1,720,978 research outputs found
#RIP: Social Media and the Changing Experience of Life and Death
No full textThe mediated closeness experienced by social media users is built on the ongoing accumulation of personal information by corporate owned social media platforms. Each user’s digital footprint becomes more intricate as this collection continues across their life’s procession, leaving something behind after they die. Social media platforms have become intimately insinuated into life and finally, into death. These haphazard archives were never created with death or grief in mind. But users die, and their friends and family use social media to grieve; death isn’t something a platform or its users can avoid. This thesis examines the ways that death and grief are experienced and how social media is facilitating and changing that process. The study approaches social media and death historically, discursively, and economically. It discusses the history of mediated death, the experience of grief over social media, and the political economy of the socially mediated dead
Are You Still Watching: An Overview of Streaming in India
Get PDFThe rise of the internet and digital technologies in the last three decades has transformed how individuals and societies consume, and make sense of, media. Digital penetration affects almost every aspect of social life, including the form, content and affordances offered by transnational media conglomerates. The post-2000s shift from traditional broadcasting to digital streaming has raised a new set of questions about contemporary media technologies. This study, rooted in the theoretical framework of global media, political economy and cultural studies, enhances the existing scholarship around the concepts of hybridity and glocalization by analyzing the effects of the relatively new, dynamic technology of digital streaming in a rapidly digitizing economy of India. I will concurrently analyze the factors behind the global leader Netflix’s relative struggles, and the emergence of Disney+Hotstar and JioCinema as the domestic leader in India. The present investigation argues that in the arena of global media, conglomerates, technologies, platforms need to localize their message, agendas, ideology for effective consumption, interpretation and adoption
Network Frontier: Reframing Exploration and Exploitation in Internet Rhetoric
No full textThe Internet is a product of the organizational structure of the Office of Science and Research Development, scientific corporate liberalism of Vannevar Bush's post-WWII policies, the process-oriented rhetoric in Science: The Endless Frontier, and Kennedy's commitment to the New Frontier. This thesis first examines the network infrastructure and then the Web in succession, following the common use of the metaphor, which moved from the rhetoric of science in the 1940s to a metaphor that financially and ideologically supported the Pentagon's Advanced Research Project Agency infrastructure in the 1960s and then finally created the value-laden features of the Internet, cyberspace, and its culture in the 1990s. This thesis connects the stages of development of the Internet to uses of the frontier in political rhetoric
Network of Knowledge: Wikipedia as a Sociotechnical System of Intelligence
No full textThe purpose of this study was to explore the codependencies of the social and technical structures that yield Wikipedia the website and Wikipedia the community. In doing so, the research investigated the implications of such a sociotechnical system for the maintenance of the project and the emergence of collective intelligence. Using a theoretical framework informed by digital media studies, science and technology studies, and the political economy of communication, this study examined the material and ideological conditions in which Wikipedia has developed. The study's guiding research questions addressed the nature of Wikipedia's sociotechnical system and potential for collective intelligence, as well as the historical development of the project's technical infrastructure and the state of its technology-assisted collaboration.
A mainly qualitative multi-method research approach was employed, including document analysis, semi-structured interviewing, and social network analysis. A plethora of documents were carefully selected and examined to explore how and why decisions were made, policies implemented, and technologies adopted on the site. Additionally, 45 interviews were conducted with members of Wikipedia's technical community to understand the relationships between social and technical aspects of the project and the motivations of programmers who contribute automated tools. Finally, social network measures and visualizations were used to interrogate notions of collaboration and make more transparent the centrality of technology to the content creation process.
