This ethnographic study investigated the underlying motivations behind college-aged students ' use of the popular social-networking site, MySpace. It also examined how MySpace influences online and offline relationships as well as impacts individuals' self concept. The research method included an initial unobtrusive observation of 50 random MySpace pages, participant-observation of informants' sites and 18 interviews with the study's participants. Each component of this ethnographic design helps reveal various patterns associated with relational and self motivations using MySpace. Following transcription analysis and multi-tiered triangulation among interview, participant-observation and lurking data, the information was compiled in a matrix to help break down and to evaluate data in manageable pieces. Two key findings related to concepts of self and relationships resulted from this study. The first discovery suggested that participants engage in a number of relational maintenance strategies, particularly activities associated with alleviating dialectical tensions, such as autonomy and togetherness. Secondly, the study revealed that MySpace members constantly negotiate their ideal and actual selves through computer-mediated communication, based on reflective appraisals from significant others on MySpace. Taken together, relational maintenance strategies and self-concept activities are engineered by the users' need to necessarily learn the values, norms and culture associated with life in MySpace. The study builds upon previous literature on ethnographical methods, computer-mediated communication, relational maintenance, self-concepts and socialization practices. This thesis contributes to burgeoning research in virtual ethnography as well as to emerging, yet underrepresented academic research investigating social networking sites use motivations.

'l'his paper proposes to present a simplified course in radio broadcasting equipment, adequate for the needs and within the realm of understanding of the student of programming and production techniques.

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.

Social media has been used in a variety of contexts to connect people of varying backgrounds and as a method of teaching. This thesis collaborated with the Utah County Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) department to develop an online course management system that facilitated research to evaluate the effectiveness of social media on nutrition behavior and attitude changes among WIC clients. We created a toddler themed Facebook page in conjunction with the online nutrition classes and provided the opportunity for clients to use them. Previous social media research used individuals that had agreed to participate in the social media experiment whereas this research let them choose whether or not to participate. The Facebook intervention proved ineffective. In response, we developed surveys to gather the criteria and strategies from WIC clients and existing WIC themed Facebook pages that could be used for a best-case social media intervention.

Do two people, coming from different cultural backgrounds, see the same image the same way? Do we employ technologies of seeing that embed visuality within relentless cultural and ideological frames? And, if so, when does visual difference become a tool for inclusion and exclusion? When does it become an instrument of war? I argue that we‘re always implicated in visuality as a form of confirmation bias, and that what we see is shaped by preexisting socioideological frames that can only be liberated through an active and critical relationship with the image. The image itself, albeit ubiquitous, is never unimplicated - at once violated and violating; with both its creator and its perceiver self-positioned as its ultimate subject. I follow a trace of the image within the context of a supposed Islam versus the West dichotomy; its construction, instrumentalization, betrayals, and incriminations. This trace sometimes forks into multiple paths, and at times loops unto itself, but eventually moves towards a traversal of a visual divide. I apply the trace as my methodology in the sense suggested by Derrida, but also as a technology for finding my way into and out of an epistemological labyrinth. The Visual Divide comprises five chapters: Chapter One presents some of the major themes of this work while attempting a theoretical account of image perception within philosophical and cross-cultural settings. I use this account to understand and undermine contemporary rhetoric (as in the works of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis) that seems intent on theorizing a supposed cultural and historical dichotomies between Islam and the West. In Chapter Two, I account for slogan chants heard at Tahrir Square during the January 25 Egyptian revolution as tools to discovering a mix of technology, language and revolution that could be characterized as hybrid, plural and present at the center of which lies the human body as subject to public peril. Chapter Three analyzes a state of visual divide where photographic evidence is posited against ethnographic reality as found in postcards of nude and semi-nude Algerian Muslim women in the 19th century. I connect this state to a chain of visual oppositions that place Western superiority as its subject and which continues to our present day with the Abu Ghraib photographs and the Mohammed cartoons, etc. Chapter Four deploys the image of Mohamed al-Durra, a 3rd grader who was shot dead, on video, at a crossroads in Gaza, and the ensuing attempts to reinterpret, recreate, falsify and litigate the meaning of the video images of his death in order to propagate certain political doxa. I relate the violence against the image, by the image, and despite the image, to a state of pure war that is steeped in visuality, and which transforms the act of seeing into an act of targeting. In Chapter Five, I integrate the concept of visuality with that of the human body under peril in order to identify conditions that lead to comparative suffering or a division that views humanity as something other than unitary and of equal value. I connect the figures of der Muselmann, Shylock, Othello, the suicide bomber, and others to subvert a narrative that claims that one‘s suffering is deeper than another‘s, or that life could be valued differently depending on the place of your birth, the color of your skin, or the thickness of your accent. v Finally, in the Epilogue: Tabbouleh Deterritorialized, I look at the interconnected states of perception and remembering within diasporic contexts. Cultural identity (invoked by an encounter with tabbouleh on a restaurant menu in Orlando) is both questioned and transformed and becomes the subject of perception and negotiation.

