The social network site (SNS) of Facebook is a dynamic online socio-cultural arena which gives users ample and unprecedented opportunities for self-­presentation through the meshing of language with other semiotic modes. Research on the subject has tended to focus on either a particular linguistic phenomenon in relation to identity (e.g. code-switching) or on a specific aspect of identity (e.g, ethnic identity) without treating multimodality in much detail. It has also been limited to exploring identity through information abstracted from member profiles alone and not interactions amongst participants, while it often lacks an ethnographic perspective. Moreover, identity on Facebook constitutes, in the main, a slice of larger-scale linguistic research on social media and not a fully-fledged study per se. In this light, the present study is in its entirety dedicated to the ways in which identity is discursively constructed within Facebook, drawing on insights from Greek users. More specifically, it investigates i) how Facebook users construct themselves, 2) how they are co-constructed by their Facebook friends, 3) the role of multimodality in these identity constructions, and 4) the kinds of textual practices that Facebook users follow to construct their identities. To this end, I adopted a discourse-centred online ethnographic approach (Androutsopoulos 2008), which combined a three-year systematic observation of specific Facebook profiles with the direct engagement with their owners (two females and three males; mean age = 28). The: data of the study comprise Facebook profile information, status updates, comments from interactions, video and article links, photos my Informants have taken themselves or have found elsewhere in the internet, interview excerpts, survey and field notes as well my informants’ comments on my analysis. Developing a data-driven, bottom-up approach of discourse analysis, this ■study: offers a multifaceted and nuanced view of identity on Facebook through the lenses of place, time, profession,; education, stance, and privacy. It identifies the ways in which the users locate themselves in terms of place and time; announce activities, share and broaden their expertise and buttress solidarity among colleagues and fellow students; communicate emotions, tastes, thoughts, opinions and assessments; and control the flow of information on their profiles to secure their privacy and hence identity. It is argued that apart from being a self-reflexive process, identity is intrinsically an interactive and collaborative process, shaped and reinforced by those with whom the users share a ‘friendship’ on Facebook. Focusing on discourse manifestations of identity, this study shows how Facebook can function as a cathartic gateway for self-expression, a powerful grassroots channel, a digital memory bank, a tool for promoting one’s work, a platform to exchange information, a dynamic knowledge depository, a meta-friend, and a research tool.

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Traditional news organizations exist within an apparatus of accountability, held together by their reputation and the professionalization of the occupation of journalism. Legitimacy in journalism has solidified over time; but with the emergence of online media, traditional journalistic standards have been challenged as online news organizations attempt to establish a new standard. This study explores the changing nature of journalism as a space of contested power relations and networked communities, focusing specifically on how online news organizations, born digitally, become legitimate. Based on close to 200 hours of interviews conducted over a period of six months at prominent online news organizations in the United States, this dissertation seeks to identify the manner in which online news organizations, specifically Breitbart.com, The Drudge Report, and The Huffington Post, gain legitimacy in the subfield of online journalism. There exists a unique structured space internal to the subfield of online journalism – a subfield of practices and power relations – with online organizations accumulating varying degrees of social capital in order to legitimize their role within this evolving ecology. In relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the field, Mark Suchman’s work on organizational legitimacy, and Anand Narasimhan and Mary Watson’s work on field formation, this study outlines the conditions under which certain online news organizations can participate and gain legitimacy in this emerging subfield. I argue that three characteristics determine whether an online news organization can be considered legitimate; in analyzing these characteristics, I demonstrate how they help to create legitimacy in specific cases. If media scholars are to understand how online news organizations have emerged in recent years and become a key source for information, an interrogation of this unique space, in all of its complexities, is essential.

In this thesis I study the changing linguistic and visual representations of women at work in the content of the Chinese women's magazine Rayli over a 17-year period. Since China's entry into the WTO in 2001, the Chinese magazine industry has been through dramatic changes partly driven by international titles and franchises being introduced into China from global publishers. Rayli, launched with a licensing agreement with a Japanese partner, is one such example. One question that is raised by scholars about such processes is the way that both western media models become disseminated into new territories and the extent to which these must be localised and adapted to local cultures. So, what is the relationship between traditional local values and advertising lead culture of consumer capitalism? There have in fact been no such studies of Chinese magazines and studies on global/local media of this nature have tended to be more theoretical and used not so clearly defined notions of 'local cultural values'. More recently, scholars have argued that more detailed empirical work is required to throw light on these processes, especially as they apply to specific contexts. The thesis seeks to offer one small yet important contribution in looking for ways such global and local interactions can be clearly defined and identified in the case of a lifestyle magazine. In order to do this, the thesis draws on analytical tools from Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodality to empirically identify details of the ways that the content of Rayli has been shifting. This approach provides a highly useful set of tools that allows me to point to the specific details of how participants are represented, what they are represented as doing and in which settings they are seen. It allows me to draw out what kinds of ideas, values and priorities the woman held over time. It also allows me to look at the stylistic choices in design over time, such as the use of image types, typeface, colour and composition. In each case, I identify the way that more global forms of representation and design styles interact with both those that are more local and those that are specifically Japanese, coming from Rayli’s parent company. While much of the analysis in the thesis is concerned with changes in Rayli magazine itself, I also make a comparison to the Chinese version of Cosmopolitan magazine. It is through comparing the current Rayli with its former versions and with a US influenced magazine that I assess if, where and how the discourse of women at work have changed. The interpretation of the data is supported with results from interviews carried out with staff at these two titles. The thesis finds shifts in linguistic and visual representations and in design over the 17-year period. The results point to a complex cultural exchange and transformations of what might be thought of as ‘local’ and the international. Gradually, the discourse of women at work in Rayli has been shaped in the neo-capitalist global order and has become intensely mixed up with the sphere of women's libidinal, fantasies and glamour, which lead to the sphere of consumption. This is however achieved by transforming and repacking foreign values and ideas under the mask of local identities, and vice versa, as well as recreating and converting local identities in relation to exterior cultures. A heterogeneous communicative method to (re)produce identity and culture has been created in Rayli.

