The doctoral dissertation critically investigates the processes, sites and technologies of consumer profiling. Technologically speaking, the dissertation focuses on the means by which individual consumption patterns and histories (demographic and psychographic data) are automatically solicited into computerized databases and networks. In addition to providing a historical perspective on consumer profiling or solicitation technologies (from product registration cards and mail-in coupons to point-of-sale scanners, smart cards, computer databases and registration sites on the world wide web), the dissertation also attempts to theorize the spatial, international and politically discriminatory dimensions of consumer profiling. In so doing, the dissertation analyzes a number of niche marketing and consumer profiling campaigns that attempt to construct maps of targeted consumer markets in trans-national territories and cyberspace.

This dissertation explores historical notions of resistance alongside contemporary playful forms of rebellion. This analysis is centered on the relationship of play to social protest encompassing why we play, how we play, and what this can mean to academics studying social movements, as well as specific contributions for engagement as activists and artists. I propose the need to re-invest in the possibilities of social protest given the absurd nature of certain contemporary political situations and the negative exposure of “somber street protest” by the mainstream media. I rely on play research, performance studies, folktales of tricksters and clowns, sociological research on dissent, analysis of consumerism and identity, and activist publications. This examination includes the work of Erich Fromm, Albert Camus, the Situationist International, Victor Turner, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Social protest needs to be dynamic to attract participants, inviting participation and enjoyment. My dissertation develops a philosophical structure furthering how we can conceive of dissent within the current political and cultural framework in the United States and investigates actual sites of innovative social movements, including the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, the Ministry of Reshelving, Tape Babies, Detroit Demolition, guerrilla gardening, and the Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping.

This study is a description and interpretation of mass media appropriations (or media references) in social interaction in US American culture. Two research questions guide the study: One, how, if at all, do cultural members appropriate texts from mass media in their ongoing, socially interactive lives? And two, what are the functions and meanings of mass media appropriations (MMAs) so enacted? The study is situated within the Ethnography of Communication research program and uses Cultural Discourse Theory as its main theoretical frame. The study employs ethnographic and cultural discourse analysis methods including participant-observation, interviewing, cultural description and interpretation to formulate a native theory of mass media appropriations as they are patterned and practiced in US American culture. This theory is then compared to similar practices in Western Apache, Zambian, German, and Dominican American cases. The major descriptive findings include a sequence that MMAs typically follow in social interaction including a trigger, reference, and response; the essential, typical, and possible parts of MMAs, various combinations of which are formulated into types and subtypes of MMAs; the frames typically involved in MMAs including performance, play, and quotation and how they are cued, maintained, and terminated; and a set of dimensions upon which MMAs vary. The major interpretive findings include MMAs being performed for the humor, pleasure, play, shared identity and bonds that they create, these being necessary to diffuse the focus in the culture on self, serious talk and work.

This study describes the cultural discourses in the communication and meta-communication among Finns about the mobile phone. The overall task at hand was to find out how mobile phone communication is described and discussed in speech and writing about mobile phoning, and what the underlying premises are in play on communication, personhood and social relations in these descriptions. Mobile phone communication was approached from the theoretical and philosophical perspective of ethnography of communication, and from cultural discourse analysis in particular. The analyses were conducted through the main theoretical constructs of terms for talk, myths, positioning, and the discursive force of norms. The analysis of interview talk, newspaper, magazine and other media texts, official documents, reports, and books suggested a number of different findings: Pragmatic communicative actions on mobile phone were described with several cultural terms (Carbaugh, 1989) referring to both oral and written communication. Mobile phone talk was discussed by using descriptive terms for talk. 'Idle talk' on the mobile phone was found to vacillate with asiallinen (matter-of-factly) style of communication. The comments about kännykkäkansa (the mobile phone nation), and more generally about Finnishness and mobile phoning were seen as contesting as well as re-creating the almost 150 year old myth of Finnishness. Reachability and disturbance via mobile phone were examined as paradoxical universal. Reachability was found to be related to positive face needs. Disturbance or a threat to one's negative face needs, in turn, was also an inherent feature of the mobile phone, and the need to reach others and respond could count as disturbance. As the model of discursive forces (Hall 1988/1989) was deployed, it was found that the demand or norm of reachability was criticized and challenged in many ways, and the expectation of not disturb others and not being disturbed by them was negotiable. A value of being in peace was considered more important for some Finns than being reachable or disturbing. The analyses provided insights to the Finnish cultural discourses about Finnishness, social relations, communication, and culture and technology.

This dissertation undertakes a critical cultural policy analysis of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and subsequent federal government policies, initiatives and mandates affecting the U.S. commercial radio industry. The intellectual traditions of political economy of communication are employed to assess the consequences of historic telecommunications reform on the creation and availability of radio programming. The financial activity and programming practices of radio stations are compared across multiple radio markets, diversified by geographical region, ownership structure, size and musical format. The central analysis of these data sources spans six years, from January 1995 to December 2000. This dissertation puts forth two major findings: First, the U.S. commercial radio industry experienced massive consolidation both locally and national, changing the manner by which radio is managed. Second, programming on independently owned or small group stations is significantly more diverse than programming on large, super group radio stations. Given these findings, this dissertation proposes several policy recommendations to foster cultural variety and to democratize citizen access to media.

