This thesis is concerned with the formation of online identity and relationships on Facebook. It seeks to make a contribution to knowledge by examining the way that women in Saudi Arabia negotiate a complex terrain of expectations and possibilities as they engage in social networking activities on this site. The thesis reveals the strategies used in constructing and managing their identities, the issues they discuss and share with their audiences and the forms of social capital that their interactions produce. The thesis utilises a mix of qualitative methods of research. It is based on online/offline interviews and observations of the participants’ self-performances and activities on Facebook. The conceptual language of the thesis is informed by Goffman’s dramaturgical approach and Bourdieu’s concept of social capital. The analysis is positioned within a critical engagement with studies of identity construction, online deliberation, and social capital in social media environments. The findings reveal different aspects of identity formation and management of self and others on the site, suggesting that these are overshadowed by a high awareness of the gaze of known and unknown audiences. The study identified participants’ practices of distinguishing self from other, judging the self, and imagining being judged by others. Their identities were found to be constructed, gendered, and tightly managed as they addressed multiple audiences, with networks being formed in a way that has relatively narrowly defined boundaries. By examining the ways that cultural expectations shape participants’ online self-presentation and social activities, the thesis explores the continuities between their online and offline worlds. This thesis extends Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to consider more complex settings where the self is monitored and regulated, contexts “collapse,” and the audience is physically absent. This thesis also contributes to understandings of the blurring of the public/private distinction online and proposes extending the scope of ‘online deliberation’ beyond public political spheres to other, more private networked publics. The exploration of the connections made by participants between their online identities, expressions, and relationships and their offline lives, enables the study to consider how participants' Facebook use relates to their wider contexts of interaction.

This thesis is about workplace stress due to email and computer-mediated communication use. Rather than focusing on email-specific constructs such as email overload, email interruptions or email use outside working hours, it draws an overarching construct of ‘email stress’ based on previous theories of traditional workplace stress. This cross-disciplinary approach emphasizes the individually appraised nature of email stress. As a result, the thesis gives a central importance to individuals using email and, more importantly, to their desired email use. The thesis is based on a three-stage multi-method design involving quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews. The results of these studies are part of the four self-sufficient papers composing the thesis. While the papers make their own contributions, they also build on one another to advance the understanding of email stress as being a kind of stress that is individually appraised and that affects workplace well-being. The papers adapt theories of workplace stress, such as Person-Environment Fit and Cybernetics, to the study of email stress, and empirically validate these adaptations. They reveal how email stress can be the result of unfulfilled desires in terms of email use or a reason for desiring fewer emails. As employees do not often have control over their email use, the findings encourage the emergence of a more empathetic organizational culture taking into account individuals’ desires in terms of email use.

The missing component in studies that have attempted to assess the affects of advanced-telecommunications on urban form, and/or the location of economic activity in space, is the consideration and application of the urban system. Thus, in an attempt to justify the urban system as a framework for analysis as well as establish the context of the study, chapter 1 identifies the general characteristics of the urban system from the regional and spatial economic perspective. While the increased ability with which to interact across space and the Internet have and will no doubt continue to have wide ranging implications in, for example, a social and political context, the perspective of this study is purely a spatial economic one.

This thesis investigates how web users negotiate and engage with contemporary algorithmic personalisation practices; that is, practices which seek to infer (via data tracking mechanisms and other algorithmic means) a user's habits, preferences or identity categorisations in order to ‘make personal' some component of that user's web experience. Drawing on thirty-six semi-structured interviews, I employ a qualitative methodology that seeks to bridge the gap between critical theorisations of algorithmic personalisation and the negotiations of web users themselves who encounter algorithmic personalisation in everyday life. To do this I focus on three sites of investigation. I first examine privacy tool Ghostery and the ways in which Ghostery users' negotiate their positions as data-tracked subjects, especially in relation to privacy, knowledge and their sense of self. I then investigate Facebook's autoposting apps as examples of algorithmic personalisation that act on the user's behalf, and draw on the accounts of Facebook app users to explore themes such as identity performance, autonomous control and algorithmic governance. Finally I examine users' engagement with the ‘predictive powers' (Google Now, 2014) of the personalisation app Google Now, specifically in regards to notions of user trust, expectation and speculation. My critical enquiries produced a number of themes that tie this thesis together. Central were: the epistemic uncertainties that emerged as trust and anxiety in participant responses; the implications for a performative understanding of selfhood when algorithmic personalisation intervenes in user self-articulation; the (asymmetrical) data-for-services exchange which web users must negotiate with commercial data trackers; and the struggle for autonomy between user and system that algorithmic personalisation creates. The thesis also argues that algorithmic personalisation demands that web users' identities be constituted as both a stable and fixable ‘single identity', but also as recursively reworkable, dividualised and endlessly expressable entities.

The subject of this research is to find a continuous solution, which allows the description, the creation, the provisioning, and the execution of value-added telecommunication services. This work proposes a framework for an easy and timesaving creation and provisioning of value-added telecommunication services in Next Generation Networks. As research method, feasibility, comparative methods are used in this study. Criteria and requirements for service description, service creation, service execution, and service provisioning, are defined and existing technologies are compared with each other and evaluated regarding these criteria and requirements. Extensions to the selected technologies are proposed and possibilities to combine these technologies are researched. From the results of the previous steps, a framework is defined which offers a continuous solution for the description, creation, provisioning and execution of value-added services. In order to test the proof of concept, this framework is prototypically implemented. For a qualitative analysis of the research targets and the proof of concept, an example service is created and executed within the framework prototype. Furthermore, in order to examine the validity of the quantitative aims and objectives of this research work, a second example service is created, and its characteristics are measured and analysed. The result of this research is a novel continuous approach for the creation of value-added telecommunication services. This research introduces new possibilities for the service description, service creation, service provisioning, and service execution through an extension of the common telecommunication real-time execution environment JAIN SLEE. Value-added services are described by using the business process execution language BPEL. This language facilitates a simple and fast service design. The service can automatically be composed from pre-defined and pre-deployed components.