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The development of digital technologies fosters specific forms of socialization, such as those afforded by social media platforms. Personal relationships in these platforms are dominated by dynamics that include trust, reputation and visibility. As a result, real identities are increasingly represented online in mainstream social media (e.g., Facebook), thus, relocating pre-established relationships (family, friends, work colleagues) into the social media environment. However, other social media platforms allow meeting new people online, where issues around authenticity, social stigma, and safety concerns arise. Therefore, there is a lot to investigate about new types of social interactions generated through social media, in order to better comprehend intimacy practices in contemporary society. In particular, this study focuses on (mediated) intimacy practices among adults (25-49) through three different platforms (namely Badoo, CouchSurfing and Facebook) to analyze how users create and maintain intimate relationships through social media. The project aims to bring together a critical analysis of the politics of social media with users’ perspectives by employing a multi-method research design, which combines interviews, participant observation, and the analysis of platforms architecture and user profiles. The main aims of the thesis are to explore the characteristics of intimacy practices on social media and to question if intimacy online exists in spite of the publicity afforded in these platforms. For doing so, this research examines the extent participants expose their intimacy through social media, as well as the strategies that they use to manage their privacy online. The research gathers user’s perspectives of what constitutes intimate information (visual and textual) and how they negotiate its publication on social media. It explores the relationship between the architecture and politics of social media platforms and the emergent intimacy practices that take place within them. This study also investigates whether participants consider personal relationships originated via social media are shallower than relationships created in other environments, safety, authenticity and social stigma concerns, as well as the extent patriarchal gender roles are reproduced online.

The research focuses on the practices of digital activism and political communication of the Muslim Brotherhood, examining a selection of meda outlets established by the group before the 25 January revolution. In doing so, it attempts to answer the following research questions: what is the political role of digital technologies? How is one to conceive of the role they play in relation to contemporary social movements? The thesis argues that the political role of new media is to be found in their capacity to store information. Far from merely making claims to authorities or expressing identities, social movements produce knowledges about the territories they inhabit. What new media provide social movements with is the capacity to assemble digital archives, which in turn enable them to organize and produce knowledge. By going online, social movements create archives of their own history, read against the grain others' archives or remember what was arbitrarily removed from them. For keeping memory is never an innocent act, but always an exquisitely political one. Having positioned the theoretical argument in relation to both social movement and new media studies, I will then proceed to apply it to three cases of study. Two chapters will examine and compare the official websites of the Muslim Brotherhood - one in English, the other in Arabic. The last chapter focuses instead on the development of an Ikhwan-related blogosphere. The research argues that the adoption of new media was both beneficial and detrimental to the organization. Digital technologies did help the group in circumventing the obstacles imposed by the regime, yet they equally enabled internally marginalized subjects, such as the youth, to intervene in decisionmaking processes and pierce the ideological veil of unity and cohesion.

This thesis explores the perceptions of a sample of young Egyptian activists about the potential of social media (SM) for mobilising collective action. Themes of media usage, dispositions and actions (online and off-line) that appear to relate to these perceptions are investigated and analysed. This thesis builds a moderate case for SM’s influence on the mobilisation of collective action. Although young activists purposively use the SM repertoire as instruments through which to mobilise collective action, they believe that the role these media may play varies significantly, depending on the media user, i.e., the contribution of SM to creating favourable dispositions towards the participation and mobilisation of individuals to move from behind their keyboards and to take to the streets differs between activists and non-politicised individuals. The findings suggest that SM are not perceived as a suitable arena for the building of an activist identity, which consequently raises concerns about the commitment to and sustainability of social movements organised on social media platforms. This thesis is organised to allow these arguments to be made clearly in relation to the data. Findings are discussed and analysed in Chapters Five (young activists’ uses of social media), Six (young activists’ contextual perceptions and political dispositions) and Seven (the perceived opportunities to link to off-line space). Each chapter considers several dimensions that are related to the theme being investigated. Throughout these chapters, the data are analysed and discussed horizontally in order to delineate the interconnection and interaction of the research themes. In each chapter, data from questionnaires and focus group discussions (FGDs) are presented. Quantitative and qualitative findings around key themes and issues are presented in an integrated fashion. In most cases, general findings begin by displaying participants’ questionnaire answers. These findings are subsequently considered within the context of what respondents said in FGDs. Chapter Eight coherently draws together these three dimensions based on findings illuminated in the preceding three chapters. It also presents recommendations for practice and future research.

