This mini-dissertation places a specific focus on the City of Cape Town and considers the space between aesthetics, commercial interest and social relevance in public visual communication practices. Instead of making a general statement or providing a value judgement, this research examines the nature of the debate surrounding public artistic practices by referring to three main artists; namely Michael Elion, The Tokolos Stencil Collective and Freddy Sam. The basis of the discussion is centred around the recent controversy surrounding Michael Elion's Sea Point public art sculpture, Perceiving Freedom (2014) and the respective questions it raised about what public space means, who has the right to represent themselves, and what that looks like. By drawing a comparison with Perceiving Freedom (2014) to the visual communicative practices of Freddy Sam and The Tokolos Stencil Collective, this research examines the progression of the debate. This encompasses the ways in which each artist and their work serve to illuminate the different visual modes of engagement in Cape Town's public spaces. Due to the contemporary nature of the subject matter, this debate is engaged with on three different levels. The first level examines the context of this debate and each artist, whereas the second level considers the points where their respective visual communicative practices intersect and engage in dialogue with each other as well as the general public. The last level considers an alternative way of reading the content, context and form of visual communicative practices so that their resulting effect can be better understood. This is done with the use of Marshall McLuhan's (1964) total effect media theory. Although several other prominent South African artists are mentioned in the scope of this research, it is important to note that the focus still pertains to the aforementioned themes of aesthetics, commercial interest and social relevance in public visual representative practices. Therefore Michael Elion, The Tokolos Stencil Collective and Freddy Sam remain the specific focus of discussion, as their respective works are used to illustrate these three themes. The first level of engagement offers a theoretical background to the reader by briefly familiarising them with international street art and graffiti practices. This brief yet concise background allows for a better understanding of the history and politics surrounding unsanctioned public visual practices and how they differ to formal sanctioned and funded ones.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [223]-246). / This thesis examines the agency of marginalised subjects in the context of global capitalism and the information age. The key question that is addressed is whether transnational corporations have appropriated aspects of cultural identity, creative expression and technological innovation for their own enrichment - to the detriment of civil society. Where this is the case, this thesis considers what opportunities exist for issuing challenges to the power of global corporations. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's concept of Empire provides the theoretical foundation for examining cultural, technological and legal conflicts between the interests of citizens and those of corporations. Hardt and Negri theorise the ways in which former imperial powers continue to extend their military, economic and political power in former colonies. The authors argue that former imperial powers no longer compete with each other for the same resources because they now co-operate with each other through multilateral organisations and trade agreements. Ultimately, the key beneficiaries of these modes of co-operation are global corporations that tend to monopolise the production and distribution of technological and cultural products at the expense of the public interest and the functioning of democracy. This work considers the possibilities of responding to Empire and resisting globalisation through strategies that employ some of the same decentralised, network-based techniques that benefit global corporate entities. Hardt and Negri's concept of 'the multitude' as a multiplicity of singularities makes sense of the diverse struggles under discussion in this study, providing the conceptual basis for possibilities of multiple engagements with Empire that are not reductive and that do not exclude certain interest groups. This is an interdisciplinary project that uses case studies to analyse the relationships between law and policy documents, technological development, and the production of cultural texts (such as hip-hop music). Specifically, this work explores the MP3 revolution and Napster (version one); digital sampling in hip-hop; hip-hop activism on South Africa's Cape Flats and these activists' use of new media in their pursuit of social justice. It addresses concerns about the commodification of youth culture as well as debates about intellectual property and the United States' use of trade agreements as enforcement mechanisms that serve the interests of its own corporations. This thesis presents an overview of copyright and trade agreements in order to examine the vested interests that underlie them. In keeping with the focus on globalisation and cultural imperialism, US legislation - such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act - is discussed in relation to alternatives to proprietary approaches toward intellectual property, such as open source software and Creative Commons licenses.

Domestic space and place, as well as how we conceptualise the home, are shifting in response to changes in digital and SNS technologies, and our relationships with such technologies. The home is not only the building in which we live, but a networked assemblage of material and digitally mediated space and place. This study examines predominantly white middle class arrangements of domestic space and place in South Africa, which provides insight into a relatively unexplored aspect of digital culture: the performance of domesticity via SNS, particularly Facebook. Furthermore gendered and racialised power dynamics and privilege in everyday life were investigated through a digital ethnography and critical discourse analysis of posts by 50 Facebook users. This data was supplemented by interviews and in-situ observations of five couples drawn from the broader sample. In combination, these methods revealed how space, place, and domestic responsibilities are secured through narrative practice. Through this study I show how Facebook has emerged as a collaborative platform where storytelling practices are influenced by the site architecture and algorithm. Facebook has opened up the private space of the home allowing domestic space, place, and practice to steadily gain visibility. This visibility, analysed in conjunction with Actor-Network Theory, revealed that homes, and narratives about the homes, are networked and dependent on relationships between actants. The home, and the relationships that stabilise it, are also reflective of discourses and power relations. Human actors negotiated territory and network roles, and these negotiations reveal power and hierarchy. Women remain more tightly bound to the home because of cultural and historical gendered discourses, and as a result the white women participants in this study continue to create place and ascribe space in digitally mediated and material versions of their homes. Furthermore, the resurgence of middle class postfeminist accounts of domesticity have promoted domestic idealism and many women have migrated back to the home spurred on by popular media, and economic privilege that has allowed them to forego paid employment. This study also shows that white, middle class women participants were offered choices to construct their own postfeminist narratives of domesticity. On the other hand, the black women employed as domestic workers by these middle class couples, were largely absent from such narratives and conversations. Findings further suggest that domestic space and place remained the domain of white women participants, and that white men were able to renegotiate their domestic responsibilities because they remained distant from domestic narratives and conversations, where they were largely associated with domestic inadequacy.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-225) / This thesi explores two possibilities and relates them to each other: infusions of fantasy (or magic, the dream, the ,marvellous) which undermine realism and the use of disruption as a specific strategy for communicating disorder or elusive experience. It examines the expression of both fantasy and disruption with an emphasis on film editing. This study considers editing as the foundation of narrative structure in film, and explores the effects of alternative articulations of space, time and the body in film that deliberately subvert the norms of continuity editing.

The political and economic crisis that beset Zimbabwe since the late 1990s forms the backdrop to this study which examines the discourses that occupied a position of dominance on the state radio station, Radio Zimbabwe, between March and April 2011. This study moves beyond an analysis of texts and also looks at how some women listeners, who were living in a rural community in Zimbabwe, engaged with the radio and the mainstream discourses in the context of everyday life. The analysis of Radio Zimbabwe broadcasts is informed by Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony (1971) as well as ideas from the propaganda model postulated by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988). The audience study draws on some ideas by Carragee (1990) on the critical audience research perspective. This study also takes a poststructuralist approach to language, discourse and subjectivity. Available media scholarship on the post-2000 crisis in Zimbabwe has mostly focused on analysing how the print media represented the land question and the elections. Scholars have neglected to look at hegemonic and counter hegemonic discourses that were broadcast on the most pervasive medium in the country and on the continent, radio during this time. In radio studies in Africa and in Zimbabwe, the exploration of radio content is also largely missing. Also conspicuously absent in research that has been carried out in Zimbabwe and in Africa is an understanding of how audiences interact with mainstream meanings embedded in radio texts. In view of the above-mentioned gaps in literature, this study focuses on radio texts and radio listeners. The study combines a critical discourse analysis of Radio Zimbabwe content with a discourse analysis of narratives of 30 women listeners of the station that were interviewed. Two arguments are made in this thesis. The first is that in the face of waning support, immense opposition at home and abroad and an unrelenting economic crisis, the Zimbabwe African Nationalist Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government used the discourses on land, the liberation struggle, the father of the nation, Christianity and God to legitimise its continued stay in power. These discourses were also used to delegitimise political opponents inside and outside the country. The second argument that this thesis makes is that women's engagement with Radio Zimbabwe content and hegemonic meanings broadcast on the station is not straightforward and predictable. Though some women said they listened to the news, a programme embedded with dominant ideas, most of them said they did not remember what was contained in most bulletins. Most women recalled news items that were directly relevant to them. While Radio Zimbabwe content was predominantly political in nature, the programmes that women talked about as favourite programmes had nothing to do with politics. The majority of women in the study singled out Kwaziso/Ukhubingelelana and Chakafukidza Dzimba Matenga as programmes they enjoyed listening to. In terms of interacting with mainstream ideas, most of the time many of the women affirmed the dominant discourses. There were, however, instances when some women contested hegemonic ideas. Sometimes mainstream ideas were challenged because what the women heard on the radio and their lived realities were not congruent. Interestingly, there were also times when this disjuncture did not drive women to question what they heard on the station.

The Internet’s liberative qualities have been hyped by a number of Zimbabwean scholars who argue, on the basis of the existence of online alternative media that carries political content, that democratisation can be technology-led. Given that the question of source selection is connected to the democratising potential of the Internet (Lecheler and Kruikemeier, 2016) by some scholars – this study interrogated the liberative potential of the Internet by tracing the social media sourcing patterns of four daily newspapers within Zimbabwe’s polarised mainstream media. Using a mixed methods approach which deployed Actor-Network theory as a preliminary methodological tool, this study collected and evaluated empirical data drawn from 146 social media sourced political stories published over a 30-month period and the responses from semi-structured interviews with purposively sampled participants – to account for the human and non-human actors in the news production network. A social constructivist analytical lens was then used to appreciate the contexts in which social media sourcing was being adopted in newsrooms, which revealed how unique circumstances had triggered unprecedented reliance on social media as a political news source. Those unique circumstances involved an escalation of factional fighting within the ruling ZANU PF that morphed into a propaganda war, which was waged through The Herald newspaper by one faction and through social media by the other faction. The public feud, which played out on social media, forced political reporters to gather story ideas from social media and overly rely on a few tech savvy elite sources. In these circumstances, social media’s influence on the political news agenda was overstated as it was conflated with the influence of a news event (ZANU PF factionalism) and the influence of social media users (high-ranking ZANU PF members) who could not be ignored. It is hoped that the findings of this study will contribute towards filling the lacuna in terms of scholarship demonstrating the influence of social media within Zimbabwe’s political narratives.

