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Doctoral Dissertations

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Online Fan Communities: Welcoming Behavior, Brand Community Markers, And Multiple Identities In Sports Fandom, Blaine R. Huber Mar 2024

Online Fan Communities: Welcoming Behavior, Brand Community Markers, And Multiple Identities In Sports Fandom, Blaine R. Huber

Doctoral Dissertations

Online fan communities have revolutionized the way sport consumers engage with fellow fans and the sports product. The traditional regional boundaries that once characterized sports fandom have been mitigated by the emergence of new media, social media platforms, and online fan communities. This dissertation explores the non-geographically bound nature of contemporary sports fan communities, examining the evolving dynamics of fan behavior in the digital age. In Study 1, an interactional perspective is employed to explore online fan socialization. The focus is on how new fans' self-presentation influences acceptance within NFL team-specific Reddit communities. Utilizing data mining, textual analysis, and qualitative …


University Students’ Perspectives Of Visual-Based Cyberbullying On Instagram, Li-Min Huang Dec 2022

University Students’ Perspectives Of Visual-Based Cyberbullying On Instagram, Li-Min Huang

Doctoral Dissertations

Researchers have been investigating the cyberbullying phenomenon since the early 21st century. There is a substantial body of cyberbullying studies focused on text-based formats. However, studies revealed that visual-based social media platforms are more powerful than text-based platforms in affecting people’s emotions, causing significant psychological impact. Young adults ages 18-29 use visual-based social media heavily in their daily lives; therefore, visual cyberbullying on various sites has become a critical issue for this generation. Yet, the majority of existing cyberbullying studies focused on age groups under 18. The studies that did investigate this phenomenon among young adults focused mainly on text-based …


Three Essays On The Political Economy Of Cultural Production And Creative Labor, Luke Pretz Oct 2022

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 …


We're All Friends Here: Examining Transparasocial Interaction On Twitch And Its Effects On Strategic Communications, Alexander Edward Carter Aug 2022

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.


Alt-Education: Gender, Language, And Education Across The Right, Catherine Tebaldi Mar 2022

Alt-Education: Gender, Language, And Education Across The Right, Catherine Tebaldi

Doctoral Dissertations

I explore the ideologies of gender, language and education in conservative, Christian Nationalist, and White nationalist mothers groups. I draw on my own family history, as well as on two years of blended ethnographic research in online right wing communities and one year of fieldwork in New Orleans, Louisiana, to look at homeschooling, online schools, and public teachers’ social, linguistic, and educational practices -- what I call Alt-Education. Alt-education is of course a play on alt-right, and refers to the far-right ideology; but it also refers to an alternative to mainstream education, and to education through a broader range of …


A Postfeminist Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Red Bull Sponsored Female Action Sports Athletes’ Digital Media Representation, Charli Celine Kerns Dec 2021

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.


In Our Very Blood: The Use Of Social Media In The 2018 West Virginia Teachers' Strike, Everette Scott Sikes May 2021

In Our Very Blood: The Use Of Social Media In The 2018 West Virginia Teachers' Strike, Everette Scott Sikes

Doctoral Dissertations

The 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike exemplifies the changing shape of social movements and events of dissent and protest in the digital age. The use of information communication technologies (ICT) and social media have changed the ways such events develop and unfold. These technologies offer new tools for organizing and strategizing, for generating large numbers of participants, and for communicating crucial information while reducing temporal and spatial barriers. The teachers’ strike presents an opportunity to increase our understandings of these issues and to widen the scope of research in the field of information sciences to include the impact of ICTs …


Becoming A Mom: Intersectionality And Fashion Consumption For Millennial Latinas And The Role Of Social Media Influencers, Leslie M. Cuevas Aug 2020

Becoming A Mom: Intersectionality And Fashion Consumption For Millennial Latinas And The Role Of Social Media Influencers, Leslie M. Cuevas

Doctoral Dissertations

When it comes to motherhood for women of color, the topic of women empowerment is scarce, and the media mostly portrays Latinas through traditional ethnic stereotypes. The advent of social media has presented women the opportunity to engage in identity formation as they exercise empowerment in choices and self-monitoring online. A good example of this transition in power involves fashion influencers who use their personal influence to change the meaning of motherhood, making it more accessible and realistic to women in general. However, a lack of diversity remains within the influencer industry as white women are the majority. Drawing upon …


