The recent political protests around the globe since the uprising in the Arab World, the Indignados movement in Spain, and the Occupy Movement in United States, were broadcast to the world through both the global mainstream and alternative media using many images and reports produced by people on the ground using internet, mobile phones, and social media. These events have triggered a discussion not only about the political changes taking place in the region but have also opened up an academic debate about what changes and transformations may have occurred in the nature of citizens' political actions and the use of social media to communicate with people around the world. In turn, these political events have also reignited the discussion on social media as transnational public spheres beyond government control and opened to question the ethos of existing attempts at Internet governance by western nation-states. The aim of this thesis is to engage in a theoretical discussion of this political phenomenon through a case study of New Social Movements and social networking sites' Uses: Mexicans' mobilization for peace in Mexico, an important element in the development of citizen participation on the Internet focused on in the thesis. In this process, this thesis examines how theoretically social movements have been transformed with the goal of contributing to the debate on the role of new communication technologies in redefining social movements and their potential to transform traditional political practices, such as opening up space to develop temporary alliances with the government, widening political participation in government structures, and/or exercising more influence on the policy-making process.

In recent years different forms of media communication have increased in popularity and brought new technology into our daily lives, such as social media and smartphones. It has brought new opportunities for communication. However, there has traditionally been a communication gap between the deaf/hard of hearing (D/HoH) and hearing people. The question therefore arises: Are the new communication opportunities able to bridge this communication gap? This research aims to explore new communication opportunities for D/HoH people by the use of social networking services (SNS) and the new communication applications (apps). It will provide an innovative communication solution, via interaction design, for bridging the aforementioned communication gap between D/HoH and hearing people. This study is divided into two parts: a. Preliminary study; b. Primary research and creative practice. The preliminary study shows that new media communication technologies (SNS and communication apps) can open new communication opportunities and bridge the communication gap between D/HoH and hearing people. This study argues it is possible because there are three specific features provided by SNS and communication apps. However, it also shows there is a further communication gap in face-to-face (FTF) communication even when using SNS and communication apps. This is because the physical interaction with nonverbal messages is absent in the use of SNS and communication apps. The primary research provides a communication solution (a smartphone app 'Talk2Me') that has been developed through interaction design creative practice and specifically a user-centred design (UCD) development process. The resulting app can be used to bridge the FTF communication gap between D/HoH and hearing people. This innovative communication solution provides a specific way to communicate between D/HoH and hearing people in FTF communication. This study contributes new knowledge in the understanding of SNS and communication apps as used by the D/HoH, which are not studied in detail in existing literature. In addition, this research contributes an innovative communication solution for the D/HoH that has been specifically developed from an interaction design perspective.

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the quality of online video content. Watching video content online has become one of the most popular activities on the Internet as audiences continue to grow rapidly around the globe where more people than ever access the Internet. This leads to a global demand for more video content and an ever increasing number of video content producers. As online audiences grow and the number of video content producers increases a challenge is the identification of high quality video content amongst billions of hours of video. Evaluating video quality and identifying video content that will entertain and emotionally engage the user is a complex task. Evaluating high quality video content has commonly been addressed with video recommender systems, which rank videos for comparison. Sentiment analysis, which identifies positive and negative emotions in text has been applied to text movie reviews to improve movie recommendations. Affective recommender systems utilise the emotional state of the user to improve recommendations. Gamification, which utilises game techniques in non-game scenarios, is a recognised method of encouraging user participation and for monitoring online communities. This research focuses on the use of sentiment analysis, emotion detection and gamification in an emotion-centred model for the evaluation of online video content. The emotion-centred model combines the Unifying framework (Tkalcic et al. 2011) and the Emotion Imbued Choice model (Lerner et al. 2015). The emotion-centred model is implemented in a software system called 360-MAM-Affect. 360-MAM-Affect's sentiment analysis module automatically evaluates the quality of online videos by analysing people's text comments on them. 360- MAM-Affect's emotion detection module obtains people's emotion feedback on videos together with data on their emotional state including explicit mood feedback, implicit mood feedback, and personality and preferences. 360-Gamify, a gamification module, uses gamification techniques to encourage the user to proactively provide feedback and engage with 360-MAM-Affect. This thesis investigates two hypotheses: (1) Video-Sentiment Hypothesis (Hl): Sentiment analysis can enhance the quality evaluation o f online videos and (2) Video-Emotional-Reaction Hypothesis (H2): Users can be monitored with emotion detection and gamification during video viewing to identify their current emotional state and emotional reaction to video content. Five experiments are conducted on YouTube videos with 360-MAM-Affect in order to investigate Hl and H2, with 2 of these experiments applied to 1,433 YouTube videos, and one experiment involving 22 human participants interacting with 200 of those YouTube videos over a two-week period. The results from both experiments provide evidence for hypotheses Hl and H2. Future work includes experimentation with a larger number of participants and incorporating 360-MAM-Affect within a video recommender system.

