Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Social Media Usage And Its Effect On Quality Of Adolescent Social Relationships, Sadie Saltzman

Sociology Senior Seminar Papers

Does the number of social media platforms that an adolescent uses have an effect on the quality of their social relationships? As social media continues to grow and evolve, sociologists have begun to explore its effect on an individual’s everyday life. I propose that the more social media platforms that an adolescent uses, the more they will experience negative effects on their social relationships. Using survey data from 786 respondents living in the United States, ages 13 to 17 and collected by the Pew Research Center in 2014 and 2015, regression analyses were conducted to determine the relationship between ...

Review: Crash Course In Media Literacy, Faith Rogow Ph.D.

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Forced by its format to distill a subject area’s central tenets into just a few sessions, a “crash course” should be an excellent place to uncover the essential elements of a topic or field. Viewed through that lens, Complexly’s YouTube offering, “Crash Course in Media Literacy,” provides an illuminating, if sometimes confounding opportunity for reflection.

A Case For The Common Good: How Training In Faith-Based Media Literacy Helped Teachers Address Social Justice Issues In The Classroom, Maria Rosalia Tenorio De Azevedo

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This case study reveals how a faith-based initiative offering structured teacher training in media literacy. The program is centered in Catholic Social Teaching, encouraging the use of critical media literacy in the classroom to aid the learning of social justice issues. The critical literacy of Paulo Freire serves as theoretical framework to help answer the research question: How has a teacher training program in faith-based media literacy influenced teachers’ practice when addressing social justice issues in the classroom? This case study relates the accounts of a middle school teacher, a high school teacher, and a college professor, graduates of the ...

Media Literacy And American Education: An Exploration With Détournement, Seth D. French, Jacob Campbell

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Many competing voices are speaking about the state of American education and how it should be reformed in the best interest of students. Topics such as teachers unions, charter schools, and standardized tests are at the center of many of these discussions. How do we decipher what to believe amid such conflicting perspectives concerning these topics and others like them? To progress American education in a direction that benefits students and democratic society, today’s educational stakeholders must adopt a critical stance in their evaluation of issues at the center of American education; lessons that encourage the development of critical ...

Developing Student Critical Consciousness: Twitter As A Tool To Apply Critical Literacy In The English Classroom, Joshua P. Kunnath, Arika Jackson

Journal of Media Literacy Education

As young people today are flooded with information from a multitude of sources, they must be prepared to perceive the potentially oppressive and nefarious nature of many texts. Critical literacy is a theory and strategy that allows young people, along with people of all ages, to achieve just this; however, teachers often experience difficulties implementing and guiding students in taking crucial action steps in the classroom. This exploratory action research case study was conducted to address these concerns, as a teacher utilized Twitter to implement critical literacy and guide 32 ethnically diverse eleventh grade students in applying critical literacy in ...

Critical Awareness Of Media And Teacher Education: An Experience With Colombian Elt Pre-Service Teachers, Camilo Dominguez

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Media texts are exponentially displayed in physical and virtual public spaces and their impact on humanity is unimaginable. Teachers of all fields face the challenge and the responsibility to educate sensitive humans able to critically consume or produce media messages. English language teachers are no exception. In this paper, the author describes a qualitative research study exploring how a group of Colombian pre-service English teachers developed critical awareness of media as they deconstructed advertisements displayed in the public spaces of their rather rural communities. Findings, conclusions, implications for teacher education, and new questions for further research are presented.

Preparing Pre-Service Teachers To Teach Media Literacy: A Response To “Fake News”, Todd S. Cherner, Kristal Curry

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The call to integrate media literacy into public education is not new. However, with the rise of “fake news” and sensationalism along with technology’s ever-growing role in society, media literacy offers teachers and students a set of skills to analyze, critique, and respond to the information that appears before them in the digital texts they read, the television shows they watch, and their social media feeds. As multiple case studies have identified ways teachers are already blending media literacy into their instruction, this case study used a lesson plan assignment coupled with a survey to analyze how pre-service teachers ...