Improving Chinese Mothers’ Health Literacy: A Wechat Intervention, Qiong Chen Oct 2019

Improving Chinese Mothers’ Health Literacy: A Wechat Intervention, Qiong Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

The health literacy and eHealth literacy of women during the reproductive age is crucial, as it can affect their health and the health of their children. Promoting health literacy is essential to achieve mothers’ empowerment by improving access to and capacity of using health information effectively. However, functional, interactive, and critical health literacy and eHealth literacy have never been assessed among Chinese women. The first study during this dissertation assessed functional, interactive, and critical health literacy and eHealth literacy among 421 of Chinese mothers with children under 3 years old. The results revealed overall less than optimal level of health …


Probabilistic Models For Identifying And Explaining Controversy, Myungha Jang Jul 2019

Probabilistic Models For Identifying And Explaining Controversy, Myungha Jang

Doctoral Dissertations

Navigating controversial topics on the Web encourages social awareness, supports civil discourse, and promotes critical literacy. While search of controversial topics particularly requires users to use their critical literacy skills on the content, educating people to be more critical readers is known to be a complex and long-term process. Therefore, we are in need of search engines that are equipped with techniques to help users to understand controversial topics by identifying them and explaining why they are controversial. A few approaches for identifying controversy have worked reasonably well in practice, but they are narrow in scope and exhibit limited performance. …


Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden Nov 2018

Rights, Recognition, And Changing Borders: Latin American Activism In Post-Brexit Britain, Stephanie Aragao Medden

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the advocacy work and political activism of Latin American social movement organizations based in the United Kingdom. I examine how activists working in Britain as it prepares to exit the European Union, make sense of their collective agendas, strategize to achieve their goals, and evaluate the outcomes of their advocacy efforts. In doing so, this project provides insights into the ways that identity movements are negotiated and performed during periods of increased political and public hostility toward their constituents and agendas. I illuminate the relationship between identity movements, immigration discourses, politics, and policy implementation and explore how …


Cultural Practices And Social Formations In A Reforming Society: The Transnational Fandom Of European Football In China, Yuan Gong Nov 2018

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 …


Do I Deserve To Spend? Social Support And Spending Pleasure, Kawon Kim Jul 2017

Do I Deserve To Spend? Social Support And Spending Pleasure, Kawon Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite evidence of people posting their consumption experience on online social networks to fulfill the needs of social support, a systemic understanding of how social support obtained via online social networks affects post-consumption behaviors related to spending remains elusive. This dissertation aims to answer the question of how social support via online social networks affects consumer’s post-consumption behavior by investigating in what form and from whom consumers obtain online social support. To do so, the purpose of this dissertation is to examine how online social support from others influences perceptions of deservingness which then influences spending pleasure. This dissertation focuses …


The On-Screen Water Cooler: Effects Of Televised User-Generated Comments On Cognitive Processing, Social Presence, And Viewing Experience., Jaclyn Ann Cameron Aug 2016

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 Jul 2016

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 Nov 2015

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 Aug 2015

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, …


Computational Communication Intelligence: Exploring Linguistic Manifestation And Social Dynamics In Online Communication, Xiaoxi Xu Nov 2014

Computational Communication Intelligence: Exploring Linguistic Manifestation And Social Dynamics In Online Communication, Xiaoxi Xu

Doctoral Dissertations

We now live in an age of online communication. As social media becomes an integral part of our life, online communication becomes an essential life skill. In this dissertation, we aim to understand how people effectively communicate online. We research components of success in online communication and present scientific methods to study the skill of effective communication. This research advances the state of art in machine learning and communication studies. For communication studies, we pioneer the study of a communication phenomenon we call Communication Intelligence in online interactions. We create a theory about communication intelligence that measures participants’ ten high-order …


Personality Traits And Motivations For Usage Of Online Social Network Sites Among College Freshmen, Jason Paul Rieger Dec 2013

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 …