Within a contemporary context of self-revelation, which Jon Dovey has called the 'selfspeaking society' and Ken Plummer has described as the 'auto/biographical society', public funds are being directed towards inviting members of the public to represent themselves on public platforms. This thesis asks how processes of mediation shape these self-representations in public sector projects in the cultural sphere. The notion of mediation as a process delineates a specific form of enquiry which stresses both the multiple factors that shape meaning, and the open-ended nature of meaning-making. Within this broad concern, this study focuses on the processes of mediation implicated when public service institutions invite members of the public to represent themselves, assist them in constructing their self-representations and then frame and disseminate the finished texts. Three overlapping but distinct processes of mediation are examined: institutional, textual (including technological) and cultural. The empirical analysis explores the production processes in two cases: BBC Wales' Capture Wales and The Museum of London's London's Voices. The case studies are multi-method, including in-depth interviews and observations with participants and producers, and the textual analysis of selected self-representations. The empirical research suggests that processes of mediation in London's Voices and Capture Wales are constituted through a series of tensions that are both challenging and productive. The public museum and public service broadcaster constitute markedly different contexts and consequently the particular ways in which tensions emerge in each case study are distinctive. Nevertheless self-representations in both Capture Wales and London's Voices are mediated by tensions in four areas: Purposes, Quality, Ordinary people, and Community. Institutional personnel hold varied conceptions of purpose and participants take part for a range of reasons, from imagining audiences for what they produce, to training in specific skills. Some stakeholders emphasise quality of process while others emphasise quality of outcome. The category of the 'ordinary person' is both strategically avoided, and invoked and, in the texts produced, the 'ordinary person' is both brought into being and simultaneously undermined. 'Community' is something which these projects aim to engender and, at the same time, is seen as always already there. In analyzing the empirical data, I draw on Nikolas Rose's Foucauldian analysis of structures of governance to argue that the categories of 'ordinary people' and 'community', as revealed in the case studies, work to constrain how members of the public represent themselves. At the same time the empirical analyses reveal cracks in these structures of governance, which are potentially challenging to their very operation. However, I argue that it is also possible to imagine these cracks as valves, which allow the structures of governance to continue to function all the more effectively. Finally, the thesis considers the normative and critical arguments for the continuation of publicly funded projects of this kind. In particular, I suggest that projects of this kind present a challenge to the increasingly formatted representation of members of the public in media and cultural spaces that is evidenced, for example, in the expansion of reality television formats across the television channels.

This doctoral thesis investigates genre, discourse and ideology in relation to mass media and translation in the light of communication theories. The theoretical part of the thesis adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, and integrates communication-scientific works and insights. This part focuses on mass media institutions in general and Aljazeera and the BBC in particular as social communication systems, and explores the categories of genre, discourse and ideology in these institutions as communicative structures; it also studies the translation of the categories concerned as a complex and uncertain act of social and intercultural interaction. The analytical study then operationalizes a methodological framework which proposes a qualitative and exploratory approach, and draws on the tools and methods of critical discourse analysis in order to examine a corpus data of Aljazeera and the BBC news reports in relation to Turkey’s accession talks with the EU. The analysis explores Aljazeera and the BBC news construction relating to the categories of genre, discourse and ideology, and examines translation between the language cultures of Arabic and English. The results suggest uncertainties in translation, as well as differences in how Aljazeera and the BBC construct their journalistic stories with respect to the examples examined.

This interdisciplinary thesis provides a contemporary-historical, psychoanalytically inflected study around family-help reality television programmes. The combination of psychoanalytic and discursive perspectives, and the focus on popular cultural texts positions this as a psychocultural study. Focussing on Supernanny, Honey We're Killing the Kids and House of Tiny Tearaways, engagements with theses hows and issues around parenting on the web, and policy representational texts, I argue that such programmes and surrounding texts articulate a set of `affective discourses' that are also present in theoretical writing and representations about family and/or reality television. These discourses are often reactionary, and always paradoxical. The programmes in question can be regarded as an anxious distillation of ideological and emotional contradictions, a remediation of parenting and family which fans the very anxieties it purports to soothe. A study of `web audiencing' alongside a close analysis of both theoretical and televisual texts allows an unravelling of the contradictory elements of this `family-help' phenomenon, and its connections with class, shame, and fantasies of the split good/bad parent and child. The thesis begins by examining the cultural context for such concerns by providing a contemporary-historical psychocultural analysis of the UK family as a social and cultural construction in the late 200' and early 21" centuries. Through a focus on the concept of family as a psychosocial construction and the varied attempts to grapple with it in the media, this thesis also shows that ideology and affect are inextricable, especially when they seem furthest apart. This thesis offers a nuanced picture of familial discourses and related affects in contemporary Britain. It also contributes an original psychocultural analysis of popular media, incorporating a refiguring of the media audience in its work on `web audiencing', a psychoanalytically inflected yet materially contextualised textual analysis of reality television shows which do not often garner close textual attention, and a strong argument for a multiperspectival psychocultural perspective in media and popular cultural analysis.

Recent years have seen the dramatic growth of new modes of communication. Besides using landline and mobile for voice real-time communication, people spend increasing amounts of time receiving and sending messages through social networking (e.g. Facebook) and real-time communication software (e.g. Skype or MSN). The main purpose of this research is to develop a behavioural model to demonstrate how media attributes "and communication scenarios affect consumers' choice of telecommunications media. Seven telecommunications media available in 2010 have been studied included landline, mobile, short message service (SMS). E-mail, Internet telephony, instant messaging and social networking. Various media product/service attributes such as synchronicity, multitasking, price, quality, mobility, privacy and video which might affect consumers' media choice were identified. Importantly, this research has designed six types of communication scenarios in an online survey with 894 valid responses to clarify the effects of different communication aims on consumer's media choice. Various existing methods for modelling media choice have been examined including conjoint analysis and simple multi-attribute rating techniques (SMART). The weight of each attribute in each communication has been estimated leading to forecasts of individual media choice. both in adoption and use. By calculating the forecasting error between the probability of the estimated media choice and the actual media use behaviour, we found that using conjoint analysis to forecast consumers' media choice is better than using SMART. In the issue of segmenting customers, using employment status is better than using self-explicated utility. In addition, through aggregating the probability of the individual's media choice and the proportion of time spent on each communication scenario, the market share of each medium has been estimated. Substitution effects between voice media and text media have also addressed leading to forecasts of end usage patterns, a critical element in the investment decisions made by telecommunications and internet providers.

In this interdisciplinary research I set out to develop an understanding of the stages in which human participants experience the application Radiomap, an interactive telematic application mapping live radio stations upon a photorealistic live map of the world, developed as part of this practice-based research program. It was applied in two iterative studies, first in a study using a screen-based version of the application, followed by a study using an immersive, telematic environment. Both studies capture and analyse participants experience via interviews in an adapted Grounded Theory approach, resulting in different models of the stages of experience. This includes diagrams of experiential stages as well as telematic set-ups. A contextual review looks at media theory, media design practice, and relevant dimensions of Human-Computer Interaction research and how this discipline understands and describes telematic experiences. Parts of these dimensions are adapted to inform the methods and methodologies necessary for this research and also to discuss a selection of case studies of interactive art. These case studies, as part of the contextual review, are used to elucidate, establish and analyse the areas of interest Telematic Art, Transformation Art and Global Awareness Art and point to their intrinsic capabilities of not only extending our limited human senses to sense the natural world via remote sensors, but also to create a global awareness, in the sense of an awareness of the planet Earth, in this process. Relevant literature from art theory, philosophy and history of arts complements these examples to form a comprehensive and interdisciplinary system of research methods aided by diagrams and other visual aids depicting crucial experiential characteristics, such as spatiality and medium, which again inform the analysis of data. The conclusions present a critical theory of the different stages of experience that individuals using the application go through. It suggests that a combination of immersive telematics together with the transformation of data into another sensorial modality can create a platform for technological art that questions our relationship with technology and that this critical distance, as opposed to an overwhelming immersion, may aid this process in leaving space to reflect and contemplate this relationship.

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The relationship between the media and social/political mobilisation is a specifically modem phenomenon, contemporaneous with and responding to dominant capitalist communications. Today the trend towards concentration marches forth, policies of privatisation and deregulation of the media reveal a world-wide trend towards the commodification of information, culture and hence, of democracy. We are witnessing the privatisation of access to information and culture with the shrinking of public space in communications. My research begins from the standpoint that we can not ignore that we still live in deeply unequal capitalist societies, driven by profit and competition operating on a global scale. It is also undeniable that we live in a media dominated world with many different ideas and identities in circulation at any one time. We need to understand the former to appreciate the latter - the relation between individual autonomy, freedom and rational action on the one hand and the social construction of identity and behaviour on the other. The mainstream media as part of the political and economic infrastructure of society both disguise inequalities and frustrate any attempts to contest or reveal them. As a consequence dissident or oppressed groups have had to seek alternative means to be heard and to mobilise. These means include both organisation (investigated here in the form of the voluntary sector) and communication (including mainstream and 'alternative' media) within civil society. My research investigates why it is felt there is an ever pressing need to present oppositional views, how strategies of organisation and communication have been deployed and with what success. This research examines the relationship between the media and resistance - either as a dominant social force which through uniformity of representation encourages digression, or as a means of forging other identities and developing alternative political projects.

