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The study takes ideological domination in the field of the media as a point of departure, concentrating on current affairs as one of the most keenly debated issues in the field of mass media since the emergence of news agencies and up to the present age of satellite television channels. The study deals in particular with monopolies of news coverage by the major news agencies, including Reuters, Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UP), and Agence France Press (AFP). The study focuses on the cultural dimensions of news stories and the controversies over their content which have spurred regional and international efforts to establish alternatives to the one-way flow of news and information from core countries to the rest of the world. The study also focuses on American domination in the field of news and the establishment of CNN, which has itself become a symbol of American influence as well as a significant influence on the live news coverage of events. The impact of CNN has also triggered many reactions, including efforts in various countries to compete with it in order to cover the news from perspectives within these countries. The study goes on to focus on the Arab region, which has its own characteristics but also shares many features with other peripheral countries, particularly in the field of the mass media and the reliance of Arab audiences on news sources in core countries. This study deals with various issues concerning the mass media and news coverage in the Arab region, providing a historical framework for the development of its mass media; the political atmosphere and other factors which have affected their performance. The study also examines attempts by Arab countries to work collectively in order to establish alternatives to the core countries’ news outlets. By focusing on the Arab region this study aims to examine in particular the significance of the Arab satellite news channels and their success in competing with the news outlets of core countries. The competitiveness of the Arab satellite channels is evaluated, considering Al-Jazeera as a particularly important example. The study finally focuses on Libya as an example both of an Arab county and as a representative of peripheral countries. This section of the work involves an empirical study into perception and evaluation of regional and international news. This provides ideal opportunities to assess the theoretical framework of the study with references to the features and difficulties of peripheral countries. Libya’s efforts in the field of mass media, and particularly its news outlets, are also evaluated. In addition the study examines the attitudes of the Libyan people towards domestic, regional and international news outlets and their significance in terms of news coverage. This provides a thorough understanding of the perceived weaknesses and strengths of these news outlets, and such information may help in the development of a new strategy for the Libyan mass media in order to make them more competitive.

Smartphone take-up has grown exponentially, a growth that far exceeds any consumer technology in history. The growth of these technologies has created a cultural shift. Users are accessing, storing and retrieving digital information on more portable devices and doing so on the move. This cultural shift away from the stationary context (at home or at work) to a more mobile 24/7 way of accessing and consuming information is creating challenges. Today’s developers and shapers of digital information (businesses, marketers, advertisers and web agencies, to name a few) need their applications to be workable to support the consumer in all contexts; at home, at work, in the lift, on the bus. When developing applications for these kinds of situations, changeable technological configurations and contexts are crucial to support the user experience and device interaction. In the early days of mobile computing researchers and usability professionals identified a range of challenges facing a tester’s ability to accurately map a mobile users experience. Testing strategies have stood the test of time, working extremely well in many lab-based configurations, but how do they fare in an increasingly mobile information society? This Professional Doctorate aims to support and contribute to the mobile testing evolution and will adapt some existing practices to help keep pace with the phenomenon. This research will present a strategy that explores the development of new a framework (via a systematic review) to inform mobile testing. The framework builds upon themes within Human Information Behavior (HIB) and Mobile Human Computer Interaction (Mobile HCI). The research takes an interpretivist approach to investigate how this framework is applied to build and contextualise methods informing testing methodology in the mobile arena.

This thesis explores the social processes through which technological change and technologies themselves are negotiated in everyday life. I look to interpersonal communication as a site of such negotiation and focus on the networked practices that extend from mobile telephones, personal computers, and online social platforms. The management of everyday life and interpersonal relationships are shaped by practices of communication management that work through the use of these technologies. I extend and inflect the phenomenological approach to co-presence in interpersonal communication, also reassessing notions of time, for the context of constant networked connection. Drawing from divergent theoretical approaches for understanding technology, an entry point for this thesis was formulated through social interaction. A grounded qualitative approach was used to engage with individuals’ experience of interpersonal communication across everyday domains and contexts of activity. A selection of 35 participants was asked to complete two in-depth interviews, thinking-aloud tasks, and a communication diary. The empirical findings are explored from three perspectives. First, individuals’ relationships to communication tools as objects in an everyday environment are understood for the perceived temporal pressures and a need for networked connection. Second, individuals’ management of those pressures is explored through their imposition of individually controlled barriers to interaction, through which domains of activity are managed by communication practices as relational domains, developing a form of networked awareness between individuals. Third, I examine the forms of negotiation taking place through the interdependency of individual practices, captured by notions of authenticity and perceptions of technologies, as well as a discourse about technology that is enacted through practice rather than communicated through content, what I call meta-communication. I conclude that the negotiated use and role of technologies in interpersonal relationships has implications for the negotiation of wider social changes to the role of technology and to everyday life itself.