The study revealed that Wikipedia's technical development has been shaped by the dueling ideologies of the open-source software movement and postindustrial capitalism. Its sociotechnical system features the complex collaboration of human contributors, automated programs, social bureaucracy, and technical protocol, each of which conditions the existence and meaning of the others. In addition, the activity on Wikipedia fits established models of collective intelligence and suggests the emergence of a cyberculture, or culturally informed shared intelligence, unique to the digital media context. Software robots (bots) are central actors in this system and are explored in detail throughout this research
A MEDIA GENEALOGY OF THE JAPANESE MOBILE PHONE, 1997–2007
Get PDFThe mobile phone—in its present form, the smartphone—has become a ubiquitous part of everyday life. We use it to facilitate personal and professional communications, access entertainment media, and purchase goods and services, among other things, and yet it has become so thoroughly familiar that it is seen as unremarkable and we take its presence for granted. These meanings of mobile media—what it is to be used for, and in what ways—are not intrinsic to the form of the mobile phone itself or the natural outcomes of technological development, but are instead the result of significant processes of negotiation of meaning that have occurred and continue to occur throughout media history.This dissertation is a media genealogy of the keitai denwa (lit. “mobile phone”) in Japan from 1997 to 2007, when the keitai denwa emerged and transformed from a limited office technology aimed at professionals to a commonplace fixture used by people of all ages to facilitate the experiences of everyday life. Drawing from a range of contemporary print media, this dissertation shows how the keitai was constituted as a discursive formation through media representations, and how these changing representations subsequently helped shape the expectations of what mobile media could do, for whom, and how. As a media genealogy, the dissertation attends to the social and technological conditions of 20th-century Japan which made it possible for the keitai to emerge and assume its particular form, at the same time contesting mainstream Western histories of media and the Internet that frame the keitai ecosystem as an inconsequential, geographically-limited failure. Instead, I argue that what we have come to understand as “mobile media” today is an assemblage of affordances, expectations, and cultural meanings that are the result of the contingent negotiations and technological developments that were in constant play during this period of media transition, and that understanding how discourses of keitai and mobile media became established in this period is vital to our understanding of mobile media today
The Virtual Deputy: Digital Surveillance and Neoliberal Governmentality
No full textThis thesis interrogates the website BlueServo.net through a neoliberal framework with a focus on surveillance theory. BlueServo is a site that registers users as "Virtual Deputies" and allows them to file reports with U.S. Border Patrol on activity observed through camera feeds trained on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Employing textual analysis of the site and its attendant Facebook page, four thematic categories emerge for analysis: Labor, Entertainment, State, and Social Sorting. This thesis concludes with a discussion of the site in relation to reality TV and video game culture and the future of increasingly sophisticated and widely accessible digital surveillance as applied to social minorities
Gameplay Mechanics, Ideology, and Identity in Mobile and Online Girl Games
No full textThis thesis analyzes the ideological functions of gameplay mechanics in five mobile and online girl games. The subjects of close reading in this study are Tampon Run, Wonder City, Barbie Fashionistas, Style Studio, and Central Park Wedding Prep. First, a review of the literature is presented. Video game studies and ludology, identity in game studies, and performativity and game studies are examined as the central areas of literature from which the thesis draws. The thesis then explores the historical context of the problem, investigating politics and ideology in gaming spaces and considering the activist and educational games Tampon Run and Wonder City. Finally, the thesis analyzes three traditional girl games: Barbie Fashionistas, Style Studio, and Central Park Wedding Prep. This study argues that activist games rely on limiting mechanics to convey feminist ideologies, while traditional games rely on the perceived mechanics-based empowerment of their players to convey patriarchal ideologies
Sacred Spaces and Expressive Bodies: At the Urs of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar
No full textThe shrine of Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar is located in the rural city of Sehwan in Sindh, Pakistan. Sehwan is a site of pilgrimage for thousands of devotees at the annual festival known as urs, spanning three days to commemorate the death anniversary of the saint. Men, women, and transgender participants engage in many rituals at the urs among which the prominent is devotional dancing called dhamaal. This thesis project relates sacredness of spaces and hyper-reality of the festival with the performances of rituals that involve diverse publics. At the urs and otherwise, the shrine space provides devotees, largely poor, a collective non-verbal expression in the form of dhamaal. Dhamaal gives expression to the body in a society that does not normally encourage such expressions in the public sphere. This thesis argues that the Sufi discourse in Sehwan makes the body of a devotee an expressive body
Delivering Democracy: The History and Deployment of Electronic Voting Machines in India and the United States
Get PDFMy dissertation explores how the introduction of electronic voting technologies (EVTs) has reshaped electoral democracy in India and the United States. Through archival research, patent analysis, interviews, and discourse analysis, I examine how EVT’s technical features, public policy debates, and media discourse configure controversies around the use of electoral technologies and how those controversies both reify and challenge existing democratic norms. I argue that EVTs are a digital interface between the voting public and the government. As such, they transform one’s vote from a discrete act of civic participation into a source of political information that communicates much more than electoral preferences. As information, our votes are integrated into data-driven campaign strategies, disinformation and misinformation projects, and media debates about electoral integrity and democratic culture. In the contemporary political moment, the project has important implications for policymakers, activists, and an interdisciplinary and global set of scholars concerned with voter suppression, the security of elections, and democratic legitimacy. The project also has much to offer political communications scholars concerned with the relationships among technology, citizenship, and civic engagement.
Chapter 1 elaborates how the Election Commission of India has used electronic voting machines and other electoral technologies to create a relationship with the voter that is not structured by partisan affiliation. Chapter 2 uses EVMs to explore the relationship between electoral administration, electoral controversy, and voter perception. In Chapter 3, I provide a genealogical analysis of contemporary debates about the use of voting technologies by tracking how the secret ballot and mechanical lever voting machines reorganized the act of voting in the United States in the late 19th century. The fourth and final chapter analyzes the discourse on electoral reform after the 2000 US presidential election and argues that this literature created, consolidated, and institutionalized a science of election administration for the first time in US history. I then examine how this literature configures the voter as a user of voting technology and customer for electoral services
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