Fujianese migration is emblematic of the social impact of the migration-asylum nexus and has prominent significance in migration studies. Yet it remains a hidden social phenomenon and has occupied a marginal position in media and socio-cultural studies. This situation exemplifies the contradictions and complexities of globalisation embedded in, and interacting with, economic, political, historical, social and other factors. My study attempts to explore these factors through a socio-cultural theoretical approach that combines textual and empirical analysis. Chapter One conceptualises the migration-asylum nexus from the sociological perspectives of globalisation, risk and racism. Chapter Two reviews a history of British attitudes towards China and Chinese immigration. Chapter Three analyses the textual properties of the press coverage of the Dover incident in which 58 Fujianese migrants died while being smuggled into Britain. Chapter Four draws an ethnographic picture of the marginalised life experiences of some Fujianese in Britain. Chapter Five explores the migration culture in a sending community of Fujian. My study suggests that an overall negative and stereotypical pattern of representing Chinese in the British society is perceivable in the UK media's recent coverage of the Dover incident. Analysis of this coverage also indicates that the UK media's coverage of migration and asylum issues generally accords with an anti-asylum political discourse. This helps to explain the culture of marginality and secrecy that pervades Fujianese migration to some extent. This study brings together the British press's representation of the Fujianese as 'Others' with an ethnographic investigation of what those 'Others' actually think of themselves. It addresses the discrepancies between migrant-receiving and migrant-sending societies in their perceptions of migration, and draws upon elements of politics, history, society, culture and individual dynamics to provide a more comprehensive portrayal of migration culture.

Between January 2008 and June 2008 20 young people between the ages of 15 and 29 took their own lives in the South Wales Borough of Bridgend. In this study I examined a sample of both national and Welsh newspapers over this six-month period, employing both quantitative (content analysis) and qualitative (discourse analysis, interviews with journalists) methods to determine how the British press reports suicide and also to determine how journalists balance their social responsibility to report suicide with their role of maintaining stability in society. Emile Durkheim's framework for suicide and Edwin Shneidman's theory of "psychache" helped contextualise why suicide occurs, while Bob Franklin's, Stuart Allan's and Barbara Zelizer's theories of news constructions, framing and production processes helped further my argument about the press' responsibility to report responsibly while maintaining the status quo. My findings show that journalists created five key categories in which they could further stigmatize the issue of suicide: reaction to death by those left behind; reason for death; description of the deceased; infantilisation; and suicide and internet usage. These categories were summarily framed by questions around why suicide occurs and by ideologies of childhood. This study concludes that the most prevalent discourse around suicide is that it should never happen; people should die naturally, preferably in old age. To reinforce that discourse, journalists tend to deem all adult suicides to be childish acts and "other" those that die into a category of the "deviant non-child". It appears, then, that an overarching assumption underpinning press reports of suicide is that it is a destabilising force in liberal democratic society. As such, journalists play a significant role in maintaining balance and replicating acceptable discourses around the issue of suicide in this society.

This thesis contributes to the existing literature in fan and audience research, particularly within television studies. By focusing upon issues of identity, ontological security, and cultural value, this thesis proposes a conceptualisation of fandom which accounts for inherent dualisms such as the tension between community and hierarchy, and the internal importance of fandom to individuals and the impact of external social factors. Whist prior work has failed to adequately theorise such contradictions, this thesis draws on the work of sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens to propose that we view fandom as forms of 'pure relationship' which enable fans to negotiate their self-identities, gain trust and comfort, and accrue levels of fan power. These ideas are demonstrated via empirical data generated by a cross comparative multi fandom case study of three online fan communities devoted to the television programmes Big Brother UK7, Neighbours, and The West Wing. This thesis demonstrates that fans across different fandoms make distinctions regarding the 'quality' of their chosen fan objects, those who create them, and the position of fellow fans. They also rely upon the routines and repetitions of television scheduling to provide them with ontological security and a sense of trust in the fan object. This thesis also examines the results when this trust is undermined by unwelcome narrative developments or the total cessation of the fan object, which this work uniquely theorises as 'post-object fandom'. Furthermore, fan practices are enacted within the specific arena of the broadcasting field, and this thesis situates the battles over fan objects between producers and fans within the context of this field. Thus, this thesis proposes a theoretical model which considers fandom as a community and a hierarchical site of struggles over power and capital, accounts for the internal impact of an individual's fandom on their sense of self, and treats fan/object and fan/fan relationships equally.