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Sixteen percent (5.2 million) of the UK population possess low levels of literacy. The Government and other non-profit organisations, due to funding reforms, are forced to reduce the provision of face-to-face advice, and therefore, are pushing advice services via telephone or internet. As a consequence, low literacy users are experiencing difficulties finding the information they need to solve their day to day problems online. This thesis evaluates how walk in clients of a local Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) who come to get social service information, obtain information online using the Adviceguide website. The thesis presents two challenges: (i) knowing the users in a way that can help consider design solutions that are probably not in a typical designer’s standard repertoire of design patterns, and (ii) knowing what is the problem that needs to be addressed. It is not simply an issue of usability or the need for simpler language, but understanding that these low literacy users are very different from the high literacy users. These low literacy users need this information to solve their day-to-day problems and are likely to be less successful in doing so. By providing an information architecture that permits them of a reasoning space and context, while supporting less abstract skills by visualized information in an unconventional way. The above challenges leave us with these research questions to address: what is the basis of such a design, how can these designs be incorporated into existing non-traditional interface proof of concept and finally how can these designs be evaluated.

This thesis provides a transdisciplinary investigation of ‘deviant’ media categories, specifically spam and noise, and the way they are constructed and used to (re)produce territories and people. Spam, I argue, is a media phenomenon that has always existed, and received different names in different times. The changing definitions of spam, the reasons and actors behind these changes are thus the focus of this research. It brings to the forefront a longer history of the politics of knowledge production with and in media, and its consequences. This thesis makes a contribution to the media and communication field by looking at neglected media phenomena through fields such as sound studies, software studies, law and history to have richer understanding that disciplinary boundaries fail to achieve. The thesis looks at three different case studies: the conceptualisation of noise in the early 20th century through Bell Telephone Company, web metric standardisation in the European Union 2000s legislation, and unwanted behaviours on Facebook. What these cases show is that media practitioners have been constructing ‘deviant’ categories in different media and periods by using seven sonic epistemological strategies: training of the (digital) body, restructuring of territories, new experts, standardising measurements (tools and units), filtering, de-politicising and licensing. Informed by my empirical work, I developed two concepts - processed listening and rhythmedia - offering a new theoretical framework to analyse how media practitioners construct power relations by knowing people in mediated territories and then spatially and temporally (re)ordering them. Shifting the attention from theories of vision allows media researchers to have a better understanding of practitioners who work in multi-layered digital/datafied spaces, tuning in and out to continuously measure and record people’s behaviours. Such knowledge is being fed back in a recursive feedback-loop conducted by a particular rhythmedia constantly processing, ordering, shaping and regulating people, objects and spaces. Such actions (re)configure the boundaries of what it means to be human, worker and medium.

Despite the high number of cases of overt political violence in the Mediterranean and the richness of media art in the region, there has been no comprehensive research about political violence and contemporary media art production in the region. Departing from the question of networks in media art from the Mediterranean, this research looks at the artists’ imagination of the region informed by practices of various forms of violence through critical outlook on the issues of visibility. In doing so, it inquires into treating the Mediterranean itself as a medium. It conducts four case studies whose common focus is on the networks of relations that reproduce, strengthen, and reinforce models of political violence at various levels, using anecdotal evidence and content analysis methods. The case studies give a a) microscopic view of a computer virus; b) life-size view of an individual human body; c) landscape view of urban transformation; and d) bird’s eye view of occupation, consumption and destruction. Taking Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as its theoretical framework, the study analyses the contemporary blend of disciplinary, sovereign, biopolitical, and necropolitical practices within granular and grand levels across the region and claims that temporality is the key element in the transformation and survival of forms of violence.

The Sibe people in Northeast and Northwest China lived largely apart for over 250 years until information and communication technology (ICT) renewed regular contact. This thesis hypothesizes that the changes in Sibe interaction resulting from ICT use are redefining their ethnic identity – or minzu in Chinese. To investigate this hypothesis, data was gathered using a combination of interviews and ethnography of Sibe use of social media across platforms from Sina Weibo to QQ and WeChat. The findings contribute to research on both the concept and practice of minzu today and the role of ICT in the production of identity. They challenge essentialist explanations of the relation between ethnic minorities and the internet found in both cyber-utopian and cyber-realist literatures. First, they demonstrate that ethnicity – or minzu in Chinese – is a social construction and dynamic concept. Second, they show that ICT participates in identity construction in an interaction between users’ social and cultural needs and the characteristics of ICT itself. To support this understanding and show how different players shape ethnic identity in their use of ICT, the core chapters: trace the genealogy of minzu as a concept in relation to Sibe identity; analyze the representation of the Westward Migration of Sibe to Northwest China in official museums and unofficially online; and examine debates about how to transliterate Sibe language on the internet.

