First UAL viva voce using the approved model (Academic Affairs) devised for Teaching and Learning Fellowship 2005/06. Audio recording of thesis.

Excessive internet use and its problematic outcomes is a growing focus of research, receiving attention from academics, journalists, health workers, policymakers and the public. However, surprisingly little has yet been accomplished in terms of understanding the causes and consequences of this phenomenon. I argue that this is due to the framing of excessive internet use as an addiction, which leads researchers to neglect people’s reasons and motivations for excessive internet use. The perspective taken in this thesis is that excessive internet use may help people to cope with difficult life situations. This explains why people keep using the internet excessively despite problematic outcomes: the overall experience is positive because worse problems are alleviated. Based on the relationship between a person’s well-being, which is the focal point of literature on excessive internet use, and the motivations for media use grounded in uses and gratifications research, this thesis proposes a combined framework to examine if excessive internet use may be explained as a coping strategy taken to excess. This question was asked in relation to three online activities: World of Warcraft; Facebook; and online poker. Each group was surveyed about their psychosocial well-being, motivations for internet use, and any problematic outcomes. Findings showed that interactions between motivations for use and psychosocial well-being were important explanatory factors for problematic outcomes. Respondents with low self-esteem or high stress experienced more problematic outcomes when gaming or gambling to escape negative feelings, while escapist use was less problematic for players with high self-esteem or low stress. This has implications for how society needs to respond to cases of excessive internet use, since such behaviour can be both helpful and harmful. Future studies may usefully move beyond theories of addiction and consider excessive internet use as a coping behaviour that has both positive and negative outcomes.

This thesis investigates the role of information framing strategies for services advertising. The framing strategy refers to the distinguishable pattern in the manifest advertisement (McQuarrie and Mick 1996) and represents the structural composition of the information presented (Tsai 2007). Focusing on services is an important line of enquiry which is in keeping with global economic developments and the evolution of services marketing as a distinct discipline within marketing. Despite the ever increasing importance of services for global economies, services advertising research remains underdeveloped compared to goods (Stafford et al. 2011). Information framing is important because how messages are presented to consumers has both direct effects on consumer responses, as well as mediated effects via the specific information processing styles triggered. This thesis is divided into three papers, each of which work towards improving our currently impoverished understanding of the effectiveness of different framing strategies for services. The first paper is a literature review, which offers a comprehensive review of the traditional and contemporary literature informing our knowledge of the impact of framing strategies on consumer responses to advertising. The next paper employs a content analysis methodology to shed light on the different framing strategies viewed as alternatives by modern services and to offer an overall perspective on the most frequently used framing strategies in practice. This paper also examines trends in the use of framing strategies across service types and identifies if any disparity exists between the findings of this study and optimal framing strategies as dictated by the theoretical background. The third and final paper in this thesis is a 3(framing strategy: argument v. metaphor v. narrative) x 2(mental intangibility: high v. low) x 2(customization: high v. low) between-subjects web-experiment (n = 663). This paper develops and empirically tests hypotheses related to the moderating impact of service characteristics on consumer response to framing strategies. This study raises interesting findings on the effectiveness of different framing strategies in enhancing comprehension and attitudes towards different types of services. Further, comparing the content analysis and experimental findings brings the disparity between how service practitioners are framing their advertisements versus effective framing strategies to light. This thesis therefore has important managerial implications.

The purpose of this thesis is to study whether and how death-related media rituals construct and reconstruct a global cosmopolitan community. The performance of the media at the occurrence of mass death events, may cultivate expressions of grief aimed at reinforcing a certain understanding of the social order. These rituals facilitate a sense of unity and solidarity between members of an imagined community. What kind of community does the enactment of death-related media rituals construct? What is the sense of solidarity they foster? By focusing on the performance of transnational media organisations following mass death events, the thesis studies the ways in which these ritualistic performances function as a social mechanism that informs the audience of the boundaries of care and belonging to an imagined community. Drawing on theories from sociology, media anthropology and moral philosophy, the thesis develops the analytics of mediatised grievability as an analytical tool. It aims to capture the ways in which news about death construct grievable death, and articulate the relational ties between spectators and sufferers. The thesis puts the analytics of mediatised grievability in play and employs it in a comparative manner to study and analyse the coverage of three different case studies by two transnational news networks. This comparative research design captures the complexity of the mediatisation of death in terms of geopolitics, cultural proximity, legitimacy of violence and the morality of witnessing death. The analysis of the three case studies by the two transnational news networks enables to account for different propositions that two of the networks make for their audiences in comprehending remote mass death. These propositions contain different ethical solicitations, each articulating a different understanding of the relational ties between spectators and distant others – some promote a cosmopolitan outlook, and others maintain a communitarian outlook.

