This dissertation explores the production, circulation, and regulation of Shanzhai online videos in order to understand how people's everyday lives are governed and how the governing power is resisted through the media system in contemporary China. This research is situated in the specific socio-cultural and historical context where Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) have proliferated among various social strata, where the media are both the propagandistic mouthpiece and a profit-oriented industry, and where people are encouraged to pursue their life goals under a neoliberal rationality that is pervasive in media. I use a Foucauldian framework to examine the power modalities and power relationships manifested in the Shanzhai practices. I argue that both disciplinary power and the power of governmentality are found in this cultural practice. It is through the production, circulation and regulation of Shanzhai videos that power is exercised on different parties involved in this process as governance and resistance. This power relationship, I argue, is explicated through a ritualistic view of the reality presented in the trans-media, trans-genre narratives that people internalize in order to develop specific ways of using media to pursue their life goals. Meanwhile, people also employ various strategies to negotiate for resources to achieve these goals. In these negotiations, power relationships manifested themselves as their actions upon each other. Ordinary people are disciplined through patterned uses of media to live their lives and governed by a neoliberal mentality to pursue their life projects on the Internet. However, there is more than one set of discourses with a claim to the "truth" about Shanzhai in Chinese media. Thus, people are also empowered to take advantage of this discrepancy to gain symbolic as well as material favors. This study examined a nuanced and dialectic power relationship in contemporary Chinese society. First, it is found that people are both empowered and subjected to the ways they use media to pursue personal goals. Second, the resistance in the Shanzhai practices not only brought them symbolic power as much previous literature suggests, but also material resources such as media access and sponsorship. Last, the holistic view of the media system helps us situate Shanzhai online videos in the convergent media environment and draw a better picture of the web of power relationships.

Thesis (M.S.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1991. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2714. Abstract precedes thesis as [1] preliminary leaf. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 27-28).

Thesis (M.A.)--Michigan State University. Advertising, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (Proquest, viewed on Aug. 7, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-76). Also issued in print.

Thesis (MFA)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2008. / Typescript. Includes DVD Sharon Pieczenik's Thesis. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Walter Metz. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 20-21).

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-56).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2005. / Principal faculty advisor: Elizabeth Perse, Dept. of Communication. Includes bibliographical references.

Το πεδίο έρευνας της παρούσας διδακτορικής διατριβής είναι η ευφυής διαχείριση ιατρικών δεδομένων και πιο συγκεκριμένα ιατρικό βίντεο που επιτυγχάνεται κυρίως με την ενσωμάτωση κλινικών δεδομένων με τη χρήση ψηφιακής υδατογραφίας στο ιατρικό βίντεο. Η ψηφιακή υδατογραφία είναι το ερευνητικό πεδίο που ασχολείται με τη διαδικασία ενσωμάτωσης κρυφών πληροφοριών σε ένα σήμα. Η συγκεκριμένη ερευνητική εργασία επικεντρώνεται σε ένα μη ορατό και εύρωστο υδατογραφικό σχήμα για ιατρικό βίντεο. Μια συχνή απαίτηση για τα υδατογραφικά σχήματα είναι η ικανότητα τυφλής αποκωδικοποίησης, η αποκωδικοποίηση δηλαδή χωρίς το αρχικό σήμα. Στην ερευνητική εργασία σχεδιάστηκε και υλοποιήθηκε ένα υδατογραφικό σχήμα που σκοπό έχει τη χρήση του από ιατρικούς οργανισμούς για την προστασία των ιατρικών δεδομένων που παρέχουν τα ιατρικά βίντεο καθώς και την ευφυή διαχείριση των κλινικά χρήσιμων δεδομένων για διαγνωστικούς και εκπαιδευτικούς σκοπούς. Πιο συγκεκριμένα το σύστημα εφαρμόζει τρισδιάστατο μετασχηματισμό κυματιδίων σε ιατρικά βίντεο και ενσωματώνει πολλαπλά υδατογραφήματα, με διαφορετικές ανάγκες σε απαιτήσεις για ακεραιότητα και αδιορατότητα, χωρίς ωστόσο να αλλοιώνει τη διαγνωστική αξία των ιατρικών εξετάσεων. Καθώς η χρησιμότητα της εφαρμογής υδατογραφικών σχημάτων στις ιατρικές εικόνες είναι διεθνώς αναγνωρισμένη, ενώ αντίθετα δεν έχει γίνει μέχρι στιγμής καμία προσέγγιση για ιατρικά βίντεο, η παρούσα ερευνητική εργασία αποτελεί μια καινοτόμα προσέγγιση στην εισαγωγή υδατογραφίας και στα ιατρικά βίντεο, η οποία παράλληλα διαχειρίζεται ευφυώς τις κλινικές διαγνώσεις που προκύπτουν από αυτά. / The research field of this Ph.D thesis is the intelligent management of medical data, and more specifically medical video which is achieved based on the embedding of clinical data through the use of digital watermarking, on the medical video. Digital watermarking is the research field that uses a process to embed hidden information into a signal. The Ph.D thesis focuses on a non visible and robust watermarking scheme for medical videos. A common requirement of watermarking schemes is the ability to blindly decode a message without the use of the original signal. On the current work, a watermarking scheme was designed and implemented aiming to be used by medical organizations to protect medical data and to intelligent manage clinical useful data for diagnostic and educational purposes. In particular the system performs a three dimensional discrete wavelet transform into medical videos and embeds multiple watermarks with different requirements for integrity and imperceptibility without degradation of the diagnostic value of the medical examinations. The use of watermarking schemes on medical images is well established by the international literature. The use of a watermarking scheme for medical videos has not been achieved until today. The present scientific works proposes an innovative approach for medical video watermarking, that intelligently manages at the same time clinical diagnosis from the examinations.