This thesis, based on a critical “militant ethnography” (Juris 2007) with an auto-ethnographic component, applies the Gramscian concepts of party, leadership and class (Gramsci 1971) to analyse the attempts of the small radical grassroots activist group Our London (OL) to mobilise a collective oppositional politics within a highly unequal city. The group - which was loosely structured, socially and politically heterogeneous and run on very few resources - aimed to mobilise around economic inequality in London through a campaign for the 2016 London elections. I was a founding member of the group and heavily involved in its activities for much of the research period; my account is therefore necessarily a partial one and involves critical reflection on my own practice as well as that of the group as a whole. Through analysis of data collected - including through interviews, observation, collation of internal documents, emails and Facebook posts - I outline how the dispositions and orientations of OL’s activists informed their praxis, developing in the process a novel account of activism as a located social practice. I also explore the collective political activities of the group, discussing the need to articulate identities to interests and the central role of what Dean (2016) calls “crowd events” (p8). I situate my analysis of grassroots organising within the context of what is often termed post-Fordism: a form of contemporary capitalism characterised by flexibility and decentralisation in workplace organisation and the rise of the informational economy (Harvey 1989; Lazzarrato 1996; Hall 1988). I argue that Gramsci’s (1971) emphasis on the “feeling-passion” (p418) that underpins political collectivity and the need for political action to “develop, solidify and universalise” (p227) incipient expression of class sentiment are more pertinent than ever in societies that operate, as Gilbert (2013) argues, upon neoliberal logics hostile to the very notion and practice and collectivity.

This study is an investigation into the operation on the ground of community radio (CR) in Bangladesh. The thesis argues, on the basis of fieldwork conducted at various CR sites, that the heavy involvement of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) poses a number of problems. Their domination of the sector, and their formative influence in the campaign for the introduction of CR in the first place, has tended to reduce the potential of the medium to generate democratization of communication. Simultaneously, the initiator-NGOs’ dominant role and protectionist approach to operations has generated a lack of active community participation and reduced community access to the medium. We have not, therefore, witnessed the emergence of an alternative public sphere in any meaningful way. Indeed, their efforts to institutionalize programing and broadcasting are indicative of a process moving towards the ‘NGO-ization’ of CR. This process is setting limits to the democratic potential of the medium. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in selected community radio station (CRS) areas, supplemented by qualitative research methods such as interview and focus group discussion (FGD). In practice, the NGO-guided CR only partially reflects the key values that constitute this participatory medium. The marginalised and excluded are yet to own and manage a CRS or have any decision-making authority. In the current status quo, local communities are unable to use the stations as a discursive arena in which to challenge dominant socio-political discourses. Nonetheless, initiator NGOs have trained local volunteers and the contributions of the CRSs during natural disasters is noteworthy. Furthermore, CR has demonstrated its utility as a means to support local development, i.e. as a form of local development radio. This, however, falls short of the true potential of CR. Thus, the thesis concludes with the overall observation that NGO involvement is failing to facilitate the proper democratic development of CR in Bangladesh.

This interdisciplinary project examines discourses of internet in Nunavut, a territory in Northern Canada. It has two main arguments: that internet in Nunavut is implicated in correlated discourses of frustration and potential, and that internet in the territory is articulated as having multiple faces and facets. Internet in Nunavut, this thesis argues, is experienced as a media technology, as a tool for communication, as political, as failing and frustrating, as online content, as physical infrastructure, and as potential. In making its arguments, the thesis engages with debates about internet governance, the cultural specificity of internet, and the definition of internet itself. Primary research methods for this thesis included: interviews conducted over the telephone or Skype in London (UK), face to face interviews in Ottawa, Toronto and Iqaluit, the analysis of archival materials (in particular, government reports), as well as a limited period of participant-observation at the Community Access Program site in Iqaluit (the capital of Nunavut). The first empirical chapter in the thesis (Chapter 4: “So frustrating”) examines narratives of Nunavummiut users concerning their experiences of internet; the second (Chapter 5: Fractious Collaborations) examines how some Northern internet activists have lobbied the federal government to alter its internet policy, as a means of tapping into Nunavummiut internet's potential; and the third (Chapter 6: A Local Connection) and final empirical chapter explores the Community Access Program (which provides internet access free of charge to the Nunavummiut public), as a means of linking macro-perspectives and discourses of internet.