Background: Persons treated during compulsive care are in a vulnerable situation. Caring for someone against their will involves great responsibility and places high demands on the staff's psychiatric skills, empathy and ability to interpersonal relationships. Many people who have been treated under compulsive psychiatric care are critical to the health care content and its execution. Aim: The aim of the studie was to describe people's experiences of compulsive care in Swedish psychiatric hospital care. Method: A qualitative study of 15 blogs with inductive approach and descriptive design was chosen. The material from the blogs has been analyzed with inspiration from content analysis. Results: The result was subdivided into three categories; A care process characterized by powerlessness, fear and ambivalence, Interaction and participation on the terms of care and Meaningful environmental factors. Conclusion: The result described both positive and negative experiences from compulsive care. The care process was often described as difficult to handle and included a great powerlessness. There was a great dissatisfaction regarding communication, information and personal treatment. The conclusion is that if persons are informed of what the compulsive care will entail and what is expected of them, the chances are higher that they will feel respected and that their wellbeing generally improves during the care period. If the person's autonomy is considered, the experience of an unequal power relationship in healthcare and in the meeting with healthcare professionals changes.

This paper explores the complexity of the texts women create through blogging and their inherent value. I seek to explore how the mothers who blog are constructing online identities for their family units and family members in this space and how those constructions affect and inform the mothers' construction of their personal identities online. I analyze how perceptions of gender norms and practices of gender performance may affect and inform the identities thus constructed, and further complicate the liminal nature of blogging spaces. I begin with the sociological framework of Erving Goffman, which is commonly used to deconstruct identity performance in social and digital mediums through his explanation of social performance and identity construction. After presenting the shortcomings of this framework, such as its inability to deal with the more private aspects of blogging, I introduce theories of gender performance and feminist autobiographical studies to frame a constructive discussion of the subjectivities and constructed identities within women's blog posts. I explore the role and effects of audience relationships in creating autobiographical writing. I illustrate the co-constitutive relationship between understood norms, gender norms, and genres in blogging, as well as the forms that bloggers' self-representations take. , I analyze factors that inform female authorship and how these factors are shaped by prior models of female authorship, demonstrating how the private/public paradox of blogging informs how women perceive of their audiences in a gender-conscious way, and how that in turn affects their blogging behavior. I offer suggestions for how the study questions in this thesis can inform the decisions women make when they perform their identities through disclosive blogging. I demonstrate how an increased awareness of the unique qualities and tendencies of female subjectivity can decrease women's inclination to define their experiences as an “other” to a male normative. I also show that as women highly regard their autobiographical blogging, blogging can become more effective in fulfilling the autobiographical urge and can have a democratizing effect on global dialogue about blogging.

This project summary presents the details of a podcast project conducted from April to December of 2006. The project consisted of the creation of a new Internet-based audio interview show entitled Spirit In The Law. The interviews were delivered to listeners who requested the shows via the Internet, and were available to a targeted audience of law students in the United States and abroad. The show featured interviews with 20 notable attorneys and professionals who answered questions regarding spiritual values in their professional practice. The project was informed by two theoretical frameworks: New Media theory and Situational Theory of Publics. The results, when applying both theoretical frameworks, were mixed. While podcasting did demonstrate universality, it was hindered by the complexity of traditional radio production roles. Similarly, it was useful to use the Situational Theory of Publics to help to conceptualize audiences in groups, but the goals of moving the groups into activity were not completely achieved. The main objective for the project was to understand more about the opportunities and obstacles of the new communication technology of podcasting.

Public writing evolved from the social turn in composition pedagogy as scholars sought to determine which practices would be most effective in utilizing writing instruction to help fulfill the civic mission of the university and educate not just for vocational training, but to train students as better citizens as well. Based on the scholarship of Susan Wells, Elizabeth Ervin, and Rosa Eberly (among others), public writing scholars strove to distance the theory from old, generic forms, like letters to the editor, and create new arenas where students could be genuinely involved in civic acts and public discourse. As these scholars sought out new venues for their students, they proclaimed the Internet might offer better opportunities for public writing. This article discusses the effect new media, specifically blogging, has had on public writing, and how the promises of blogging in the classroom fall short of our expectations of public writing.

Internet use is a routine element of daily life in the early 21st century for many middle-class Americans. Today, millions of middle-class American mothers read and write online web-logs detailing motherhood and domestic life and mom blogs, formerly known as "mommy blogs," facilitate substantial economic activity. Participants collectively invest millions of hours in these blogs, sharing information and experiences, and offering each other validation and support. The present qualitative study of American mom blogs uses traditional grounded theory methods as well as Netnography techniques to investigate the thematic content found in the publicly posted text of 25 different mom blogs during 2011. Aspects of Goffman's theory of Dramaturgy and Chayko's theory of portable communities provide an interpretive framework for my findings. These findings suggest that mom blogs give participating mothers the power of voice which they use to publish highly controlled, yet powerful messages that communicate the values and role definitions of early 21st century motherhood to a growing online community. Messages tend to portray standards, styles, and secrets of contemporary, middle-class American motherhood.

