The visual feedback loop has long-been ignored as a form and an aesthetic within new media. Media theories have largely assumed a medium is defined by the material technology, relegating visual feedback to a circumstance of media rather than a unique and well-defined concept. This thesis sets forth a criteria for characterizing the visual feedback loop as a desired form, that is, a distinct set of formal and phenomenological qualities that are independent of a medium. Grounding the criteria are the cinema theories of Gilles Deleuze and Sean Cubitt; these theories propose that the cinematic image relates visual forms to generate information in decoding rather represents information directly. The thesis elaborates the theoretical concepts in examples of visual feedback loops from video (Nam June Paikâ s TV Buddha, Bruce Naumanâ s Live Taped Video Corridor), new media art (Daniel Rozinâ s physical mirrors), and digital technologies (GPS navigation systems). To reconcile the visual feedback loop within media theories, the thesis calls for a radical change in how theorists define a medium. Moving away from notions of inscription and materiality, media now rely on a collapsed distinction between sender and receiver. Hence, visual feedback loops exist as remediations of a conceptual framework rather than a technological one, and so require a logic within media theory that allow for the rise of other desired forms like the visual feedback loop.

Animation is popularly thought of as a sequence of still images or cartoons that produce an illusion of movement. However, a broader perspective of animation should encompass the diverse kinds of media artifacts imbued with the illusion of life. In many multimedia artifacts today, computational media algorithmically implement expanded illusions of life, which include images not only moving, but also showing reactions to stimuli (reactive animation), transforming according to their own internal rules (autonomous animation), evolving over a period of time (metamorphic animation), or even generating varying instances subject to user intervention or chance (contingent animation). Animation in the digital age consists of forms as varied as computer-generated imagery (CGI) in films, motion graphics on interactive multimedia websites, animated contents of video games, graphical interfaces of computer systems, and even digital signage in communal areas. With these forms, the new animation phenomena emerge from entertainment media, functional designs, and expressive works alike, all of which may engage viewers' sensory perceptions, cognitive processes, as well as motor actions. Hence, the study and creation of animation now requires an interdisciplinary framework, including (1) insights from perceptual psychology and animation studies about animacy, (2) theories of conceptual blending from cognitive science applied to understanding images, (3) notions of embodiment and temporality in phenomenological approaches to human-computer interaction (HCI), and (4) new interpretations of liveness in performance studies accounts of computer-mediated performance. These emergent ideas jointly characterize the new role of animation in media, and produce new possibilities for more embodied, evocative, and affective forms of generative and interactive animation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Communication, Information and Library Studies." Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-102).

Thesis (M.S.L.T.)--University of Canterbury, 2009. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-115). Also available via the World Wide Web.

This thesis focuses on the role of nonhumans in the process of value production on social media platforms. In particular, we investigate the relation between algorithm based sorting mechanisms and human work, here exemplified by the role of a hashtag in social media users’ production of identity. Previous research has shown that social media users produce identity by organising web material into coherent narratives. As suggested by Marxist media scholars (Fuchs, 2014; Bolin, 2011), such organising of material can be perceived as a value generating work process. However, little research has explored how hashtags, and other digital nonhuman actors, are involved in this process. The ambition of this study is therefore to enable a closer understanding of hastags’ relation to value producing organisational work. To do this we have selected a specific case to analyse; the hashtag rockasockorna – a Swedish version of the American hashtag rockthesocks. Our empirical material consists of a quantitative data set, collected with aid of a statistical analysis software (hashtracking.com), as well as two qualitative ethnographic case studies on the two statistically most influential users. To analyse the material we use a methodological approach based on Bruno Latour’s (2005) Actor Network Theory. Primarily, the approach is inspired by Latour’s concept of the circulating reference (1999), meaning that relations described in the qualitative material are gradually reduced into a generalised model. The model suggests that the hashtag takes a position of what we refer to as a “quasi consumer”, an imitator of human organisational work. In the paper’s final section the results are brought into dialogue with contemporary Marxist value theory. We argue that existing literature tends to neglect the aspect of nonhumans as consumers, and thus further research should investigate the implications of nonhuman consumption.

This thesis is situated in a moment when the theory and practice of inclusive design appears to be significantly implicated in the social and economic response to demographic changes in Western Europe by addressing the need to reconnect older people with technology. In light of claims that cognitive ageing results in an increasing disconnection from novel digital media in old age, inclusive design is apparently trapped in a discourse in which digital media products and interfaces are designed as a response to a deterministic decline in abilities. The thesis proceeds from this context to ask what intellectual moves are required within the discourses of inclusive design so that its community of theorists and practitioners can both comprehend and afford the enaction of cognitive experience in old age? Whilst influential design scholarship actively disregards reductionist cognitive explanations of human and technological relationships, it appears that inclusive design still requires an explanation of temporal changes to human cognition in later life. Whilst there is a burgeoning area of design related research dealing with this issue—an area this thesis defines as ‘cognitively inclusive design’—the underlying assumptions and claims supporting this body of research suggests its theorists and practitioners are struggling to move beyond conceptualising older people as passive consumers suffering a deterioration in key cognitive abilities. The thesis argues that, by revisiting the cognitive sciences for alternative explanations for the basis of human cognition, it is possible to relieve this problem by opening up new spaces for designers to critically reflect upon the manner in which older people interact with digital media. In taking a position that design is required to support human cognitive enactment, the thesis develops a new approach to conceptualising temporal changes in human cognition, defined as ‘senescent cognition’. From this new critical lens, the thesis provides an alternative ‘senescentechnic’ explanation of cognitive disconnections between older people and digital media that eschews reductionism and moves beyond a deterministic process of deterioration. In reassessing what ageing cognition means, new strategies for the future of inclusive design are proposed that emphasise the role of creating space for older people to actively explore, reflect upon and enact their own cognitive couplings with technology.

