University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences / Department of Communication

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences / Department of Communication

Magister Artium - MA / This study investigates the ever-changing trends in visual texts and images used during HIV-prevention campaigns in South Africa. The aim is to evaluate and analyse the effect of multimodal texts used in HIV/AIDS campaigns on the understanding and interpretation by the target group, and thus gauge their effectiveness. Using a text-based multimodal approach (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996/2006; Martin and Rose, 2004), the study takes into account variables such as socio-economic status, literacy levels, language and cultural differences of readers to evaluate the efficacy of loveLife campaigns to disseminate the HIV/AIDS prevention message. This study focuses on the choice of images and words, and whether they cohere to make a meaningful message. The study analyses how the design features, including images, colour and words, impact on the interpretation of the message and also how the design acts as an aid or barrier to the process of decoding the message. The choice of a two-pronged approach combining multimodality and a text-based (discourse) analyses often favoured by those working in systemic functional linguistics is that it enables the researcher to account for social context, economic, linguistic, cultural and behavioural factors that play a role during the decoding phase. / South Africa

This paper interrogates local South African news media coverage of environmental issues affecting the poor and marginalized, particularly in regard to issues such as pollution, water contamination and the destruction of natural habitats. As such, this study focuses on content from The Weekend Post and The Herald from 2010 onwards. Issues such as pollution, in its various forms (air, water and land), are often under reported and not discussed. Essentially, these issues become matters about which little-to-nothing is done, particularly when it affects the poor. This notion of ‘dumping’ or moving environmental issues to affect poorer or disadvantaged people (normally of colour), is known as ‘environmental racism’. This paper will explore the media’s role in regard to these environmental issues and how it depicts, emphasizes or de-emphasizes the importance and urgency of these issues, especially those issues affecting poor or working class people.

This thesis explores whether or not it is possible to positively inflect – via digital means – people’s orientations toward nature through connecting their duration to the time of animals. The thesis opens with an overview of the contemporary environmental crisis, mapping related significant discourses, events and responses from the early 1960s onward. In this regard, after thematizing the relatively ineffective global institutional response to the environmental crisis to date – in spite of both consistent criticisms proffered by a range of stakeholders and widely available information on the scope of current environmental degradation – the lack of any concerted effort to deal with this issue is accounted for in terms of the dimensions of what Kilbourne, Beckmann and Thelen refer to as the ‘Dominant Social Paradigm’ (DSP). However, it is argued that of these dimensions, the technological dimension is most amenable to pro-environmental inflection, particularly through recent developments within information technology. That is, despite the latter being the privileged technology of neoliberalism, and despite the environmental cost of its current material infrastructure, it is also highly unlikely that societies will abandon their dependence on information technology in the near future. Given this, the importance of considering how such technology can be harnessed to positively re-orientate users’ perceptions of the natural world, in a way that also avoids the pitfall of technophilia, is advanced. In terms of this, both positive and negative appraisals of information technology by prominent new media theorists are discussed, and information technology is put forward as a tool that remains indeterminate in terms of its use. After this, and with a view to exploring how the technological dimension of the DSP might possibly be inflected in a pro-environmental manner, the thesis draws on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who promote desire and difference outside the ambit of capitalism, particularly through desubjectivation in relation to their concept of ‘becoming-animal.’ Finally, after dealing in addition with some potential theoretical challenges to the application of Deleuze’s ideas within the digital realm, focus shifts to three contemporary digital artefacts which have the capacity, albeit to varying degrees, to facilitate a becoming-animal. In this regard, a distinction is made between those artefacts that precipitate first-, second- and third-order hybrid durationality, and it is argued that the latter category presents the greatest promise of interfacing the time of humans with the time of animals.

Media convergence has meant that the traditional separations between the various media industries, such as the internet, broadcasting and telephone networks are slowly collapsing due to the growing use and influence of digital electronics - in effect, morphing or transforming the media landscape. A fundamental change in today's media landscape has been the shift in control over media content, consumer consumption patterns as well as the manner and level at which consumers interact. Thus, the extent to which success is achieved now depends on a customer centric engagement strategy that can be implemented across converged platforms. This study considers the challenges posed by media convergence. It also investigates how organisations adjusted strategies to mitigate these challenges.

Since the establishment of Venezuela's democratic arrangement in 1958 with the signature of the Punto Fijo Pact the country democratic practises have been marked by the dependency of the exploitation of crude oil and the overt involvement of the private mass media as guard of the interest of the political elites. Although the Punto Fijo Pact represent the Venezuela's first step towards democratisation, it paved the way for the institutionalisation of clientelism as feature of the country's political tradition. By the late 1980s the population grew tired of inability of the political elites to redistribute evenly the country's oil revenues, thus starting a period of political reconfiguration that saw the decline of the traditional party system and rise of the Bolivarian movement as major political force that pledged the reconstruction of Venezuela's democratic system under a participatory arrangement. The election of Hugo Chávez as the Bolivarian movement candidate in 1998 saw the realignment of Venezuela's political forces, in particular the withdrawal of traditional political parties and the emerge of the private mass media, in particular the television networks, as a major political actor. The main argument of this dissertation is that from 1998 up to the parliamentary elections of 2010, the private television stations in Venezuela took on the role of opposition providing the population with the means to voice their criticisms of the Bolivarian government policies. The stand taken by the private television networks, as the de facto political party, was possible due to the deterioration of the Venezuelan party system and the constriction of the liberal rights of the citizenry, producing, amongst other things, the enactment of the Ley Resorte, to restrict the involvement of the private television networks in the political sphere as well as to control the flow of information. To be able to study why the private television networks were perceived by the Bolivarian movement as de facto political party and why the Bolivarian movement introduced legislation to constrain its participation in the political sphere, this thesis will examine from a historical perspective the role that the private mass media have had in Venezuela's political system and to what extent the Bolivarian movement perception that they were the de facto opposition was an adequate characterisation of the role that private television networks had up until 2010 when the opposition political parties presented themselves again to election to the Venezuela National Assembly after a hiatus of more than five years without representation in the legislative branch.