Este trabalho introduz uma interface para estender vídeos educacionais com panoramas e navegação não-linear baseada em conteúdo. Em vídeos de e-learning convencionais, cada quadro está restrito ao subconjunto da cena capturado naquele momento. Isso torna difícil para o usuário revisitar conteúdos mostrados anteriormente, que podem ser essenciais para o entendimento dos conceitos seguintes. Localizar conteúdos anteriores nesses vídeos requer uma navegação linear no tempo, o que pode ser ineficiente. Estendemos vídeo-aulas para prover ao usuário o acesso direto a todo o conteúdo apresentado através de uma simples interface. Isso é feito pela detecção automática de pontos relevantes no vídeo e a criação de hyperlinks a partir desses pontos de maneira completamente transparente. Nossa interface constrói gradualmente um panorama clicável que mostra todo o conteúdo visto no vídeo até o dado momento. O usuário pode navegar pelo vídeo simplesmente clicando no conteúdo desejado, ao invés de utilizar a tradicional barra deslizante de tempo. Nosso panorama também pode ser exportado no final da execução, juntamente com anotações feitas pelo usuário, como um conjunto de notas de aula. A eficiência da nossa técnica foi demonstrada com a aplicação bem-sucedida a três categorias de vídeos que são representativas de todo o conjunto de vídeo-aulas disponíveis: Khan Academy, Coursera e aulas convencionais gravadas com uma câmera. Demonstramos que foi possível atingir os resultados em tempo real para vídeos de baixa resolução (320x240). No caso de resoluções mais altas, é necessário que a detecção de features (usando SIFT) seja feita em uma fase de pré-processamento. Como a parte mais custosa do nosso pipeline é extremamente paralelizável, acreditamos que a execução de vídeos de alta resolução em tempo real seja um resultado alcançável em curto prazo. As técnicas descritas nessa dissertação disponibilizam maneiras mais eficientes de explorar vídeos educacionais. Dessa forma, elas tem potencial para impactar a educação, disponibilizando experiências educacionais mais customizáveis para milhões de estudantes em todo o mundo. / This thesis introduces a new interface for augmenting existing e-learning videos with panoramic frames and content-based non-linear navigation. In conventional e-learning videos, each frame is constrained to the subset of the lecture content captured by the camera or frame grabber at that moment. This makes it harder for users to quickly revisit and check previously shown subjects, which might be crucial for understanding subsequent concepts. Locating previously seen materials in pre-recorded videos requires one to perform visual inspection by sequentially navigating through time, which can be distracting and time-consuming. We augment e-learning videos to provide users direct access to all previously shown content through a simple pointing interface. This is achieved by automatically detecting relevant features in the videos as they play, and assigning them hyperlinks to a buffered version in a completely transparent way. The interface gradually builds panoramic video frames displaying all previously shown content. The user can then navigate through the video in a non-linear way by directly clicking over the content, as opposed to using a conventional time slider. As an additional feature, the final panorama can be exported as a set of annotated lecture notes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by successfully applying it to three representative styles of e-learning videos: Khan Academy, Coursera, and conventional lecture recorded with a camera. We show that we can achieve real-time performance for low-resolution videos (e.g., 320x240) on a single desktop PC. For higher resolution videos, some pre-processing is required for feature detection (using SIFT). However, since the most expensive parts of our processing pipeline are highly parallel, we believe that real-time performance might be soon achievable even for full HD resolution. The techniques described in this thesis provide more efficient ways for exploring the benefits of e-learning videos. As such, they have the potential to impact education by providing more customizable learning experiences for millions of e-learners around the world.

An emotionally involved event may subsequently appear shorter than an event of relative indifference for people. How are time-related behaviors influenced while people are emotionally affected? The purpose of this study was to test if ongoing estimates and retrospective reports of duration are similarly affected by emotional states. To test, 30 s emotional video clips were rated for Valence and Arousal by six participants. The videos were then used in a timing experiment where a new set of participants (twenty-five persons) carried out a repetitive motor timing paradigm while watching the videos and subsequently reported the perceived duration of the clip. In each of ten trials, participants first synchronized to a 700 ms isochronous interval with their index finger, and then continued unsupported as five different video clips were played in sequence, with each clip lasting 30s. At the end of each trial, participants reported their retrospective duration judgment of every video clip, and rated every video chip for Valence and Arousal. Emotion ratings suggested that the videos affected the subjects’ emotional states. Repetitive motor timing was not reliably affected by emotional states. Instead, retrospective reports of durations were affected by emotional states such that the durations estimated under high arousal conditions were significantly longer than those under low arousal conditions. The difference in results between repetitive motor timing and retrospective reports may be accounted for by the interval of 700 ms being too short to be cognitive-related.

Online video media share a great part of similar attributes with traditional mass media. They also bear some fresh features of Web 2.0, such as integration, interactivity, both synchrony and asynchrony, which break the traditional pattern of media viewing and using. They allow for new forms of user activities and offer the user a participatory experience/role so as to facilitate the evolution and dynamic reintegration of the networked society as well as the whole social environment. Online video media have therefore been drawing lots of attention from both the industry and academic field since the emergence. The aims of this research are to: 1) investigate uses and gratifications theorizations in the era of Web 2.0, with online video media the typical target, by finding out the wide and coherent spectrum of online video media usage motivations and gratifications; 2) construct a comprehensive framework of online video media uses and gratifications from integrated and interdisciplinary perspectives; 3) verify the interactive relationships between or among the variables presented in the framework. Survey is adopted for data collection in this study. Convenient sampling and snowball sampling are used. A total of 470 respondents in mainland China complete the questionnaire online, in which 462 are online video media users and the rest 8 are non-users. The online video media uses and gratifications items are then subject to principal components factoring with varimax rotation. Seven factors are identified to explain 67.31% of the variance. Results indicate that the nature of device is a potential source of resulting in unique media outcomes, and habitual behavior of mobile video use has become a part of netizens’ life. More importantly, significant differences in both motivation and gratification between the two user identities are found. Besides, different genres of media contents are related to different motivations and gratifications, and may predict different degrees of interactivity. Moreover, results show that, people in different types of emotions (positive and non-positive) tend to arouse different motivations and attempt to seek different gratifications. Investigation also detect the relationships among dependency, activities after use and attitudes during the motivation and gratification process. It is concluded that, online video media usage is a spiral feedback process of dependency, activities after use and attitudes. During the process of motivation and gratification, people gain experience and derived perceptions, and the beliefs/loyalty gradually forms. Online video media usage is an interactive and dynamic process. During the process, user interacts with the media as well as with other users in the networked society. Though media culture, media literacy and social participation are still weak and limited in the domestic networked society, online video media user exhibits more active, intentional and conscious actions, which is distinguished from traditional mass media audience. In general, this study contributes to the understanding of user’s behaviors, needs and the effects of the new media.