Despite an unshakable belief in the UK in the empowering and regenerating potential of ICTs locating the benefits of digital inclusion initiatives for deprived urban communities has remained elusive. Given social media discourses of empowerment and social progress this thesis explores whether and how social media may be associated with a greater potential for community empowerment and regeneration. I specifically focus upon the potential of the relationship between participation in community content creation and sharing, (community generated content), community empowerment and regeneration. The exploration is based on a qualitative case study of a Community Reporter Programme with a social media and empowerment focus being integrated within two urban regeneration areas in Greater Manchester. The study draws primarily on the experiences and insights of community reporter participants. The way in which participation in community generated content becomes meaningful within urban regeneration areas and thus potentially empowering, is found to lie in a complex interweave of individual interpretative framing, aspects of identity beyond the demographic frame and strategies for the domestication of the specific social media practice of community reporting. The study finds that empowerment value attached to participation in community generated content is primarily located at the individual level and psychological and social in nature related to a ‘reconnecting’ and ‘feel good’ factor which appears to have a particular benefit for those who have been at risk of social exclusion. The value at the collective level of empowerment constructed as ‘voice’ is found to be limited and potentially disempowering within a social context of audience inattention and subtle dangers of ‘voice’ exploitation and appropriation. The study highlights fresh perspectives on what ICTs might mean for local communities beyond the established links between online and offline social interaction and social capital frame locating empowerment value specifically in the process of social media focused content production. In line with emergent critiques of participatory culture the study also problematises assumptions of ease of participation and voice attached to social media technologies. While the study supports the emergent view within digital inclusion and community informatics research areas that the empowerment value of ICTs may indeed lie in the arena of content production, the importance of viewing the potential through a critical lens of specific co-creative media practices and shining a light on urban regeneration as a potential arena of disempowerment is identified.

This thesis concerns the ways in which the importance of practicing skin whitening is promoted and represented in newspaper advertorial articles and visual advertisements across different media in contemporary Taiwan, approximately between 2008 and 2012. Theoretically, it is inspired by structuralists such as Foucault in the discursive formation of discourse and knowledge legitimation, Bourdieu in classification of cultural consumptions, Barthes in the process of mythologisation, sociocultural theory in everyday practice and identity construction, and linguistic theories both from CDA and semiotics. Methodologically, I undertake qualitatively textual and visual analyses of articles from the Liberty Times newspaper, and graphic and video advertisements from product leaflets, television and the Internet. In terms of analytical approaches, CDA, semiotics and other critical visual analysing methods are applied to interpret and articulate dominant discourses, rhetorical tropes and representations of idealised female images with whitened skin. Through the exploratory investigation of the data, common themes such as scientific endorsed and legitimated discourses, an extended metaphor of fighting and the ability of whitening ingredients to penetrate/invade the skin are found in both textual and visual materials. In terms of results, the research echoes Foucault’s idea of interdiscursivity and suggests that these discourses are transferable and represented across both textual and visual media. Finally, a critical assessment is made on the extraction, appropriation and distribution of knowledge by cosmetics producers and the media to consumers; the hegemonic power of the mutual co-alignment between cosmeceutical industry, mass media, retailing channels, legislation, and advertising and research agencies intersected by ‘medical’ and ‘scientific’ qualities; and the implications behind the phenomenon of promoting skin whitening.

This thesis examines how the choice of course of study abroad interrelates with participation in online social networks, and provides an application of semiotics to research in choice and decision making in higher education and information systems research. The study itself is justified by the increasing need to consider students’ choice of course of study as a separate phenomenon from their choice of institution or host country. Alongside the adoption of a more nuanced view of student selection, the author also recognises the need to understand the role of online social networks within the decision-making process for selecting higher education courses. This work adopts an interpretivist philosophy and utilises a comparative case study method, drawing upon semi-structured interviews with international MBA students in addition to relevant documentation. The thesis finds a strong interplay between the choice of course of study abroad and participation in online social networks.

Through the examination of archived moving images, this practice-based research project explores processes and methodologies adopted by visual artists who use moving image archives as an integral component for the creation of new artworks. Underlying these methods of production are issues of originality, authorship and ownership. The research seeks to examine the role of archives as potential catalysts for the creation of new work and the role artists can play in animating collections thereby generating new meanings for archival materials. Central to the research is the study of traditional moving image archives, taxonomies, classifications and content alongside the more recent emergence of online digital archives. The creative outputs (artworks) comprise an exploration of how this virtual environment has the potential for artists to re-appropriate archival materials and how films housed in traditional moving image archives can respond to the challenge set by these new platforms. New collaborations between the artist-researcher and nine regional film archives test creative methodologies for creating artworks by re-presenting archival collections through a multi-disciplinary approach. The final artworks have been produced as a direct response to the contrast in accessibility of online works, freely available under the Creative Commons license, and the legal constraints placed on publicly funded archives (and archivists) who are nonetheless dedicated to making archives available to a wider audience and who have had a significant input into this research.

