The purpose of this investigation is to further an understanding of the spiral of silence theory as it functions within both face-to-face (FtF) and computer-mediated contexts. Computer-mediated communication (CMC is often touted for being an empowering medium as it affords its users anonymity. This finding could have an impact on whether the spiral of silence occurs within CMC. Previous studies have relied upon hypothetical scenarios and have established weak support for the theory. Despite this study’s utilization of a within-subjects experimental design, however, no significant differences in minority opinion holders’ fear of isolation were found. Similarly, no significant relationship was found between minority opinion holders’ attention paid to news and fear of isolation. In regards to both majority and minority opinion holders, no significant differences in perceptions of opinions expressed in either condition were found. Reasons for such unexpected findings, as well as strengths, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

This paper makes an attempt to explain the construction of a newly developed genre called revenge porn flourishing in new media. The study analyzes the patterns of production and display of revenge porn content as well as the mechanisms of the site that archives such materials. The results of this study suggest that the development of such a genre cannot be attributed only to liberatory and/or victimizing effects of the electronic space. Rather, social power structures based on discourses like gender, heterosexuality and capitalist patriarchy that exploit the surveillance mechanism of the internet are significantly influencing both individual uses of the internet as well as its apparatus and technologies. These are the major forces contributing to the institutionalization and commercialization of revenge porn in new media. This is a case study based investigation that uses both content analysis and discourse analysis as methods to interpret the revenge porn genre in new media.

Social media surveillance is becoming more and more popular. However, current surveillance methods do not utilize well-respected surveys, which were established over many decades in domains outside of computer science. Also the evaluation of the previous social media surveillance is not sufficient, especially for surveillance of happiness on social media. These motivated us to develop a general computational methodology for translating a well-known survey into a social media surveillance strategy. Therefore, traditional surveys could be utilized to broaden social media surveillance. The methodology could bridge domains like psychology and social science with computer science. We use life satisfaction on social media as a case study to illustrate our survey-to-surveillance methodology. We start with a famous life satisfaction survey, expand the survey statements to generate templates. Then we use the templates to build queries in our information retrieval system to retrieve the social media posts which could be considered as valid responses to the original survey. Filters were utilized to boost the performance of the retrieval system of our surveillance method. To evaluate our surveillance method, we developed a novel method to build the gold standard dataset. Instead of evaluating all the data instances like the traditional way, we ask human workers to "find'' as many of the positives as possible in the dataset, the rest are assumed to be negatives. We used the method to build the gold standard dataset for the life satisfaction case study. We also build three more gold standard datasets to further demonstrate the value of our method. Using the life satisfaction gold standard dataset, we show that performance of our surveillance method of life satisfaction outperforms other popular methods (lexicon and machine learning based methods) used by previous researchers. Using our surveillance method of life satisfaction on social media, we did a comprehensive analysis of life satisfaction expressions on Twitter. We not only show the time series, daily and weekly cycle of life satisfaction on social media, but also found the differences in characteristics for users with different life satisfaction expressions. These include psychosocial features such as anxiety, anger and depression. In addition, we present the geographic distribution of life satisfaction, including the life satisfaction across the U.S. and places around the world. This thesis is the first to systematically explore life satisfaction expressions over Twitter. This is done using computational methods that derive from an established survey on life satisfaction.

The purpose of this thesis is to describe the key aspects of the surveillance in the contemporary social media reality. It aims to take note of the basic approaches and theories in the field of surveillance and tries to fully describe and understand the impact of the - so called social media in the (post) modern situation, using the position of the interdisciplinary field of Surveillance studies, and also the works of M. Foucault, G. Deleuze etc., with the emphasis put on the theoretical and practical aspects of surveillance and monitoring of the modern media reality. The work also aims to bring balanced, sometimes critical view on the contemporary means of online communication and the tools, or means, that can be used to monitor the users of the internet - with, or without their consent or notion. Key words Surveillance studies, surveillance, media, online interactions, interactivity, social media, marketing

This diploma thesis concerns topic of control within interactivity in the new media. It deals with concept of interactivity from the perspective of the new media and semiotics. Later on it presents insight on different mechanisms and levels of control, which are present within the interactivity. The thesis is focused only on those mechanisms that are aimed at a user. These concern for example dataveillance, data-based discrimination, disciplination, tailoring, monitoring or persuasive games. This line is extended and connected with the contributions of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Vilém Flusser, who dealt with topics such as power, discipline and apparatuses. The aim of this thesis is to find out, what is the position of a user in relation to the mechanisms of control and what are her/his possibilities of action against these mechanisms (if any). Keywords: interactivity, new media, control, surveillance, semiotics, user, data, apparatus

This diploma thesis focuses on surveillance studies on online platform Facebook. This famous social site became a tool for both fun and business lately. Facebook collects data that is then used for some other purposes which means there is some kind of a surveillance done. All the infomation that Facebook collects is given by the users themselves who voluntarily share their personal information. This kind of collected data is then for example used for commercial purposes such as media advertising with obvious profit expectations and so is used in crime prevention such as cyberbullying etc. Diploma thesis is divided into three sections. First describes surveillance history until nowadays, postmodern times. Second part clarifies the formation of the social site Facebook, it's user rules and privacy rules as well as practical examples of using collected data online. The last part of this thesis introduces some other favourite social sites and its functions as well as their surveillance possibilities and advertising potential.