This masters’ thesis is a case study using an antiracist methodology and critical discourse analysis to analyze a popular blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’ and asks the main research question: How is whiteness represented and understood in the satirical blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’? Grounded in theories of representation, discourse, myth and racialization, the thesis looks at two posts, “#1 Coffee” and “#92 Book Deals” and their user comments to investigate the ways whiteness is defined, understood, produced and negotiated. The blog and the comments reveal important discussions of knowledge production strategies of racialization and racism in popular media. Specifically, these negotiations expose three major registers of whiteness that are continually enacted within the discourses of the blog and the comments. These registers encompass understandings of whiteness as biological superiority and heritage; defining whiteness as a performance of privilege; and whiteness as an enactment of dominance and oppression. Sites of antiracist educational pedagogy are also discussed within this study to reveal the importance of investigating everyday discourses and understandings of race for the future.

Faculty of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies

Sammanfattning Titel: Ge ditt varumärke ett lyft! – en studie om hur företag bygger och stärker sina varumärken i sociala medier. Författare: Emilia Sjögren och Sofie Tellram. Handledare: Navid Ghannad. Nivå: Kandidatuppsats, marknadsföring (15hp), VT 2012. Nyckelord: Sociala medier, Varumärke, Kommunikation, Sociala nätverk, Bloggar. Syfte: Syftet med uppsatsen är att beskriva hur företag kommunicerar i sociala medier samt vad som är syftet med att kommunicera. Genom detta vill vi få ökad kunskap och förståelse för hur företag kan bygga upp och stärka sina varumärken genom sociala medier. Metod: Uppsatsen har en kvalitativ metod med en deduktiv ansats i vilken tre fallföretag intervjuats. Företagen är kunniga inom sociala medier och arbetar aktivt med dessa. Teoretiskreferensram: Detta avsnitt inleds med traditionella kommunikationsteorier följt av kommunikation i sociala medier. Teoriavsnittet avslutas med övergripande teori om varumärken. Empirisk studie: I denna del presenteras de intervjuer som genomförts med tre fallföretag. Slutsats: Uppsatsens slutsats är att företag bygger och stärker sina varumärken i sociala medier genom olika aktiviteter och utifrån vad som är företagets syfte med kommunikationen väljer de socialt media. / Abstract Title: Give your brand a lift! – a study of how companies build and strengthen their brands in social media. Authors: Emilia Sjögren and Sofie Tellram. Adviser: Navid Ghannad. Level: Bachelor thesis in marketing (15 Swedish credits), Spring 2012. Keywords: Social media, Brands, Communication, Social networks, Blogs. Purpose: Our purpose is to describe how companies communicate in social media to build and strengthen their brands and to describe the purpose of the communication in social media. Our purpose is also to increase our knowledge and understanding of how companies build and strengthen their brands through social media. Method: This thesis has a qualitative method with a deductive approach in which three case studies are studied. The companies have high knowledge in the given topic and work active with social media. Theoreticalframework: This part of the thesis begins with traditional communicationtheories followed by communication in social media. The part ends with a comprehensive theory about brands with leads to a model which summarizes our theoretical framework. Empiricalframework: In this part the results of the interviews with the three Case studies are presented. Conclusion: The study shows that companies build and strengthen their brands in social media through different activities. Depending on the companies purpose it chooses a social media to communicate in.

The purposes of the research which is based on the framework of knowledge management whose five dimensions are knowledge gaining, depositing, sharing, applying and innovating are divided into two parts. First, under the framework of knowledge management, evalueate how junior school students perform towards each dimension. Second, discuss the reasons and effects from the information of questionnaires. And, from five dimensions of the framework of knowledge management, analyze different behaviors on blogs of junior school students and various factors of influences in this survey. The method is mainly by qualitative research and auxiliarily by quantitative research. The study subjects consist of 59 students in the weekend project-based learning class of academic year of 2006 in Guo-Guang Laboratory School,NSYSU. The research time was from September in 2006 to August in 2007. Based on the five dimensions of the framework of knowledge management, we can draw conclusions as follows. First, the gaining of knowledge was mostly from the internet and also others¡¦ blogs. If it was from academic books, we would surely gain knowledge of higher levels. Second, it was easy to deposit gained knowledge on blogs. However, it would be a better deposition after systematically sorting. Also, blogs which kept tracks of learning struggles efficiently could produce metacognitions. Third, on blogs, students were looking forward to others¡¦ responses. However, the course was limited in excessively close relationships and some factors. As a result, sharing behaviors were not quite frequent. Blogs made distance closer and turned one way construction of knowledge into mutual. Building internet groups on blogs tended to produce the common languages and impelled us to apply knowledge. It took more psychology levels to innovate knowledge and needed higher spontaneous motivations to learn.

Thesis (M.A.)--Queen's University (Canada), 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Dissertation--Innsbruck--Leopold-Franzens-Universität, 2005. / Bibliogr., webliogr. p. 92-100.

Thèse d'exercice : Médecine. Psychiatrie : Nantes : 2007. / Bibliogr.

A blog webring is a self-organized online network that bloggers can join based on its thematic description. Drawing upon the theory of homophily in interpersonal communication, this paper examines webring themes and explores how they may be related to the salient characteristics in human identity to which people pay more attention in online communication. Research results suggest that blogs in a webring with a mixed theme or a theme based on acquired status are associated with a higher level of conversationality, with more embedded webring-bounded hyperlinks and more member comments. Bloggers from webrings of these two types of themes reportedly have a closer social relationship with other members. They are also more positive about the likelihood of getting social support from within their webrings. In general, people are not constrained by the limited interactivity offered by blogs; many of them employ not only other online, but also offline means of communication for interactions. As webring members, people believe that much more social support is available than they originally anticipated, and the specific types of social support that are perceived to be available are not determined by how easily they may be delivered online. This study overall supports the view that meaningful social relationships are developed and maintained on the Internet, which is essentially an extension of people’s daily lives. It also underscores the necessity that contextual specificity be privileged in future research on people’s online communication. / text

This study explores the use of humor among bloggers coping with cancer. Framed by health communication literature on stress and coping and literature on humor styles, I analyzed the use of humor by individuals coping with various types of cancer. Using content analysis, I investigated 600 blog posts from 85 cancer bloggers for humor use. I adapted the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ), a scale assessing four different uses of humor, into a codebook to use for content analysis within the blog posts. The different styles of humor included affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating. Individually, I tested the relationships between the style of humor a blogger used and the blogger’s gender, age, type of cancer, and point in the cancer trajectory. I also tested the relationships between the frequency of humor use within each blog post and the blogger’s gender, age, type of cancer, and point in the cancer trajectory. Every humorous remark was categorized into at least one of the four humor style categories. Overall, I found no significant relationships among the variables tested. However, each of the humor styles was used multiple times throughout the sample. This study provides future researchers with a new way to operationalize humor use based on the HSQ and with relevant examples from cancer blogs. The findings also suggest that humor is a common communicative device among those coping with cancer, and further research into how humor is used among more specific samples of cancer patients may provide more significant results. / text

This thesis attempts to explain the political communication process in relation to blogs. The first concern of the thesis is the relationship between conventional media and blogs with regards to the political communication. The thesis will use both first and second level agenda-setting theory to explore the relationship between conventional media and political blogs. In addition, this study aims to investigate blog users' media use and political involvement in comparison to non-users.