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The alternative press refers to a group of anti-apartheid newspapers which proliferated in South Africa during the early 1980s until the early 1990s. What was ‘alternative' about these publications was how they actively pursued an anti-apartheid agenda in their news reporting. The Weekly Mail newspaper is regarded as one of the pioneers of this section of the press and is the focus of this study which examines the representation of black political voices in its political reporting. Recognising a gap in the literature on the alternative press pertaining to questions of race, gender, voice and sourcing patterns, this study utilises qualitative discourse analysis and content analysis to analyse the political reporting in the Weekly Mail to evaluate the representation of black voices in the newspaper. It asks the questions: how can we analyse the content emerging from the alternative press with regards to the representation of black voices? Who writes, who speaks and what does this say about race, power and black representation in the Weekly Mail? Would this esteemed newspaper reproduce some of the racial and gender stereotypes prevalent in mainstream newspapers, or would it shift its content to more progressive terrains? This study revealed that the Weekly Mail was centred around male voices, specifically, those of black male leaders of popular black organisations. The study further revealed an interesting division in the representations of black males, where older black males were constructed as respectable, rational and approachable, while younger black males who were sometimes referred to as “young lions” in the ANC Youth League, were constructed as unthinking, violent, politically naïve and were infantilised. The findings of this study further showed that the Weekly Mail framed black females in politics according to their roles as wives, mothers and maternal caregivers. There were inconsistencies in how white and black women were portrayed. While black women were put strictly in their motherhood boxes, white women were allowed space to think and speak more broadly about their political ideas and aspirations. These observations showed the ways which the Weekly Mail deployed subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) undertones of racial and gender biases in their representations of black political voices.

The alternative press refers to a group of anti-apartheid newspapers which proliferated in South Africa during the early 1980s until the early 1990s. What was ‘alternative' about these publications was how they actively pursued an anti-apartheid agenda in their news reporting. The Weekly Mail newspaper is regarded as one of the pioneers of this section of the press and is the focus of this study which examines the representation of black political voices in its political reporting. Recognising a gap in the literature on the alternative press pertaining to questions of race, gender, voice and sourcing patterns, this study utilises qualitative discourse analysis and content analysis to analyse the political reporting in the Weekly Mail to evaluate the representation of black voices in the newspaper. It asks the questions: how can we analyse the content emerging from the alternative press with regards to the representation of black voices? Who writes, who speaks and what does this say about race, power and black representation in the Weekly Mail? Would this esteemed newspaper reproduce some of the racial and gender stereotypes prevalent in mainstream newspapers, or would it shift its content to more progressive terrains? This study revealed that the Weekly Mail was centred around male voices, specifically, those of black male leaders of popular black organisations. The study further revealed an interesting division in the representations of black males, where older black males were constructed as respectable, rational and approachable, while younger black males who were sometimes referred to as “young lions” in the ANC Youth League, were constructed as unthinking, violent, politically naïve and were infantilised. The findings of this study further showed that the Weekly Mail framed black females in politics according to their roles as wives, mothers and maternal caregivers. There were inconsistencies in how white and black women were portrayed. While black women were put strictly in their motherhood boxes, white women were allowed space to think and speak more broadly about their political ideas and aspirations. These observations showed the ways which the Weekly Mail deployed subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) undertones of racial and gender biases in their representations of black political voices.

Power to the People: Responsible Facilitation in Co-Creative Story-Making describes and applies a tool for recording and analyzing the co-productive creation process of digital storytelling (DST) workshops to be used by project facilitators for the purposes of reflection and for developing an ethics of responsibly in story-making practices. It provides a method for analyzing digital storytelling practices that focuses on the rhetorical, dialogic, co-productive, creative story-making space rather than the finished stories or the technologies. Looking through a new media lens, this dissertation aligns the DST genre and practice in relation to alternative media broadly, and tactical media specifically, to understand DST as a resource for storytellers. This dissertation situates DST as a co-creative media process created among participants, individual storytellers, facilitators, institutions, and the audience, and discusses the inter-relationships within the workshop setting as well as in those found in the dissemination of the final digital stories. The author discusses the relationships among the storytellers and the facilitators, the other workshop participants, and the viewing audience, examining this final relationship in terms of face-to-face and digital interactions. This dissertation provides a reflexive look at the responsibility of the facilitator in co-creative digital storytelling endeavors and makes use of diverse international case studies in addition to an analysis of the author's own facilitated project, "Exploring Our Information Diets," as examples. The author argues that co-creative storymaking facilitators should interpret their roles within the collaborative creation process to ensure that responsible facilitation practices based in "witnessing" guide the storytelling process, and create an environment that treats participants as subjects with the ability to respond to the world.

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, 2016. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 83-86). / Virtual reality, as the name implies, is implicitly evaluated by its ability to reproduce or imitate aspects of reality, particularly in ways that convince users that they are physically present in the virtual space. This approach to the medium, a form of immediacy, effaces the material reality of the medium and can obscure the ways through which a medium can offer new forms of knowledge. Virtual reality's realism is a construct, and by acknowledging this, creators can push the medium to more experimental and novel ends. The framework of embodied montage proposed in this thesis seeks to provide an expressive vocabulary and techniques for creating virtual reality work that accounts for the material aspects of the medium. Drawing on theoretical research from film and media theory, analyzing existing virtual reality work, and discussing the process of creating an original virtual reality work, I analyze the 3D capture and interaction design process. I offer the term machine vision perspective to describe the process of experiencing such images through virtual reality systems. This process provides a ground to experiment with embodied modes of thinking that are not possible with the human body situated in the real world. This makes embodied montage, a novel framework proposed by this thesis, possible. Embodied montage is the decoupling and recoupling of action and perception in virtual reality experiences in order to generate new meanings, similar to montage in film. Drawing on film theory, media history and cognitive science, this framework creates a territory for creative expression that challenges embodied cognitive structures and could effectively use the medium in ways that are distinguished from other media forms. / by Halil Deniz Tortum. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, 2017. / "June 2017." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 106-111). / The improbable election of Donald Trump relied on myriad factors. Among the most important of these, I argue here, was Trump's deft use of the social media site Twitter, which Trump used as a means to both communicate with his supporters directly, and to reach a far wider audience in the mainstream media. In adopting this hybrid communications strategy, Trump's political communications reached a wider audience, on a sturdier basis, than earlier figures who had similarly adopted what I dub a "paranoid populist" philosophy. I present case studies of two of these historical figures, Charles Coughlin, whose radio "sermons" reached millions in the 1930s, and Pat Robertson, whose cable television network inspired a devout following from afar. The grander political ambitions of both Coughlin and Robertson were stymied by a combination of technological, legal and economic factors, which did not serve to constrain Trump's candidacy in the same way. Instead, Trump's hybrid use of Twitter blended the breadth of Coughlin's audience with the depth of Robertson's following, providing him both an unfiltered line of communication to his supporters and a means of reaching a far wider audience through the provocative nature of his pronouncements. Through a combination of theoretical and empirical analysis, I illustrate the extent of Trump's paranoid populism on Twitter, and explain how Trump secured an avalanche of mainstream media coverage through the eternally controversial nature of his candidacy. I conclude with some reflections on Trump's early presidency, and his evolving use of Twitter as a platform for decrying the very news organizations without whose coverage his election would have proved impossible. / by Josh Cowls. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies