This thesis investigates the cultural politics of taste in contemporary food media of Hong Kong through the lens of foodie stylistics on Instagram. By bearing on the semiotic theory and analysis by Roland Barthes, this research seeks to closely examine the mythmaking of taste in foodie criticism--the food and restaurant review written by foodies on social media platform. The theory will be used to spell out the layered meaning of foodie criticism: a linguistic depiction of food, visual stylistic of writing about taste, tactics of gaining voice of authority by foodie critics and their intention of writing. Considering taste as a cultural and social construct, the present research examines the pivotal role of foodie critics as mythmakers that render and stylize taste on Instagram, which mythologizes the intention of writing and complicates how voice of authority can be accumulated and how monopolized power of food media corporate can be further expanded invisibly. Through semiotic analysis, how taste is represented and informed by the mythmaker linguistically, how food trends are set stylistically to attract and affect the audience, as well as how attraction accumulates the voice of authority and engenders problems of self-branding, commercialization and collusion will become apparent. Finally, the findings of this pilot research of Hong Kong foodies will contribute to the understanding of cultural politics of contemporary food criticism media in the social media era.

A dissertation in fulfilment for Master of Arts in Media Studies Faculty of Humanities School of Language, Literature and Media Studies (SLLM) University of the Witwatersrand 2016 / This research study essentially sets out to explore the practices of young, ordinary, South African women who take and post selfies on social media platforms, like Instagram. The general commentary surrounding selfies is typically negative, and tends to frame the selfietaker as a narcissistic, self-absorbed individual. Therefore, this study is interested in understanding what this very particular smartphone-enabled photographic technique means to this group of women, and in doing so, aims to determine whether or not there are underlying significances to such practices. This research study adopts a vast framework of literature in order to conceptualize and contextualize selfies in contemporary culture, by drawing on the rich history of self-portraiture and snapshots as well as concepts of mediation and the representation of the self online; in addition to describing the role that mobile technologies and social media platforms have played in contributing to cementing selfies as a cultural hallmark in today’s society. This study is additionally grounded upon three dominant theoretical themes, namely: narcissism, self-exploration, and self-regulation; and Christopher Lasch, Michel Foucault, Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill’s theoretical contributions are predominantly referred to in an attempt to explain such principles adequately. Through the responses that were yielded by interviewing 14 young, ordinary, South African women, this research study essentially established that the practices of selfie-taking do in fact play a significant role in the lives of these young women, from empowering them and teaching them to learn to love and accept themselves again, to inspiring personal growth, capturing special moments and memories, and allowing them to feel accepted and as though they belong and have a fixed placed in society. Therefore, this study argues that selfies are not necessarily only about narcissism and self-obsession, but rather more about the notion of self-love and acceptance (for this group of participants at least). / MT2017

This dissertation studies economic issues in the digital economy with a specific focus on the economic aspects of how firms acquire and use consumer data. Chapter 1 empirically studies the drivers of digital attention in the space of social media applications. In order to do so I conduct an experiment where I comprehensively monitor how participants spend their time on digital services and use parental control software to shut off access to either their Instagram or YouTube. I characterize how participants substitute their time during and after the restrictions. I provide an interpretation of the substitution during the restriction period that allows me to conclude that relevant market definitions may be broader than those currently considered by regulatory authorities, but that the substantial diversion towards non-digital activities indicates significant market power from the perspective of consumers for Instagram and YouTube. I then use the results on substitution after the restriction period to motivate a discrete choice model of time usage with inertia and, using the estimates from this model, conduct merger assessments between social media applications. I find that the inertia channel is important for justifying blocking mergers, which I use to argue that currently debated policies aimed at curbing digital addiction are important not only just in their own right but also from an antitrust perspective and, in particular, as a potential policy tool for promoting competition in these markets. More broadly, my paper highlights the utility of product unavailability experiments for demand and merger analysis of digital goods. I thank Maayan Malter for working together with me on collecting the data for this paper. Chapter 2 then studies the next step in consumer data collection process – the extent to which a firm can collect a consumer’s data depends on privacy preferences and the set of available privacy tools. This chapter studies the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation on the ability of a data-intensive intermediary to collect and use consumer data. We find that the opt-in requirement of GDPR resulted in 12.5% drop in the intermediary-observed consumers, but the remaining consumers are trackable for a longer period of time. These findings are consistent with privacy-conscious consumers substituting away from less efficient privacy protection (e.g, cookie deletion) to explicit opt out—a process that would make opt-in consumers more predictable. Consistent with this hypothesis, the average value of the remaining consumers to advertisers has increased, offsetting some of the losses from consumer opt-outs. This chapter is jointly authored with Yeon-Koo Che and Tobias Salz. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 make up the third portion of the dissertation that studies one of the most prominent uses of consumer data in the digital economy – recommendation systems. This chapter is a combination of several papers studying the economic impact of these systems. The first paper is a joint paper with Duarte Gonçalves which studies a model of strategic interaction between producers and a monopolist platform that employs a recommendation system. We characterize the consumer welfare implications of the platform’s entry into the production market. The platform’s entry induces the platform to bias recommendations to steer consumers towards its own goods, which leads to equilibrium investment adjustments by the producers and lower consumer welfare. Further, we find that a policy separating recommendation and production is not always welfare improving. Our results highlight the ability of integrated recommender systems to foreclose competition on online platforms. The second paper turns towards understanding how such systems impact consumer choices and is joint with Duarte Gonçalves and Shan Sikdar. In this paper we study a model of user decision-making in the context of recommender systems via numerical simulation. Our model provides an explanation for the findings of Nguyen et. al (2014), where, in environments where recommender systems are typically deployed, users consume increasingly similar items over time even without recommendation. We find that recommendation alleviates these natural filter-bubble effects, but that it also leads to an increase in homogeneity across users, resulting in a trade-off between homogenizing across-user consumption and diversifying within-user consumption. Finally, we discuss how our model highlights the importance of collecting data on user beliefs and their evolution over time both to design better recommendations and to further understand their impact.