Traditional emergency service major incident table top training exercises are presented via ‘low-technology’ means, such as plastic bricks and paper maps, or ‘front-loaded’ via slides presented by an instructor. The purpose of this research was to develop a new, electronic approach to table top delivery, to address issues with the existing approaches and provide a usable, more useful, streamlined user experience that was acceptable for major incident education. While the benefits of the existing paper-based approaches include their: affordability; reliability; portability; accessibility and acceptability, they do not permit the recording of exercise progress. Presentations by instructors can result in a lack of candidate participation and physical maps can become cluttered and cause a loss of data when disturbed. Additionally, supporting information required by participants during the scenario is presented as an adjunct to the exercise, necessitating supplementary display equipment. To address these issues, low-cost, bespoke, interactive software solutions for major incident training were created. The usability and acceptability of these products were tested within two populations routinely using table top exercises, via an experimentally-led ‘research in the wild’ approach. These were healthcare professionals, attending the international Major Incident Medical Management and Support (MIMMS) courses, and Greater Manchester Police (GMP) Officers. An experimental approach was adopted to attain realistic responses from the target audience regarding table top use. Given the nature of this form of incident response training, we were constrained to conducting experiments in a non-intrusive way, to neither interfere with, nor distract from, the participants’ learning experiences. Three experiments were designed to establish the viability of this development. Two one centre, one sample studies were conducted, followed by a multicentre controlled trial. The one sample studies consisted of a pilot that explored proof of concept, focussing on table top usability by non-computing expert users, and a second study which determined the validity of the pilot’s findings within a larger sample size. The multicentre controlled trial compared paper-based table top with electronic table top cohorts in terms of the participant learning experience and, thereby, fitness for purpose. 6 candidates piloted the prototype MIMMS electronic exercise in February 2011. 114 Police Officers utilised the GMP table top during November and December 2011. The multicentre controlled MIMMS trial enrolled 23 candidates (n=11 electronic and n=12 paper-based table top cohorts) from courses held at 3 U.K. centres. Both the healthcare and policing trial participants evaluating the table top respectively rated significant levels of agreement with the software being fit for purpose and usable. Candidate results from the multicentre MIMMS trial indicated positive findings regarding the equivalency of the electronic with the existing, paper-based media. The MIMMS pilot trial was an acceptable proof of concept, justifying the further development of this work. The GMP study affirmed these findings for a larger sample size. The MIMMS multicentre controlled trial demonstrated the comparability of the electronic table top with its paper-based counterpart, in terms of the learning experience provided and affirmed this approach as fit for purpose. This work has changed major incident education practice by addressing real world training delivery issues, via the pertinent application of usable technology.

This research contributes to the evolving field of New Media Studies through an empirical examination of social media design in real-time practice at the computer interface. In recent years questions of technology and design have started to figure more prominently in research into Social Network Sites (SNSs) but critical analysis of design in practice, at the interface remains under-researched. The interface is becoming an increasingly important analytical concept in the digital age as it is the space where machine readable code is translated into the cultural codes which are accessible to the everyday users of digital media technology. Furthermore, there have been recent calls for an expansion of the traditional media practice paradigm encouraging practice approaches to media which take seriously the mediating role of technologies in emergent forms of digital media practice. This thesis carries out empirical research into social media/ted practice; it critically examines sites and real-time interactions at the interface, to understand the interrelationships between the specific design of platforms and evolving forms of social media/ted practice. The thesis draws on Media Studies, New Media Studies, Sociology and Social Studies of Technology to explicate an original interdisciplinary analytical framework for studying people’s interactions with social media technologies at the interface. This framework is referred to as the triple articulation of social media/ted practice. The triple articulation of social media/ted practice acknowledges the interplay between the materiality of social media technologies, the cultural coding of social media technologies and active practice with social media technologies. The term social media/ted practice has been coined specifically to emphasise the mediating role of technology in social media use. Using SNSs as a case study the thesis combines critical site analysis with interviews at the interface which illuminate the interpretive and constructive elements of the micro-interactions between people and SNSs that underpin related forms of social media/ted practice. Whilst this thesis is focused on SNSs, the analytical framework has wider applicability in New Media Studies and media-orientated Sociology. The central argument of this thesis is that design matters for social media/ted practice. Site-specific ‘micro’ architectures, affordances and algorithmic processes continue to shape social media/ted practice at the interface. The user-interface works to render aspects of the technology visible, accessible, meaningful and useful. This thesis calls attention to the user-interface as a key site for: (1), mediating social practice (2), understanding emerging social trends (3), site governance and (4), developing critical digital media literacies.

This thesis explores anonymity as an aspect of identity construction within electronic dance music (EDM). Its specific focus is on the production and control of image within genres that have arisen since the development and expansion of the club scene in the UK from the latter part of the 20th century and, then situated in visual culture and performance research, its examination of anonymity represents an area that, to date, has been overlooked in EDM. As part of this investigation, the thesis’ chapters notably analyse elements that are external to music recordings including record sleeve design and press interviews: components that are essential elements in the development and distribution of these performative identities. Following Thornton (1995), Rietveld (1998), Hesmondhalgh (1998a) and Gilbert and Pearson (1999), the research critically reviews a range of issues that are determined as associated with these representations – including the influence of technologies, a resistance to mainstream assimilation and the impact of collective ‘scene’ – while explaining some of EDM’s distinctions and hierarchies within a post-subcultural setting. To do this it uses case studies focusing on the approaches of Daft Punk, Burial, Zomby and SBTRKT: examples that are presented as unique demonstrations of image construction within the field. It also places the role of identity within a more expansive history of electronic music by aligning contemporary practice with the earlier presented image of Kraftwerk. Ultimately, and while observing this lineage of often counterintuitive practices, the thesis argues that the EDM producer’s separation from the high visibility ‘star system’ model favoured by pop and rock performers reflects commitment to a marginal status: a commitment also communicated through its visual aesthetics that reinforce an underground cultural context to celebrate the peripheral whilst, simultaneously, highlighting the EDM producer’s perceived condition as that which is inferior to his or her rock counterpart.

Packaged software is pre-built with the intention of licensing it to users in domestic settings and work organisations. This thesis focuses upon the work organisation where packaged software has been characterised as one of the latest ‘solutions’ to the problems of information systems. The study investigates the packaged software selection process that has, to date, been largely viewed as objective and rational. In contrast, this interpretive study is based on a 2½ year long field study of organisational experiences with packaged software selection at T.Co, a consultancy organisation based in the United Kingdom. Emerging from the iterative process of case study and action research is an alternative theory of packaged software selection. The research argues that packaged software selection is far from the rationalistic and linear process that previous studies suggest. Instead, the study finds that aspects of the traditional process of selection incorporating the activities of gathering requirements, evaluation and selection based on ‘best fit’ may or may not take place. Furthermore, even where these aspects occur they may not have equal weight or impact upon implementation and usage as may be expected. This is due to the influence of those multiple realities which originate from the organisational and market environments within which packages are created, selected and used, the lack of homogeneity in organisational contexts and the variously interpreted characteristics of the package in question.

This PhD by Published Work aims to present a coherent programme of original radio research practice produced by the author and placed in an appropriate academic context that explores new approaches to mise-en-scène and auteur theory. The research methodology employs an interrogation of traditional definitions of mise-en-scène and auteur and then reframes and adopts redefinitions of these theories when used to contextualise broadcast radio. The portfolio consists of the scripts and broadcast recordings of a set of five original BBC Radio 4 plays, and includes reference to a set of related academic publications and conference papers in which critical reflection about the media and creative practice of writing the plays took place. The work draws on approaching four decades of experience as a professional freelance writer and performer. The practice-based research focuses on explorations of the inter-relationships between the form, content and production of the five original radio dramas he was commissioned to write. All of the plays were broadcast by BBC Radio 4, the major public service arena available for radio drama in the United Kingdom, from 2000 to 2012. These years constituted a period of significant change in creative and administrative protocols at the BBC, and form the context for exploration of auteur innovations. The dramas achieved considerable critical attention attracting favourable reviews and provoking public debate. For example, Bell in the Ball (2010) prompted a discussion concerning writing about disability on the BBC’s In Touch programme (2010). It is a significant marker of their quality that a number of the plays have been repeated on various BBC Radio channels, as well as broadcast overseas. As part of the critical interrogation of the author’s media and creative practice, excerpts of the plays have also been included in academic papers presented at national and international conferences.

The use of social network sites (SNSs) in Iran, where people's freedom of expression is limited, provides new opportunities of sociality to be explored. The introduction of SNSs and in particular Facebook, provided an opportunity for Iranians to experience a different way of life online while living with the restrictions and control of authorities in offline settings. Drawing on the perspectives of dramaturgy and networked publics this study examines how Iranians use Facebook and why people engage with it the way they do. It has undertaken a qualitative field study approach. The empirical data are sourced through semi-structured interviews and participant observations with 30 individuals. This study demonstrates that Iranians are using the SNSs and Facebook as an independent platform from offline life. This study found that Iranians are developing their own approaches and strategies to control privacy, arranging the privacy freatures of the Facebook to meet their needs and self-presentation goals. The constant engagement with overcoming Internet censorship and devising privacy control strategies to maintain privacy enabled this group of users to develop a particular set of digital skills. Facebok cannot be treated as an independent platform for communication in society, but as a technology that is shaped by people and their perceptions about privacy violation based on the impact of ongoing social and political forces in Iran.