Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Internet Studies: Past, Present And Future Directions By Panayiota Tsatsou [Book Review], Marilyn Mitchell

Marilyn Mitchell

Book Review: Tsatsou Panayiota , Internet Studies: Past, Present and Future Directions. Farnham: Ashgate Pubishing, 2014; 279 pp. ISBN: 9781409446415, AUD$245.95. Extract: Panayiota Tsatsou’s Internet Studies: Past, Present and Future Directions is an ambitious work that reviews two decades of research on the Internet. Tsatsou’s goals were to provide an improved understanding of the nature of the Internet, explain how researchers have historically approached and studied the Internet and consider how the Internet’s structures and functions relate to its use in individual and social settings. This is a large undertaking and while the author acknowledges the ...

Open Source Micro Diplomas: New Credentials For New Learning, Jack F. Powers

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The standard model for college in America—a four-year bachelor’s degree that teaches critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and written communication skills—is unaffordable and unattainable for most Americans. Only about a third of citizens aged 25 and over have achieved a baccalaureate degree or better. Two-thirds are left behind in precarious jobs that pay substantially less and that are losing ground. Everyone from politicians to parents repeats the mantra of “college for all”, but the reality is more like “college for the socio-economically gifted.”

At the same time, the modern world of work is evolving into a more complex ...

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

All Graduate Works by Year: 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 ...

Hyper Reality

SIGNED: The Magazine of The Hong Kong Design Institute

Advancements in camera technology have the potential to break down the barriers between actors and their audience, if not breaking the fourth wall, at least peering over the top of it. But does such new technology really benefit storytelling, or is it just spectacle for its own sake?

#Mobilephotonow: Two Art Worlds, One Hashtag, Jodi Kushins

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In the winter of 2015, the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) co-curated an exhibition with the loose-knit mobile photography collective known as JJ Community. #MobilePhotoNow included images created in response to a series of prompts and shared on the photo sharing and social networking application Instagram®. The exhibition reflected a community-based curatorial practice (Keys & Ballengee-Morris, 2001) demonstrating new possibilities for participatory art and culture in the age of social media. This portrait of how the project came to be is presented as an example of how art world factions might be brought together, in both virtual and real spaces, through ...

Do Marketing Strategies Impact Condom Sales In Uganda?, Meyhar Mohammed

Master's Theses

What attracts people to buy condoms? HIV/AIDS remain one of the biggest health dangers of the world, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. A lot of efforts have been pursued in the past two decades to drastically reduce prevalence of HIV and increase awareness about preventive mechanisms. In order to prevent relapse of success achieved so far, it is important to recognize transformation of consumer behavior due to growth in social networks, education and awareness over time. There are a lot of behavioral triggers captured by social marketing interventions in the field of public health. In an attempt to investigate the ...

What Qualifies As Crisis Coverage & Why Does It Matter?: Establishing Characteristics Of Crisis Reporting Using 2015 Terror Attacks In Paris, Brooklynn L. Gray

Honors Theses AY 16/17

The November 13, 2015 Paris attacks serve as a recent and relevant example of the different approaches news and crisis-reporting take. Three main aspects serve as dominant features in crisis reporting: timeliness, authority, and the level of the crisis (often death toll or infrastructure damage). To measure credibility, a content analysis tracked these features within a sample of online articles published by BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), NPR (National Public Radio), and The New York Times. A randomly selected 10% of the articles came from the ProQuest News database and NPR’s website. The code tracked presence and absence of characteristics ...

Assistive Technology For The Cognitively Impaired: A Study Of Literacy, Comprehension, And The Print Publishing Industry, Amanda Matteo

Student Research Symposium

This paper explores how the print publishing industry has developed to include and assist children with cognitive impairments. It analyzes the ways in which assistive technology and the digital market (i.e. ebooks) have promoted reading comprehension amongst this population, and discusses what further developments are in the works in regards to cognitive reading enhancements. Finally, it explores the areas in which this development is still limited and provides potential, attainable solutions.

An Exploratory Study Of The Impact Of Language On The Transition And Success Of Students In Their First College Year, Kathryn B. Wilhite

Masters of Science in First Year Studies

ABSTRACT

In a time where colleges and universities are taking strides to consider their communication strategies with incoming students there appears to be a lack of attention on the language within communication pieces and what messages that language conveys to students. This study sought to examine this language through inductive analysis of four research questions which explored what the communication pieces are, what relationship they build, the discourse language present, and the strategies of empowerment language within the communication pieces distributed to all incoming first-year students at a large, public comprehensive four-year university in the Southeastern United States. Research on ...

Media Constructed Retirement Articles Of Professional Baseball Players, Kevin T. Berge

Sport Management Undergraduate

The career of an athlete may shape the narrative that the media uses when writing articles on that player when they retire. Many people fail to understand how the media constructs articles the way they do on Major League Baseball (MLB) players upon retirement. This research study used a mixed method approach to show how the media covers certain professional MLB players when they retire. The researcher counted how many times chosen variables were mentioned in two different articles of sixteen retired MLB players, and then extracted quotes from those articles. This study found that superstar pitchers and superstar hitters ...

In A World Where We Are Constantly Connected, How Connected Are We?, Samantha Valenza

Senior Honors Projects

Social media in today’s world is common amongst millennials (trend-setting young adults born 1980-2002) as a source of news and networking. Social media has yielded benefits, including the ability to connect with geographically dispersed, like-minded individuals for entertainment, employment opportunities, or to engage in activism. However, the popularity of social media, as well as the frequency of its use, raises questions about its effects on our lifestyles, habits, and interpersonal relationships. Despite its benefits, social media usage may have a darker side. Extreme cases involving addiction, fake news, identity theft, cyber-bullying, and other criminal activities have received some attention ...

