The spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has been since its early beginnings accompanied by the spread of the so called 'infodemic' of misinformation and conspiracy theories about the virus in the media. This infodemic swiftly started to present a matter of significant concern especially in the dynamic landscape of digital media which due to an ease of sharing and content contribution allowed for Covid-19 conspiracy theories to continue to gain momentum. Because of the severe implications that the potential ill-informed actions of conspiracy theory believers could have on the public health, it is necessary to gain a better understanding of the conspiracy theory believers and the way that they spread Covid-19 conspiracy theories. With this in mind, this thesis through the use of qualitative interviews probed into the worldviews of Covid-19 conspiracy theory believers in the Czech Republic. The analytical scrutiny of the interviews through the lens of the theories of network society, context collapse and echo chambers provided important insights into how Czech Covid-19 conspiracy theory believers use digital media in order to learn about and disseminate Covid-19 conspiracy theories. Additionally, this thesis provides an understanding of how the way the conspiracy theory believers navigate context collapse on Facebook drives them to seek echo chambers on e-mail which strengthen their beliefs in Covid-19 conspiracy theories. Moreover, my thesis also sheds light onto how the echo chambers are instrumental in the individuals' distrust in traditional media.

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Grieving Online: Street-Involved Youths’ Use of Social Media After a Death conveys the context and lived experiences of 20 street-involved youth in Victoria BC, who live both on the streets and on line simultaneously (boyd, 2008a). Using a narrative methodology, including poetry, I explore how these realities affect the grief experiences after a death. Youth strategize to find access to computers and cell phones, using free wifi, sharing minutes, or buying or trading devices in the street economy in order to communicate through texting and viewing and posting to Facebook. Dire financial and unstable living situations, the complex and difficult relationships they have with both family and friends and the traumatic circumstances they have endured directly contributes to stress and anxiety and the ways they grieve the losses of people in their lives. This vulnerability, violence and instability is entangled both in their face to face interactions and in private and public communications online. It is also directly connected to the concept of precarity: “that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (Butler, 2009, p.ii). There are several key findings from youths’ narratives. First, although youth often see themselves as outsiders from “regular society”, they have taken up a normative discourse of a “grieving subject” in their language and stories. This is a discourse of progress that includes stages and tasks and the understanding that to grieve is to do work. I argue that for many youth, this discourse is heightened because the stakes are high: their lives are surveilled by police and child protective services. Sometimes shunned by family of the deceased, or without private spaces to mourn, their expressions of grief are exposed and sometimes criminalized. Second, I argue that throughout their narratives, youth position themselves as moral beings and actors talking about and making sense of death through hierarchies of values and decisions, and framing the death as an opportunity to explore how they want to be in the world or how the world should be. This vision of street-involved youth actively experimenting in the moral laboratory (Mattingly, 2013) of the street and the moral predicaments they faced when grieving challenges the social stereotypes of street-involved youth as delinquent, loners, dysfunctional, refusing to ‘grow up’ and ‘be responsible.’ Third, youth spoke about negotiating and managing relationships both in person and within the affordances of social networking sites (boyd 2009) such as the visibility and persistence of online discussions. My findings demonstrate that these affordances have implications after a death. For example, youth were wrestling with the performances of grief online, trying to make sense “to what extent these declarations of grief are public posturing and to what extent they are genuine, personal expressions of deep feeling” (Dobler, 2006, p.180). Youth caution about posting too quickly about the death online, so that family or close friends would not have to find out online. They value communication that is private, face-to-face, or by phone that is intentional and acknowledges the importance of relationship with the deceased. Their thoughtful expertise can help all of us as we try to navigate the experiences of grieving online. Although they shared a great deal of ambivalence for the place of social media in their lives, for many it is a powerful tool to tell themselves and others about who they are and how they want to be remembered. / Graduate

