utilize the interaction of content and commerce. The collision of content and commerce is both a novel idea for media sustainability and treacherous water for its credibility. This study analyzes a few key new media economic platforms - sponsored content in a digital-first publication, crowd funding stories and a ranked, e-commerce model - in hopes …

Arab Spring In Tunisia And Egypt: The Impact Of New Media On Contemporary Social Movements And Challenges For Social Movement Theory, Victoria Carty

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

The events of Arab Spring were shocking for those who study societal movements as long-term dictators were swiftly removed from office and a democratic wave hit the region. Although the outcomes of the Arab Spring revolutions are yet to be determined, what we can gleam from these outbursts of collective behavior is that new media platforms played a significant role in the planning and mobilization efforts that brought people onto the streets and posed serious challenges to the existing political systems. This paper examines the importance of the communication field in influencing the political environment and motivating ordinary citizens to …