This is a revisionist audience study examining the everyday media cultures of twenty-four young teenage girls from Melbourne in Australia. It argues that in an era of proliferated and convergent media, audience studies cannot restrict its vision to a single media text, technology, or genre. / It takes a broad approach to girls’ media culture and considers the full range of media that girls engage with on a daily basis. It identifies a hegemonic discourse about girls’ media use which it calls “(feminist) new media effects”. This anxiety takes as its key concern the proliferation of media and mediated representations of girls across the spaces of everyday life. (Feminist) new media effects discourse renders girls passive and unable to cope with such media presence without the guidance of adults to teach them how to correctly engage with the media. In order to challenge this construction, the thesis examines participants’ engagements with a range of convergent media texts and technologies, including Internet social networking, repeat DVD spectatorship, young female celebrities, and discourses of moral panic. It shows how mediated representations of girls across these sites are embedded in the fabric of participants’ everyday lives. Apart from highlighting the challenge that this poses to the practice of conducting audience research, it demonstrates the ways that girls both resist and incorporate mediated constructions of femininity within their everyday negotiations of teenage girlhood. It argues that the representation of girlhood constructed in (feminist) new media effects discourse – the vulnerable girl overwhelmed by toxic media messages – is key to girls’ media culture. My findings indicate that participants are primarily invested in resisting this construction of youthful femininity.

This study explored how social media are setting the agenda of the traditional media and re-defining the role of the journalists. Content analysis was done to analyse the coverage of Jacob Zuma stories in newspapers and on Facebook, from the 1st of February until the 30th of June 2018.The sample for the study was drawn from three local newspapers, the Citizen, the Sowetan, the NewAge (AfroVoice), as well as the Facebook page called #Zumamustfall. This was done to determine if newspapers which are traditional media were being influenced by social media in what stories to report on. Results from the study showed that social media are influential in building an agenda for the traditional media and in particular, with the Zuma story. In the same vein, it emerged that traditional and social media set the agenda for each other. Based on these findings the research recommends that other social media sites including Twitter be used in similar research to determine their effects on agenda setting of traditional media (newspapers). / Communication Science / M.A. (Communication Science)