Building Heroes: Collegiate Esports, Character Formation, And Community Building, Cesar Iza Castillo Jr

Media Studies Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the nascent collegiate esports industry and the communities that have formed along with it. Specifically, the thesis aims to answer the questions of what the skills one can acquire through esports are, what is the nature of such communities, and how notions of masculine identity are formed through them. These questions were answered by acquiring qualitative data through participant observation and in-depth interviews of an esports team at the University of Colorado Boulder. There are three levels to the results. First, esports provide a cultural battleground in which the notions of what ...

Views Of Climate Change: How The News Influences Climate Change Denial In Rural America., Anna Scott

Journalism Undergraduate Honors Theses

Climate scientists believe that humanity has just about twelve years to solve climate change. As the second largest polluter in the world, this leaves the United States in a position of power and global responsibility. However, the United States has seen a rise in climate change denial since the late 1980s, when scientists discovered what the media dubbed an “ozone hole.” Previous research suggests that some abstract messaging on climate change in the media — as well as polarized news choice, objectification of natural phenomena and growing distrust in mainstream news — is in part responsible for growing skepticism about the validity ...

Investigating Latino Stereotypes And Identification In One Day At A Time: A Rhetorical Criticism Of Latino Representations In Entertainment Media, Hannah Stewart

Communication Undergraduate Honors Theses

Since television has had the ability to entertain, it has also had the ability to persuade us about how we ought to perceive the world. To do so, television has long relied on stereotypes, whether they are of gender, race, or class, and research across media and communication disciplines have identified that representations of these marginalized groups reinforce stereotypes’ existence in and out of television. The purposes of this analysis are to examine stereotypical narratives surrounding Latinos and the Latino experience in America, as well as to understand how these stereotypes are challenged. Using a combination of narrative and ideological ...

Virtual Lucidity: A Media Archaeology Of Dream Hacking Wearables, Aleena Chia

communication +1

In 2014, engineers and entrepreneurs began meeting up in San Francisco to explore how virtual reality and lucid dreaming headsets using electroencephalography and other kinds of biofeedback could stimulate altered mental states. They called these practices “consciousness hacking” and referred to research, financing, and design efforts around these wearables as a movement. Unlike Quantified Self practitioners who combine bodily self-tracking and population analytics to optimize health and productivity, these hackers prod their bodies to gain immediacy to their consciousness. By turning perception inward, they attempt to displace the mediation of technologies. They believe hacking the mind through data-driven stimulation can ...

A Game Industry Beyond Diversity: Systemic Barriers To Participation In South Korea, Florence M. Chee

Florence Chee

Digital gaming has become a prominent part of mainstream culture. However, as one may observe in the public exhibitions of this form of play, the multitude of reasons for participation in the games industry are especially divided along gender lines. This paper is an analysis of themes emerging from the critical ethnographic examination of South Korea’s1 online game culture that, upon closer and iterative analyses, point to additional socioeconomic complications and systemic barriers to women’s equitable participation in the game development and production. Using South Korea’s national context as a point of reference, the findings from this ...

A Commentary On Narrative Platforms, Cinematic Universes, And Consumers Formerly Known As The Audience, Andreas Treske, Aras Ozgun

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

No abstract provided.

The Unfree Space Of Play: Emergence And Control In The Videogame And The Platform, Logan Brown

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

This article attempts to understand the economic and informatic ramifications of the convergence between increasingly connective games and massive online platforms by considering recent trends in both that center around designing for emergence. Scholarship on emergence as a property of games overwhelmingly treats emergent design as a liberating force that privileges player agency in a virtual space. Yet, as games fuse with surrounding platform ecosystems like Steam, Facebook, and Google, those emergent behaviors are subject to vast systems of inscription that analyze user behavior in order to reshape the free space of emergence and extract greater social and financial capital ...

