Media effects on body dissatisfaction is a long-studied issue; however, aspects of the research – such as those regarding cultivation theory and its effects on body image – are unclear or incomplete. This study attempts to clarify the relationship between cultivation and body dissatisfaction. Besides cultivation, social comparison theory is also examined because upward comparisons with media images and peers can shape and reinforce body image attitudes as well. Additionally, the study examines the connection between media and body dissatisfaction by looking at a broader social context – one that includes other social/environmental influences, such as peer and parental attitudes, as well as internal influences such as self-esteem. A sample of 285 female undergraduate students completed media exposure, parental influence, peer influence, and self-esteem measures, as well as internalization of the thin-ideal and body dissatisfaction measures. Overall, the study found that while peer comparisons and self-esteem are associated with internalization of the thin ideal, they are not as powerful as the most significant indicators – media attitudes regarding weight and body shape and media comparisons. Contrastingly, peer comparisons and self-esteem were observed to be the strongest indicators of body dissatisfaction. These findings suggest that cultivation is directly associated with the internalization of the thin ideal. However, the cultivation of media messages may not have a direct effect on body dissatisfaction, as social/environmental influences and the internal variable of self-esteem proved to be the most significant indicators.

This dissertation examines the potential for the media to act as a corporate governance mechanism and suggests how corporate leaders, through the use of symbolic action, can influence the media’s ability to effectively enact this role. Specifically, I examine how media scrutiny may prompt firms to adopt governance structures that increase the structural independence of the board and thus, according to the prevailing agency logic of corporate governance, are thought to increase the board’s ability to monitor and control corporate leaders. However, the adoption of structurally independent boards may be largely symbolic wherein formal structural changes in board independence are made without increases in the social independence of the board. I argue that symbolic responses to scrutiny will meet the media’s expectations for proper governance and engender more positive subsequent evaluations in the media of the firm and its leaders. I conclude by showing why the effects of symbolic action on media coverage are important for a range of outcomes relevant to firms and CEOs including the likelihood of strategic change, CEO dismissal and compensation, and subsequent board appointments. By influencing the manner in which they and their firms are portrayed in the media, firm leaders may enhance their reputations in the press and garner personal benefits. Thus, while agency theory focuses on the media’s ability to curb agency costs, this study points out that because of the media’s susceptibility to symbolic action, the press may actually perpetuate agency costs in some cases. Longitudinal analysis of a sample of S&P 500 firms provides some support for these ideas. / text

The thesis begins by acknowledging the writer's status as a fan. The stimulus for the enquiry emerges from the discrepancy the writer encounters between his fan experience and the ways in which the academy conceptualises fandom. Such theories serve to position the fan at extremes of the field of reader response: as either a passive, cultural dupe or as a radical, textual freedom fighter. By contrast, this thesis aims to take the diversity of fan response into consideration, and situate its analysis in very real concepts of people's lives. In the first of three parts, a typology is developed that examines the contested and disputed nature of fandom. Reference points are drawn from academic writing, popular media and a focus group session with fans of diverse interests. The second part is devoted to fieldwork. Fan conversations, observations and reflections are combined to create six intimate pen-portraits that convey differing ideas of fandom. Topics covered include fans of Doctor Who, The Adventure Game, Sheffield Wednesday football club; the users of archive TV website The Mausoleum Club; attendees at a Kirsty MacColl get-together;Panopticon( a Doctor Who convention); Forbidden Planet (a collector's shop). The final part, `Fandom and Modem Life', draws together the ideas of the thesis to propose a series of maxims on how fandom operates that emphasise complexity, diversity, the significance of emotional attachment, and fandom's interrelation to capitalism (of it, but not about it). Fandom's role is considered in relation to notions of religiosity and sexuality. Fandom is defined ultimately as a form of social identity possible in contemporary western society. The thesis concludes by speculating on how fandom may evolve in the future.

No description available.