This research explores the ways in which Dennis Potter (1935-1994) is made inheritable to audiences through a rural Heritage Lottery Funded project. With the sale of the written Potter Archive to the Dean Heritage Centre, Gloucestershire, in 2010, this study explores in great detail the processes enacted to interpret the Potter Archive as cultural (television) heritage. Through a creative and innovative research design which utilises autoethnography, inventive qualitative methods and a level of quantitative analysis, this study examines the ways in which Potter is made intelligible to past television audiences, project members and collaborators, local people, and the casual tourist within the heritage environment. A unique and irreproducible study, this interdisciplinary research sits as a contribution to an emerging field that is located at the interface between Memory studies and Museum Studies and explores the way various forms of mediation are connected to these fields. Inherently at stake in this research is the valorisation of television as heritage, as Potter remains well within living memory. Through proximate and intimate connections to this multifaceted heritage project this work represents one of the first interventions to explore turning television into heritage at a local level drawing together the macro level of cultural policy with the micro level of enacting that policy. In asking how Dennis Potter’s legacy is managed in the Forest of Dean heritage environment, this thesis explores the ways Potter’s legacy is mediated, how television heritage is consumed and made meaningful (or struggles for meaning) in the museum space, how a writer’s legacy is interpreted by heritage professionals, volunteers, past television audiences and museum visitors, and how television as heritage is consumed online. This thesis makes visible the underlying mechanisms by which the Dennis Potter Archive is (or might yet become) articulated as television heritage, through examining the core managerial, interpretive and memorial processes involved in this high stakes, multi-partner project.

Building upon constitutive models of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication, which appreciate the role of both organisations and stakeholders in constructing CSR, this thesis suggests that understanding of CSR is on-going and emergent through unfinalisable legitimation processes in social networking sites (SNSs). Constructed upon management research that has examined discursive legitimation processes, this thesis shifts away from CSR communications research into websites, CSR reports and press releases, to descriptively investigate discourse within interaction (dialogue) in the textually rich SNS context. The thesis contributes to the CSR literature by challenging conventional definitions of legitimacy, which suggest that objective, legitimacy ‘realities’ are espoused from ‘transmission’ (sender-orientated) models of communication, to offer interpretations of legitimation processes rooted within discursive and dialogical constructionism. In exploring how discursive legitimation occurs in contemporary networked societies across four UK-based retailers: the Co-operative, Lidl, Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury’s, findings capture the ‘centripetal’ (unifying) forces of normalisation, moralisation and mytholigisation at play in organisation-stakeholder dialogue across the SNSs, but also the ‘centrifugal’ (dividing) forces of authorisation, demythologisation and carnivalisation. These findings problematise the consensual tone of legitimacy as organisation-society ‘congruence’ and reveal the shifting and contradictory expectations that surround CSR. Within a Bakhtinian (1981, 1986) conception of dialogue, the findings most markedly reveal perpetuality (unfinalisability) in CSR communication and the impossibility of exhausting relations in polyphonic (multi-vocal) SNS environments, characterised by ‘dispersed authority.’ Furthermore, in conceptualising SNSs as interactive, agential and co-constructed organisational ‘texts’, findings also illuminate the performative (constructive) nature of SNSs in organising and (re)constituting CSR through organisation-stakeholder dialogue. This thesis provides a framework for understanding legitimation processes in SNSs, with implications for theory and practice.

