Utilizing the paradigm of social constructionism, this research project inquires how the North American Free Trade Agreement is co-created, managed and transformed in communication. Articles and editorials about NAFTA in Mexican and U.S. newspapers provide the topoi where narratives of cultural identity are sought. Rather than treating communication as a variable whose amount determines the quality of NAFTA, this dissertation takes the communication perspective, arguing that persons in conversation co-create, manage and transform such social realities as that of an international economic trade agreement. The practical and critical theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning is selected as the method to approach three sets of research questions: (1) What stories do Mexican and U.S. newspapers tell about the official position in order to justify their actions to the population? What sorts of stories are told about nationalism, patriotism, economic development, capitalism? (2) How is the "self" and the "other" presented by the storytellers of different countries and the different newspapers in each country? Did the presentation in the U.S. have any repercussions on the stories told in Mexican newspapers and vice versa? and (3) What is the role of communication theory in issues of economic development and international cooperation? Can viewpoints such as Social Constructionism and the critical and practical communication theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning provide a heuristic to examine this type of issues? As with any piece of interpretive and critical research, the findings are not so exclusively significant as is the process by wh ich researchers arrive at them. In addition to this concern for process over product, the conclusion discusses the un/intended consequences of interpolating theories of development with the Coordinated Management of Meaning to address the inter(in)dependence between Mexico and the U.S.

As political liberalization spreads through Africa, there arises the urgent question of what to do with the continent's existing undemocratic press systems. What should be the fate of government- and party-owned radio and television stations and newspapers? Who should decide what should or should not be broadcast or published by such media under the new regimes? How, if at all, can previously undemocratic institutions be turned into tools for promoting and defending democracy? What kind of new media are required in the struggle for democracy on the continent? What lessons learned from Africa's past history, and from media systems elsewhere in the world, can benefit this process? This dissertation is an attempt to provide answers to these questions and lay out some of the options that should frame the theorizing about the role of the press in a pluralistic African society. The dissertation combines political economy and critical cultural studies to examine the application of competing development and press theories in Africa and their implications for the media in the continent. It conceives news as socially produced knowledge and explores the origins of the notion of news as objective truth versus that of news as ideology, and the implications of these notions for the role of the media in the democratic process in Africa. Two case studies--Kenya and Zambia--are used to try and explain the historical circumstances and economic, political and social context in which the current press system in African developed; how those factors overdetermined the press, and how the factors were, in turen, overdetermined by the press. Toward the end, it examines the philosophy underlying some of the foreign aid-driven efforts to reform the Africa press and the possible direction of such reforms. Finally, it offers an alternative social democratic press model based on Africa's unique political, social and economic conditions--a model that emphasizes public information as a social product, rather than a private commodity for sale--and conceives media that are an integral part of other social institutions, rather than independent of them.

The following study explores two separate yet intimately related aspects of the nature documentary, as film and as television production. It first provides a context in which to understand and appreciate the vast amount and variety of material that has been produced in this unique segment of the mass media, a segment still underrepresented in mass communications studies. The context is established by performing an original historical survey of the nature documentary genre, a genre which the survey dates to some of the very first images recorded as motion picture film. The survey then follows the course of the genre to the present time. In turn, the survey provides a chronological and contextual framework for exploring mythologies that have informed the nature documentary since its inception. The study advances the thesis that, as with fictional media, the nature documentary has been the instrument of mythopoeic force. It endeavors to identify, type, and analytically deconstruct a number of the operating mythologies, as well as to trace their evolution and/or stasis over the course of the genre's history. The ultimate goal of this study is to initiate scholarly dialogue and additional historical and critical research about this largely overlooked and under-appreciated form of mass media. Indeed, the nature documentary has had a long history of communicating to an ever less rural population perceptions of an increasingly distant natural world. The study offers a point of departure for productive further investigation of subject matter that in itself serves as a distinct lens through which to view the development of mass media and its relationship to modern western culture.

This dissertation assesses the impact of international computer networks on the size and nature of international news windows. It expands on theoretical frameworks of structural news flow, media gatekeepers, ideological state apparatuses, global civil society, and global journalism. It makes valuable contributions to mass communications research by focusing on an entity largely overlooked by the field: computer-mediated communications systems. A content analysis was applied to 2,500 stories in a one-week sample of international news coverage drawn from print, radio, television, and online media from a Northern country (U.S.A.) and one from the South (Brazil). The study came up with three sets of findings. First, online services enable individual users to access news in forms and types unavailable via traditional media, such as raw feeds of newswires, press releases, calls to activism, reports from non-media organizations, and news digests published on a regular, timely basis. Reportage on the online services constitutes a form of global and human journalism. Second, users had unfiltered access to news from a number of media and non-media organizations. Thus, subscribers of online services could bypass the gatekeepers of traditional media and access a news window which was larger (especially in coverage of the South), freer of domestic coverage constraints, and more pluralistic. But concerns also arose about intellectual property rights, authenticity of news sources, and ethical use of public forums. Third, the online news material on these computer network services came from more news and information producing organizations based in the North (especially the U.S.) than in the South. The economic and infrastructural disparity between North and South leads to a domination of Northern information sources on such online services. Though these networking organizations, as compared to the traditional media, can better function as ideological apparatuses for international civil society, they largely reflect the views and ideology of Northern civil society. This dissertation identifies recent technological developments like search engines, personalized news services, multimedia publishing, and the global growth of the Internet. The findings of the dissertation can apply to this newly emerging media landscape as well; promising directions for future research are identified.