The Islamic Republic of Iran's discourse has been articulated differently throughout various periods of its history. After the presidential election of 2009, this discourse was confronted by a crisis brought its hegemony into question. The claim of electoral fraud by the predominantly middle class residents of Tehran produced the 'Green Movement' - with unprecedented protests and subsequent repression. Despite the repression, the Islamic Republic's discourse also needed to form a kind of subjectivity among the middle class in order to remain hegemonic. The middle class in Tehran has always played a significant role in major social and political changes in contemporary Iranian history. Therefore, forming the subjectivity of the middle class secures the Islamic Republic's discourse from losing its hegemony. Since 1979, Iranian state television has always represented the preferred meanings and ideal subject positions of the Islamic Republic's discourse. Therefore, studying the representations of this apparatus reveals the articulation of the Islamic Republic's discourse regarding different aspects of everyday life. Using the method of discourse analysis offered by Laclau and Mouffe, this research sets out to explore if the Islamic Republic's discourse is the hegemonic discourse in forming the subjectivity of the Tehranian middle class after confronting a dislocation in 2009. The preferred meanings and ideal subject positions of this discourse were explored by studying three of the most popular television series in the four years following the events of 2009. The hegemonic appropriation of these meanings has been examined through conducting interviews with middle class residents of Tehran. Brining these two elements together, the research demonstrates that the Islamic Republic's discourse has constructed a depoliticised subjectivity among this class that not only prevents the discourse from being dis-articulated, but also can advance its desired articulation within various realms of the middle class's everyday life.

This thesis presents evidence of how immediacy affects consumer engagement behaviour in a social media setting. It answers the research question: Does immediacy influence consumer engagement behaviours with brands on Facebook? This research context is important and timely because of the rapidly increasing usage of social media by consumers and the resultant unexplored marketing challenges faced by brand managers. This thesis is informed by Social Impact Theory (SIT) (Latané, 1981), which proposes that immediacy is a determinant of influence in off-line environments. This study focuses upon three forms of immediacy, physical, social and temporal, that are identified within prior literature. This thesis measures the effect and develops SIT to account for immediacy as a social influence determinant of social media behaviour. The thesis follows a mixed method approach using focus groups and experimental design to measure the impact of each form of immediacy on four types of engagement behaviour: page liking, content liking, content sharing and content commenting. A series of three focus groups and three experimental studies were conducted with a total of 312 student participants who were presented with Facebook pages (created specifically for this study). Each Facebook page treatment was modified so that it contained either a high, low or neutral levels of each of the three types of immediacy identified in the literature and the subsequent change in participant engagement behaviour was measured. The results show that social immediacy significantly affects brand engagement intentions in terms of page liking, content liking and content sharing, whereas physical immediacy significantly affected page liking and content liking intentions. Temporal immediacy did not show any effects on the engagement intentions being measured in this thesis. This thesis presents three original contributions to knowledge. First, it makes a theoretical contribution by measuring the effects of three types of immediacy as social impact factors on engagement behaviours in social media. Second, it makes a contextual contribution by exploring how immediacy is perceived in the context of Fan pages, and by identifying other factors that can moderate the social impact of immediacy on consumer behaviour. Finally, this thesis measures the effects of product involvement, Facebook intensity usage and gender as moderators of social impact in social media settings.

Globalisation, the manifestation of a global village, has meant that countries compete with each other for the attention, respect and trust of investors, tourists, consumers, immigrants, the government of other nations, and the media. A desired national image has become a form of soft power which has the ability to get what a country wants through attraction. Third world countries are facing the need to create a positive image to the West for sustainable economic development. It is with this background that this thesis examines how Nigeria as a country has been reported by the British press between 2007 and 2010. It assesses the image of Nigeria presented by the British press and appraises Nigeria’s rebranding campaign ‘Good people great nation’ launched in 2009. This thesis also addresses the question ‘Can rebranding work for Africa?’ With the aid of content, framing and discourse analyses, the results showed an increase in the amount of news coverage on Nigeria from 2007 to 2010 but the coverage was sporadic, negative and centred on crisis events. The rebranding campaign did not show much effect on the reporting of Nigeria in the British press. The launch of the campaign and all the activities carried out by the campaign were not considered newsworthy by the four newspapers in this thesis. A few positive indicators of change noted were shadowed by the continual negative portrayal and recycling of frames from the colonial era. This study concludes that rebranding can only work if Africa as a continent invests in its own communication networks, and utilise all forms of media to counter negative reporting. African countries should leverage the power of technology to project their success stories and potential. Rebranding of African countries shouldn’t be about defending the indefensible, a few positively targeted stories in the West but a measured process of reform.

