The purpose of this study is to examine the manner in which the media covers mens and womens athletics and how it may affect the publics perception of womens athletics. The study also seeks to examine how the hegemonic devices and primes that the sports media use can affect viewers enjoyment of womens athletic coverage as well as the effect that sports fandom plays on viewers perceptions. Using an experiment exposing participants to heavy mens college and womens college basketball coverage, the results showed that sports media coverage did not elicit negative perceptions toward womens athletics.

Marcel Duchamp's speech "The Creative Act" and the context of its delivery at the American Federation of Arts (A.F.A.) convention in Houston, Texas, in 1957 reveal the manifold nature of American art discourse during the second half of the 1950s. In contrast to overly-simplified histories of the period which maintain that formal concerns and artist-centered criticism predominated, this paper determines that Duchamp's speech and its acknowledgment of the spectator are not unusual for 1957. Nor is Duchamp as author completely consistent with the ideas of critical "indifference" said to be present in the speech. On the contrary, the artist, his speech, and the 1957 A.F.A. convention are reflective of their complex history: of the political and economic climate of the mid 1950s, of both American and French aesthetic philosophy, of a growing popular interest in the arts, and of the growing media presence within American art discourse.

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This study presents a content analysis of Twitter posts tagged with one of six institutions to establish uses and gratifications with this medium and the art museum industry. Due to industry norms, copyright law, museums traditionally do not permit photography and therefore may limit the advancement of their mission through misuse of the social media. This study establishes a baseline by seeking to understand how museums and individual account holders engage on Twitter within the art museum space as well as begin to unearth whether museums are misusing this media outlet and limiting their potential to educate the public while providing access to objects and information entrusted with their institution.

Entertainment media represent a primary source of health information, making it a prime area of research for wide-spread health issues such as chronic pain. Chronic pain conditions can elicit stigmatization due to pain representing a subjective experience; coming to understand the experience of a person in pain can reduce stigma for that person as well as the entire group of people with chronic pain. Entertainment media, through the use of an engaging narrative and characters, can portray an illness experience that potentially elicits empathy and reduces stigma for chronic pain conditions. This study is among the few to employ empathy and stigma measures for chronic pain. In a mixed experimental design, participants watched either a healthy or chronic pain media depiction from the television series House, M.D. and subsequently read an article about Smith, a stigmatized depiction of a man who experiences chronic pain after a vehicular accident. Empathy was divided into affective and cognitive components, and measured at baseline, post-video, and post-article times. Results from a repeated-measures ANOVA found that Gregory House was highly stigmatized and Smith moderately stigmatized. Additionally, empathy diminished for both healthy and pain depictions with no statistical difference. However, significant gender differences were found between baseline, post-video, and post-article scores for both empathy and stigma. Females experienced greater changes in empathy and stigma than males, expressing both higher baseline scores and lower post-video scores. Implications for cultivation theory are explored.

When Helis Oil & Gas Company announced it was interested in drilling for oil in Louisianas St. Tammany Parish, it ignited a firestorm. The proposed drilling project would use hydraulic fracturing or fracking causing some residents to voice their concerns for the parishs wellbeing. My thesis looks to framing theory to analyze how local media covered the issue, as well as the effects those frames might have on public policy and the lawsuits that arose out of the proposed drilling operation. I performed quantitative and qualitative content analyses of local media coverage of this issue from April 2014 through December 2014. I found that the media focused the most on the public backlash frame. The media coverage showed that public opinion has already had an impact on public policy; it could also influence litigation in this matter.

In this paper I tested the effectiveness of a biomimetically designed classifier algorithm in an effort to support a new argument for the systemic application of biomimetic design principles to mass communication technology. To supplement the purely system-level test, I conducted a series of interviews with interface-level designers regarding their own design strategies, generally accepted design strategies in the field of mass communication technology design, new design strategies, and the landscape of the field in general. The findings of my test lend strong credence to biomimicry's potential systemic contribution to mass communication technology design, and the tone of the interview responses suggests that the practices of interface-level design are congruent with this contribution. I argue that the placement of biomimetic design principles at the systemic level would enhance the user-interface design practices already in place, given their congruency with biomimetic design principles. I argue that to improve usability, interactivity, and security, and to improve our consumption, storage, and transmission of information on a massive scale, the most prudent course of action is to concentrate biomimetic design strategies systemically--into our hardware, networks, and systems in general--and that user-interface design would not only accommodate the changes to our system-level designs, but that it would thrive on them.

The nonprofit sectors adaptation and implementation of digital media is one that has received surprisingly little exploration. While some research has been conducted in this area, these studies tend to generalize results across all organization types within the nonprofit sector. Often, these studies overlook specific advantages nonprofits of varying types, sizes, and locations may potentially have in regard to fostering relationships with their communities. This study explores how these differences may impact organizational use of digital media, and how organizations can potentially use these media to more efficiently achieve their goals. Specifically, this study focuses on the use of narratives in organizational blogs and the varying appeals nonprofits can make to build stronger relationships with their publics. This study utilized a 2 (appeal type: rational vs. emotional) X 2 (issue proximity: local vs. broad) X 2(issue type: adult literacy vs. at-risk youth) mixed factorial experimental design was implemented to test the hypotheses and research questions, with issue proximity and appeal type being between-subjects factors and issue type being a within-subjects factor. Dependent measures included perceived local impact of an issue, levels of organizational trust, levels of organizational commitment, and supportive behavioral intentions. This experimental study was conducted online with a sample of undergraduate and graduate students (N = 268). Participants were randomly placed into one of four possible conditions, viewing a narrative organizational blog for each issue type respectively. Results were analyzed using a repeated-measures mixed-factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA). While the study did not find main effects for issue proximity or appeal type, it did find significant main effects for issue type. The results revealed a significant main effect for issue type across all outcome measures, as well as several significant interactions between issue type and both issue proximity and appeal type respectively. These results would suggest that the specific mission of the organization plays a major role in the effectiveness of localization and the use of particular appeals on respective target publics. These results and their implications are discussed.

Reports of sexual violence should be written from a public health perspective approach to appropriately frame the occurrence and encourage accurate understandings of sexual assault as a larger societal issue. This research consists of two studies to investigate the way universities do (and should) communicate about sexual violence with their students. For Study 1, interviews were conducted with a random sample of public state Universities regarding their emergency alert processes and template usage to determine current emergency communication practices. The majority of universities contacted do not have a template or best practice guidelines in place for creating timely warnings. For Study 2, an experimental test asked participants to read a hypothetical university timely warning message about a sexual assault on campus and take a post-test survey about their perceptions of sexual assault and personal estimation of threat. The experiment tested whether the inclusion of contextualizing statistics and information in the message changed their reported perceptions of rape overall. Results from the study show that a combination approach incorporating both statistics and personal safety strategies had the greatest influence on both threat perception and reported preventative behaviors. This research has significant public policy implications for best practices concerning institutional communication about sexual assault.