The web browser has become one of the most recognizable software applications on consumer desktops. Yet its utilization and capabilities are often misunderstood. Recent innovations in the web have evolved the Internet into a network of sophisticated applications that defy historical uses of the “browser”; a term that itself has become somewhat of a misnomer. This research studies the evolving set of user expectations for the browser as an application platform and challenges certain anachronistic features, specifically the “back” button, that are unnecessary and confusing given the new environment that browsers are used in. Because of this shift, implicit new user requirements arise around the browser’s user interface. The back button, like other elements in the browser have already demonstrated, should be de-emphasized in modern iterations of web browsers. The study is qualified by an analysis of user behavior within a popular, modern, web application. NOTE: This master's thesis has been removed at request of the author due to it containing experimentation data referencing a branded software application for which the author no longer has permission to share.

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.”

Cyberbullying is harassment through the Internet or other technologies. Forty-two percent of youth nationally have experienced cyberbullying and 53% admitted to being the cyberbully. A lack of understanding by adults of cyberbullying logistics and impact causes cyberbullying to remain a serious issue that has not yet been appropriately addressed within schools. A sequential, mixed methods study was implemented to investigate the prevalence of cyberbullying in one middle school and to determine the nature and impact of the experience in order to inform site-based interventions. Bandura's social learning theory, Bronfenbrenner's ecological framework, and Agnew's strain theory provided this investigation's theoretical foundation. Two separate web-based data collection tools were administered sequentially. Descriptive survey data showed that 37.8% of students had experienced cyberbullying, 56% observed cyberbullying, and that eighth grade students experienced a higher incident rate of cyberbullying (42.1%). Inductive coding of qualitative data from the questionnaire conducted with eighth graders contributed to the identification of emergent themes related to the psychological and educational impact. Specifically, these themes included symptoms of anger, depression, thoughts of violence, and interference with learning. Overall key findings from this study showed that cyberbullying is prevalent at this site and cyberbullying experiences have had a debilitating impact on psychological functioning, environmental comfort, and educational engagement. This study informs social change by providing information to tailor school-based solutions that can effectively decrease incidence of cyberbullying among students within this educational community.

Three studies were conducted to investigate how social media affordances influence individuals’ source credibility perceptions in risk situations. The MAIN model (Sundar, 2008), warranting theory (Walther & Parks, 2002), and signaling theory (Donath, 1999) served as the theoretical framework to examine the effects of bandwagon cues and identity cues embedded in retweets and users’ profile pages for health and risk online information processing. Study One examines whether bandwagon heuristics triggered by retweets would influence individuals’ source credibility judgments. Study Two investigates how bandwagon heuristics interact with different identity heuristics in credibility heuristics on an individual level. Study Three explores bandwagon heuristics at the organizational level. Three post-test only experiments with self-report online surveys were conducted to investigate the hypothesis and research questions. Results indicate that different online heuristic cues impact the judgments of competence, goodwill, and trustworthiness at different levels. Authority strongly influenced source credibility perceptions. A reverse-bandwagon effect was observed in influencing source credibility judgments. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

During a public health crisis, officials need to communicate with the public quickly and accurately. Social networking sites (SNS) have been identified as an appropriate channel for this type of communication; however, few studies have examined what makes SNS messages effective. Further limiting research in this area is a lack of attention to theoretical constructs that may explain message effectiveness in SNS. In this dissertation, I propose that diffusion of innovations (DOI) be used to understand SNS and message success on SNS. In doing so, I compare traditional message success (persuasion) to message success on SNS platforms (amplification) and provide a brief overview of relevant message design constructs. I then conduct a study to analyze Twitter messages from state and local health departments and federal government agencies charged with communicating to the public during a public health crisis to test these theoretical claims and identify message elements that increase SNS message amplification. The context of the study is the fall 2014 Ebola crisis in the United States. The messages are first classified using content analysis methods to identify message design elements related to content, structure, and style. The success of those elements, in terms of the influence they have on messages amplification, is then evaluated using negative binomial regression. The results suggest that specific content (hazard information, response instruction, and official action), effective structure (word and image graphics), and key style choices (using figurative language, one hashtag or a keyword hashtag, and the first person) improve the amplification value of a message. Other choices, like mentioning another user, reduce the amplification value. These findings add to the evidence that suggests that DOI enhances scholars’ understanding of communication on SNS. In addition, the results demonstrate that messages can be conceptualized as innovations, and, as such, their characteristics influence the likelihood that they will be diffused through SNS platforms. The results suggest that those charged with communicating during a public health crisis use specific message strategies for SNS messages. These strategies include recommendations related to message content, message structure, and message style. Finally, the results suggest that scholars should continue research to understand the relationship between message design and message amplification in order to improve our knowledge of communication on SNS and help practitioners identify effective communication practices on this new and important channel. Research should also examine the relationship between persuasion and amplification in order to understand how amplification influences attitudes, behavioral intentions, and behavior in both those who amplify the message and in those who receive the message as a result of that amplification.