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of the Arts (Media Studies) in the Faculty of Humanities University of the Witwatersrand, March, 2017 / Many young black aspirational South African women are involved in the construction of their identities, and their ideal selves, through their self-display on Instagram. Within the framework of certain hegemonic structures, these women are seen exercising their ‘freedom’ within a post-feminist setting, as neoliberal citizens, and thus striving for a sense of empowerment from this engagement. This project explores the self-display of 10 of these young women that have each accumulated more than 10,000 followers on Instagram. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with each of them, and their Instagram images were analysed, in order to find out how their online performances relate to consumption and global celebrity culture, and how these ideologies are depicted in their images. They draw inspiration from certain black female celebrities such as Beyoncé and Rihanna, and their emulation of these celebrities is used in their identity construction. They do this by displaying a lifestyle of glamorous consumption by incorporating certain exclusive brands and fashionable items into their online presentation. Additionally, they modify and model themselves to fit a specific beauty ideal, which is characterized by long straight hair, fair skin and a curvaceous body. By doing all of this, these young women are, by their own definition attaining a level of ‘success’, and achieve the status of ‘Insta-Celeb’ by the Instagram community. The ideological frameworks on which this construction is built, involves a collective imperative to be liked and accepted by their online followers, the desire for status, and the contradictory creation of a faux idea of female empowerment that is, in reality, not actually as free as it seems. / XL2018

It is not uncommon for graphic scenes of violence and death to infiltrate our timelinesfrom retweets, reposts, and shares. I often question how much control do we really have over the images that enter our feed? In what ways are we affected and influenced by these images? How do we relate to these images and video clips that are played and replayed before us? In what ways are these images evoking or are related to past scenes of racist violence? In what ways are these racially violent moments captured in photos and videos and shared online speaking to a Black consciousness? This project comparatively researches and examines the relationship between past modes and methods of Black trauma curation in the past, to contemporary modes of dissemination on social media in order to argue that contemporary uses of spaces such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter serve as an extension of previous scrapbooking methods. By comparing The Emmet Till Generation and their curation of trauma via scrapbooks which were used to galvanize social movements, and impact organizing efforts of the youth, The Trayvon Generation today uses social media in a similar fashion; to bear witness, to organize, and to curate digital memorials for the dead. Witnessing is further extended and complicated on digital platforms, providing an abundance of visual evidence that has proven to be vital in leading tp prosecutions and arrests of violent state officials, and perpetrators of extrajudicial violence. These live or recorded moments of witnessing are used not only as evidence, but to inform the public. However, we have always known that it’s always happening somewhere, even if we aren’t around to witness it. With that said, what are the effects of having the duty, and the responsibility to bear witness? Paying particular attention to Black youth, this project examines their presence and usage of social media spaces. By analyzing young Black people’s use of social media platforms in relation to Darnella Frazier’s strategic use Facebook, this project examines how Black youth and witnessing is currently driving a cultural shift in entertainment media that highlights witnessing death as a significant milestone for Black youth that marks the transition between childhood and adulthood. It is also impacting entertainment media that is not marketed towards Black people, further highlighting Black witnessing of racialized violence at the intersection of technology as both a contemporary and future issue through its inclusion in contemporary media.Witnessing for Black people is framed as being both necessary and traumatic. This project concludes with an in depth examination of speculative media to reveal the implications of both the present and the future intersections of race relations, state violence and technology. Through analyses of interviews, image circulation and dissemination, magazine articles, social media platforms, visual and speculative media, this dissertation works to address and attempts to answer the aforementioned questions.