This dissertation refutes the notion that contemporary girls are uninterested in feminism by exploring how teenage girls are engaging in feminist activism as bloggers. Using a feminist cultural studies approach I analyze how girl bloggers produce feminist identities and practices that challenge hegemonic postfeminist and neoliberal cultural politics. I employ feminist ethnographic methods, including a series of in-depth interviews with U.S. -based girl feminist bloggers and an online collaborative focus group, as well as a discursive and ideological textual analysis of girl-produced feminist blogs. Using these methods, I privilege girls' voices while proposing a model for conducting feminist ethnography online. In doing so, I demonstrate how girls' feminist blogging functions as an activist practice through networked counterpublics, intervening in mainstream and sometimes even commercial public space. I position this activism within a lengthy tradition of American feminism, analyzing how my participants remain in conversation with feminist history while simultaneously responding to their unique cultural climate. Finally, I argue that we must recognize the political importance of girls' feminist blogging by theorizing it as an emergent citizenship practice that makes feminism an accessible discourse to contemporary teenage girls. / text

Despite the recent growth of social media, rhetorical theory which addresses authorship in this realm has been slow to develop. Static terms such as "reader," "writer," and "author" are often used to refer to the roles occupied by users in social media, although these terms are insufficient to describe the dynamic rhetorical exchange which occurs there. The goal of this dissertation is to use rhetorical theory to develop an updated terminology to describe the model(s) adopted by creators of social media content. First, past models of authorship are surveyed to locate rhetorical precedents for the model(s) that currently exists in social media. After comparing potential historical precedents to the overall process of content creation in social media, the term "participant" is adopted to describe the roles which users assume when creating digital content. Although "participant" initially appears to be an appropriate term, this notion is complicated when one considers the asymmetrical roles adopted on a smaller scale in genres such as social networking and blogs. To determine if the "participant" model is still applicable in such cases, an examination of authorship as it occurs in the genre of women's personal blogs is conducted. An analysis of the terms that bloggers use to refer to themselves as writers reveals that bloggers situate themselves in roles through which they claim to speak for a group such as storyteller and truth-teller. Subsequent examination of the interactions between bloggers and other participants reveals that bloggers negotiate authority with readers in a variety of ways. By using such strategies, bloggers attempt to situate themselves as community members in a manner which aligns with the "participant" model. The participant role adopted in women's personal blogs helps this previously marginalized group to establish a public presence and may also serve as a precedent for models which could be adopted by learners in the composition classroom as they strive to break free from the author/student writer binary and to establish themselves as socially-engaged participants.

News credibility studies have been around since radio and television began competing with the newspaper industry for consumers' attention. However, at this time, the news industry is experiencing a shift in medium as the Internet is quickly becoming the predominant source by which many get their news. Due to the free and independent nature of the Internet and the rise of blogging as a source by which people get news and information, audience perception of what constitutes a credible source needed to be examined. This study took the dimensions of news credibility that have been set in previous studies and compared them against an individual's news blog use to see if there was any change in what was important in measuring credibility. Through these comparisons, the measure that was used in previous studies did not seem deep enough and did not produce the expected outcome. Barely touching on each dimension, this study calls for individual studies on each dimension that would provide a better look at how credibility is perceived by news blog users.

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This study examines secular mommy bloggers, a group of women who blog about the difficulties of being a nonbeliever parent in a predominantly religious society. In this study, I explore the rhetorical dimensions of four separate blogs by investigating how each mother builds identity within her personal blog and how her sense of identity enables her to construct individual ethos. Furthermore, I illustrate how the individual ethos of each blogger contributes to a group ethos representing the entire secular parenting community. Ultimately, I show how these mothers rhetorically set themselves apart from other nonbeliever/secular groups. / Master of Arts

Lifestyle blogging has become a vast and profitable domain, with visitors engaging with new content in a variety of ways. The communities that begin to form around these blogs has rarely been analyzed, due to a lack of metrics and a complex definition of virtual communities. Relying on Henry Jenkins work on virtual communities, a set of metrics were used to analyze the depth and breadth of three communities: A Cup of Jo, Wit & Delight, and Cupcakes and Cashmere. The three areas these metrics worked to measure were: awareness, membership, and belonging. Through this audience reception study the clear marker of a community was the direct and systematic blogger engagement with the readership. Many other factors are influential in building a virtual community on a blog, however, what set the three blogs apart was the ways in which Joanna Goddard (A Cup of Jo) and Kate Arends (Wit & Delight) reached out and built relationships with their readers, strengthening their community and allowing it to thrive.

