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The purpose of this research is to explore how multimedia technologies such as the Internet, satellite TV, cable TV and mobile phones, combined with people's everyday practices, produce the hybrid city where the boundaries between binary territories are blurred; and to offer implications for understanding our everyday lives and cities. Here, multimedia technologies are crucial triggers by which the boundaries between binary categories such as time/space, actual/virtual, human/machine and so on are blurred. And, cities, where urban locales are connected to electronic networks and human bodies are wired to electronic machines, are locations where such boundary-blurring processes occur intensively. I call such a city the 'hybrid city' where we can observe various geographies of technocultural spaces formed by multimedia technologies. In this epistemological context, I investigate cities in South Korea, a country that is one of the most 'wired' to electronic networks in the world. My argument is that the hybrid city, composed of global-local networks, actual- virtual circuits, centripetal-centrifugal vectors and human-machine hybrids, cannot be explained as a singular and consistent space, but rather as multiple and complex spaces. This is because the hybrid city itself exists in between different categories or territories. That is, the hybrid city does not exist as A or B, but instead in between A and в which are deterritorialised towards each other through a-parallel evolution or co-evolution, and thus it can be seen as fractal and fluid. In this sense, the hybrid city can be defined as not a 'being', but 'becomings' always in motion through the continuous 'dis/appearances' or 'dis/connections' of heterogeneous networks. In Latour's, Deleuze and Guattari's and Haraway's terms, the hybrid city is not only composed of a number of actor-networks, rhizomes or cyborgs, but also a kind of actor-network, rhizome or cyborg itself. That is, the hybrid city is the 'middle kingdom' in Latour's terms.

This thesis investigates the affective and embodied ways in which representations of celebrity on gossip blogs generate ideas about femininity, queerness and whiteness. To date, celebrity studies has largely focused on how celebrity representations shape cultural ideas about proper and improper forms of subjectivity through discursive or semiotic approaches. I extend these readings by drawing attention to the technological and affective specificities of celebrity representations on such gossip blogs as Dlisted.com, Jezebel.com and Perezhilton.com. I do so by bringing feminist work on the politics of emotions into dialogue with key new materialist and phenomenologist thinkers. Using the concept of skin as a heuristic device to read these representations of celebrity allows me to think through the relations of affect, embodiment and technology that shape our meaning-making processes. Skin enables us to understand online representations not as fixed texts on the screen but as dynamic and sensuous interfaces that affect and are affected by that with which they come into contact. This thesis is comprised of three core chapters. The first focuses on the affective production of femininity in these gossip websites. Drawing on feminist theorisations of touch, I demonstrate how meaning is produced beyond the realm of visibility. The affective- discursive force of humour is a central concern throughout the thesis, but the second core chapter explores the role of humour in some depth in order to tease out how it serves the creation of queerness in these websites. The third main chapter examines some of the ways in which the technological affordances of online blogs influence the affective production of whiteness. The thesis places these gossip blogs within the context of neoliberal consumer culture in which the production and modulation of affect is vital for the creation of profit. Far from locating these online productions as mere products of market forces, however, I argue that they can move the reader in new critical directions, thereby challenging dominant ideas about femininity, queerness and whiteness. This potentiality lies in the complex ways in which the humour and the affective force of these online representations move and touch the offline reading body.

As one of the most violent, ideological and intractable conflicts in modern history, sited in a very sensitive and strategic region, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has always been under the spotlight of media and politicians. The conflict is almost a constant item in the coverage of news outlets, especially since the outbreak of the spiraling violence that marked the end of the peace process and the beginning of the second Palestinian uprising in the fall of 2000. The discourse of the conflict is as ideological and controversial as the conflict itself. Even news reporting, which is governed by values of truthfulness, accuracy, balance, impartiality and integrity, has always been the object of scrutiny and criticism by members of both sides who often accuse newspapers of bias against them. The discourse of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been the object of a number of academic studies. This thesis aims to contribute to this body of knowledge about the discourse of the conflict by critically analysing the discourse of news reports on selected events of the second Intifada, both from cross-cultural and inter-cultural perspectives, by exploring the way Arab and Western newspapers report on some recent events of the conflict and the way different newspapers issued in the UK cover the same events.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the complexity of young women's identities in a context where accelerated global cultural flows have become enormously influential. In particular, this research examines how the consumption of global media affects young women's identities in postcolonial South Korea. Young Korean women's identities have been constructed through specific historical experiences: colonisation under Japanese rule; the division of Korea after the Korean War; and a compressed modernity with rapidly increasing consumption of global media during the 1990s. This research demonstrates how global culture has adapted to a particular local culture. It illustrates how women as audiences are in conflict with, and have to negotiate, newly introduced values through their consumption of global mass media. The research was based on a series of group interviews, including 21 group (101 women) interviews along with data collected from magazine and newspaper articles during nine, months' fieldwork in 2000. The analysis is structured around three key themes of women's cultural practice; consuming plastic surgery, the translation of romantic love and marriage, and the notion of femininity amongst married women. It provides a detailed example of postcolonial theory and argues that the global-local relationship is not monolithic but interactive; it forms part of the devolution of global media. The process of women's identity formation is therefore closely associated with the multi-layered and dynamic practice of struggling with, resisting, and negotiating with, an evolving and devolving global media, and this dominates women's contemporary cultural practice. That cultural practice needs to be contextualised and understood as part of a continuous local negotiation with global forces, as we seek to avoid an unnecessary dichotomy where women are seen as either oppressed or as subversive audiences.

This thesis emerges from a general interest in how actors in the field of international affairs use the media as a means of power in politics and war. It examines the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's (NATO) use of its Press and Information (PI) function in three peace support missions in the Balkans, and specifically studies how the officers in charge of this function strove to achieve the alliance's political and military ends. Departing from six illustrative cases the thesis demonstrates how PI operated to enhance NATO member countries' public support to the alliance as well as its presence and use of physical force in the Balkans. Further, it examines how NATO used PI in an effort to influence the general behaviour and specific actions of ordinary people and warring parties in the Balkans without having to resort to such force. The thesis does not evaluate whether the PI activities actually influenced people in the Balkans and elsewhere, but it provides a conceptual framework to appreciate the kinds of influence PI sought to exercise on them. Robert A. Dahl's notion of power may further the understanding of Pi's mode of operation to influence the parties' specific actions. To this end, PI holds the potential of being a non-lethal enforcement measure. Michel Foucault's notion of power adds another dimension by clarifying in a theoretical sense how PI may enhance public understanding and support and influence people's general behaviour. Used in this manner, PI may ultimately be a government technique applied as a concentration of knowledge in a discursive battlefield.