This dissertation demonstrates the findings and implications of a study inquiring into the existence and range of models equipped to integrate new telecommunications technology in the classroom. The research methods employed included: (1) a discourse analysis of the socio-cultural narratives and quasi-solutions addressing the appropriateness and filtering of Internet content, (2) a content analysis of the print or online marketing strategies used to validate and promote the purchase of Internet rating systems and blocking software devices, and (3) a content analysis of various technology-based curricular programs funded across schools in Massachusetts. By adjoining bodies of research in media theory, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy, this study articulates a vision of critical learning directed at providing teachers with student-centered lessons in online communication content, grammar, medium literacy, and institutional analysis. Through the analysis of mainstream print and online media sources, my findings suggest that “inappropriate content” constitutes a cultural currency through which concerns and responses to the Internet have been articulated within the mainstream. Although government regulation has been decried as undercutting free speech, the control of Internet content through capitalist gateways—namely profit-driven software companies—has gone largely uncriticized. I argue that this discursive trend manufactures consent through a hegemonic force neglecting to confront the invasion of online advertising or marketing strategies directed at children. By examining the rhetorical and financial investments of the telecommunications business sector, I contend that the rhetorical elements creating cyber-paranoia within the mainstream attempt to reach the consent of parents and educators by asking them to see some Internet content as value-ladden (i.e. nudity, sexuality, trigger words, or adult content), while disguising the interests and authority of profitable computer software and hardware industries (i.e. advertising and marketing). The next component of my research describes the results of my analysis and assessment of 74 technology initiatives in Massachusetts' schools sponsored during the 1998–1999 school year through the Lighthouse Technology Grants. With few models offering higher levels of critical learning with and about technology, the final segment of my research outlines a model of educational empowerment over censorship through the theoretical and practical considerations of media literacy in cyberspace.

Owning Culture demonstrates how the fabric of social life in most Western countries—and increasingly, the world—is deeply bound up with the logic(s) of intellectual property law. The primary new question that is asked, which provides the focus for this dissertation, is the following. What happens to an area of cultural production that had been previously (relatively) untouched by the sphere of intellectual property law when that area is immersed in these new social relations? To better understand why people resist, adapt, or cease to engage in cultural practices at particular historical moments and in situated social contexts, I use articulation theory to help me identify and map the particular elements at play in the privatization of culture. By primarily focusing on ownership patterns, battles over ownership, and the effects of the corporate ownership of culture, political economists have ignored many interesting questions that are raised when cultural texts become commodified and subject to laws of private ownership. If one looks beyond the political economy of cultural production and shifts the unit of analysis to the location where culture is produced, a whole new set of questions emerge—questions that focus on the way in which intellectual property law affect the day to day lived experiences of cultural producers and consumers.

This dissertation examines a body of popular arguments concerning gender and communication. In several important areas of popular cultural discourse, conflicts between men and women are regularly explained as misunderstandings caused by differences in communication style. This specific line of discourse is part of a larger picture where women and men are portrayed as fundamentally different groups, with different values systems, interpretive frameworks, and ways of using language. This miscommunication explanation for gender strife resonates with many men and women who find that it accurately reflects their experiences with the opposite sex. The overall purpose of this project is to identify the ways in which these discourses are used to make specific arguments about the meaning of perceived gender differences and to understand the consequences of those arguments. I examine popular representations of the miscommunication argument from a gender performance perspective. This perspective treats differences in communication behavior as the on-going performance of gender identity rather than as a simple product of gender identity. This perspective shifts attention away from identifying and verifying gender differences towards understanding the consequences persistent belief in gender differences. Women's communication style, as presented in popular literature, television, and participant comments, includes assisting others and deferring authority. At the same time, men's communication style is presented as a natural product of men's greater need for autonomy and independence. In self-help literature, these two different styles are used as a justification for men and women serving different roles in relationships and in the workplace. Women are portrayed as natural helpers at home and work while men are portrayed as better decision makers. Primetime television offered portrayals of men and women that closely parallel the different communication styles present in self-help literature. Finally, interviews with individuals about their response to a primetime television program revealed that many people believe that men and women have communication styles that match the styles presented in self-help literature. I conclude that the resonance of these differences is linked to the undeniable importance of communication in relationships coupled with the heterosexist bias of self-help literature and television representations of relationships.

