The use of the Internet has grown substantially, especially since the late 1990s. Businesses are relying increasingly on the Internet and intranet as tools to promote productivity. Use of the Internet has several implications for institutions of higher education. Some of the issues institutions are faced with include legal liability for defamatory postings and sexually explicit materials, monitoring versus privacy, motivations to abuse Internet privileges, and use of the Internet to create a corporate culture. Institutions of higher education need to consider how the Internet is being used and how it should be used when acceptable use policies are being formulated. The purpose of this quantitative study was to gain an understanding of perceptions about acceptable use of the Internet by employees at work, attitudes about personal use of the Internet during working hours, and the knowledge and effectiveness of an acceptable use policy within the context of institutions of higher education. The data gathered could be used as a foundation for an effective, progressive acceptable use policy for higher education. The data for the research were gathered from December, 2005 through January of 2006. Six 4-year institutions were surveyed. The study revealed older employees responded that the use of the Internet at work as not acceptable, while younger employees, faculty members and respondents with more Internet experience or more hours of overtime indicated that personal use was acceptable. The study identified significant differences in self-reported use of the Internet, both at home and at work. Additionally, a general lack of knowledge existed regarding an institutional Internet acceptable use policy. The results of the study were applicable to the formulation of policy for institutions of higher education.

Professional wrestling is a performance art in which the line between fact and fiction is often obscured. Much of the existing scholarship on the medium that examines its dynamics regard reality and artifice focuses on the role of the artificial, analyzing pro-wrestling as primarily a form of heightened spectacle akin to passion plays or soap opera. However, professional wrestling in Japan, particularly that found in the country's largest promotion, New Japan Pro-Wrestling, features many elements that resemble real sports much more closely than many American promotions. These elements include fighting styles, wrestler injury, characters that do not fit easily into defined archetypes, stories focused on win-loss records, promos that resemble press releases, and audiences who react to the show not only like a performance, but also as if it were a real sport. At the same time, it does still feature many spectacular and heightened elements found throughout the pro-wrestling world, resulting in an overall aesthetic of qualified realism. This realism is a defining element of promotions like New Japan Pro-Wrestling, and it serves to make characters and their stories relatable to audiences in ways that are more difficult for other promotions. This reveals unique thematic qualities of Japanese pro-wrestling, in addition to demonstrating the aesthetic diversity of the genre as a whole.

Users' acceptance of a new information technology (IT) is considered to be a key determinant factor of its success. Also, studying users' adoption and use of new IT plays an important role in determining users' needs and reducing business risk, especially in industry segments with rapid changes in IT such as Smartphone technology. Such rapid evolution is influencing consumers' behaviors, their daily lifestyle, the manner of conducting their activities and their ways of consuming and using information. Smartphone technology holds a promising future with an expected global market that could reach US $258 billion by the end of year 2015 [1]. Besides the mobile industry, Smartphone technology introduces a wide range of opportunities and challenges for many related industries that participate directly or indirectly in producing and providing Smartphone services/products to the end users. Moreover, the Smartphone technology is relatively new technology with plenty of room for improvement. Better understanding of users' intentions and their behaviors regarding the adoption and use of the Smartphone technology plays a critical role in determining its success and benefiting all stakeholders. Significant efforts have been made to study and explain users' adoption and use of Smartphone technology. However, most of the empirical research focused on only a limited number of Smartphone aspects or on a specific profession such as doctors and nurses which may neglect other important factors. In emerging regions such as Jordan and China, cultural and social influence showed significant relationships with users' adoption and use of the Smartphone and its related technologies. Saudi Arabia is a developing country that has different cultural and social contexts that could influence users' intention to adopt and use the Smartphone technology. The key factors that influence general users' intention to adopt and use Smartphone technology in Saudi Arabia have not yet been studied and explored in a comprehensive manner. Therefore, the main purpose of this dissertation is to empirically study and explore the key factors that influence general users' adoption and use of the Smartphone in a comprehensive manner in Saudi Arabia. This dissertation starts with a literature review of existing research related to the adoption and use of Smartphone technology. Taxonomy is developed that includes factors that were identified as important in previous research and related to the adoption and use of the Smartphone technology. By using the developed taxonomy and reviewing literature related to the IT adoption theories, a preliminary theoretical research model is developed based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). A number of qualitative methods, namely brainstorming, focus group and individual interviews, have been conducted to evaluate, select and validate the existing factors, as well as introduce new factors, and to identify only the most related factors to be included in the preliminary research model. A survey questionnaire has been developed and validated to survey general users of the Smartphone in Saudi Arabia. A web-based survey has been designed and sent through email to 5,000 randomly selected smartphones users in Saudi Arabia. Data has been statistically analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results indicate that performance expectancy factor, effort expectancy factor, brand influence factor, perceived enjoyment factor and design factor have a positive and significant relationship with users' intention to adopt and use smartphones in Saudi Arabia. Also, the results indicate that the social influence factor has a significant and positive relationship with use behavior or actual use of smartphones in Saudi Arabia. The results of this dissertation provide more insights to practitioners in the smartphones domain and information that contributes to the body of knowledge regarding information technology adoption and its related research, especially in Saudi Arabia.