This thesis contributes to the study of the role of communications in national development. It examines news item content used to promote a sense of common identity among Malaysians in the 1Malaysia media campaign and how different ethnically composed audiences negotiate the meanings offered in the media campaign material. The aim is to understand those patterns and structures in the broadcast campaign strategies to construct shared discursive positions on identity in Malaysia. To see whether these media discursive strategies are effective in addressing concerns and tensions in multi-ethnic Malaysia, the project combines this analysis of selective news content from the campaign together with findings from eight focus groups discussions with young multi-ethnic audiences of the campaign. The thesis investigates how the audiences' negotiate the campaign messages and the role that ‘ethnic background’ plays in shaping their engagement with its meanings. This study showed Malaysians accept in general the 1Malaysia concept, but each ethnic group in this country still have a narrow notion of the idea. Malaysians are still sceptical about the impact of the 1Malaysia over life and relationship among them. This study uncovers significant differences in the way audiences from different ethnic backgrounds read the same news content and argues therefore that social identities affect the interpretation of the campaign messages. This study, aligned with recent case studies in communication research, indicates that audiences are active and heterogeneous and informed specifically by understandings and experiences of living an ethnic identity in Malaysia, these challenge the discursive strategies and the wider campaign aim to build a single national identity.

This thesis is a qualitative investigation of memories of Palestine among exiled Palestinians and their descendants in Poland and in the UK. Taking the continuous character of Palestinian dispossession as a point of departure, it examines their modes of remembering, imagining and relating to Palestine. The thesis seeks to contribute to the sociology of diaspora by shedding light on the multiplicity of situated trajectories that shape diasporic Palestinians’ relationships with their ‘ancestral’ homeland. It delineates three generations of Palestinians in diaspora: those exiled in the 1948 and their descendants born in refugee camps; those who left as a direct or indirect result of the occupation; and those born as ‘second generation migrants’ in their parent’s countries of exile. It argues that while the continuing erasure of Palestine informs all of their experiences, each generation produces memories of ancestral homeland in relation to different geographies, temporalities and set of imaginings. Tracing these differences, I am concerned with how the plurality of diasporic memories allows generations of Palestinians to endure and constantly re-create their relationships with the Palestine despite more than six decades of continuous uprooting. The research is based on oral history interviews with 33 Palestinians in Poland and the UK, followed by an ethnographic audio-visual exploration of some of the research participants’ sites of memory. The audio-visual engagements have moved back and forth between stories narrated in Poland and in the UK and site-specific field visits within today’s Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The five ethnographic études that accompany the written part of this thesis strive to restore, at least partially, access to context that was lost with the participants’ uprooting and to explore the texture and materiality of their dispossession. This approach contributes to the development of a multi-sensory methodology that seeks to understand diasporic and exilic experiences by placing the relationship between memory, time and place at the heart of sociological enquiry.