Poster: Image Disguising For Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning, Sagar Sharma, Keke Chen

Keke Chen

No abstract provided.

Towards Practical Privacy-Preserving Analytics For Iot And Cloud Based Healthcare Systems, Sagar Sharma, Keke Chen, Amit P. Sheth

Keke Chen

Modern healthcare systems now rely on advanced computing methods and technologies, such as IoT devices and clouds, to collect and analyze personal health data at unprecedented scale and depth. Patients, doctors, healthcare providers, and researchers depend on analytical models derived from such data sources to remotely monitor patients, early-diagnose diseases, and find personalized treatments and medications. However, without appropriate privacy protection, conducting data analytics becomes a source of privacy nightmare. In this paper, we present the research challenges in developing practical privacy-preserving analytics in healthcare information systems. The study is based on kHealth - a personalized digital healthcare information system that ...

Poster: Privacy-Preserving Boosting With Random Linear Classifiers, Sagar Sharma, Keke Chen

Keke Chen

We propose SecureBoost, a privacy-preserving predictive modeling framework, that allows service providers (SPs) to build powerful boosting models over encrypted or randomly masked user submit- ted data. SecureBoost uses random linear classifiers (RLCs) as the base classifiers. A Cryptographic Service Provider (CSP) manages keys and assists the SP’s processing to reduce the complexity of the protocol constructions. The SP learns only the base models (i.e., RLCs) and the CSP learns only the weights of the base models and a limited leakage function. This separated parameter holding avoids any party from abusing the final model or conducting model-based attacks ...

Augmented Personalized Health: Using Semantically Integrated Multimodal Data For Patient Empowered Health Management Strategies, Amit P. Sheth, Hong Y. Yip, Utkarshani Jaimini, Dipesh Kadariya, Vaikunth Sridharan, R. Venkataramanan, Tanvi Banerjee, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Maninder Kalra

Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Healthcare as we know it is in the process of going through a massive change from:

1. Episodic to continuous

2. Disease-focused to wellness and quality of life focused

3. Clinic-centric to anywhere a patient is

4. Clinician controlled to patient empowered

5. Being driven by limited data to 360-degree, multimodal personal-public-population physical-cyber-social big data-driven URL: https://mhealth.md2k.org/2018-tech-showcase-home

Personalized Prediction Of Suicide Risk For Web-Based Intervention, Amanuel Alambo, Manas Gaur, Ugur Kursuncu, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Jeremiah Schumm, Jyotishman Pathak, Amit P. Sheth

Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Across the United States, suicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged between 15 and 34, and younger people are more prone to mental health problems, suicidal thoughts, and behaviors. For instance, 80% of patients with Borderline Personality Disorder have suicide-related behaviors, and between 4-9% of them commit suicide. Moreover, the social stigma associated with mental health issues and suicide deter patients from sharing their experiences directly with others. In such a situation, social media that provides a free and open forum for voluntary expression can provide insights into suicide ideation and self-destructive behavior.

Reddit is a ...

"What's Ur Type?" Contextualized Classification Of User Types In Marijuana-Related Communications Using Compositional Multiview Embedding, Ugur Kursuncu, Manas Gaur, Usha Lokala, Anurag Illendula, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Raminta Daniulaityte, Amit P. Sheth, Budak Arpinar

Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

With 93% of pro-marijuana population in US favoring legalization of medical marijuana, high expectations of a greater return for Marijuana stocks, and public actively sharing information about medical, recreational and business aspects related to marijuana, it is no surprise that marijuana culture is thriving on Twitter. After the legalization of marijuana for recreational and medical purposes in 29 states, there has been a dramatic increase in the volume of drug-related communication on Twitter. Specifically, Twitter accounts have been established for promotional and informational purposes, some prominent among them being American Ganja, Medical Marijuana Exchange, and Cannabis Now. Identification and characterization ...