This thesis seeks to explore the impact of the increased coverage of environmental issues on television since the late 1980s, on children’s awareness and concern about the environment. The rise of environmental concern and related media coverage is charted, and then research regarding the effects of mass media on behaviour is discussed. Frequent methodological flaws and oversimplistic approaches are seen to limit these studies. The theoretical approaches of Adorno, Gramsci, and others are then discussed in some detail in an attempt to renegotiate critical theory and cultural studies for the purposes of the thesis. Paradigms of research on children and the media are discussed. It is argued that research, particularly in psychology, has traditionally disenfranchised young people and not recognised their capacities. Previous research on environmental issues and media audiences is then considered, and interviews with the producers of three key British environmental TV programmes are discussed. It is found that programmes tend to focus on individuals, rather than social structures, as both the causes and potential solutions to environmental problems. The new research method developed for this study is introduced, and its methodological foundations are discussed. Children aged 7-11 were invited to make their own videos about the environment. (Total of 53 children, from seven Leeds schools, worked in small groups). Observation of this process, and the videos produced, formed the research data. Findings showed that the children were impressively media literate. Most children had environmental concerns, but these were not necessarily as indicated in preliminary interviews. Concerns were generally local and associated with individuals. It is argued that the children’s environmental concern was not a product of simple media ‘effects’, but that their understanding of the issues had been subject to ‘hegemonic bending’ by programmes which had emphasised individualistic rather than social accounts.

In an era bombarded by information society has become more and more dependent on mass media communication and computerised communication technology. As "religion finds technology" (Biersdorjer 2002), religious symbols can be found in media texts. As media consumption and interpretation processes can be subjective, Hoover suggests that modernity has changed the meanings of "traditionally defined religion" (2006). The textually based study on religion is inadequate to study the socio-cultural context of the lay people as well as the changing practices of religions in the media age. This thesis selects three dramas from Da-Ai Drama (the most popular TV programme on the Da-Ai TV network) to examine how the Tzu-Chi organisation, the largest Buddhist civil organisation in Taiwan, uses its own TV network, DaAi TV network, to spread Buddhism. The narrative structure of the selected dramas shows the intricate relationship between the secular discourse on gender and the religious teachings. To further understand how Da-Ai Drama is perceived by the audience or Tzu-Chi's followers, fifteen one-to-one interviews were conducted in Taiwan and discussions from online users were collected to further understand the audience's response to Da-Ai Drama. Results from the interviews suggest that there is a reassessment of religion in an East Asian context in the twenty-first century. This thesis provides an innovative research method to explore the relationship between media discourse, gender discourse, and religious discourse. In the media age, religious teachings can be transmitted via various media platforms. Written texts are no longer the only way to transmit religious teachings. Also the media provides a greater choice of ways in which lay people may practise religions. A media approach to studying Buddhism provides a different perspective on the discussion of women in Buddhism.

Research on third sector media and cultural organisations has tended to focus on socio-political imperatives in organisational and production processes. However, my research shows that as socio-political circumstances have gradually changed, other imperatives especially of a professional, artistic and commercial nature now play an equally important role in these processes in the third sector. The interplay between the different imperatives can be conflicting, pulling producers in different directions. Moreover, producers can be subjected to systemic pressures such as demands from subsidy, other funders, broadcasters and politics, all of which impact third sector media and cultural work. Producers respond in ways that have not been sufficiently studied. This thesis aims to address this gap. Drawing on relevant theoretical perspectives and qualitative research methods, I address three key issues in this thesis. First, I examine the ways in which producers in the third sector respond to professional, artistic and commercial imperatives alongside socio-political ones in the organisation and production of news, documentary film and arts and cultural programmes. Where the interplay between these imperatives is conflicting, I analyse how producers negotiate between them. Second, I analyse the response of producers to systemic pressures. Third, I evaluate how producers perceive their work following competing imperatives and systemic pressures. I argue that the evolving environment in which third sector media and cultural organisations operate in some cases compels producers to prioritise commercial and professional imperatives over socio-political and artistic ones and to give in to systemic pressures. Based on British and German case study companies, my thesis provides crucial insights into the interplay between such pressures and competing imperatives in contemporary third sector media and cultural organisation and production.