Based on archival research, in-depth interviewing, and extensive participant observation carried out over two years in both New York and Los Angeles, this ethnography of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) critically examines the professionalization of a media advocacy organization and interrogates the value of visibility in contemporary sexual politics. On what and whose terms has the visibility of gays and lesbians been conceptualized and negotiated, and with what consequences for movement politics? How has GLAAD responded to movement tensions between legitimationist and liberationist approaches to social and cultural change? What is the nature of GLAAD's relationships with the media industries and with other movement agents and organizations? What representations does the leading cultural advocate for the gay and lesbian movement help (re)produce and, in the process, which political constituencies does it represent? I approach GLAAD as a positioned organization in the movement and media fields, in Pierre Bourdieu's sense of the word, in which various agents with stakes in the representation of gays and lesbians compete for various kinds of capital. I describe how, as a result of field positioning objectives, corporate media professionals have come to dominate efforts by the gay and lesbian movement to improve the representation of sexual minorities in mainstream culture. This professionalization has tended to produce normalized representations of gays and lesbians and has fundamentally altered the relationships between the gay and lesbian movement and the media, leading to unprecedented levels of integration. While this integration has contributed greatly to GLAAD's fundraising and institution-building objectives, it has not necessarily led to more influence in the media advocacy system, especially in periods of conflict, and may in fact have made it more difficult for the gay and lesbian movement to advocate effectively on behalf of diverse lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender constituencies.

Two studies explored the associations between media consumption, partner/relationship ideals and beliefs, and relationship satisfaction. Study 1 assessed participants' total television consumption as well as total romance/relationship-oriented and total erotic media consumption. Total television consumption (regardless of content) showed little evidence of cultivating effects on relationship beliefs. However, the more romance/relationship-oriented media participants consumed, the more idealized their partner/relationship ideals, the stronger their belief that mind-reading is expected in a relationship, that disagreement in a relationship is destructive, and that fate brings soul-mates together. For men, a negative relationship between erotic media consumption and relationship satisfaction was mediated by their perception of a discrepancy between their ideal and actual partner/relationship. Study 2 used an experimental design to explore the temporary effects of viewing a popular film that strongly emphasizes the idea that destiny determines relationships. Compared to participants exposed to the control film, those exposed to the manipulation endorsed significantly stronger beliefs in relationship destiny directly after viewing. These findings are an important first step in showing how media messages influence people's relationship attitudes but will need to be replicated and extended.

Media literacy refers to one's ability to understand, analyze and produce media messages. Media literacy scholarship has demonstrated that there are various perspectives on how to teach media literacy but research has not focused on how the complexities of media literacy teachers' personal ideologies and media consumption practices are connected to media literacy teaching. In this study, nine media literacy teachers who teach in public schools, private schools, and community settings were interviewed about their thoughts about the media, their media habits and their approaches to media literacy practice. Findings illustrate that there is a complicated relationship between teachers' ideologies about the media and their media literacy practice. Teachers mainly described teaching about the media in ways that are associated most with the interventionist paradigm of media literacy and teachers' described ideologies focus on the tremendous power of the media in the culture and the potential impact media has on their students. Two of the teachers described practices that are representative of the goals of critical media literacy, but other teachers rarely discussed aspects of their media literacy practice that encouraged students to locate individual understandings of media messages. Findings also demonstrate that schools are not fully supporting the implementation of their media literacy programs; often media literacy instructors do not have educational backgrounds or training in media literacy.

This dissertation examines how a nonprofit media organization, Active Voice, uses reality-based film as a catalyst for audience engagement, dialogue, identification and social change. This ethnography of cultural production investigates Active Voice's pursuit of social justice goals through broad partnerships that include local and national non-profits, grassroots advocacy organizations, as well as policy makers and corporations. The fieldwork spanned 16 months of study at the Active Voice headquarters in San Francisco, California, when the organization developed from a public television initiative into a strategic, entrepreneurial organization that became an independent nonprofit in 2005. This field study centers on the multi-institutional production process of a community campaign that used the public television broadcast of the 3-part documentary series, The New Americans (2004), as a catalyst for community dialogue and activism on immigration issues. Through comparisons with U.S. public service media projects, such as public journalism and public television outreach, the dissertation identifies and analyzes complex links among documentary representation and advocacy; entrepreneurism and social change; information and entertainment. The study argues that Active Voice's collaborative campaign production process, as well as its engagement with popular genres and venues, answers some of the critiques of U.S. public television as irrelevant and elitist. Following this analysis, this dissertation recommends a cultural policy that fosters public service media projects that balance popular culture with community, nonprofit goals.

In contradistinction to social scientific theories of communication, this dissertation poses the philosophical question of why humans communicate to begin with. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan (1966/2006), it is argued that human being communicates not merely due to a need to overcome its separation from other human beings. Rather, it is argued that because language splits it into self and other, human being communicates due to an unconscious desire to overcome its separation from itself. The self-alienating cause of the subject of communication is explained via Lacan's theory of the dialectic of identification and the effect of symbolization. Three studies of visual communication are offered (on evil, ethics, and the event of being) to illustrate how the symbolic content of expressive media is tied irrevocably to the question of what it means to be human. In so doing, the direct relevance of psychoanalysis to the study of media and communication is demonstrated.