Project Anonymous: When Anonymity Meets Artwork, Robert J. Riglietti

Senior Honors Projects

In an attempt to build a new type of even playing field for artists, Kira Wencek and I developed an anonymous art sharing web app under the moniker of Project Anonymous. In an attempt to mitigate the drawbacks of current online avenues for creative content sharing, the app addresses privacy issues, visibility issues, and external artist influence. As the theorist of the group, using research from Manuel Castelles, Danah Boyd, and Jaron Lanier, I assisted in shaping the functionality and oversaw the general direction of the application. This assisted me in theorizing the hypothetical outcomes and social impacts that the ...

Information Sharing, Transparency, And E-Governance Among County Government Offices In Southeastern Michigan, Lawrence Bosek

All NMU Master's Theses

The Internet has given rise to the availability of information at our fingertips. While the public, particularly consumers, are more commonly described as being the leading users and beneficiaries of electronic information services, businesses and governments are also players in the arena for sharing official information. Information can be easily stored on Internet websites for the public, businesses, and other governmental offices to search and peruse when needed. This study examined the ease of locating county governmental information, such as contact information for public officials and financial reports, and surveyed elected county officials for purposes of identifying how information is ...

It Brings Me Back: A Look At Personally Collected Musical Memories And Their Kinetic Typographical Representation, Kathryn Galley

Honors College

This project examines personal accounts of music related memories. In January of 2017, an initial survey was launched to reach out into the University of Maine community which asked participants to recount specific music related memories. After receiving 107 responses, the survey was closed in February of 2017. The data was examined and selected from the responses, a list of 30 participants were selected, each with differing life experiences, song choices and well-rounded responses necessary for a successful multimedia portrayal. A total of 17 interviews from this list of 30 were conducted on the University of Maine campus, each session ...

Creating A Future With Female Coders; Supporting Women Through Community, Ruth Leopold

Honors College

In the last two decades, the proportion of women earning bachelor’s degrees in computer sciences has declined from 28% to 18% (NSF/NCSES 2015c), even though the proportion of freshmen women declaring a computer sciences major when first enrolled in a 4-year institution has remained stable (at about 20% in recent years)” (NSF, Retention of Women in Computer Science). My undergraduate capstone aims to lessen the amount of women dropping out of computing fields by creating a sense of community. The key components and benefits of community that I targeted were peer support, shared experience, confidence and interest. I ...

Social Relevance And Innovation In Public Radio, Malak Habbak

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

Since its founding, National Public Radio has been denied steady funding by the government and has therefore been focused and reliant on its audience for funding. This study explores National Public Radio’s (NPR) efforts to appeal to audiences by staying relevant and innovative in the face of changing technology and new media. The study content analyzes five years of news media coverage of NPR stations for news values and key messages. Out of 1,853 articles that were analyzed, about 23 percent were related to the stations’ efforts to remain socially relevant and innovative. Those articles were then examined ...

How Facebook Has Transformed Journalism, Sarah E. Rodriguez

Senior Honors Theses

Journalists use Facebook as a tool to distribute information to the public. Over recent years, Facebook with its updated features has changed the way journalists interact with readers and sources. Facebook Live and Instant Articles have increased reader engagement. Journalists use crowdsourcing and conversationally-toned posts to gather information and connect with readers on a personal level. The journalistic process has accelerated since the addition of Facebook because news is disseminated almost instantaneously. Yet the rise in fake news challenges journalists to effectively use Facebook as a platform for news dissemination. Facebook is using fact checkers and increased awareness to fight ...

When One Is Sick And Two Need Help: Caregivers’ Perspectives On The Negative Consequences Of Caring, Ilja Ormel, Susan Law, Courtney Abbott, Mark Yaffe, Marc Saint-Cyr, Kerry Kuluski, Debbie Josephson, Ann C. Macaulay

Patient Experience Journal

Informal or family caregivers contribute significantly to individual care, and to the Canadian healthcare system, yet receive limited support from governments, institutions, and healthcare professionals in recognition of their role, or in response to their health and social care needs – often due to the negative consequences of caregiving. Learning about the diversity of others’ experiences can positively influence personal decision-making, reduce feelings of isolation, as well as promote adjustment to a personal situation. For caregivers, however, few resources exist that provide reliable information on others’ experiences. We collected the narratives of caregivers’ experiences of caring for someone with a chronic ...

From Code To Discourse: Social Media And Linkage Mechanisms In Deliberative Systems, Benjamin A. Lyons

Journal of Public Deliberation

Scholars have increasingly examined less formal conceptions of public deliberation, coinciding with a shift to the deliberative systems approach. However, few have grappled with how, or how well, discussions in distributed spaces connect to one another. Those who have theorized about such “linkage” have done so in an unsatisfactorily broad manner (Parkisnon, 2016). This article addresses this gap in the context of social media by reviewing the literature on platforms’ technical features and emergent discursive forms, and considering the capacity for these to link flows of deliberation as they evolve online and approach empowered spaces. Avenues for future research are ...

Divided We Fall: A Look Into American Crime Story: The People V. O.J. Simpson And How The Media Creates Reality, Angela G. Flanagan

SCOM Undergraduate Research Conference

This event is an undergraduate research conference for undergraduates in the School of Communications at James Madison University.