The aim of this research was to establish a new style of AV performance that facilitated me in knowingly steering audience engagement. My interest in steering engagement stems from the intent I have with my performances; an intent to encourage audiences into considered thought about the topics I bring to my shows. As practice-based research, a series of performances formed its basis, with each adapted toward establishing a new style. I introduced audience conversations to my performances, doing so in real-time by harnessing the audience's second-screens. In this way, their smartphones facilitated spontaneous collaboration between the audience and I; in turn this gave me a way to steer them toward thinking about the themes behind my performances. By then bringing this style of performance to the context of live debate, a new paradigm emerged; one that challenges the audience to participate in shaping the emergent audio-visual event. I had to develop the capacity to monitor audience engagement, first online with the `video-cued commentary' and then in real-time via two different `audience-commentary systems'. This may be of interest to anyone engaging in forms of audience analysis or viewer studies. How I developed second-screen systems may be of interest to designers of phone-network-based social-media commentary platforms. My effort toward simplifying how I generated audio-visual content and how I controlled it on-stage may make this research of interest to other digital-media performers and installation-designers.

Social media technology (SMT) has become central to adolescent life with 96% of teenagers having a SMT profile (Coughlan, 2016). Previous literature has either investigated the discretely positive or negative implications for adolescent development or adopted a broad, quantitative approach lacking depth and validity. This qualitative study examined the experiences of adolescents who use SMT in a balanced, yet rich and detailed way. A constructivist-interpretive approach was adopted and 12 semi-structured interviews were conducted using a sample of 14-18 year olds and analysed through the 6-stage process of thematic analysis outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006). The findings present a balanced, yet complex interaction between positive (e.g. feeling connected to friends and able to express true/ideal self) and negative (e.g. destruction of self-esteem/self-image and long-lasting feelings of distress) implications for adolescent wellbeing and development and offer a nuanced perspective on the use of SMT within this demographic, with suggestions for holistic support and intervention.

This thesis aims to identify the extent to which popular music functionality in UK and US film can be regarded as a developmental process, and, in particular, the importance of the contribution of the 13-year period bounded by the films A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, UK, 1964) and Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, USA, 1977) to this. It also explores salient cultural, historical and industrial factors which may have influenced development. Both these areas have been largely neglected to date. Within the period identified above, three key phases have been recognized which each contributed to specific innovations and developments. These have been labelled ‘The British Invasion Phase’, ‘The New Hollywood Alienation Phase’ and ‘The Disco Phase’. For each of these a primary film text (A Hard Day’s Night, The Graduate and Saturday Night Fever respectively) is analyzed in detail, with reference to the work of Claudia Gorbman and Jeff Smith on the principles of musical function in film. In addition, these chapters are prefaced by an examination of a further stage, ‘The Classic American Musical Phase’, covering a period of relative inactivity, in respect of developments in popular music function, prior to the ‘British Invasion Phase’. Examples of two of Elvis Presley’s films, Girls! Girls! Girls! and It Happened at the World’s Fair, are examined to illustrate why innovation was lacking at this time. As this thesis is not only concerned with what innovations occurred but also why they manifested specifically during a particular phase, individual chapters extend beyond pure film analysis into a study of crucial elements of cultural and popular music history associated with aspects of The British Invasion, New Hollywood and Disco.

This is a mixed methods research thesis on how the Western press covers Venezuela. It found a pronounced to overwhelming tendency for all newspapers to present the country, its economics and politics in an extremely negative light, presenting minority opinions on highly-contested and controversial issues as undisputed facts while rarely acknowledging opposing opinions existed and displaying an overwhelming aversion to the Venezuelan government and its project in the majority of articles, especially editorials. Drawing on Herman and Chomsky (1988) and Gramsci’s (1971) theories, it found the coverage shaped by the cultural milieu of journalists. News about Venezuela is written from New York or London by non-specialists or by those staying inside wealthy guarded citadel enclaves inside an intensely segregated Caracas. Journalists speak mainly to English-speaking elites and have little contact with the poor majority. Therefore, they reproduce ideas that are largely attuned to a Western, neoliberal understanding of Venezuela. Facing intense financial pressure, newspapers have outsourced their coverage to local journalists affiliated with the virulently partisan opposition, leading to a highly adversarial newsroom culture that sees itself as the “resistance” against chavismo. Journalists sympathetic to chavismo practice self-censorship and experts sharing differing opinions about Venezuela are commonly blacklisted from mainstream media.