This dissertation analyzes how discourses of risk shape teens’ digital media practices. The purpose is to understand the relationship between discourses of risk, policy regulations, informal learning, and teens’ everyday experiences. This research serves to combat discourses that construct technology as a threat and youth as ‘at-risk’ in two ways. One, it demonstrates the agentive ways teens manage risks and two, it provides empirical evidence of the ways technologies and literacies function as risk reduction strategies. From a Foucauldian perspective of governmentality, this study considers risk to be an always already historically, socially, and politically constructed phenomenon; as such, policies serve as risk intervention strategies. The first part of this dissertation traces how risk discourses are mobilized through moral panics and federal policies regulating young people’s use of the internet. Despite research to the contrary, policies reify anxieties associated with the threat of pornography and predators. As such, policies rely on constructions of young people as passive victims and technologies as risks; such regulations unintentionally limit learning opportunities. The second part analyzes how schools regulate subjects of risk and digital media, as well as how teens themselves manage risks. Ethnographic research was conducted in a large, ethnically diverse, low-income high school in Texas. As part of a team, the researcher spent eight months observing two after-school digital media clubs. The ethnography also consisted of 18 case studies with diverse high school students. Researchers conducted individual, semi-structured, qualitative interviews with the students on a regular basis for an entire academic school year. Findings suggest discourses of risk were mobilized through school district policies which regulated teens’ use of digital media. Specifically, regulations limited students’ opportunities to develop a) social, b) network, and c) critical digital media literacies. However, students generated agentive ways to resist regulations in order to maintain robust peer and learning ecologies. The clubs constructed technologies as interventions for ‘at-risk’ youth. Within informal learning spaces teens a) developed skills, b) acquired social capital, and c) negotiated empowered identities. Lastly, the study considers how teens acknowledged and negotiated risks associated with privacy. Teens demonstrated three strategies for managing consumer and social privacy: a) informational, b) audience management, and c) spatial strategies. / text

This thesis began as an audience exploration into early adopters of “podcasting” technology through the journalistic radio program Latino USA, distributed by National Public Radio. An explosion in the use of this new media has changed the way radio networks distribute programming, yet little communications research has been done about the audience. This examination documents how podcast audiences are significantly younger and are both substituting and supplementing traditional media. The study also determined that iPod users are significantly more likely to abandon CDs, listen to less radio, and watch less television as the industry converts from 20th Century analog to 21st Century digital technology. Qualitatively speaking, the podcast audience is highly regarded, but quantitatively small. Despite producer expectations that podcasting is the digital mass media of the future, the data shows audiences to have interpersonal connections to podcasting. As such podcasting remains niche programming and not a true mass medium. / text

Η εργασία αυτή παρουσιάζει έξι (6) διδακτικά σενάρια τα οποία έχουν σχεδιαστεί για τη διδασκαλία της γλώσσας σε μαθητές που φοιτούν στη Στ΄ τάξη του Δημοτικού Σχολείου. Σκοπός αυτής της εργασίας είναι να τονίσει ότι τα διδακτικά σενάρια, ως μέθοδος διδασκαλίας, μπορούν αποτελεσματικά να βοηθήσουν την εκπαιδευτική διαδικασία. Πιο συγκεκριμένα ακόμη, τα ψηφιακά μέσα και ειδικότερα ο διαδραστικός πίνακας δίνουν τη δυνατότητα σε όλους τους μαθητές να συμμετέχουν ενεργά στην εκπαιδευτική διαδικασία μέσα από την ανακαλυπτική μάθηση. / This study presents six (6) instructional scenarios that have been designed for the language tutoring in students that study at the 6th grade of Elementary School. The purpose of this study is to point out that instructional scenarios, as teaching method, can really be effective at the educational procedure. More specifically, digital media and especially the interactive whiteboard give the ability to all students to participate actively in the educational procedure through the discovery learning.

Digital media storytelling and the creation of narrative texts using digital technology is an emerging social process that is being utilized by social workers as a means of engaging in critical reflection. As an emerging practice, little is known about the contributions that these texts make to critical social work knowledge; to this end this thesis considers social worker's use of digital media storytelling as a tool for resisting and remembering and as a tool for critical reflection about their changing field. Six digital media stories are considered in this thesis. The texts are deconstructed using multi-modal analysis informed by internet/digital media research scholarship. The layers produced through this deconstruction are crystalized using critical discourse, narrative and metaphor analysis in order to develop a complex understanding of the multi-modal and multi-vocal meaning making processes inherent in these stories. The analysis reveals the way in which discourses and themes present in the contemporary context of social work practice such as neo-liberalism, managerialism and professionalization, are brought to life in the narratives produced by the social workers, who each tell their stories using different genres, from unique points of view, based on their individual subjective positions. The findings point to the significance of digital media storytelling as an important resources for knowledge production and knowledge dissemination. The analysis further points to the significance of connections between and among these texts as demonstrating the tensions and contradictions that are produced through the workers’ attempts to bring to life the social justice values, goals and objectives of social work to which they are committed in a social climate that is increasingly hostile to such approaches to human service work.