Microblogs and social media platforms are now considered among the most popular forms of online communication. Through a platform like Twitter, much information reflecting people's opinions and attitudes is published and shared among users on a daily basis. This has recently brought great opportunities to companies interested in tracking and monitoring the reputation of their brands and businesses, and to policy makers and politicians to support their assessment of public opinions about their policies or political issues. A wide range of approaches to sentiment analysis on Twitter, and other similar microblogging platforms, have been recently built. Most of these approaches rely mainly on the presence of affect words or syntactic structures that explicitly and unambiguously reflect sentiment (e.g., "great'', "terrible''). However, these approaches are semantically weak, that is, they do not account for the semantics of words when detecting their sentiment in text. This is problematic since the sentiment of words, in many cases, is associated with their semantics, either along the context they occur within (e.g., "great'' is negative in the context "pain'') or the conceptual meaning associated with the words (e.g., "Ebola" is negative when its associated semantic concept is "Virus"). This thesis investigates the role of words' semantics in sentiment analysis of microblogs, aiming mainly at addressing the above problem. In particular, Twitter is used as a case study of microblogging platforms to investigate whether capturing the sentiment of words with respect to their semantics leads to more accurate sentiment analysis models on Twitter. To this end, several approaches are proposed in this thesis for extracting and incorporating two types of word semantics for sentiment analysis: contextual semantics (i.e., semantics captured from words' co-occurrences) and conceptual semantics (i.e., semantics extracted from external knowledge sources). Experiments are conducted with both types of semantics by assessing their impact in three popular sentiment analysis tasks on Twitter; entity-level sentiment analysis, tweet-level sentiment analysis and context-sensitive sentiment lexicon adaptation. Evaluation under each sentiment analysis task includes several sentiment lexicons, and up to 9 Twitter datasets of different characteristics, as well as comparing against several state-of-the-art sentiment analysis approaches widely used in the literature. The findings from this body of work demonstrate the value of using semantics in sentiment analysis on Twitter. The proposed approaches, which consider words' semantics for sentiment analysis at both, entity and tweet levels, surpass non-semantic approaches in most datasets.

This thesis examines the uses and place of television in Varanasi, the major city of eastern Uttar Pradesh, India. The focus of the thesis is the household consumption of television and the gender and kinship relations through which viewing is organised. Particular attention is given to household negotiations with satellite television and on attempts to find a place for what is often represented as an intrusive medium. It explores some of the processes through which television has become implicated in the lives of household and its members. The current lively debate about the effects of satellite television, seen most clearly with reference to children, is explored as an issue which both informs household responses to television and has wider symbolic currency in contemporary Indian society. A result of participant observation in Varanasi is ethnographic description of the organisation of satellite services in the city and the production and reception of local television programmes. So that the implications of television within this environment can be examined a discussion of newspaper consumption is included. By attending to the media environment in the city the thesis provides a localised account of global processes and places the discussion within the pre-existing media framework of the city. Description of public and domestic space in Varanasi acts as a context through which the relation of television to both these arenas is examined. Shifts in the evaluation and use of the 'outside' act as a significant commentary on changes in the physical and social landscape of Varanasi in which television has played a role. Similarly, attention to domestic space and its social and aesthetic organisation provides the setting for a discussion of the place of television within everyday household life. The widespread involvement of television sets in dowry prestation is examined as a phenomenon which simultaneously bears on consumption, concerns about television content, aspects of contemporary marriage and the spatial organisation of the house.

This study examined TV coverage of terrorism from Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya using media framing analysis. The study attempted to address two main objectives. These objectives are exploring the terrorism issues in both Arabic news channels under the period of study and the extent to which the two networks differ or agree; and identifying the factors that might have influenced each of these two news providers’ news selection processes and the framing of terrorism on broadcast networks. Using a framing approach, this study initially used content analysis to examine a number of framing devices based on past literature such as types of news frames, framing perspective, geographical location of terrorism coverage, sources used, perpetrators of terrorism, victims of terrorism, episodic versus thematic frame, and responsibility frames. Furthermore, discourse analysis was applied to understand the link between discursive practice and the broader social and cultural developments and structures. Language extracts taken from both TV networks’ broadcasts were compared, taking into consideration different contextual factors that contribute to the production and consumption of news discourse about terrorism. This study found that the stereotype that ‘the terrorist is a Muslim’ prevailed in the news coverage that was analysed. Furthermore, contrary to the pattern among western news sources, both networks were consistent in at least implying that the majority of terrorism victims are Muslims. In addition, the findings reveal that too much media focus was placed on disseminating and supporting official positions and decisions, and that humanitarian suffering from terrorism is seldom brought to the attention of the public.