Communication Commons^™

Who Posts Selfies And Why?: Personality, Attachment Style, And Mentalization As Predictors Of Selfie Posting On Social Media, Nancy Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the phenomenon of selfie posting on social media and its relationship to narcissism, the Dark Triad, impulsivity, attachment style, rejection sensitivity, and reflective functioning. The sample was made up of 499 participants who completed an online survey consisting of personality measures and open- and closed-ended questions about selfie posting behavior. Data were analyzed using a negative binomial regression model.

Results: The study found that individuals with high levels of the Dark Triad trait of psychopathy post more selfies on social media than do individuals with low levels of the trait. The Dark Triad trait of narcissism was …

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 …

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

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

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, technical, and computerized …

Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …

Merchandise, Promotion, And Accessibility: Keith Haring’S Pop Shop, Amy L. Raffel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the peak of his career in New York, Keith Haring took his highly recognizable artistic style and distributed it in the form of merchandise in his Pop Shop, established in 1986. Stemming from his early work displayed on the New York streets, directly within public space, and his explorations into mass media strategies, he learned he could make his work accessible to new audiences outside contemporary art institutions and art circles. He translated his work across several surfaces: from subways or canvases, to everyday functional merchandise, such as buttons, t-shirts, and bags sold in his shop. Responding to a …

Capturing The Attention Of Caregivers: Variability In Infant Vocalizations, Catharine A. Castelluccio De Diesbach

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The effect of variability in infant vocalizations on potential caregivers’ heart rate variability (HRV), facial expressions, and subjective ratings on emotional reactions and desire to approach the baby was examined in an evolutionary context. Recordings of non-canonical, canonical, fussing, and crying vocalizations were utilized to elicit physiological and self-reported reactions from sixty participants. Breastfeeding mothers, non-mothers at high estradiol point in menstrual cycle, non-mothers at low estradiol point in menstrual cycle, fathers, and non-fathers were included in the study. Participants wore Polar RS800 heart rate monitors, were video recorded for facial expression analysis, and filled out 11 point self-rating forms …

Thiscollegestory.Com: How Interactive Writing Media Influenced The Way First-Year Students Made Sense Of Their College Transition, Philip Kreniske

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on insights from Bakhtin (1986) that demonstrated the significance of writing as an interaction, and building on recent developments in narrative analysis that offer insights into narrator’s sense making processes (Daiute, 2014; Lucic, 2013); this research explores how freshmen in an educational opportunity program used interactive writing media to make sense of their transition to college. The exploration involved three main questions and each question concerns students’ development over time:

• First, did college students’ writing in two different media (blogs and word-processed text) differ and did these differences change over time?
• Second, how did the narrators and audience interact …

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …

Selling National Security: Journalism, Political Actors, And The Marketing Of Counterterrorism Policy, Nicole M. Napolitano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The social construction of terrorism in the public sphere naturally limits and directs logical policy options. In the United States, media are a primary vehicle for the construction of social problems and accompanying policy solutions, as much of public discourse takes place in media narratives. News media play a major part in political communication, both between government and governed as well as among different segments of government.

Social construction in media is shaped by journalistic values and preferences, occurs within an active and influential policy process, and is shaped by powerful policy actors. Government-based policy actors, or governmental policy entrepreneurs, …

Development Of A Patient-Centered Health Literacy Toolkit For Audiology And Hearing Loss (The 'Hh Lit Kit'), Jennifer L. Gilligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Patient-Centered Health Literacy Toolkit for Audiology & Hearing Loss (‘HH Lit Kit’) represents four years of inquiry into health literacy and Patient-Centered Care (PCC) in audiology. While awareness of health literacy continues to gain momentum in medicine and public health, there is a paucity of information on PCC and health literacy in audiology.

Low health literacy is linked to poorer health and poorer quality of life. Patients with hearing loss are at high risk for low health literacy. This presents a major concern because hearing loss affects the way information is processed, retained, and applied. Gaps have been identified …

Effect Of An Internet-Based Education Program On Self-Care Agency In People Living With Human Immunodeficiency Virus, Darcel M. Reyes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Both low health literacy and insufficient electronic health literacy (ehealth) impede access to reliable internet health information for people living with chronic illnesses such as HIV/AIDS. Use of reliable internet health information has been shown to improve self-care through increased understanding of symptoms, disease processes, and improvements in adherence with treatment plans.