Research on Information Communication Technology (ICT) and Development involves assumptions about the potential of such technologies to engender social transformations and development. Corporate organisations have financed studies that seek to understand the impact of such technologies in a bid to push for their business agenda (Castells et al., 2007; Vodafone, 2005; ITU, 2004) and also act as a means of helping developing nations eradicate poverty levels in the wake of the millennium development goals (MDGs). This kind of development is seen as synchronic, without considering the target populations’ involvement in decision making, and also tends to dictate what development should look like in the eyes of most development economies where such ICTs like mobile telephones have come from. Such development is also considered as being linear in nature (Melkote and Steeves, 2003; Donovan, 2011). This thesis is an attempt to advance the second kind of development that is diachronic in nature, which pays attention to the interrelationships of human technology rather than the former that privileges technology as engendering social transformations and development. This kind of development has been conceptualised as maendeleo, a Swahili term that denotes process, participation, progress and growth. Unlike the first perspective of development that views technology as causing changes, maendeleo sees social transformations and development as an interaction between mobile telephony users and their specific contexts. It is a localised understanding of development from the participants’ encounters with mobile telephony in their everyday life. This thesis thus examines the role of mobile telephony in the social transformation and development of the Marakwet people of rural Kenya, using ethnographic methods of data collection and assemblage theory as theoretical framework. Historically the Marakwet community of Kenya suffered from decades of insecurity due to cattle-rustling with their neighbours. Since its advent in Marakwet a decade ago, mobile telephony still remains complex. On one hand, it is seen as answering the insecurity question by allowing users to alert each other in case of an invasion, but at the same time is seen as the source of more insecurity, especially since mobile phones can also aid the enemies to cattle-rustle. Physical meetings that are the domain of most Marakwets are also affected by the technology, with it being seen as reducing the need for social gatherings, yet enhancing it at the same time. Mobile money transfers, discussed as M-PESA, have not been spared either regarding services deemed to boost development and bring about social cohesion, on one hand, while still believed to cause disharmony within households and also be a ‘risky’ endeavour with lack of sufficient money deposit security, on the other. Twenty-five ethnographic interviews were conducted with 12 households, taking into account age, gender, literacy levels and the length of time the device had been accessed by users. The interviews were complemented with data obtained from 5 focus group discussions among homogeneous groups (women, men, clan elders, girls and boys). The findings show that mobile phone is implicated in everyday life of the people of Marakwet, challenging concepts such as co-presence, power and gender relationships, interpersonal networks and also the idea that the use of mobile telephony in the region incorporates older modes of communication models such as the community horn. Mobile telephony influences and is influenced by all areas of community life: health, education, and agriculture, religion forming assemblages of people (users), financial institutions, government and mobile phone service providers. This thesis challenges the dichotomisation of society into micro (individual or household) and macro (national or societal) that ignores the intermediate or meso levels. The boundaries suggested by such categorisation are blurred by communication technologies that re-define terms, such as time and space, public or private places, here and there. In a way, macro and micro distinctions also assign power to macro forces to determine the micro, which in the advent of technologies, the micro can only be changed if they so wish and not necessarily because change has been decided, packaged and delivered to them via mobile telephony or any other communication technologies. Instead, it is how they negotiate power, gender relations, cultural inclinations and socio-economic dispositions in their domesticated use of mobile telephony that facilitates social change and development. Key words: Assemblage, Maendeleo, M-PESA, Social transformation, Co-presence, Development and Sharing.

The thesis examines the potentialities offered by social networking websites for constructing original metafictional narratives. It comprises a novel, a critical exegesis, and three Facebook pages which are attributed to fictional characters and used as a plot-development tool. Readers ‘befriend’ the characters and place themselves within the fabric of the fictional narrative. The result is a collaborative storytelling experience which evolves in real time and forms the basis of the print novel Esc&Ctrl. The exegesis places the creative piece into a contemporary research context. In chapter one I provide an account of the evolution of metafiction and the selfbegetting novel with reference to the works of William H. Gass, Steven Kellman and Patricia Waugh. I also account for the problem of authenticity in fiction, and use Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative to demonstrate the ways in which the temporal spectrum of an online narrative differs from that of traditional print text. Chapter two argues that the evolution of the internet offers a new set of conditions that necessitate a radical overhaul of the ways in which postmodernity tends to be theorised, and according to which postmodern theories may be reconfigured. Referencing Jean-Francois Lyotard, I discuss the micronarratives of the internet and how these lead to the formation of an online ‘self’ which is necessarily different from a self located in the offline realm. Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the loss of the real is extrapolated in order to show that the internet, and particularly social networking sites, are representative of a simulated culture. The chapter ends with a definition of what I have called ‘metafictional virtuality’ and a summary of how it could be said to impact postmodern consciousness. Chapter three examines the new creative vistas opened up by hypertext, social networking and transmedia fiction for metafiction and the self-begetting novel. Referencing the works of Wayne C. Booth, Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish, I explore the role of the reader in attributing meaning to hypertext. I then examine the advantages and shortcomings of using social networking to tell stories, with specific reference to the critical work of Ruth Page and the practical example of the online counterpart to Esc&Ctrl. Chapter four provides an account of the mechanics of setting up, maintaining and operating the Facebook pages I used in the project. It ends with a statistical analysis of reader-engagement throughout the eight days that the project was live. I conclude by evaluating the strengths and shortcomings of the social networking narrative and account for how its basic principles might be applied to newly-emerging technologies such as the soon-to-be-released Google Glass.