In recent years, the salience of obesity and body image in society has given rise to a "fat activist" movement dedicated to defending non-normative body types. This activism has extended to the online environment, in which groups who are ostracized from the traditional realm have taken to blogging as a form of resistance and expression. The term "fat" has been reclaimed by the movement as a term of emancipation and defiance. The so-called "fatshion" blogs have a growing audience, and there is a burgeoning scholarly literature on this phenomenon. The aim of this research was to investigate college-aged females who identify as "fat," who may or may not have been exposed to the online fatshion (fat fashion) market or blogs. Are these blogs being used as resources for these women? Do they even know these websites exist? Thus, the aim of this study was to discover what the current fashion sector is like for those who may not participate as heavily within these communities. The main objective of this study was to find how plus-size women's fashion choices are shaped by the dominant discourses of the body and how this, in turn, influences their shopping experiences. By conducting semi-structured interviews along with participants filling out a small questionnaire, an in-depth look at the personal thoughts and feelings of fat women outside of this movement was explored. Fatshion was studied through four theoretical lenses: as a counter-discourse, as a place for identity construction, as a mode of gender performativity, and how fatshion is informed by intersectionality of race, class, and gender. Based on the interview data, the study found that the messages found on fatshion blogs have the potential to spark opposition in ways that mobilize a more positive self-image as well as nonconformist self-presentations through a heightened awareness of the possibilities for opposing dominant ideologies.

<p>ABSTRACT</p><p>Purpose/aim: To clarify what information is communicated through the PR-firm JKL:s blog, how it is communicated, how it relates to and diverges from the communication theories in point, and what the strategies behind the blogging are. By doing this I hope to contribute to the knowledge on corporate blogging and how it can be used.</p><p>Material/method: Qualitative textual analysis of ten blog posts published on the JKL Blog and process seeking interview with the person in charge of the same blog.</p><p>Main results: JKLs’ blogging coincides to the most part with business intelligence, with the exception that the information doesn’t relate directly to the company’s’ main activities. This is mainly due to that they can’t publish information about their customers or competitors. Instead they want to expose the broad knowledge the company possesses, and thereby create goodwill towards their target groups. JKL can therefore be said to contribute with a different aspect to business intelligence. The blog also uses an asymmetrical PR-model with two way communication but no deep dialogue. This is not, as Grunig and Hunt argue, due to their claiming to be right in every matter, but rather to the nature of the comments given. Feedback on the blog posts is none the less important to JKL, mainly to correct and bring nuance to the information.</p><p>Key words: Blogging, corporate blogging, public relations, symmetrical/asymmetrical communication, one way/two way communication, communication strategy, business intelligence.</p>

ABSTRACT Purpose/aim: To clarify what information is communicated through the PR-firm JKL:s blog, how it is communicated, how it relates to and diverges from the communication theories in point, and what the strategies behind the blogging are. By doing this I hope to contribute to the knowledge on corporate blogging and how it can be used. Material/method: Qualitative textual analysis of ten blog posts published on the JKL Blog and process seeking interview with the person in charge of the same blog. Main results: JKLs’ blogging coincides to the most part with business intelligence, with the exception that the information doesn’t relate directly to the company’s’ main activities. This is mainly due to that they can’t publish information about their customers or competitors. Instead they want to expose the broad knowledge the company possesses, and thereby create goodwill towards their target groups. JKL can therefore be said to contribute with a different aspect to business intelligence. The blog also uses an asymmetrical PR-model with two way communication but no deep dialogue. This is not, as Grunig and Hunt argue, due to their claiming to be right in every matter, but rather to the nature of the comments given. Feedback on the blog posts is none the less important to JKL, mainly to correct and bring nuance to the information. Key words: Blogging, corporate blogging, public relations, symmetrical/asymmetrical communication, one way/two way communication, communication strategy, business intelligence.

Ces dernières années, le contenu disponible sur le Web a augmenté de manière considérable dans ce qu’on appelle communément le Web social. Pour l’utilisateur moyen, il devient de plus en plus difficile de recevoir du contenu de qualité sans se voir rapidement submergé par le flot incessant de publications. Pour les fournisseurs de service, le passage à l’échelle reste problématique. L’objectif de cette thèse est d’aboutir à une meilleure expérience utilisateur à travers la mise en place de systèmes de filtrage et de recommandation. Le filtrage consiste à offrir la possibilité à un utilisateur de ne recevoir qu’un sous ensemble des publications des comptes auxquels il est abonné. Tandis que la recommandation permet la découverte d’information à travers la suggestion de comptes à suivre sur des sujets donnés. Nous avons élaboré MicroFilter un système de filtrage passant à l’échelle capable de gérer des flux issus du Web ainsi que RecLand, un système de recommandation qui tire parti de la topologie du réseau ainsi que du contenu afin de générer des recommandations pertinentes. / In the last years, the amount of available data on the social Web has exploded. For the average user, it became hard to find quality content without being overwhelmed with publications. For service providers, the scalability of such services became a challenging task. The aim of this thesis is to achieve a better user experience by offering the filtering and recommendation features. Filtering consists to provide for a given user, the ability of receiving only a subset of the publications from the direct network. Where recommendation allows content discovery by suggesting relevant content producers on given topics. We developed MicroFilter, a scalable filtering system able to handle Web-like data flows and RecLand, a recommender system that takes advantage of the network topology as well as the content in order to provide relevant recommendations.