This study examined the effectiveness of two interventions that taught people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWH) how to recognize reliable internet based HIV health information. Orem’s Self-Care Theory was the framework for this quasi-experimental study that used a non-equivalent two-group design with two experimental interventions (MEDLINE and E-HELP). Participants …

Queering By Example: Sex Education In The Age Of Vlogging, Zoe M. Simpson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The 1990s saw the rise of third wave feminism, queer theory and the digital age. This paper looks at how the three come together in YouTube video bloggers’ promotion of queer sex-positive ideology. Sex positivism is the belief that all safe, consensual sex is healthy, while queer theory emphasizes the diversity and instability of sex and gender identities. YouTube vloggers engaged in life-streaming profit from the entertainment value of revealing personal sexual information while framing their sexual revelations as healthy, shame-free sex positivism. In doing so, they also put their unique and sometimes changing sexualities on public display, in effect …

A Systematic Review Of Dual-Sensory Impairment In Older Adults, Abby F. Malawer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The elderly population (ages 65 years and older) in the United States is estimated to double between 2000 and 2030 to approximately 72 million people. Among this population, sensory impairment is a chronic disability. The combination of both hearing and vision impairment, referred to as dual-sensory impairment (DSI) is a chronic condition on the rise. The prevalence of DSI ranges from a low of 1.6% to as high as 22.5% depending on the population (Appollonio et al., 1995). Higher prevalence rates tend to emerge in populations receiving rehabilitative and hospital care. DSI impacts independent physical function and verbal communication, along …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

A Light In The Darkness: Argentinian Photography During The Military Dictatorship (1976-1983), Ana Tallone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 2006, on the thirtieth anniversary of the military coup that brought Argentinian democracy to a halt, a group of photojournalists put together an outstanding exhibition of images from the dictatorship. This dissertation critically engages with the most enduring photojournalistic works produced during this period and featured in the landmark retrospective. By researching the historical context of these photographs, I aim to underscore the important contributions photojournalists made not only during the dictatorship, but also in its immediate aftermath, when the most iconic images were republished in printed publications including newspapers, magazines and books. As a starting point, I review …

Tales Of Language Loss And Language Maintenance: Elicited Ancestral Language Use In Lazuri-Turkish And Turkish-German Caregiver-Child Dyads During Structured Play, Peri Ozlem Yuksel-Sokmen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In language contact situations parents who grew up acquiring their ancestral language (AL) often have to make choices about the fate of AL transmission by negotiating resources and beliefs about what is best for their children's future. Their language practices contribute to AL loss or maintenance, affecting developmental pathways for bilingualism. The situation faced by speakers of Lazuri -- a Grade 2, severely endangered South Caucasian language that is no longer used in child-directed speech illustrates a global phenomenon of rapid language loss within indigenous communities due to linguistic assimilation to a dominant language (DL). AL loss is associated with …

Variability, Stability, And Flexibility In The Speech Kinematics And Acoustics Of Adults Who Do And Do Not Stutter, Eric S. Jackson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is well known that people who do and do not stutter produce speech differently, at least some of the time, even when perceived as fluent. One way that investigators have assessed these differences is by measuring variability, or the inconsistency of repeated speech movements. Variability in speech has typically been quantified using linear analysis techniques (e.g., measures of central tendency), and results have indicated that people who stutter produce speech that is (sometimes) characterized by increased variability. However, variability is a complex phenomenon, one that cannot be assessed by linear methods alone. This dissertation employs linear and nonlinear analysis …

Modernity, Parallel Editing, And The Flâneuse: Examining The White Slave Narrative In Early And Contemporary American Cinema, Alex W. Bordino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores cinema and the conceptual presence of Charles Baudelaire's nineteenth century flâneur; in particular, it examines how this modernist notion relates to cinematic technique and issues associated with female spectatorship through an analysis of the white slave genre in both early and contemporary American cinema. Seven early films are examined: How They Do Things on the Bowery (Porter, 1903), The Boy Detective, or The Abductors Foiled (McCutcheon, 1908), The Fatal Hour (Griffith, 1908), The Miser's Heart (Griffith, 1911), The Muskateers of Pig Alley (Griffith, 1911), The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (Beal, 1913), and Traffic in Souls …

Network Modeling Of The Mental Lexicon: Phonological Links Within And Between Communities, Jennifer Anne Gerometta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Graph theory is a branch of mathematics that is used to study networks. Recently, graph theoretic techniques have been embraced by the cognitive sciences, and used to study the developing lexicon, semantic memory, and first and second language organization (Carlson,et al., 2011, Kennet et al., 2011, Wilks & Meara, 2002, Zareva, 2007) Graph theory can give valuable insight into the underlying phonological structure of language. Studying phonological networks contributes to our understanding of how the mental lexicon develops, and results of experimental studies on lexical processing can be used to test whether the proposed network structure is plausible. The goal …

The People Behind The Presidential Bully Pulpit, Kara Susan Alaimo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