The aim of this study is to explore advertising and in particular advertising reception as a significant part of contemporary social practice. Although advertising in some form has been a feature of a wide range of societies, historically and culturally, its economic and social importance has perhaps never been greater. Advertising, across the industrial period and in particular since the Second World War, has through the entrenchment of market economies and the development of different media technologies increased its reach and density through a variety of means. It has become a significant media form, received by audiences differentiated by social, economic, spatial and other factors. This study enquires into the nature of audience reception of advertising through an exploration and application of the encoding/decoding media model. The study argues that attention to the textual and formal elements of the model need to be given greater emphasis and the decoding aspect of the model broadened to deal with a complexity of contextual factors contributing to the process. Advertising media by their nature are comprised of different formal and presentational means. The study focuses on newsprint, television and billboard and other outdoor advertising. The public and private environments in which these forms appear can be characterised through the social and symbolic difference between the domestic environment in which much television is viewed and the outdoor urban environment in which much billboard advertising appears. These are recognised as contributory elements in the reception of advertising and any significance the advert may have for its audience. Audience decoding of advertisements is then a combination of producer intent and a complexity of contributory factors brought to or found in the decoding process. This includes a recognition of various ways of seeing associated with different media forms and social and spatial circumstances and the presentation and reception of adverts as part of a flow of advertising and of a wider social experience. The relation between adverts and other texts also has important intertextual consequences for reception. In the process of decoding, it will be argued that social groups can be understood to act as interpretive communities and a process of advertising diffusion can be observed. Three empirical case studies form a survey of mainly car or car related advertising, featuring television, billboard and newsprint advertising, and highlight a range of possible decodings. The significance of historical and social factors is confirmed as important in securing particular readings of advertisements, and spatial, environmental and contextual features are emphasised in this survey. The survey acknowledges the significance of advertising form and medium and highlights the circumstances in which negotiated and oppositional readings may occur. This study re-emphasises that advertising texts form their signification within a complex arrangement of synchronic and diachronic circumstances in which immediate social and environmental factors should be accorded further significance in the study of advertising. The study concludes with a reflection on its methods and procedures and a consideration of further work that might be carried out in the area of empirical advertising studies. In the interest of a richer understanding of advertising, further research would acknowledge the complexities of audience reception and might include an enquiry into further advertising contexts and environments.

In this thesis I explore the role and significance of editorial illustration, developed in printed publications and evolving within online publishing structures. Editorial illustration has a long tradition of illustrating stories in news publications, but I argue that in current online news websites its particular role has all but failed. Online publishing has become the driving force within editorial publishing and this raises the question whether, and how, editorial illustration can continue to be a successful constituent in an online publishing environment? I argue that the continuation of editorial illustration lies within digitally native narrative forms, from online interactive documentaries, game-based storytelling, data-visualisation to memes: viral images spread through social media. Within these forms the significance and agency of illustration is not only clearly present but evolving, except here illustration is interwoven with the story. I argue that these forms of illustration, as well as printed illustration, are based on the same conceptual model and articulate editorial illustration’s inherent attributes. I propose a constellation of four attributes (manifestation, translation, reflection, and engagement) that together give rise to the key quality that illustration offers to the reader, deliberation. Illustration should not be understood as a separate artifact, positioned next to a text, but as a multimodal practice, always related to a story, enabled by the specific qualities of its contextualizing medium. As practice-led research, the thesis explores this proposition in practice and theory within printed and online forms of editorial illustration and in relation to online media technologies and material properties. Central is the development of a potential method of online editorial illustration that I call data driven illustration, a formation employing the material and semiotic expressive potential of live data and code. The research draws primarily from the ideas of media materiality (Hayles, Kittler, Manovich), but in doing so is supplemented with other relevant theories found in semiotics (Barthes, Hayles, Kress and van Leeuwen) and audience reception (Hall). This interdisciplinary approach is applied to the field of illustration through a historical study of wood-engraved news illustration in the Illustrated London News; through my own practice as an illustrator, in this case, work undertaken for the NRC newspaper; and explorations of various examples of online illustration. This thesis offers a first step in constructing a framework for editorial illustration, to move beyond the print paradigm and provide a language through which to explore illustration as an emergent practice.

