This media creative project explores the experiences of South African women on social media platforms. The idea for this project stems from my personal experiences as an avid consumer and viewer of online content generated by these women. My engagement with YouTube began about ten years ago, when I started to consistently watch YouTube videos. Later, I would go on to consume Instagram posts by digital content creators. However, these consumption choices of mine were not functions of random videos or pictures promoted on these platforms. Rather my consumption was driven by a desire to see women who looked like me - black women. From 2009 onward black diasporic women, and women on the African continent, were suddenly, it seemed, putting out content related to black women's experiences in the world, with themes relating to education, hair, beauty and all other sorts of lifestyle-related topics. I would be lying if I did not mention how the women on YouTube talking about their natural hair drove me to explore a hair routine away from chemicals. Straightening our natural hair and being 'presentable' according to Eurocentric standards were for a long time, a burden into my life. I began consuming their videos whereby the content creators were encouraging the viewers to own their natural hair and most importantly, own whatever hairstyle they seemed to 3 fit. The choice of how we present ourselves seemed to come back to us, and the space in which it was performed felt like a safe, communal one. Six years ago, a black youtuber called Chizi Duru, had cut all her hair to start all over again without any chemicals. The act of cutting off all your hair within the community was labeled 'The Big Chop': an act of rebirth, renewal and resistance for black women. I went along and did the same, following her journey and exploring my own.

The format program trade has grown rapidly in the past decade and has become an important part of the global television market. This study aimed to give an understanding of this phenomenon by examining how global formats enter and become incorporated into the national media market through a case study analysis on the Korean format market. Analyses were done to see how the historical background influenced the imported format flows, how the format flows changed after the media liberalization period, and how the format uses changed from illegal copying to partial formats to whole licensed formats. Overall, the results of this study suggest that the global format program flows are different from the whole 'canned' program flows because of the adaptation processes, which is a form of hybridity, the formats go through. Previous studies tend to simplify the adaptation process of format programs by just seeing it as a proof of nationalization, but this study found that format adaptations are much complicated. The way the formats were adapted to the local context differed by specific situations, such as cultural proximity, political ties with other countries, channel identities, target audiences, format genres, or conditions of the format license contracts. Moreover, there were also differences in where the initiative to make such adaptations came from. Thus, this study argues that format program flows are one of the many sub-flows in television program flows which complicate our understanding of what 'global' media is. / text

Este estudo teve por objetivo comparar grupos de mídia ocidentais e não ocidentais no que diz respeito à guerra na Síria, em curso desde 2011, no rastro das chamadas primaveras árabes. Foi realizada uma analises de conteúdo, quantitativa e qualitativa, seguindo parâmetros de Herman e Chomsky em A manipulação do Público (2003), porém adaptados à mídia global. Na divisão dos veículos, utilizou-se o conceito de mídias do fluxo dominante e do contra fluxo, para ilustrar a posição dos grupos analisados em relação ao atual panorama global da mídia. Os resultados apontaram para uma cobertura global da guerra na Síria polarizada, alinhada com interesses geopolíticos, e com maior unidade no Ocidente. Como conclusão, a hegemonia dos conglomerados ocidentais midiáticos ou o fluxo dominante da mídia global ditou a pauta mundial sobre a crise na Síria, em um espaço de disputa com as mídias no contra fluxo. Estas vão buscando expor melhor seus interesses e os de seus países, à medida que a guerra na Síria começa a afetá-los / This study aimed to compare Western media groups and non-Western regarding to the war in Syria, ongoing since 2011, in the wake of the so-called \"arab spring\". An content analysis, quantitative and qualitative was conducted following Herman and Chomsky parameters in Manufacturing Consent (2003), but adapted to the global media. In the groups division, we used the concept of media dominant flow and contra flow (THUSSU, 2007), to illustrate the position of the groups analyzed in relation to the current global panorama of the media. The results showed an overall coverage of the war in polarized Syria, in line with geopolitical interests and greater unity in the West. In conclusion, the Western media hegemony promoted by media Western conglomerates in a dominant flow of global media, dictated an agenda on the Syria crisis, in a space of content with the media in contra flow. These will seeking to better expose their interests and those of their countries, as far as the war in Syria begins to affect them