"The People Behind the Presidential Bully Pulpit" argues that civil servants best serve the interests of both the President of the United States and the American people as public affairs officers in the Department of the Treasury. Using interviews conducted with political appointees who served as Treasury spokespeople during the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, civil servants who served in public affairs for the Treasury, and Treasury reporters who interacted frequently with the government officials, the study finds that civil servants better advance the goals of the President in the press than the political appointees personally …

Occupy Wall Street's Challenge To An American Public Transcript, Christopher Neville Leary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the rhetoric and discourses of the anti-corporate movement Occupy Wall Street, using frameworks from political ethnography and critical discourse analysis to offer a thick, triangulated description of a single event, Occupy Wall Street's occupation of Zuccotti Park. The study shows how Occupy achieved a disturbing positionality relative to the forces which routinely dominate public discourse and proposes that Occupy's encampment was politically intolerable to the status quo because the movement held the potential to consolidate critical thought and action. Because the "soft" means of re-capturing public consent were weak in 2011 because of the 2008 economic collapse, …

Infrastructure, Production, And Archive: American And Japanese Video Art Production Of 1960s And 1970s, Ann Atsuko Adachi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Focusing a study on the infrastructure of artistic production and maintenance opens a space in which to examine the relationship between artistic inspiration and knowledge making, the occurrences and the writing of its history. In the case of the comparative study of the emergence of Japanese and American video art, common artistic technique employed may indicate motivations derived from the technical possibility of the video medium, while the study of infrastructure demonstrates how large-scale funding, formation of archives, the establishment of systems of distribution and channels of education affect the emergence and development of video art as a genre. This …

The Kids Are All Right Online: Teen Girls' Experiences With Self-Presentation, Impression Management & Aggression On Facebook, Alison Michelle Hill

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Online social network participation is widespread among American adolescents. Prolific creators, consumers and curators of content, they write themselves into being (boyd, 2007) on social network sites like Facebook. Drawing on Erving Goffman's study of symbolic interaction in the form of dramaturgical perspective and The Third Person Effect, this research explores how young women ages 14-17 craft their self-presentations, engage in impression management, and experience aggression and bullying on Facebook. I propose that the majority of this age cohort craft online self-presentations that are consistent with their offline selves, yet they believe that other girls their age use their profiles …

Women's Experiences Of Privacy, Publicness And Place In Mediated Space, Nelida Quintero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This mixed-method study explored the experiences and understandings of the notions of privacy, publicness and place in mediated space among women who use the internet daily. Mediated space is experienced at the intersection of mass media, including the internet, and the physical environment. In this two-phased study, fourteen women were interviewed and sixty-one completed an online survey. Participants were asked about the physical places they preferred and the activities they undertook, whether for paid work, domestic work or entertainment, such as sending e-mails and gathering information, posting or reading posts on social network sites, shopping, banking, web browsing, watching TV …

Gentle Introduction Resource, James Anderson Laird Evans

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Gentle Introduciton Resource (GIR) is an open-access web application that offers digital humanities researchers a malleable platform with which they can crowdsource technical material. Such material often poses challenges to the traditional humanities researcher when trying to implement digital layers to his or her research. The Gentle Introduction Resource (GIR) is an open-access web application designed to allow a single classroom or single institution to crowdsource technical information/instruction filtering out the influence of rhetorical analysis. It is written in the Ruby language on the Rails web framework. Though a GIR instance can be invoked to crowdsource primarily web-based information …

Coming Of Age During The Sixties: A Narration Of Lives Through Music And Battle, Jennifer L. Oliveri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis has been written based on my retrieved memory, as it concentrates on autobiographical memories and the lives of two politically opposing men, from the American sixties. I discuss the effect of music and the war in Vietnam as it was experienced by these men--a moderately angry veteran and a "hippie." I examine how their stories were "retold" to me, which in turn created new memories. This is a study in the memory of memories.

An Examination Of Western Representation Of The Muslim Brotherhood Through Various Media Outlets, Popular Literature And How Has Recent History And Outside Influences Affected The Viewpoint Presented To The Public?, Lynn Andrew Perkins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In depth study of Western media's coverage of the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. Not only using key events between the West/ United States and the Middle East over the last 40 years to show how current events are reported but also investigating where and how the media receives their information to report. The outside and internal influences put upon western media are also under investigation in this paper and how those influences insure that their own interests supersede that of complete and accurate reporting …

Backward C Inside A Circle: Free Culture In Zines, Alycia Sellie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although zines made today utilize many forms of antiquated technologies such as the typewriter and the photocopier in their construction, they are a part of contemporary tinkering with intellectual property. This thesis examines free culture as it has been expressed in self-published zines made in the last thirty-five years. It looks at the licenses found in zines as conversations between a zine maker and a zine reader. Beyond just the legal implications, the cultural and ethical effects of licensing a zine are explored.

The internet is not the only place where people have played with intellectual property and toyed with …