This thesis is an autoethnography exploring the engagement of records management (RM) through the vehicle of a computer mediated communication (CMC) focused co-operative inquiry. CMC is defined as, “communication that takes place between human beings via the instrumentality of computers” (Herring, 1996, p.81). The PhD stance was that with the advent of new technologies, such as CMC, the role and place of RM has been challenged. RM practitioners needed to evaluate their principles and practice in order to discover why RM is not uniformly understood and also why it fails to engage many CMC users and information professionals. The majority of today’s information is generated as the result of unstructured communications (AIIM, 2005 and 2006) that no longer have a fixed reality but exist across fragmented globalised spaces through the Cloud, Web 2.0 and software virtualisation. Organisational boundaries are permanently perforated and the division between public and private spaces are blurred. Traditional RM has evolved in highly structured organisational information environments. Nevertheless, RM could lie at the heart of the processes required for dealing with this splintered data. RM takes a holistic approach to information management, establishing the legislative requirements, technical requirements and the training and support for individuals to communicate effectively, simultaneously transmitting and processing the communications for maximum current and ongoing organisational benefits. However RM is not uniformly understood or practiced. The focus of the thesis was to understand how RM engagement can and should be achieved. The research was conducted by establishing a co-operative inquiry consisting of 82 international co-researchers, from a range of disciplines, investigating the question, ‘How do organisations maximise the information potential of CMC for organisational benefit, taking into account the impact of the individual?” The PhD established a novel approach to co-operative inquiry by separating, managing and merging three groups of co-researchers (UK Records Managers, UK CMC users, international Records Managers and CMC users). I was embedded as a co-researcher within this wider inquiry personally exploring as an autoethnography the relevance of RM to the wider research question, the ability of RM practitioners to advocate for RM and the co-researchers’ responses to the place of RM within this context. The thesis makes several contributions to the research field. It examines how records managers and RM principles and practice engaged through the inquiry, articulating the reasons why users sometimes failed to engage with RM principles and practice, and what assists users to successfully engage with RM. It was found that national perspectives and drivers were more significant as to whether or not individuals engaged with RM concepts than age, gender or professional experience. In addition, users engaged with RM when it was naturally embedded within processes. In addition, as a result of the inquiry’s discussions and actions, the thesis suggests that RM principles and practice need to be refined, for example in regards to the characteristics that define a record. In this respect it concludes that there is rarely likely to be an original archival record surviving through time given the need for migration. The research delivered a novel approach to co-operative inquiry whereby merging groups through time produced new learning at each merger point. The thesis recommends further research to build upon its findings.

The aim of this research is to investigate factors affecting active participation in Business-to-Business Online Business Communities (B2B OBCs). The primary objective of the study was to develop a framework to better understand the important factors affecting members’ active participation behaviour in B2B OBCs. To achieve the main goal of this research, an integrated framework was developed underpinned by three well known theories: Uses and Gratification (U&G), Social Exchange (SET), and Information Systems Success Model (ISSM). A mixed method approach (partially mixed sequential dominant status design) was employed to answer the research question and achieve the objectives of the study. Accordingly, this study was carried out in two phases. During the first phase an exploratory study was carried out to further explore the framework. For that purpose semi-structured interviews with twelve members of B2B OBCs were conducted. The collected data was analysed using thematic analysis utilising NVIVO and this assisted in discovering another important factor ‘service quality’, which reflected on the moderator’s role inside B2B OBCs. Subsequently, service quality was added to the model. The exploratory study is also helped to develop a new measure for active participation in the context of B2B OBCs as this study was unable to adapt the measure for the construct from prior studies due to the discrepancy in the literature. In the second phase of the study, a quantitative approach (online questionnaires) was employed to test the developed framework. Using non-probability convenience sampling technique, 521 useable online questionnaires were collected from 41 B2B OBCs on LinkedIn. The collected data was then analysed using a second generation approach (SEM) utilising AMOS. During the data analysis, two U&G constructs (functional need and hedonic need) were found to have a positive impact on active participation. Yet, the direct association between psychological need and active participation was not significant. Nevertheless, the construct found to have a positive and indirect relationship with active participation. In addition, two of the SET constructs (reciprocity and affective commitment) were also found to have a positive association with active participation. Trusting beliefs was found to have no direct impact on active participation. Further analysis revealed that the relationship between the two construct was indirect via affective commitment. Furthermore, three factors that were identified under ISSM, information quality, system quality, and service quality, were also found to be the antecedent of trusting beliefs but they did not have a direct impact on active participation. Information quality and service quality were also found to have an indirect and positive impact on affective commitment and active participation. The analysis also revealed that members from different industry types had different participation behaviour in B2B OBCs. The research outcomes made several contributions to the literature. These include a new measure for active participation and service quality. This provides a new validated instrument for B2B OBC researchers to adapt in the future. Further, an integrated model for factors affecting active participation in B2B OBCs was developed. This also provides a foundation for future studies in the field. The final results of this study demonstrate the appropriateness and robustness of the developed model, and further suggests that any attempt to investigate members participation behaviour in B2B OBCs will be incomplete unless all three theories (U&G, SET, and ISSM) are cosnidered. Moreover, this study helped to extend the existing knowledge on Online Community (OC) defintions, OC taxonomies, OC commitment, and OC trust. Finally, the findings of this study propose several guidelines to assist B2B OBC providers to build and maintain successful communities.