Goodbye Brigadoon examines the shifting role media production plays in the economic and cultural strategies of global cities in small market nations, specifically Glasgow, Scotland. In particular, this project focuses on the formation of a digital media village along the banks of the River Clyde to argue the site constitutes a logical component to Glasgow’s ongoing transformation into a cosmopolitan center. Yet, as the regional government’s economic strategies and policy directives work to transform the abandoned waterfront into a center of cultural activity, this project also underscores the contradictory cultural dynamics to emerge from media production’s new role in the post-industrial city. At its core, the media hub reveals a regional government more interested in the technology used to deliver “national” stories than the manner of the stories themselves or the cultural practices responsible for creating them. Indeed, Goodbye Brigadoon is most interested in how media professionals based at the emergent cluster negotiate a sense of cultural identity and creative license against the institutional constraints, policy matters, and commercial logic they also must navigate in their workaday rituals. Ultimately, the conclusions offered in this project argue for a more complicated conception of the global-local location where these professionals work. Glasgow’s digital media village, in other words, is much more than an innocuous site of competitive advantage, urban regeneration, and job growth. It is best understood as a site of intense social struggle and unequal power relations where local mediamakers often find the site’s impetus for multiplatform media production an institutionally enforced false promise at odds with the realities of creative labor in the city. / text

This thesis examines Iranian-Kurdish filmmaker, Bahman Ghobadi’s authorial strategies and cinematic aesthetics through the theoretical and methodological lens of hybridity. According to Homi Bhabha, hybridity can be understood as a “third space,” in which cultural meanings resist binary either/or logic, and are instead negotiated through a logic that is neither one, nor the other. Thus, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity as a “third space” provides a fruitful framework to analyze Ghobadi’s authorship and cinematic style. By analyzing Ghobadi’s neo-realist treatment of Kurdistan’s cultural and physical landscape and hybrid cinematic aesthetics in his first two features, A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) and Turtles Can Fly (2004), this research calls attention to intercultural processes that generate cultural meaning through indexical and material as opposed to symbolic registers. In addition, this thesis applies Hamid Naficy’s concept of “shifters” to examine how Ghobadi’s hybrid authorial strategies and narrative reflexivity garners international audiences in his two latest features, Half Moon (2006) and No One Knows about Persian Cats (2009). This project also examines how Ghobadi’s use of a digital camera and employment of digital cinematic techniques to capture Iran’s underground rock music culture in No One Knows about Persian Cats, testifies to the authenticity of this cultural space while simultaneously structuring the film as a global vehicle for these Iranian musicians’ performances. Ultimately, Ghobadi’s hybrid authorial strategies and cinematic aesthetics function as a means to enunciate and globally circulate diverse Kurdish and Iranian cultural identities. In doing so, this thesis illuminates hybrid modes of cultural production and hybrid cultural subjectivities that have emerged in the contemporary globalized landscape. / text

Este estudo teve por objetivo comparar grupos de mídia ocidentais e não ocidentais no que diz respeito à guerra na Síria, em curso desde 2011, no rastro das chamadas primaveras árabes. Foi realizada uma analises de conteúdo, quantitativa e qualitativa, seguindo parâmetros de Herman e Chomsky em A manipulação do Público (2003), porém adaptados à mídia global. Na divisão dos veículos, utilizou-se o conceito de mídias do fluxo dominante e do contra fluxo, para ilustrar a posição dos grupos analisados em relação ao atual panorama global da mídia. Os resultados apontaram para uma cobertura global da guerra na Síria polarizada, alinhada com interesses geopolíticos, e com maior unidade no Ocidente. Como conclusão, a hegemonia dos conglomerados ocidentais midiáticos ou o fluxo dominante da mídia global ditou a pauta mundial sobre a crise na Síria, em um espaço de disputa com as mídias no contra fluxo. Estas vão buscando expor melhor seus interesses e os de seus países, à medida que a guerra na Síria começa a afetá-los / This study aimed to compare Western media groups and non-Western regarding to the war in Syria, ongoing since 2011, in the wake of the so-called \"arab spring\". An content analysis, quantitative and qualitative was conducted following Herman and Chomsky parameters in Manufacturing Consent (2003), but adapted to the global media. In the groups division, we used the concept of media dominant flow and contra flow (THUSSU, 2007), to illustrate the position of the groups analyzed in relation to the current global panorama of the media. The results showed an overall coverage of the war in polarized Syria, in line with geopolitical interests and greater unity in the West. In conclusion, the Western media hegemony promoted by media Western conglomerates in a dominant flow of global media, dictated an agenda on the Syria crisis, in a space of content with the media in contra flow. These will seeking to better expose their interests and those of their countries, as far as the war in Syria begins to affect them