Yuen Yui Chi Peter. / Thesis submitted in: June 2003. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-101). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Table of Contents --- p.1 / The Nation Lives On --- p.2 / The Case --- p.8 / Definitions --- p.10 / Objective and Research Question --- p.11 / Significance --- p.12 / The Liberal Narrative for the End of Nations --- p.14 / The Liberal-Pluralist Logic: An Overview --- p.14 / """The Control Revolution "". from State to Individual" --- p.16 / Nationalism According to the Liberal-Pluralist: Two Critiques --- p.22 / "The Internet, Civil Society and Nationalism: An Alternative View" --- p.32 / Chinese Nationalism： A Case Study --- p.34 / The Case --- p.34 / Sampling Methodology --- p.36 / Results --- p.44 / Analysis --- p.77 / Discussion and Conclusion --- p.85 / Internet and Mass Media Nationalism --- p.85 / Limitations and Future Work --- p.91 / Conclusion --- p.92 / Appendices --- p.94 / Keywords Used in Sampling Hong Kong Online Discourse --- p.94 / References --- p.95

This study has found that negative body image is present in third graders, as young as seven years of age. One interesting finding was that a high number of students who viewed body-oriented magazines had a negative body image.

A dissertation submitted to the School of Literature, Language and Media, University of the Witwatersrand in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by dissertation. 14 March 2016 / The aim of this research is to investigate practitioner perspectives and assumptions about the role media plays in communication strategies that aim to change the behaviour of an individual. It assesses whether these assumptions are consistent with the way the media is actually used in the campaigns of three organisations, and then asks whether there is any correlation between the apparent effectiveness of the campaign and the assumptions of media effect held by practitioners. The purpose is to gain better insight, from a media practitioner’s perspective, into how communication practitioners working on public campaigns understand the impact of the media. Three case studies are analysed, focusing on the use of print, broadcast and the internet to communicate the key messages in the campaigns. The case studies are of highly visible national organizations, each using the media in a particular way, with varying results. The first case study is of SANRAL's E-tag campaign, a campaign which has struggled to achieve widespread public support for e-tolls in Gauteng; the second, Play4Life, is a campaign launched by loveLife, which has in the past been controversial in its use of mass media, and the last, PhuzaWize, is campaign run by Soul City, generally credited with having an evidence-based and strategic approach to its communication strategies. The research found that the communication strategies used in the campaigns are in line with the compliance gaining, the two-step and multi-step, and with communication for social change models, respectively. Practitioners interviewed for this study however showed slightly differing views on the impact of media. Some seemed to understand the mass media through theoretical prisms described in Hovland’s “magic keys” (of attention, compliance and acceptance), whilst others argued that the messaging must change internal psychological makeup of the audience – as described in De Fleur’s psychodynamic model. Whilst one practitioner was an advocate of educational-entertainment and communication for social development approaches, others made repeated references to the power of inter-personal interactions, which are most in line with Lazarsfeld’s two-step and multi-step models. / MT2017