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The aim of this study is to explore the relation of New Media, in particular blogging, at the intersection of the African Diaspora, identity construction and postcolonial thought. Postcolonialism is a theory and practice that seeks to encounter the dominant Western discourse and its affects on both the individual as well as society as a whole. It critically addresses and means to deconstruct Western representations of the ‘Third World’, in the case of this study ‘Africa’. It aims at hearing and recovering the experiences of the colonized or of those who have to deal with colonialism’s legacies and one of the most established strategies to do so is ‘writing back’ and delivering a counter-story that challenges the dominant discourse and its inherent power structures. New Media, through the relative ease of access and the communicative possibilities they present, blur the lines between media producers and consumers. They offer an attractive option for anyone with a certain level of computer literacy (and economic conditions) to enter the stage and produce his/ her own media content. Through New Media, it becomes possible to confront dominant media culture, politics and power and reclaim a space where a different story can be told. Weblogs, or blogs, are one of the most popular phenomena within New Media. They are a format for creating a sense of individual presence on the Web, allowing the author(s) to articulate and archive his/her/their thoughts. They can be seen as ‘digital identity narratives’, where people tell stories about themselves and how they see the world.In the frame of this study, six weblogs which belong to a blogosphere of African, mainly diasporic bloggers, have been analysed using a combination of narrative analysis and qualitative interviews in order to learn more about how New Media impact on the construction of identity for those who are permanently challenged by society for being ‘the Other’, and how they are used to oppose the Western discourse about Africa and to ‘write back’.

This dissertation examines a community of men who write online parenting blogs—known as “dad bloggers.” The emergence of dad bloggers in North America is nascent, under-researched, and a result of recent shifts in work-family arrangements, gender expectations, and the proliferation of social media technologies. Accordingly, this dissertation is designed to provide three distinct, yet interrelated, contributions to the literature on: families and parenthood; gender and masculinities; and media communications and communities. Taking a cyber-ethnographic approach, this is the first study of dad bloggers to collect online and offline data in order to investigate personal, interpersonal, and public meaning-making practices. The entire dataset consists of 1,430 blog posts written by 45 bloggers, approximately 50 hours of fieldwork conducted at The Dad 2.0 Summit conferences from 2016 to 2018, and 5 in-depth interviews. In three substantive chapters, I address: (1) the collective actions and goals that shape dad bloggers’ group culture and public engagement; (2) the creation and dissemination of meanings for fatherhood in an online context; and (3) the negotiation of gendered family roles and articulation of masculinity discourses by fathers. Collectively, this research provides new empirical and theoretical insights about the social construction of fatherhood in the contemporary digital age. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Empirically based on a series of focus groups with college-age women, this thesis examines how the affordances of anonymity and audience specificity facilitate both intimate personal expression and political participation on the Tumblr platform. In dialogue with literature on self disclosure and privacy, I seek to broaden our understanding of the mediated contexts that provide space for women’s voices online. The privacy afforded by Tumblr’s registration policies allows users more flexibility in terms of self-presentation than sites such as Facebook, which are necessarily linked to one’s offline identity through “real name only” policies. The use of pseudonyms contributes to a larger culture of anonymity on the platform, emboldening users to express themselves more freely and with less consequence. Specifically, Tumblr norms encourage the communication of emotions other than happiness or significant “life events” – instead providing a space for girls to express culturally devalued emotions such as sadness and anger. These kinds of intimate and cathartic expressions were made to an (imagined) audience of close friends and strangers in which parents and acquaintances were importantly absent. The reduced pressure of explanation, a limited (often like-minded) audience and the lowered-stakes of anonymity, are all also key features that encouraged feminist expression online. For focus group participants, the possibility of back-and-forth Facebook debates with relatives or former classmates kept them quiet. They described these interactions as exhausting, not as true conversations but as times when they needed to give long explanatory defenses as to why their concerns were issues at all. While debate is often assumed to be as a positive, constructive element of political discourse, this research calls into question the ways in which these ideals contribute to the silencing of women online and ask us to rethink what it means to say that “the personal is political.”

The Internet today has become a powerful tool-that has greatly improved the lives of all peoples across the globe. Simply put, the Internet has brought us into a new century of interconnectedness unlike any other period in human history. However, in terms of politics the effects of the Internet have been rather difficult to monitor, making the recent developments in the country of Iran unique. The Islamic Republic of Iran has become increasingly hostile towards moderate reforms and has steadfastly refused to grant greater freedoms, resulting in the disillusionment of many Iranians with their government. Coupled with this rising discontent has been a meteoric rise of Internet activity. With other outlets of expression dominated by the regime, the Internet has become the sole battlefield for political discussion. This research focuses on how the Internet is being used by both the government and the opposition as a political tool in the struggle for democracy. The intent of this thesis is to analyze the effects- of the Internet through the emergence of three different Internet trends. The expansion of blogging has led to greater political discourse as it has allowed Iranians to provide their opinion in an open environment for the first time. Social networking has given Iranians the ability to meet and learn about each other in ways that would never have been originally possible Lastly, the inception of the "YouTube Effect" has brought the events'oflran worldwide. Different from a typical news piece, these Internet videos are unedited showing the gravity of the situation to outsiders. Above all, the Islamic Republic of Iran presents a unique case study for analyze of the abilities of the Internet in institutionalizing democracy.