Young adults spend a lot of their time on social media where they share their lives with friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, ect. Wesch (2009) explains that things posted on social media such as YouTube can be viewed by anybody, everybody, and nobody, anywhere in the world all at once. This becomes a problem for young adults as several different audiences blend into one (i.e. context collapse) (Brandtzaeg, Lüder & Skjetne,2010). For example, how would it feel if your mother saw a video of you at a party which was posted for friends to joke about? However, Brandtzaeg and Lüders (2018) states that is not the only problem. Social media also blurs the line between the present and the past. One example can be a friend commenting on a silly post on facebook you made years ago, then it appears in everyone's feed again making it seem as if you have posted it recently. Both of these problems make young adults change how they chose to self-presentate themselves on social media. In addition, since social media is asynchronous as content does not take place in real-time, it provides time to be more strategic as well as for more polished forms of self-presentation and self-censorship(Gardner & Davis, 2013; Lindgren, 2017). With foundation in this, this study is going to examine which strategies young adults use that are related to self-presentation on the occasion of facing context and time-collapse. The study will focus on to what extent the participants use the tactics mentioned in earlier literature as well as how different aspects relate to the tactics one chooses to use. In order to create an understanding of context- and time collapse previous research has been examined. Furthermore, previous research about self-presentation in general and self-presentation on social media inparticular is examined to connect to how self-presentation can be disturbed by context- and time collapse. Finally, theories and research about privacy is used to gather an understanding of how young adults experiencecontext and time collapse as a problem for their privacy. Through a survey, data have been collected from 226 respondents to be examined, presented and analyzed. The respondents were born between the years 1997 and 2004. The result showed that all of the strategies were used yet the extent varied depending on the strategy. However, the most commonly used strategies were connected to self-censoring. Moreover, there are relations between the strategies and for example gender, how long one had social media, how one perceives oneself etc.However, surprisingly the relations were for the most part weak even though some stand out as a bit stronger. / Unga vuxna spenderar mycket av deras tid på sociala medier där de delar sina liv med vänner, familj, kollegor, bekantskapskretsar, etc. Wesch (2009) förklarar att saker som är publicerade på sociala medier så som YouTube kan bli sedda av vem som helst, alla, ingen och var som helst i världen på samma gång. Detta blir ett problem för unga vuxna då flera olika publiker samlas och blandas på ett och samma ställe (d.v.s kontext kollaps) (Brandtzaeg m fl., 2010). Ett exempel är hur skulle det kännas ifall din mamma såg en video på dig från en fest som du postat till vänner för att skoja? Dock konstaterar Brandtzaeg och Lüders (2018) att det inte är det enda problemet. Sociala medier suddar ut linjen mellan nutid och dåtid. Ytterligare ett exempel kan vara när vänner kommenterar ett töntigt inlägg du gjorde för flera år sen som då hamnar i allas flöden igen, vilket får det att verka som att du har publicerat det nyligen. Båda dessa problem gör att unga vuxna ändrar hur de väljer att presentera sig själva på sociala medier. Dessutom då sociala medier är “asynchronous” då innehåll inte händer i realtid, möjliggör detta tid att vara mer strategisk men även visa mer polerade former av självpresentation och självcensurering  (Gardner & Davis, 2013; Lindgren, 2017). Denna studie kommer med grund i ovanstående undersöka vilka strategier unga vuxna använder som är relaterade till självpresentation vid bemötande av kontext och tids kollaps. Studiens fokus kommer att ligga på vilken utsträckning deltagarna har använt sig av de olika taktikerna som är nämnda av tidigare forskning men även hur olika aspekter relaterar till de taktiker som beslutats att användas.   Genom att skapa en förståelse för kontext- och tid kollaps, har tidigare forskning blivit undersökt. Fortsättningsvis har forskning gällande självpresentation överlag på sociala medier i särskildhet undersökts för att knyta ihop hur själv presentationen kan bli rubbad av kontext- och tids kollaps. Slutligen så har teorier och forskning gällande integritet används för att bilda en förståelse för hur unga vuxna upplever att kontext - och tids kollaps är en problematisk faktor för deras integritet. Genom en enkät har data samlats för analys, undersökning och presentation från 226 deltagare. Deltagarna föddes mellan åren 1997 och 2004. Resultatet visade att alla strategier var använda till viss del, dock varierade det till vilken grad strategierna användes. De mest använda strategierna var länkade till självcensurering. Fortsättningsvis, är det relationer mellan strategier och exempelvis kön, hur länge man har haft sociala medier, hur man ser sig själv o.s.v. Oavsett är det överraskande att relationerna mellan variablerna var till större delen svaga, dock stod vissa ut i mängden som lite starkare.

Denna studie undersöker hur representanter från musikindustrin använder sig av hashtags, sociala medier och vilka effekter hashtags har samt, vilken effekt de skulle kunna ha på deras arbete. Användningen sätts i förhållande till tio redan definierade funktioner av hashtags.Uppsatsens syfte är att bidra till djupare förståelse hur hashtags används och hur dessa kan användas inom musikindustrin. Genom att förtydliga om detta är ett verktyg som kan användas för att lättare sprida information på social media. Detta genomfördes genom en kvalitativ studie och utförandet av semistrukturerade intervjuer med fem representanter från musikindustrin och två respondenter som arbetar inom andra områden, varav en är har forskat på twitter och hashtags och en jobbar med att stärka användningen av digitala verktyg på ett större företag. Detta har sedan blivit granskat genom en induktiv ansats. Frågeställningen har besvarats genom att resultaten från empirin analyserats utifrån teorin.Studien kom fram till att representanterna från musikindustrin i huvudsakligen använde sociala medier och hashtags för att marknadsföra sig själva och sina band. Men Artist 1 använde hashtags mer än Skivbolag 1. Effekterna hashtags hade var både positiva och negativa. Fördelen var att hashtags kunde rikta deras budskap mer exakt och nackdelen var att personer kan ha en negativ bild av hashtags och på sätt bli kritiska till användningen av dem. / This study examines how representatives from the music industry use hashtags, social media and what effects hashtags have, and what effect they could have on their work. The usage is set in relation to ten already defined functions of hashtags.The purpose of the thesis is to contribute to a deeper understanding of how hashtags are used and how these can be used in the music industry. By clarifying whether this is a tool that can be used to more easily disseminate information on social media. This was done through a qualitative study and was conducted by semi-structured interviews with five representatives from the music industry and two respondents as workers in other areas, one of which has been researching twitter and hashtags, and one who is working on strengthening the use of digital tools at a large company. This has since been examined through an inductive approach. The question has been answered by analysing the results of the empirical data based on the theory.The study concluded that the representatives of the music industry mainly used social media and hashtags to market themselves and their bands. But the artist used hashtags more than the record company. The effects of hashtags had been both positive and negative. The advantage was that hashtags were able to target their messages more accurately and the disadvantage was that people could have a negative image of hashtags and thus become critical of their use.