Background: With the adoption of smartphones, a new mean of communication emerged for businesses, calling for deep knowledge on how to leverage this profitable direct-link to consumers. However, previous literature has mainly studied the subject from a quantitative standpoint with a theoretical foundation built on traditional advertising, hence, not studying the subject on its own. It is therefore relevant to study the topic from the ground up, exploring users perspective on main factors driving their attitudes towards mobile advertising.Purpose: To explore consumer attitudes toward mobile advertising.Methodology: A qualitative exploratory study based on 4 focus groups, sampled through convenience sampling and analysed using direct content analysis.Conclusion: Findings indicate that, mobile advertising lack credibility, which drives negative attitudes and that entertainment was non-present in mobile advertising. Perceptions expressed a vast element of irritation and that informativeness depends on the relevance of ads forming the outcome of attitude. Additionally, personalization emerged as a component influencing the majority of the studied factors, and consequently suggested to be further studied as a factor on its own.

This dissertation looks at several issues in designing an optimal skill-based consumer contest (SBCC). Consumer product (or service) companies, such as online entertainment providers, often use SBCCs to promote the consumption of their products (or services). The main objective of a SBCC is to maximize the profit from the enhanced consumption by consumers rather than their outcome in the contest. This research is the first to investigate design issues in contests of this kind. The first part of the dissertation explores the role of SBCCs in online entertainment area by focusing on the status-seeking behavior of human beings. Drawing from psychology literature, I argue that the desire for status provides a strong motive for consumers to compete with each other in online entertainment communities. In the second part of the dissertation, I build a game-theoretical model to study a handful of design issues arising from the SBCCs. In this framework, a monopoly firm faces n consumers who may differ in skill levels. The firm offers a set of prizes to consumers in a SBCC that requires two inputs: skill and consumption. One of the main findings in this research is that a Winner-Take-All prize structure is often optimal (but not always) for the SBCCs. Another finding is that consumers will compete more aggressively when their skill levels are closer to each other. As a result, the firm may be better off by segmenting consumers based on their skill levels. In addition, in some cases, the firm is better off by charging an entry fee to exclude low-skilled consumers. These findings contribute to existing literature on contest designs and provide practical guidelines for structuring a SBCC. The last part of the dissertation empirically analyzes two individual-level datasets from a wireless game to verify the insights obtained from the theoretical model. / text

The purpose of this study is to examine individuals’ perceptions of classicness in film experiences. To this end, the paper begins by providing general anecdotal and professional definitions of classicness, and by pointing out the limited explication found in previous academic literature in entertainment. I discuss distinctions between enjoyment and appreciation from previous literature in media psychology. Following this, a study is presented by applying a measure of enjoyment and appreciation adapted from Oliver and Bartsch’s scale (2010) to an online questionnaire in order to understand individuals’ film experiences with both popular (high grossing) and classic (high rating) films. Results indicate that perceptions of classicness are highly associated with appreciation, but unrelated to enjoyment. Additionally, results also provide a negative relation between appreciation and the release-year as well as budget. Discussion focuses on the study’s empirical definition of classicness, as well as the study’s extension of previous research examining the relationship between film popularity, budget, and audience perceptions (Grizzard, Lewis, Lee, & Eden, 2011). / text

The Indian entertainment industry has firmly cemented its place on the global map of cinema. With more than 1000 multilingual films being produced every year, it has had great impact upon the world of fashion, music and dance. The Indian entertainment industry is in a favorable phase right now driven by ground-breaking changes such as the advent of new leaders, increased usage of technology, new ways of storytelling and new stories being told. Though it started out by being dominated by a handful of people, it has evolved to allow the growth of leaders who shaped its progress. This paper analyses the transformation of leadership styles within the industry and explores how the change in audiences’ tastes and expectations, nepotism, the role of fashion designers, the role of women and the Indian diaspora have produced leaders through the years and how this has resulted in the continuous transformation of its definition of leadership and leadership.