The purpose of this research is to assess the function, form and content of knowledge sharing in communities of practice, social networks and the use of collaborative technologies in Third Sector community networks in the North East of England. This is a significant area worthy of detailed examination due to the acknowledged relationship between communities of practice, social networks and the use of collaborative technologies. These three domains have been examined separately by others and suggestions have been made as to relationships between them but few, if any, studies appear to have used case-based evidence to explore how these relationships add value to knowledge sharing. The research addresses the following research question: To what extent does the use of collaborative technologies in communities of practice and social networks, in the Third Sector of the North East region, add value to face- to-face knowledge sharing and how may this be measured? In order to answer the research question a qualitative holistic case study approach based upon three case studies in Newcastle upon Tyne, South Tyneside and Sunderland has been utilised and grounded theory is used to formulate theory from the observed and analysed practice of the case studies under investigation. The conclusion is drawn that when value is added to knowledge sharing it is relative to the strength of several key variables, including, reciprocity, trust, the strength of network ties and the ability to integrate the use of collaborative technologies into ongoing activities. To aid analysis of the presence and strength of these variables a working paradigm has been designed and developed. Case studies are analysed through this paradigm leading to the development of a theory of knowledge sharing in the Third Sector.

Promoting knowledge sharing has long been regarded as a very important aspect of the management of knowledge. However, knowledge sharing has its challenges due to the special nature of knowledge. Based on this, the researcher argues that it is knowledge seeking rather than knowledge sharing that plays a crucial role in knowledge management. However, there is no clear definition for knowledge seeking in existing literature. In the few studies of knowledge seeking research, knowledge has been viewed as a noun and as such knowledge seeking has been seen as no different to information seeking. The aim of this research has been to explore the knowledge seeking process in the workplace in order to conceptualise knowledge seeking by developing a theoretical model. A review of the literature concerning knowledge seeking has been conducted in order to clarify the concept of knowledge seeking. From the interpretivist’s perspective, a qualitative research approach has been taken, in which sense-making theory is employed as a methodological guide. Time-line interviews were carried out with construction engineers in China to collect primary data, and Template analysis was utilized. Based on the literature, this thesis defined knowledge seeking as a learning process, which consists of three major themes: experiential learning, information seeking and problem solving, based on which a preliminary framework was developed. Twenty six engineers were successfully interviewed. The findings from the data confirmed the links between the themes. Further codes were also identified to develop a final template, which evolved to a theoretical model illustrating the knowledge seeking process in the workplace. By promoting knowledge seeking rather than knowledge sharing, this research contributed innovatory insight into existing KM research. The new concept of knowledge seeking and the theoretical model developed thereafter contribute to knowledge by providing a theoretical framework for further research in this area. The specific combination of time-line interviews and template analysis has demonstrated good results in this research. Collecting primary data from China, this research applied Western theories onto engineers within a Chinese context, which has contributed to KM research in China. These contributions will result in many practical implications for KM practices.