Although a seemingly trivial subject, fashion blogs could be put into the same categories as other feminine genres such as magazines, soap operas and romance novels that have been shown by feminist scholars to be worthy of scholarly attention. This study argues that Indonesian Muslim fashion blogs are an important and rich cultural text where gender identity, religion, nation and class intersect in contemporary Indonesian society. Using feminist audience ethnography as the methodological approach, this research first analysed why women read Muslim fashion blogs; second, how readers negotiate the articulation of modesty, modernity, motherhood, class and nation; third, the motivations behind the blogging practise; and fourth, how bloggers define and facilitate their female readers’ empowerment. Using individual interviews, FGDs and archival study to gather data which can then be analysed thematically alongside visual analysis of several texts garnered from the most popular blogs in Indonesia, this study illustrates that Muslim fashion blogs are being consumed as leisure and pleasurable activities, and that such activities are also associated with hobbies and youthful activities in which my participants practised more frequently before marriage and children. Reading fashion blogs allows readers to escape from mundane domestic lives and serves as a space of resistance despite the visual representation that still conform to the state’s gender ideology and traditional Islamic discourses of femininity. Indonesian Muslim fashion blogs also illustrate that the integration of modesty (through the interpretation of the hijab and Islamic clothing) and modernity (through the influence of global fashion) is undertaken with ease and fluidity despite readers’ criticisms of certain styles of hijab. Muslim fashion blogs represent the hijab as a middle ground between Islamic identity and modernity that, borrowing from Smith-Hefner (2007), is “neither traditionalist nor anti-modernist reaction”. Finally, this study investigated Indonesian Muslim bloggers as neo-liberal feminine subjects where empowerment may be understood through the construction of self as business, with the private sphere, such as family lives, being treated as promotional tools through personal blogs. This study offers academic contribution to the scholarship of Muslim women and social media by analysing that hijab or modesty as a religious practise is being shaped by the globalisation process and neo-liberalism and furthermore, how such transformation is represented and negotiated in the age of social media.

Presently, Nigeria is grouped among the poorest nations of the world despite billions of dollars earned from years of crude oil sales. The underdevelopment and poverty in Nigeria has been attributed to years of corruption and irresponsible leadership, which has led to the subversion of civic values. Historically however, the Nigerian media has shown the capacity to mobilize Nigerians; as exemplified by its efforts during the struggles against colonialism, military dictatorships and campaign for civil rule. The media has also been visible in challenging, criticizing and exposing some individuals involved in corrupt behaviors. This study was therefore conceived on the conviction that the Nigerian media has the capacity to successfully undertake the reorientation of values in Nigeria. The core question therefore is: What role can the Nigerian Mass Media play in the social and economic development of Nigeria through the re-orientation of civic values? This is addressed through five areas of enquiry: the capacities of the Nigerian Media; media ownership, press freedom, training and remuneration; media believability and accessibility; the capacity of the "public sphere" in Nigeria; and the ethnic, tribal and religious background of media practitioners. A critical realist paradigm underpins this study. Key theoretical approaches are the related ideas of agenda setting theory; gatekeeping; framing and priming. Interviews and survey methods were used to collect data from key media stakeholders. The analysis of empirical data indicates that the Nigerian media can play a key role in the reorientation of civic values in Nigeria where: 1. There is a consensus of opinion about the need for values re-orientation. 2. There is a high level of media believability 3. Topical media issues are freely discussed 4. Media access is unhinderedHowever, certain aspects of the Nigerian culture were found to validate corruption across ethnic, tribal and religious boundaries.