Human perception is a process that begins with sensory input that is organized and then interpreted. During this process there is a movement of information about an event in the real world, into information that represents that event in the mind. This movement of information in the form of perception is similar to the filming process; where the event, sensory input, organisation and interpretation is like the pro-filmic event (that which exists in the world before or regardless of whether it is filmed), the light entering the camera lens, and, the editing process and audience experience, respectively. When these systems are influenced at any stage of the process, there is an alteration in the resulting representation. The pro-filmic event can be influenced through the filmmaking techniques used to record it that may influence beliefs that concern the event. For example, the recording of films that concern mental illness need to be approached with caution because treatment of the pro-filmic event can either reinforce or challenge stereotypes about the mentally ill. Bipolar is a mental disorder of mood that is often represented with wild inaccuracy in films. The biographical drama, Shine (1996), for example, attempts to represent the life of David Helfgott, a musician who suffered a mental breakdown and spent subsequent years in mental asylums. He is portrayed as an imbecile, always mumbling indistinctly. In the film, the connection between psychopathology and creativity is supported, heavy- handedly. This demonstrates how the intervention (by the filmmaker and his filmmaking techniques) can transform meaning and influence viewer perception through the film medium. For the case-study documentary film, Don’t Hide the Madness (2017), I use recording and editing techniques to portray a personal account of bipolar in a way that challenges mainstream beliefs about the disorder. I argue that this application of the film medium has the capacity to confront stigma and change perceptions about mental illness.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 278-292). / This thesis explores emerging patterns of communication in student video production and the extent to which such patterns signify cultural border crossings in a South African upper income group school context. The investigation was carried out with specific reference to the politics of difference, an educational philosophy defined by Henry Giroux (2006) as border pedagogy. Within the framework of multimodal pedagogy, four learners from diverse cultural backgrounds collaborated with one another in a timeframe of three days to create digital video productions using guidelines provided by the researcher. The production unit was observed in order to answer questions around the utilisation of video production in the classroom, as well as how learners interact and negotiate cultural issues while producing video. The data was analysed with a custom-made multimodal toolkit as proposed by Baldry and Thibault (2006). By employing Kress and Van Leeuwen's four strata of Discourse, Design, Production and Distribution various types of data illuminated themes around social memory, race, the influence of class difference, and gender representation. Assessment techniques in terms of the multimodal theories of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) also enabled the researcher to look at the way in which meaning is made "in any and every sign, at every level, and in any mode" (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001: 4). The classroom intervention was designed to encourage adolescents as "unique hybrids" (Bhabha 1994) to cross borders of cultural identity, hypothesising that difference might emerge more clearly in the negotiation and video production process, than what might crystallise in analyzing the final video production. Metaphorical border crossing in a cultural and racial sense might become more apparent in production than final product. The negotiation of Border Difference took preference over the ultimate erosion of these borders.

Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis investigates children's gaming relationships with peers in out-of-school settings, and explores their interpretation of digital games as gendered media texts. As an interdisciplinary study, it combines insights from Childhood Studies, Cultural Studies, Game Studies, domestication and performance theory. The concept ludic gendering is developed in order to explain how gender "works" in games, as designed semiotic and ludic artefacts. Ludic gendering also helps to explain the appropriation of games through gameplay, and the interpretation of gendered rules and representations. The study expands on audience reception research to account for children's "readings" of digital games. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is used to study gaming relationships. Combining SNA with broadly ethnographic methods provided a systematic way of investigating children's peer relationships and gendered play.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 218-236). / In 1994, South Africa was emancipated from apartheid, and in 1996, a new democratic Constitution was released. This charter envisioned a progressive society and placed emphasis on equality, multiculturalism, reconciliation and freedom. The state targeted the cultural industries, including cinema, to carry this new vision to the nation. The problem, however, was that the production, exhibition and distribution infrastructure inherited from apartheid was not only dominated by Hollywood, but also exclusively catered for the white sector of the nation. This monopolised, racially skewed structure continues to pose an obstacle to the dissemination of progressive identities and the sustainability of local cinema. Through an analysis of relevant film policy, industry structure and specific cinematic texts, this study aims to trace the intersection between the dynamics of national identity representation and South Africa's political and economic position as a developing nation in the global marketplace. The research presented took place over a period of three years (2007-2010) and incorporated both quantitative and qualitative methods.