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Video-conferencing has become a widely-used form of mediated personal communication. While other form of real-time communication such as face-to-face conversations or telephonic conversation, do not afford any form of feedback about self-presentation to individuals; video conferencing has the ability to provide a continuous feedback video loop. Previous work in this area has shown that this form of feedback can cause issues related to vanity and distraction. However, effects on sensitive aspects of the human psyche, such as self-consciousness and self-esteem, have not been studied. In this project we investigated such possible effects, specifically related to self-consciousness and self-esteem, through laboratory-based user study. The results of this exploratory study form lay the grounds for further research, which can be used to inform theory and design for video-conferencing systems. / Master of Science

Co-workers who are physically distributed in the same building often obtain information about others through the windows in office doors. Using the information gathered by looking through the window, they can determine whether it is a good time to initiate a conversation with the occupant. There are, however, two problems with ordinary glass windows. First, there are times when the window does not provide enough information, such as when the occupant is away. Second, there is potential to violate the occupants privacy; as a result of the privacy risk, people often cover their windows entirely. If office windows are to work efficiently as a support for collaboration, there must be a balance between awareness and privacy. In this research, I augmented the functions of a physical office window with a computer-mediated replacement called the Magic Window. The Magic Window collects video of the occupant, mediates the signal in various ways, and then presents the altered view on a screen that replaces the glass window. The Magic Window provides a better balance of awareness and privacy in office settings by allowing occupant to differentiate the amount of awareness information based on the viewer. The Magic Window system was tested in an eight-month field trial. The trial showed that the augmented window did provide a balance of privacy and awareness, and also raised a number of issues that will aid the design of future design of co-present media spaces.

Co-workers who are physically distributed in the same building often obtain information about others through the windows in office doors. Using the information gathered by looking through the window, they can determine whether it is a good time to initiate a conversation with the occupant. There are, however, two problems with ordinary glass windows. First, there are times when the window does not provide enough information, such as when the occupant is away. Second, there is potential to violate the occupants privacy; as a result of the privacy risk, people often cover their windows entirely. If office windows are to work efficiently as a support for collaboration, there must be a balance between awareness and privacy. In this research, I augmented the functions of a physical office window with a computer-mediated replacement called the Magic Window. The Magic Window collects video of the occupant, mediates the signal in various ways, and then presents the altered view on a screen that replaces the glass window. The Magic Window provides a better balance of awareness and privacy in office settings by allowing occupant to differentiate the amount of awareness information based on the viewer. The Magic Window system was tested in an eight-month field trial. The trial showed that the augmented window did provide a balance of privacy and awareness, and also raised a number of issues that will aid the design of future design of co-present media spaces.

Families have a basic need to stay connected to each other. When families are separated by distance, they turn to communication technologies to stay connected with loved ones. However, most technologies do not provide the same feelings of connectedness that one feels from seeing loved ones. This dissertation explored the design and use of video-based technologies to allow families to communicate and remain connected across distance. The first part of this dissertation explored families' use of video mediated communication (VMC) systems and focused on determining design factors that are critical for its successful adoption. This research was conducted in three phases. Phase 1 explored families' use of a current VMC system, namely video conferencing, to uncover how and why families' use this technology to communicate with loved ones. An interview study led to findings about families' communication practices using video conferencing systems. These included initiating communication using other technologies prior to engaging in a video call, and sharing activities in each other's homes. Design recommendations that emerged from this study highlight the need for mechanisms in VMC systems that allow families to easily initiate communication and easily share everyday life. In Phase 2, design recommendations from Phase 1 were used to design and implement a dyadic VMC system with always-on video called the Family Window (FW). A field evaluation of the system uncovered a mix of practices, some similar to the use of video conferencing systems, for example to share activities, and some new practices that were made possible by the always-on video system. Design recommendations from this field evaluation highlight the importance of dedicated displays, mobility, and privacy controlling mechanisms. In Phase 3, design recommendations from the evaluation of the FW were used to design, implement, and evaluate a multifamily VMC system with called Family Portals. The second part of this dissertation describes the codification of families' communication and awareness practices using VMC systems, into patterns and a pattern language. These communication and awareness practices were codified into Patterns of Practices that can be used as a design tool to design technologies for domestic communication and as a vocabulary to describe domestic communication practices. / Ph. D.