The launch of the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information in 1791 is recognised by historians as one of the earliest and most radical expressions of organised working class calls for parliamentary reform in England. Research for this thesis has shown that Joseph Gales, the Sheffield publisher, was active in supporting the reform movement through his newspaper the Sheffield Register, with the help of his wife Winifred, a novelist, and his assistant, the poet James Montgomery, until the flight of the Galeses to America in 1794-95. However, existing historical scholarship has not explored the archival material in depth to reveal the detailed content of their radical journalism and publishing in the key years 1791-94. There is also a pronounced gap, despite the presence of a significant archive, in the later activities of the Galeses in North America, and of Montgomery in Sheffield in 1794-97. This thesis will seek to fill this gap in historical knowledge by showing in more detail the content and depth of their radical journalism and writings, their links with national and international reformers, and how their later claims of moderation are contradicted by the newly available data. This will be achieved by exploring the letters, poems, and editorials, of the Sheffield Register, the Sheffield Iris, and the Raleigh Register newspapers, the "Recollections", letters and novels of Winifred Gales, and the poems and prose writings of James Montgomery. There will also be a consideration of their place in the rise of a middling-sort class awareness, transatlantic radicalism, the role of feminist autobiographical diaries, and the boosterist activities of the Galeses in North Carolina.

This thesis is an exploration of the affective processes, behaviours and practices that lie at the heart of journalists’ work when covering traumatic news stories such as conflict, acts of terror and natural disasters. The starting point is one of the central tensions of Anglo-American journalism. On the one hand, the normative values of objectivity have become deeply ingrained as a mark of professional standing. On the other hand, the practice of journalism relies on emotion to engage the public. The apparent contradiction has often been the focus of academic analysis, sometimes from the perspective of audience reception and sometimes from that of professional and political economic tensions facing the industry. This thesis unpicks and examines in detail the component parts of the ‘objectivity paradigm’ and breaks new ground by uncovering the affective dimension of practice when covering traumatic news. Its analysis draws principally on affect theorists who have been influenced by a psychosocial tradition. Empirical research is based on interviews with 25 journalists who have covered traumatic news stories where the objectivity norm has been challenged or disrupted. These include the shooting of primary school children in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, in the pre-Internet era, and several contemporary stories dominated by social media ranging from the Syrian conflict to terror attacks in London and Paris. What emerges is a complex picture of journalists grappling with competing tensions – on the one hand a virtually hard-wired notion of what it is to be a professional journalist and, on the other hand, a visceral, empathic often instinctive affective dimension of practice. The research identifies two main affective behaviours of journalists covering difficult stories, that of ‘cool-detached’ and ‘autopilot.’ It also investigates the affective dimension of social media images, including potential mental health risks of working with user-generated content and the ‘herd instinct’ of journalists covering major breaking news. The research highlights the moral obligation on news organisations to maintain the mental well-being of their journalists whether on assignment in the field or in the newsroom handling graphic user-generated content. It also explores the tensions between the commercial attractions of such content as a means to reengage disaffected audiences and its impact in creating a more emotionally driven news file.

This submission draws on research and practice completed over a twelve-year period (2003-2015). It explores changes within the media economy, considers the historical development of participatory media and then interrogates practice within it by using two key periods of action research (Inclusion Through Media, 2004- 2008; Digital Storytelling with older people in their communities across two major projects – Extending Creative Practice and Silver Stories, 2009-2015) as fields of enquiry. Three supporting documents (Building the Knowledge Economy: A Strategy for the Media and Related Creative Industries in the Channel Corridor, 2003; Digital Science: A Collaboration between the Wellcome Trust and Nesta, 2006; The Power of Youth Media to Change Lives, 2012) set out the changing nature of media from 2003 to 2010. The first adopts a strategic approach to economic development and, in doing this, shows the particularity of the media economy. Taken together, the second explores the use of media within a new market and the third reviews the growth and importance of youth media. The three reports examine the impact of digitalization on the media landscape. This combination of diverse research sources enables the submission to draw on an evidential richness transcending different worlds of policy, practice and theory. In doing this it is able to join dots to provide a clearer picture of voice and representation within participatory media. The submission argues that the development of new forms of media activity enabled by digitalization led directly to new modes of community-based media which, in turn, created spaces for community based practitioners that emphasized the importance of the voice of the participant. It uses three concepts of voice, namely opportunities for new voices to speak and be heard, an increased mutual awareness flowing from a greater influence over distribution and exhibition and the potential for new intensities of listening as a means to interrogate the notion that digitalization has increased the range and number of voices across the media. The thesis argues that these changes have shifted the dynamics of participatory media away from a model dependent on the patronage of broadcasters to a more varied landscape with lower costs and a greater range of funding opportunities. This has led directly to an increase in the amount and range of media. New forms of media, such as Digital Storytelling, have acquired an international standing. The thesis considers the extent to which these changes have created a space for the voices of participants to be expressed and heard. It goes on to argue that the representative components of these new forms of media are partly illusory as the participant voice is frequently distorted and curtailed by the need to meet an explicit requirement set by the funding agencies, the longer term needs of the producer or by the inability of the work to reach and engage an audience. Examples to illustrate these points are taken from Digital Storytelling work completed over the past six years.

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