Entertainment Education is a communication strategy widely used in non-formal community education for the purpose of inspiring behaviour and social change. As an international development strategy for educational interventions in mostly developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, the practice is founded on persuasive communication aimed for the diffusion of ‘modern’ innovation. Entertainment Education has been commended for its efficiency in creation of awareness amongst target communities, but criticised for its inability to generate enduring practical change in the lives of the target community members. Situating this practice within Emancipatory Transformative Education, I interrogated the emancipatory principles of democratic practice in Entertainment Education as representational of an intercultural educational space. I did this with a sample case of Geenu Nti programme situated in Northern Nigeria and executed by an American centre for international development. My interaction with the programme stakeholders and audience through the use of semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and documentary analysis revealed that despite efforts at participatory practice, the programme fell short of the key emancipatory values of intellectual equality and freedom in its educational content and process. This raised the need for the reconceptualization of current approach in the management of transformative change in individuals and communities and a relational concern with practitioners’ approach to emancipatory education in general. Drawing on the thoughts of emancipatory education philosophers like Freire, Rancière and Biesta as well as trialectic change philosophers like Bergson, Chia and Ford & Ford, I conceptualised the principles of a model of emancipatory educational change practice. These principles were then articulated into a realisable interactional space with ideas drawn from Ross and Harré to develop a Model of Emancipatory Education for Change which presents an equally creative and expressive inter-subjective communicative relationship between the educator and the ‘educandee’**. Here the educator, through democratic authority simultaneously challenges and nourishes the educadee’s freedom for autonomous growth within individual and collective existential realities, while equally navigating personal growth. The model furthers the idea of emancipation as a process of subjectification to a conceptualisation of emancipation as a process of subjectified socialisation. NB **: The term ‘educandee’ is adopted from Kivelä et al. (1995) and Biesta (1998) and introduced in the later part of the work to signify my concept of participants in communicative educational engagements. I use the term educandee to convey my concept of an educational participant who, under a relatively equal power relation with the educator, actively participates in the educational process as an autonomous individual creating response to own existential circumstances under the intentional support or guidance of a skilled practitioner. This represents the ‘educated’ which is generally my preferred term as against the ‘learner’ or ‘student’ that I deliberately avoided using except when presenting the ideas of other scholars and in their own terms.

The recent push for more detailed graphics and realistic visuals in animated productions has sparked much debate around the new films’ photorealistic visual style. Some critics argue that the new “live-action” versions of movie classics such as the Lion King are not as visually stylish as the original ones, and the photorealistic characters are not as likeable, fun and intriguing as their stylized counterparts. This paper reports ongoing research whose goal is to examine whether it is possible to apply traditional animation principles to photorealistic animated animal characters in order to make them more expressive, convincing and ultimately entertaining. In particular, the study reported in the paper investigated the extent to which varying degrees of exaggeration affect the perceived believability and appeal of a photorealistic, anthropomorphic cat character performing a series of actions in a high detail environment. The study included 82 participants and compared three levels of exaggeration applied to the cat’s motions, e.g. no exaggeration, low exaggeration and high exaggeration. Findings show that subjects found the no-exaggeration clip more appealing and believable than the exaggerated versions, although the difference in appeal was not statistically significant. When comparing the two exaggerated clips, participants rated the high exaggeration clip higher for believability and appeal than the low exaggeration one.

Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo analisar os novos paradigmas da sociedade tecnocêntrica, por meio da evolução dos meios de diversão, tomando-se como metáfora o trem-fantasma dos parques de diversões mambembes, contextualizando-o em seu momento histórico e social e comparando-o com as novas experiências de simulações, por meio da chamada Realidade Virtual, produzida a partir de equipamentos eletrônicos de última geração tecnológica. Verificar também se, por meio dessa evolução, vem ocorrendo alterações na visão de mundo das pessoas e possíveis consequências nas relações sociais, principalmente na escola. Como metodologia foram utilizadas entrevistas estruturadas com funcionários, usuários de parques de diversões, jogadores de videogame, alunos e professores e também coleta de imagens visuais como fotografias e vídeos de parques, de histórias em quadrinhos, de capas de discos e trechos de filmes capturados na Internet, além da pesquisa bibliográfica que foram analisadas à luz da Teoria Geral do Imaginário, buscando identificar os traços míticos dessa amostra na contemporaneidade. Foi possível perceber que, embora os avanços tecnológicos estejam modificando as formas de relacionamento social e provocando uma mudança na bacia semântica, os universos míticos ainda são os mesmos, assim como o imaginário coletivo, as fantasmagorias e os medos. / This research aimed to analyze the new paradigms of technocentric society, through the evolution of the means of entertainment, taking as a metaphor the \"ghost train\" of mambembes amusement parks, contextualizing it in its historical and social moment and comparing it with the new experiences of simulations, through the so-called Virtual Reality, produced from state-of-the-art electronic equipment. This paper also aims to check whether, through this \"evolution\", there have been changes in the world view of people and possible consequences in social relations, especially in school. In order to identify the mythical features of this sample in the contemporaneity, the methodology used was the structured interviews with employees, users of amusement parks, video game players, students and teachers, as well excerpts from films obtained from the Internet, besides the bibliographical research that was analyzed in the light of the General Theory of Imaginary. Although technological advances are changing the forms of social relationships and causing a change in the semantic basin, it was possible to perceive that the mythical universes, the collective imagination, the phantasmagoria and the fear are still the same.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-25T20:20:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Alexandre Leonarde.pdf: 68513306 bytes, checksum: 49bedd47af90abc12db247f86f0f0652 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-10-18 / This research studies the identity of São Paulo city, assuming it is dynamic and open, not fixed and not permanent, characterized by multitude, a work in project, and assuming it cannot be studied based on stable rules. To grasp the city's multiple identities given the absence of stable references, this study analyzed its identity narrative, which can be apprehended through history, literature, music, and popular culture. These elements take on the role of indications as they enable one to grasp how the city is imagined, described, and shown, thus revealing its multiple identities. Under the historical perspective, the city's identity, as from the "second founding", has been linked to speed, work, and progress, overlapping its colonial past, which was conflicting and anarchic, and gradually building an image of a modern city, characterized as a financial, industrial, cultural, and political center in the country. However, since the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, night entertainment has become part of the city's identity narrative. Night Entertainment, which gained increasingly more relevance in the city's identity narrative through the following decades, and which can be considered currently as another cultural identity element in the city of São Paulo / Esta pesquisa estuda a identidade da cidade de São Paulo, assumindo-a como dinâmica e aberta, não fixa e não permanente, caracterizada pela multiplicidade, entendida como obra em construção, não podendo ser pensada a partir de regras estáveis. Para captar as múltiplas identidades da cidade diante da ausência de referenciais estáveis, analisou-se sua narrativa identitária, que pode ser apreendida na história, na literatura, na música, na cultura popular, que assumem o papel de indícios, permitindo captar como a cidade é imaginada, descrita e apresentada, revelando suas múltiplas identidades. Na perspectiva histórica, a identidade da cidade, a partir da segunda fundação , foi vinculada à velocidade, ao trabalho e ao progresso, sobrepondo seu passado colonial conflitivo e anárquico, aos poucos construindo uma imagem de cidade moderna, caracterizada como centro financeiro, industrial, cultural e político do país. Porém, desde a virada do século XIX para o XX, o entretenimento noturno passou a compor narrativa identitária da cidade. Entretenimento Noturno que, ao longo das décadas seguintes, ganhou cada vez mais relevância na narrativa identitária da cidade, podendo ser considerado no tempo presente como mais um elemento cultural identitário da cidade de São Paulo