This dissertation expands upon the definition of eco-visualization artwork. EV was originally defined in 2006 by Tiffany Holmes as a way to display the real time consumption statistics of key environmental resources for the goal of promoting ecological literacy. I assert that the final forms of EV artworks are not necessarily dependent on technology, and can differ in terms of media used, in that they can be sculptural, video-based, or static two-dimensional forms that communicate interpreted environmental information. There are two main categories of EV: one that is predominantly screen-based and another that employs a variety of modes of representation to visualize environmental information. EVs are political acts, situated in a charged climate of rising awareness, operating within the context of environmentalism and sustainability. I discuss a variety of EV works within the frame of ecopsychology, including EcoArtTech’s Eclipse and Keith Deverell’s Building Run; Andrea Polli’s Cloud Car and Particle Falls; Nathalie Miebach’s series, The Sandy Rides; and Natalie Jeremijenko’s Mussel Choir. The range of EV works provided models for my creative project, Sculpting Corn Production, and a foundation from which I developed a creative methodology. Working to defeat my experience of solastalgia, Sculpting Corn Production is a series of discrete paper sculptures focusing on American industrial corn farming. This EV also functions as a way for me to understand our devastated monoculture landscapes and the politics, economics, and related areas of ecology of our food production.

Media has the potential to legitimize or spread a belief system to the general public. The 2014 movie Left Behind is an example of a deliberate attempt at promoting the belief system referred to as dispensational premillennialism (DPM), or belief in the imminent rapture of Christians. Producers of Left Behind (2014) sought to promote DPM to the general public, hoping for a mass conversion. Online discussion and interviews were gathered and interpreted qualitatively. Content analysis of audience anticipation and reception show believers were as concerned with the conversion of the general public via this movie than the movie itself. Differences between the text of the movie and discussion surrounding the film provide insights into the DPM worldview. Dispensational premillennialists are observed; rejecting earthly existence as counterfeit, asserting the general inerrancy of prophecy while rejecting “date setting” practices and using the effigy of the Antichrist to criticize perceived socio-political enemies.

This research aims to fill a research gap by examining video games to explore whether gender, age, or hours played per week would exert any influence on the information of those who may or may not play video games. Mood Management Theory and Uses and Gratification Theory were used as the theoretical foundation for this study. Four-hundred-three East Tennessee State University students who received the survey via email were asked to voluntarily participate in a survey about their motivations behind playing video games. Results from MANOVA showed that the motivations of male participants on video games were significantly higher than were female participants on video games. Moreover, those who claimed to play five or more hours of video games per week were significantly higher than those who claimed to play zero hours per week.

When people go online and leave their mark in bytes, how do their traces get preserved, shared, or lost? In the early 2000’s through about 2012, communities of millennial girl web developers and bloggers flourished on the English-speaking Internet. They would write about their intimate lives, code their website designs from scratch, create portfolios of graphics, and forge friendships with fellow bloggers that lasted through years. Most of these blogs are now gone; only patches remain as screenshots on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. For my senior project, I explored how techniques used in glitch art, normally used for destroying image files for purely aesthetic effects, could also be used to embed texts that could be read by humans inside digital photos. I excavated photos and self-portraits of individual bloggers whose old content has since been erased from their original domains as of 2018. Then, I overrode pieces of each image file with the respective bloggers’ journal entries extracted from https://web.archive.org. The result is a picture irreversibly corroded by the loss of its original data, akin to the state of their bloggers' archived websites. It still functions like any image file in that the picture can be copied, shared, and viewed on another computer. However, unlike a typical image file, it also hides a patchwork of legible English text; one can “dig” into the image’s encoding and uncover nuggets of letters from a past Internet presence--specifically, that of a millennial girl's thoughts on identity, life, and the joys and struggles of coding and managing her own website.

With the increase of social media usage and its relevance for the millennial generation, social media influencers rise as credible sources who influence their followers purchase behaviors. Micro-influencers have up to 400,00 followers and fashion brands are constantly collaborating with them to generate brand awareness. The purpose of this study is to analyze how micro-influencers impact engagement levels on fashion retail brands’ accounts on Instagram and what common visual patterns the posts with higher levels of engagement present. A sample of 817 posts from three different brands were analyzed to provide insight in what kind of posts generates higher engagement levels: motivational posts, product posts, model/catalog, micro-influencer, influencer, or none of the above. A content analysis was conducted and after all the posts were coded, the top 100 with the highest engagement levels were submitted to a frame analysis so common patterns and themes could be recognized among the top engagement posts.

This study examines how museums build relationships with audiences to gain financial contributions and volunteer support. Financial support to museums has been dwindling in recent years and new revenue streams are needed for low-resource museums to survive. A content analysis of 485 Facebook posts of four small and large sized museums along with a survey of 131 respondents were conducted within the theoretical lens of organization-public relations. Results from study one indicate that larger museums fared better than smaller museums in terms of transparency, authenticity and positivity measures whereas on measures of credibility both the large and the smaller museums fared equally. While results from study two indicate millennials are not sufficiently engaging with museums.

In 2016, the Walt Disney Company launched Shanghai Disneyland--the company’s first theme park in mainland China. Entering mainland China poses significant political and cultural challenges for American companies. To address these challenges, Disney pursued a “glocalization” strategy -- it accounted for local norms and values in launching Shanghai Disneyland. This paper examines how Shanghai Disneyland constructed its brand narrative to negotiate tensions in this glocalization process. A semiotic analysis of two Shanghai Disneyland commercials illustrates the ways in which Disney tapped into culturally meaningful themes of harmonic balance and collective identity to produce the park’s brand narrative--“China’s Disneyland.” A thematic analysis also considers how Chinese citizens engaged with that brand narrative on the popular Chinese social network, Weibo. Citizens engaged with this brand narrative in ways that deviate somewhat from Disney’s messaging, such as by avoiding depictions of people in the park. Still, even these deviations aligned with and reinforced the cultural values in the “China’s Disneyland” brand narrative. The study underscores the importance strategically adjusting brand narratives for new markets and accounting for users’ engagement with those narratives.