This dissertation seeks to offer a revision of the Lacanian film theory, which was prevalent during the 1970s but declined in the 1980s. The revision is an attempt to establish a Lacanian interpretation of film spectatorship by means of a new focus on Lacan's "real" to which the contemporary theorists paid limited attention. Underpinned theoretically by the concepts situated in Lacanian psychoanalysis, a discursive approach to locating the spectator in the film is applied to answer the following two questions: Why people love to watch movies and how movies make people "different." By means of Lacan's master discourse, the spectator now has two different roles in watching a film: producer and reader, which have different goals. While the former looks forward to a unified symbolic order, the latter seeks the jouissance. These two different roles cause a conflict within the spectator because of the film. Hollywood cinema is a special form of film designed to deal with this conflict by suppressing the spectator's role as the reader while maintaining his/her role as the producer. On the contrary, Avant-garde film is another form of film which seeks to satisfy the desire of the spectator as the reader by offering him/her the jouissance. The devices and techniques adopted by these two types of film are discussed and analyzed in this dissertation. The finding suggests that not only Hollywood movies, but also most of Avant-garde films, are failed to provide the jouissance to the spectator. Following Barthes's "the third meaning" and Heath's "excess," I argue that the author's style can help the spectator to obtain the jouissance while watching a film. The dissertation concludes that Lacan's film is a film with style.

Television contributes to social learning. Most people believe in supporting the environment yet high-polluting, gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks are the most popular vehicles purchased by Americans. The literature supports the view entertainment television talks very little about the environment and the causes or solutions to pollution. Television informational programming rarely reports on environmental issues and may actually vilify the environment by emphasizing natural disasters, storms, etc. Some informational programs trivialize nature. Into this milieu, ubiquitous ads trumpet the automobile as a means to access and dominate nature. Mobility and the status of owning an automobile are lifestyle values advanced by the Dominant Social Paradigm and its cultural arm, television. The automobile is the most advertised product in history. Manufacturers have made automobiles an integral part of the American lifestyle by placing automobiles prominently in cultural products such as movies, songs and television shows and supporting the products with billions of dollars in advertising. For over 100 years, ads portrayed the automobile as a means to access and dominate nature, a form of status and an integral component of the American Dream. This project documents the role of automobiles and mobility in popular culture through a cultural history of the automobile. A content analysis of 200 automobile commercials was conducted to investigate natural images in television ads. Finally, focus group research was used to hear discourses about automobiles, the environment and automobile advertising. Americans privilege mobility. The role of the automobile in American society and culture is quite salient. Although people articulate concern for the environment in the abstract, the root causes of these problems do not seem apparent to most people. Immediate action or action by individuals to address environmental problems is not critical. There is considerable faith that technology, industry or the government will solve environmental problems before they impact lifestyle. Industry causes pollution, not people or the consumerist lifestyle.

During the latter part of the twentieth century, the prison population in the United States rose to unprecedented levels. Despite the increasingly powerful impact that the penal system has on U.S. society, prisons and prisoners are virtually invisible in television news. Simultaneously, however, prisons and prisoners are frequently the focus of fictional narratives in both television and film. Films such as The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and Con-Air have been successful Hollywood products in recent years. On television, prisoners are frequently seen in many popular crime dramas such as Law and Order and NYPD Blue. Cable television offers a serial drama set entirely in a maximum-security prison, Oz. This dissertation explores the nature of U.S. television portrayals of prisons and prisoners. The argument is made that these representations are the raw material from which most viewers forge their conceptions of prison life and prisoners. Years ago, Lippmann (1922) argued that the media help to create a “pseudo-environment” in people's minds. Audiences may believe that they possess knowledge about places, people, and events that they have never experienced, and the “pictures in our heads” may not accurately reflect the “world outside” due to media filtering and distortions. Because most audience members probably have little personal experience with prisons or prisoners, our primary sources of images of incarceration are television programs and films. In the following chapters an initial statement of the need for this research is followed by a review of the relevant theoretical and empirical literature. After introducing several research questions, a description of the methods employed to respond to those questions is offered. The next two chapters examine local television news coverage of prisons and prisoners and national network news about incarceration. Then four prime time crime dramas are analyzed in regard to their images of prisons and prisoners, and the subsequent chapter discusses the prison series, Oz. In the conclusion results are summarized and thoughts on the social significance of the material covered are offered, as well as a discussion of the limitations of this project and suggestions for future research.