The live-commenting feature Facebook Live offers a unique look into how persuasion operates online. By giving citizen-users, or the viewertariat (see Anstead & O'Loughlin, 2011), the opportunity to comment on live political performances, Facebook Live presents a worthy site of investigation into how traditionally-powerful performer-persuaders (electoral candidates) now face off with traditionally-excluded masses of audience-persuadees (citizen-users). The livestream then becomes a mediated space of contestation, where the boundaries between persuader-persuadee and performer-audience fades, where, this study proposes, persuadee becomes persuader, rendering, in the process, the traditional persuader less persuasive, and thus less powerful. The study sought to understand how electoral persuasion operates online in Mauritius by using the Facebook livestreamed interviews of three candidates (incumbent, long-time, and first-time candidate) running in the December 2017 By-Election. A combined rhetorical and content analysis was conducted on candidates' representative claims (see Saward, 2006) and the viewertariat responses to these claims. This study finds that candidates employ a self-centred rhetoric, focusing on their ‘candidateness' rather than their representativeness, which, this study proposes, has ramifications on how candidates approach politics in contemporary Mauritius. The study also finds that the viewertariat is actively engaged in counter-persuasion, constructing their own (re)representative claims and exchanging primarily with other viewertariat members and lurkers (see Hill & Hughes, 1997). The viewertariat exhibits horizontal persuasion which, this study discusses, dilutes the vertical persuasion employed by candidates. The overall findings lead to the conclusion that rhetoric as a theoretical framework must be extended to adequately capture the persuasive dynamics in online electoral public spheres. A new theoretical framework is finally proposed, with the tripartite distinction between performer-text-audience rearranged to include performer-persuasive text-viewertariat-lurkers, and complemented with an argument as to the growing conceptual obsolescence of the ‘audience' in studying rhetoric online.

It has been more than ten years since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, but the events related to the attacks are still a focus for the whole world. This study examined the news coverage of the 9/11 tenth anniversary from Phoenix TV and CNN, which are among the most influential news media in China and the U.S., respectively. A systematic content analysis was performed using latest news, opinion articles, photographs, and videos as classified by CNN and Phoenix TV on their commemorative 9/11 tenth anniversary websites. Framing theory guided this thesis project. The results offer some evidence regarding differences in the selection and use of frames in the U.S. and Chinese media. Results also suggest that global media share news resources for global events. / Master of Arts

The purpose of this study is to examine how immigrants are portrayed in the Swedish daily newspapers online reporting. The essay investigates in what context immigrants, as individuals, are made visible and how they and their origins are reproduced. The study focuses on the roles victim and aggressor, and is also investigating potential differences between morning and evening newspapers. Present theories are discursive discrimination, critical discourse analysis, cultural racism, stereotypes and structural discrimination. Adopted methods are qualitative and quantitative content analysis, based on the Global Media Monitoring Project-tool. The results show that immigrants are not individually stereotyped or depicted negatively, but that their immigrant origins often have a central part of the story, that they are mentioned mainly in connection with negative news and that negatively charged words occur frequently.

In a global media environment characterized by change and conflict, narratives are especially useful to understand how the media form and distribute shared understanding of how the world works and who the important actors are. As the borders between local and global politics are blurred in the digital media landscape, protesters are in increased rate turning their placards to global broadcasters’ cameras, especially when political movements such as the U.S.-based Black Lives Matter movement get international counterparts. The scholarship concerned with the framework through which the media report protests argue the protest paradigm offers useful variables for the study of protests, while problematizing the lack of research on global broadcasting media. Global broadcasters, International Relations scholars argue, need to be understood as resources of soft power that distribute strategic narratives, but they have yet to develop a methodology for how broadcasts can be empirically studied. With this research gap as a point of departure, the chosen case study is the unrest in Ferguson in August 2014. A quantitative mapping and a comparative narrative analysis focusing on the narrative structure were conducted on 16 days of news bulletins from Al Jazeera English, BBC World News and RT. The results show several differences in the reports, the first concerns the amount of attention that was given to Ferguson by each broadcaster, where RT gave almost twice the amount of attention as the other two broadcasters. Further differences were found in the sources each broadcaster used and how they used violence as an entry-point to what their narratives where about, which in the case of AJE was the effects violence has on a society; BBCW’s narrative was of a political issue of high importance that concerns people of color; whereas RT’s narrative was about the militarization of the U.S. police force. The results imply the global broadcasters offer distinctive narratives, which through different storytelling techniques convey different attitudes and morals.