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Set against the background of public life and political practice in late capitalist mass democracies, this study presents information and communication structures as central to the formation of discursive opinion and the negotiation of social identities. Discussion and processes of exchange, that is, are conceived to be crucial to politics in the full democratic sense (as the pursuit and realization of human emancipation) . Taking the mass media to be the central institutions and a primary locus of power in the contemporary public sphere, this study seeks to explore both their semiotic, discursive natures, and the material, institutional context in which they are embedded. The concern to theorize the impact of the mass media on the public sphere 's internal processes of social, cultural and political discourse and therefore on individual and social orientation and action - is essentially a concern to come to terms with the operations of ideology and power in industrial capitalist democracies . The overall context of social communication is changing, and with it the ideological codes of power. It is therefore imperative to arrive at some understanding of the dynamics of signifying processes, the ways in which the culturally specific rhetorical lenses of the media filter and alter the wider framework of social understandings, and the possibilities for generating new social, cultural and political discourses critical of the mystifications of power. Chapter One discusses Habermas's analytical and historical account of the development of bourgeois forms of social criticism in England, France and Germany during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their effacement in the nineteeth and twentieth centuries by the forces of mass culture and industrial capitalism . Chapter Two then proceeds to address several theoretical problems and methodological flaws in Habermas formulation. Of particular concern are his understanding of the role of the media in shaping cultural criticism, and his conceptualization of the process of communication, in which the audience is cast as passive. A critical interrogation and reconstruction of Habermas category of the public sphere to suit the changing environment of public communication is therefore called for. Chapter Three engages the pessimistic, cynical and apolitical epistemological stance of postmodernism, and rejects its unwillingness to engage in a critical hermeneutics of the structure and dynamics of ideology and power in contemporary society. Chapter Four presents Gramsci's and Althusser's reformulations of Marx's notion of ideology, points out some theoretical deficiencies in their arguments, and suggests why a semiotic understanding of the relation between meaning and reality would be of value to a theory of ideology. Chapter Five focuses on structuralist and semiotic approaches to language and society, and their understandings of the process of signification. Here the work of Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Barthes are seminal, though they are presented as not being entirely satisfactory. Voloshinov 's alternative "social semiotics" is introduced as a more appropriate conceptual framework , taking cognizance as it does of both the dynamic and (necessarily) contested nature of ideology, and the importance of the material and social elements in the signifying process. Chapter Three engages the pessimistic, cynical and apolitical epistemological stance of postmodernism, and rejects its unwillingness to engage in a critical hermeneutics of the structure and dynamics of ideology and power in contemporary society. Chapter Four presents Gramsci's and Althusser's reformulations of Marx's notion of ideology, points out some theoretical deficiencies in their arguments, and suggests why a semiotic understanding of the relation between meaning and reality would be of value to a theory of ideology. Chapter Five focuses on structuralist and semiotic approaches to language and society, and their understandings of the process of signification. Here the work of Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Barthes are seminal, though they are presented as not being entirely satisfactory. Voloshinov 's alternative "social semiotics" is introduced as a more appropriate conceptual framework , taking cognizance as it does of both the dynamic and (necessarily) contested nature of ideology, and the importance of the material and social elements in the signifying process.Chapter Six explores the political economy of late capitalism and demonstrates the need to balance semiology's textualist approach to meaning construction with an understanding of the relevance of the wider institutional context. Notwithstanding the inherent polysemy of media texts and the active role of audiences in the construction of sense and identity, this chapter argues that the character and quality of the discursive relations of advanced capitalist societies are profoundly shaped by the dynamics and principles of industrialization, commercialization, commodification and profit realization . This mediating institutional context of social communication must be taken into account by those concerned to demystify the discourses of power and their implicit agendas. Chapter Six then proceeds to address the democratic potential of new information and communication technologies. The background for this cautionary discussion is the technologization of human culture , as well as certain depoliticizing trends within the infrastructure of so-called "Information Society ", such as the growing prevalence of market principles and the increasing demands of "corporate imperatives". The chapter ends with a brief discussion of Tim Luke's argument that the participatory nature of new technologies can be exploited by counter-hegemonic groups seeking to broaden the scope of public communication in order to build a firebreak against the further colonization of the lifeworld by capital and the State. The study concludes by arguing that despite observable tendencies towards the privatization of information and the centralization of meaning, ideology remains everpresent in modern industrialized countries, and is always open to contestation. It further suggests that the ability of audiences to actively decode ideological cultural forms according to their own interests and lived experiences, together with the potential of new technologies to circulate these alternative and often counter-hegemonic meanings augurs well for democratic practice. For not only is it possible to expose and challenge the dynamics of power, but it is also increasingly possible for audiences to contribute to the agenda of political discussion, and thereby lend substance and credibility to the discursive formations of the (much maligned) contemporary public sphere. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1997.

Assignment (MPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Globally weblogs have burgeoned since their development in the late nineties. The phenomenon has demystified the technical side of online publishing, allowing individuals without specialised knowledge to create and update their own websites. Weblogs are already used in a number of professional sectors such as journalism, marketing, politics and now also education. This study is approached from a uses and gratifications framework and provides a broad overview of the emergence, structure, applications, pitfalls and future of blogs in education. Weblogs are also investigated in relation to other social software tools and learning theories. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die gebruik van webjoernale wêreldwyd het gebloei sedert die verskynsel in die laat negentigs ontwikkel het. Dit is nou moontlik om webwerwe te skep en in stand te hou sonder ´n gespesialiseerde kennis van programmering. Webjoernale het reeds ´n impak gemaak op ´n verskeidenheid professionele sektore soos joernalistiek, bemarking, politiek en nou ook die opvoedkunde. Hierdie studie word aangepak vanuit ´n gebruike -en gratifikasie-raamwerk en ondersoek webjoernale in die opvoedkunde. Die opdrag gee ´n wye oorsig oor die ontwikkeling, struktuur, gebruike, hindernisse en toekoms van webjoernale in opvoedkundige omgewings. Aandag word ook gegee daaraan om webjoernale te ondersoek in verhouding tot ander sosiale sagteware en leerteorieë.