The purpose of the study was to determine the possible influence of particular television imageries of African-Americans on the self-perceptions of selected young adult African-Americans, ages eighteen to twenty-five. The focus of the study was on specific aspects of self that are addressed by particular television imageries of African-Americans and the possible influences that particular television imageries have on self-perceptions of selected young adult African-Americans. For the design of the study, a qualitative methodology was deemed most useful. Three African-American judges participated in the study: a social psychologist, an anthropologist, and a psychiatrist. The judges were asked to identify and analyze the positive and/or negative imageries that they thought may influence the self-concept of African-American young adults. Thus, the judges provided data for the study. Additionally, in-depth interviewing was determined to be the most useful method for gathering data from ten young adult African-Americans. The interview sessions included the viewing of nineteen episodes of a popular television show featuring African-American actors/actresses. Afterwards, the interviewees were asked to express their perceptions of the African-American television imageries. Profiles of the interviewees were established from a personal history form, and data from the interviews were analyzed. The judges' data explain that the television images are likely to have negative influences on self-perceptions of the young African-American viewers. Moreover, the judges overwhelmingly agreed that degrading stereotypes are the major likely influences on self. Thirty hours of interviews with ten African-American adults revealed that the subjects differed in their perceptions of the possible influence of the television programming on their self-perceptions. Although differences in perceptions existed, only one respondent perceived all television episodes to have negative influences, except for the hybrids. Many of the episodes were viewed as having the potential for positive and negative influences. The judges perceived the television imageries to be negative. Yet the young African-Americans who were interviewed tended to see the same imagery as being positive. This difference in perception among different generations of African-Americans may be attributed to thoughts about humor and ridicule. Also, the limited life experiences of those being interviewed may influence their critical consciousness and thus contribute to the tendency to be more tolerant of the possible negative impact the images may have on their views of themselves. The television industry must join the effort to make education a more positive and powerful means for equality in our democracy.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of the process by which communication technologies are defined, constructed, and developed. The technology chosen for examination is High Definition Television (HDTV). The data set consists of a body of HDTV forecasts and predictions concerning HDTV released between the years 1985 and 1990. Utilizing the methodology of the integrative research review, a coding scheme is employed to analyze the data along eight significant variables. They include: (1) the author(s) of the study, (2) the sponsor of the study, (3) the date of the study, (4) the intended audience of the study, (5) the primary methodology employed by the author(s), (6) the degree of audience preference for HDTV, (7) the time frame envisioned for deployment of HDTV, and (8) the degree of success that is depicted for the technology. These eight variables are arranged in a data matrix. Analysis of the data matrix reveals a high level of disagreement and discrepancy concerning the development of HDTV. In interpreting this pattern of divergence, three issues are discussed: how the forecasters define the technology, the positions the forecasters take with respect to the technology, and the sort of strategic response to the technology the forecasters feel is the most appropriate for the U.S. Important conclusions are offered concerning our understanding of the way in which this particular technology is being developed and constructed, and the methods and techniques which are utilized in understanding and predicting this process. The limitations of HDTV as a representative case study are discussed, and areas requiring further research are outlined.

The present research identifies June, 1995 to July, 1996 as the period marking the Cyberporn Panic in the United States and analyzes the cultural conditions and the claims-making in mainstream newspapers about Cyberporn and the Communications Decency Act using traditional moral panic theories, as well as the theories of moral panic developed by Hall et al. in Policing the Crisis (1978). This communication-centric investigation of the Cyberporn Panic includes results of a discourse analysis of the mainstream news reports, and focus group interviews with parents who are themselves Internet users, and who have children under 18 years old also on the Internet. Results of the discourse analysis show that, while initial news coverage of Cyberporn reported claims about the prevalence of Cyberporn, these discourses rapidly gave way to the claims about censorship made by those who wished to shift the debate from the symbolic moral universe of pornography and the threat to children to one that focused on censorship and the threat to free speech. The research argues that this shift in discourse is the result, in part, of the commercial interests of newspapers in the U.S. and the emerging business needs of news organizations that saw the Internet as a potential new business opportunity. The refocusing of discourses is discussed as part of an overall hegemonic process that reproduces contemporary cultural conditions with regard to communication technologies and capitalist ideologies. At the same time, focus group interviews indicate that parents were not aware of the commercial nature of the Internet and believe the government is the only potential source of censorship. In the end, the Cyberporn Panic is discussed, in many ways, as the moral panic that wasn't.