Alors que les démocraties occidentales voient leur population toujours moins impliquée en politique, les outils numériques offriraient de nouvelles possibilités susceptibles de remobiliser les citoyens. Les blogs politiques, en particulier, permettraient à de nouvelles populations de publiciser à moindres coûts leurs opinions politiques en ligne. En parallèle à l’espace de l’action politique spécialisée et à l’espace médiatique, se formerait alors un nouvel espace de discussion et de publicisation d’idées politiques, ouvert à tous et susceptible de rencontrer une audience considérable. La question est alors de savoir si, aujourd’hui, les blogs politiques permettent à un nouveau type de producteurs de messages politiques d’accéder à de nouveaux publics. Nous démontrons que seuls les blogueurs ayant une visibilité antérieure dans le champ médiatique classique, de par leurs positions politiques ou professionnelles, sont susceptibles de rencontrer un public sur leur blog. Loin d’avoir permis à de nouveaux producteurs de messages politiques d’acquérir de l’audience, la blogosphère politique apparaît au contraire encastrée dans les champs politique et médiatique dont elle prolonge très largement les hiérarchies. Ainsi, notre travail tend à invalider la représentation enchantée d’une blogosphère politique qui, comme l’avançaient les tenants de la thèse cyber-optimiste, devait permettre à de nouveaux producteurs de messages politiques de rencontrer de nouveaux publics. / While the population of western democracies is less and less involved in politics, digital tools would seem to offer new possibilities to remobilize citizens. Political blogs can allow new people to publish their political opinions online. In addition to existing political and media spaces, a newspace of discussion and publication of political ideas would thus appear, allowing every citizen to participate and to be widely read. The question for research is whether political blogs today allow a new type of political message producer to reach a new audience. We demonstrate that only bloggers having previous visibility in the classic media field, due to their political or professional positions, can have a large audience on their blog. Far from having allowed new producers of political messages to attain a large audience, the political blogosphere seems on the contrary embedded in the political and media fields, of which it largely extends the hierarchies. Our work, accordingly, tends to invalidate the idea of a political blogosphere which, according to the cyber-optimistic thesis, would have allowed new producers of political messages to get new audience.

The key approach of this thesis is to define closer discourse and importance of civic engagement in the media from the point of view of journalistic practice. This study examines trends of citizen journalism and community media that support active citizen participation and contribute to diversity of media content. The vision of traditional journalism disruption and enforcement of news agenda focusing on public interest became the key message of alternative media. The first two chapters concentrate on the origins of public interest involvement in the history of media discourse. They also highlight the alternative journalism characteristics, its current typology and the role of citizens supporting the concept of media democratization. They also specify the character of transformation of on-line professional journalism and its relationship to user-generated content in journalistic practices. Further four chapters determine specific demonstrations of citizen engagement in public media space and its concepts - public journalism, citizen journalism and community media. These chapters refer to characteristic of these phenonenons, they evaluate their contribution to the public life, concrete performance and practical applications abroad and in the Czech Republic. They also mention the key critical...

Durant les opérations de reconstruction qui ont eu lieu à la suite des conflits en Bosnie-Herzégovine (1992-1995) et au Kosovo (1998-1999), d’importants moyens ont été déployés par des organisations internationales pour réformer les espaces médiatiques bosnien et kosovar en vue de les dépolitiser. Ces réformes visaient notamment la création d’instances de réglementation des médias et la transformation du secteur de la radiodiffusion, qui s’avérait problématique en raison de la présence de médias relayant des discours incitant leur auditoire à la haine ethnique ou religieuse. Ces initiatives en matière de réglementation des médias et de réforme du secteur de la radiodiffusion ont nécessité des investissements considérables. Elles ont aussi généré des débats animés, qui ont révélé des divergences importantes entre les différents acteurs impliqués dans ces processus de réforme. En Bosnie, par exemple, l’élaboration de la loi relative au système de radiodiffusion publique a provoqué des échanges acrimonieux entre les responsables du Bureau du Haut Représentant et l’ambassade américaine. Au Kosovo, les initiatives de réglementation de la presse kosovare menées par l’OSCE et l’ONU ont été vivement critiquées par des ONG de défense de la presse qui les associaient à de la censure.Comment expliquer ces débats qui dévoilent différentes philosophies d’intervention en matière de réforme des médias? En procédant à une étude des théories normatives de la presse et de la littérature spécialisée, nous avons élaboré deux idéaux-types : l’« approche américaine » et l’« approche ouest-européenne ». Les caractéristiques de ces deux concepts idéal-typiques nous ont permis d’analyser les données recueillies durant notre recherche, incluant 50 entrevues, dont plusieurs avec des acteurs diplomatiques qui ont été au cœur de ces processus de réforme. Ce faisant, nous avons construit quatre propositions qui dévoilent les principales conclusions avancées dans cette thèse. Nous suggérons notamment que les approches des acteurs impliqués dans les processus de réforme des médias en Bosnie et au Kosovo peuvent être éclairées par certaines normes dominantes des environnements médiatiques aux États-Unis et en Europe de l’Ouest, ce qui permet une meilleure compréhension de leurs débats et leurs divergences. / During the interventions that followed the conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995) and in Kosovo (1998-1999), important resources were engaged by international organizations to reform the Bosnian and Kosovan media space. These reforms were aimed at the depoliticization of the media environment through the establishment of media regulatory bodies and the transformation of the broadcasting sector, which had caused concern due to the presence of propagandist media that were inciting ethnic and religious hatred.Media regulatory and broadcasting reforms implemented in Bosnia and Kosovo required significant investments. Most interestingly, these reforms caused heated debates that revealed significant differences of view among the actors involved. In Bosnia, for instance, the development of a law targeting the public broadcasting system generated a sometimes acrimonious debate between the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and the American embassy. In Kosovo, initiatives to regulate the media by the OSCE mission and the United Nations were vigorously criticized by NGOs defending freedom of the press, arguing that such measures amounted to censoring of the media. How can we explain these debates, which reveal different intervention philosophies with regards to media reforms? In light of an analysis of the normative theories of the press and of the relevant scientific literature, we have developed two ideal-types: the “American approach” and the “West-European approach”. These two concepts facilitated the analysis of the data collected during this doctoral research. The data included the information gathered from fifty interviews, many of which were conducted with policy makers and diplomats that played a key role in these reforms. The data collection and analysis, achieved through an iterative process, allowed us to develop four propositions, which reveal the main findings of this research. We suggest, among other things, that the approaches of the actors involved in the media reform processes in Bosnia and Kosovo can be explained in light of some of the media environments’ dominant norms in the United States and in Western Europe, which clarifies in turn the different perspectives of these actors and the debates that resulted.