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T14:53:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Alexandre Leonarde.pdf: 68513306 bytes, checksum: 49bedd47af90abc12db247f86f0f0652 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-10-18 / This research studies the identity of São Paulo city, assuming it is dynamic and open, not fixed and not permanent, characterized by multitude, a work in project, and assuming it cannot be studied based on stable rules. To grasp the city's multiple identities given the absence of stable references, this study analyzed its identity narrative, which can be apprehended through history, literature, music, and popular culture. These elements take on the role of indications as they enable one to grasp how the city is imagined, described, and shown, thus revealing its multiple identities. Under the historical perspective, the city's identity, as from the "second founding", has been linked to speed, work, and progress, overlapping its colonial past, which was conflicting and anarchic, and gradually building an image of a modern city, characterized as a financial, industrial, cultural, and political center in the country. However, since the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, night entertainment has become part of the city's identity narrative. Night Entertainment, which gained increasingly more relevance in the city's identity narrative through the following decades, and which can be considered currently as another cultural identity element in the city of São Paulo / Esta pesquisa estuda a identidade da cidade de São Paulo, assumindo-a como dinâmica e aberta, não fixa e não permanente, caracterizada pela multiplicidade, entendida como obra em construção, não podendo ser pensada a partir de regras estáveis. Para captar as múltiplas identidades da cidade diante da ausência de referenciais estáveis, analisou-se sua narrativa identitária, que pode ser apreendida na história, na literatura, na música, na cultura popular, que assumem o papel de indícios, permitindo captar como a cidade é imaginada, descrita e apresentada, revelando suas múltiplas identidades. Na perspectiva histórica, a identidade da cidade, a partir da segunda fundação , foi vinculada à velocidade, ao trabalho e ao progresso, sobrepondo seu passado colonial conflitivo e anárquico, aos poucos construindo uma imagem de cidade moderna, caracterizada como centro financeiro, industrial, cultural e político do país. Porém, desde a virada do século XIX para o XX, o entretenimento noturno passou a compor narrativa identitária da cidade. Entretenimento Noturno que, ao longo das décadas seguintes, ganhou cada vez mais relevância na narrativa identitária da cidade, podendo ser considerado no tempo presente como mais um elemento cultural identitário da cidade de São Paulo

Computer entertainment is a big business today. Due to the availability of broadband network connections, the Internet is already a platform for many high quality multimedia applications. For example, online theaters and multi-player online games (MOG) are two of the most popular multimedia applications on the Internet. Although the Internet provides us a very convenient channel for data dissemination, its open architecture leads to many security issues. The security problems are especially complicated for computer entertainment applications since we must address both efficiency and security at the same time. In this thesis, we tackle four security issues in different aspects of computer entertainment applications. Specifically, the issues are (1) "to provide secure multimedia streaming while allowing proxy caching by untrusted third parties", (2) "to detect cheating in MOGs other than using conventional labor-intensive methods", (3) "to synchronize game clients in highly-interactive MOGs while resisting cheating in both the application and protocol level", and (4) "to exchange messages in peer-to-peer (P2P) MOGs so that distributed simulation is allowed but information exposure is mitigated". For each of the above issues, we present an effective solution that preserves the architecture of that particular multimedia application and also is feasible and efficient to deploy on the Internet. / Yeung, Siu Fung. / Adviser: John C. S. Lui. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-09, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-142). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.