The thesis entitled Comparison of the media coverage of the World Floorball Championships in years 2008 and 2018 aims to identify and compare the media coverage devoted to these two championships held in the Czech Republic. The goal of the thesis is to determine and compare the media coverage in the two examined media - Mladá fronta DNES, Deník Sport and online servers iDnes.cz and iSport.cz, based on these findings define which direction is the trend going. The diploma thesis is divided into main three parts, in the first theoretical part, key definitions, terms and topics from the media side such as gatekeeping, agenda-setting and news values are gradually introduced. A similar space is also devoted to the sports, more precisely floorball side of the thesis, where important historical milestones of this sport, both Czech and worldwide, are presented. Last but not least, this section offers an introduction of a closer relationship between the media and sport. In the second part, the research method of quantitative content analysis is methodologically explained, so that could be used for the analytical part. The third final part simultaneously answers the thirteen given hypotheses, the research question and presents an overview of the results of the analysis. In addition to the aforementioned...

This thesis is a contribution to design-led research and addresses a readership in the fields of architecture as well as in media and communications. In juxtaposing the tools of the designer (e.g. drafting, prototyping, visual/textual/spatial forms of montage) with those of architectural theory, this thesis seeks to extend the disciplinary boundaries of architecture by observing its assimilation of other media practices. Its primary contribution is to architectural design and theory, and its aims are twofold: Firstly, this thesis applies the concepts of virtual and mediated space to architecture, proposing an extended architectural practice that assimilates the concept of remote presence. Through realized design examples as well as through the history and theory of related concepts, the thesis explores what designing mediated spaces and designing for presence entails for the practicing architect. As a fusion of architecture and media technology, video-mediated spaces facilitate collaborative practices across spatial extensions while simultaneously fostering novel and environmentally sustainable modes of communication. The impact of presence design on workplace design is examined. As an extended practice also calls for an extended discourse, a preliminary conceptual toolbox is proposed. Concepts are adapted from related visual practices and tested on design prototypes, which arise from the author’s extensive experience in designing work and learning spaces. Secondly, this thesis outlines presence design as a transdisciplinary aesthetic practice and discusses the potential contribution of architects to a currently heterogeneous research field, which spans media space research, cognitive science, (tele)presence research, interaction design, ubiquitous computing, second-order cybernetics, and computer-supported collaborative work. In spite of such diversity, design and artistic practices are insufficiently represented in the field. This thesis argues that presence research and its discourse is characterised by sharp disciplinary boundaries and thereby identifies a conceptual gap: presence research typically fails to integrate aesthetic concepts that can be drawn from architecture and related visual practices. It is an important purpose of this thesis to synthesize such concepts into a coherent discourse. Finally, the thesis argues that remote presence through the proposed synthesis of architectural and technical design creates a significantly expanded potential for knowledge sharing across time and space, with potential to expand the practice and theory of architecture itself. The author’s design-led research shows that mediated spaces can provide sufficient audiovisual information about the remote space(s) and other person(s), allowing the subtleties of nonverbal communication to inform the interaction. Further, in designing for presence, certain spatial features have an effect on the user’s ability to experience a mediated spatial extension, which in turn, facilitates mediated presence. These spatial features play an important role in the process through which trust is negotiated, and hence has an impact on knowledge sharing. Mediated presence cannot be ensured by design, but by acknowledging the role of spatial design in mediated spaces, the presence designer can monitor and, in effect, seek to reduce the ‘friction’ that otherwise may inhibit the experience of mediated presence. The notion of ‘friction’ is borrowed from a context of knowledge sharing in collaborative work practices. My expanded use of the term ‘design friction’ is used to identify spatial design features which, unaddressed, may be said to impose friction and thus inhibit and impact negatively on the experience of presence. A conceptual tool-box for presence design is proposed, consisting of the following design concepts: mediated gaze, spatial montage, active spectatorship, mutual gaze, shared mediated space, offscreen space, lateral and peripheral awareness, framing and transparency. With their origins in related visual practices these emerge from the evolution of the concept of presence across a range of visual cultures, illuminating the centrality of presence design in design practice, be it in the construction of virtual pictorial space in Renaissance art or the generative design experiments of prototypical presence designers, such as Cedric Price, Gordon Pask and numerous researchers at MIT Media Lab, Stanford Institute and Xerox PARC. / QC 20100909