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This dissertation is a three-pronged study examining American themes, celebrity, and collective identity associated with the television program American Idol. The study includes discourse analyses of the first seven seasons of the program, of the season seven official American Idol message boards, and of the 2002 and 2008 show press coverage. The American themes included a rags-to-riches narrative, archetypes, and celebrity. The discourse-formed archetypes indicate which archetypes people of varied races may inhabit, who may be sexual, and what kinds of sexuality are permitted. On the show emotional exhibitions, archetypal resonance, and talent create a seemingly authentic celebrity while discourse positioning confirms this celebrity. The show also fostered a complication-free national American collective identity through the show discourse, while the online message boards facilitated the formation of two types of collective identities: a large group of American Idol fans and smaller contestant-affiliated fan groups. Finally, the press coverage study found two overtones present in the 2002 coverage, derision and awe, which were absent in the 2008 coverage. The primary reasons for this absence may be reluctance to criticize an immensely popular show and that the American Idol success was no longer surprising by 2008. By 2008, American Idol was so ingrained within American culture that to deride it was to critique America itself. In sum, the findings were that American Idol presents an ideal version of American culture, where gender, race, and class issues are non-existent, power is shared democratically, the American national identity is fair, generous, familial, and celebrity and success are easily attainable. This idealization of contemporary American culture functions to sustain the current status quo of economic and cultural standards. / Mass Media and Communication

abstract: Contemporary cities are physical and virtual. This thesis describes the findings of a mixed-methods study concerning visual images of the city in the urban Northeast of the United States. I ground these approaches in existing literature concerning digital media, visual narrative, genre ecology, urban planning, and virtual places. The first part of the study analyzes the results of a survey in which 150 people responded to questions about social media use and the relationships between image type and the functions of social media in urban contexts. The second part of the study analyzes the results of coding one year of visual images tweeted by @CambMA, the municipal Twitter feed for the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. These approaches required the development of new tools for analyzing visual communication and genre moves in specific media contexts. My research suggests that specific image types are suited for specific media functions in the context of visual communication in virtual urban environments and that some image types are especially effective in capturing and expressing the city. These findings provide potential strategies for municipal social media channels to consider in terms of how they communicate with their audiences. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Technical Communication 2019

The objective of this research is to develop an optimized quality of service (QoS) assurance algorithm with the differentiated services (DiffServ) architecture, and a differentiated polling algorithm with efficient bandwidth allocation for QoS assurance in the hybrid multi-hop mesh/relay networks. These wide area networks (WANs), which will employ a connection-based MAC protocol, along with QoS-enabled wireless local area networks (WLANs) that use a contention-based MAC protocol, need to provide an end-to-end QoS guarantee for data communications, particularly QoS-sensitive multimedia communications. Due to the high cost of construction and maintenance of infrastructure in wireless networks, engineers and researchers have focused their investigations on wireless mesh/relay networks with lower cost and high scalability. For current wireless multi-hop networks, an end-to-end QoS guarantee is an important functionality to add, because the demand for real-time multimedia communications has recently been increasing. For real-time multimedia communication in heterogeneous networks, hybrid multi-hop mesh/relay networks using a connection-based MAC protocol, along with QoS-enabled WLANs that use a contention-based MAC protocol can be an effective multi-hop network model , as opposed to multi-hop networks with a contention-based MAC protocol without a QoS mechanism. To provide integrated QoS support for different QoS mechanisms, the design of the cross-layer DiffServ architecture that can be applied in wireless multi-hop mesh/relay networks with WLANs is desirable. For parameterized QoS that requires a specific set of QoS parameters in hybrid multi-hop networks, an optimized QoS assurance algorithm with the DiffServ architecture is proposed here that supports end-to-end QoS through a QoS enhanced WAN for multimedia communications. For a QoS assurance algorithm that requires a minimum per-hop delay, the proper bandwidth to allow the per-hop delay constraint needs to be allocated. Therefore, a polling algorithm with a differentiated strategy at multi-hop routers is proposed here. The proposed polling algorithm at a router differentially computes and distributes the polling rates for routers according to the ratio of multimedia traffic to overall traffic, the number of traffic connections, and the type of polling service. By simulating the architecture and the algorithms proposed in this thesis and by analyzing traffic with the differentiated QoS requirement, it is shown here that the architecture and the algorithms produce an excellent end-to-end QoS guarantee.

Quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees have become critically important for the transmission of real-time multimedia traffic in next generation mobile wireless networks. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the cross-layer design for support of delay bound QoS guarantees over fading channels. Providing diverse QoS guarantees presents a challenge due to the time-varying fading nature of wireless channels. Existing physical layer modelling is inadequate in supporting real time QoS metrics such as delay, hence adaptive techniques need to be extended to the upper-protocol layers. The first objective of this dissertation is to introduce a cross-layer design framework which investigates the impact of the physical layer on the data link delay bound QoS performance. At the physical layer, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) is utilized for transmission over block fading channels. At the data link layer, the effective capacity approach is used to model the delay bound QoS performance subject to physical layer variations. The effects of varying physical layer parameters, such as average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the fading parameter for the kagami- model, and target packet-error rate (PER), on the analytical delay bound performance are investigated and then validated by the simulation of a queuing system. Due to the cross-layer design framework, the system’s throughput has a significant impact on bounded delay at the data link layer. The switching levels of the conventional AMC scheme used in the first objective were fixed, subject to a target PER. However, fixed switching levels results in the system’s throughput limiting the delay bound performance. The second objective of this dissertation is to optimize the switching levels of the AMC scheme employed at the physical layer, by maximizing the average throughput, while maintaining the target PER constraint. The analytical and simulated results show that by optimizing the switching levels, a superior delay bound performance is achieved, when compared to the deterministic switching levels of the conventional AMC scheme used in the first objective. / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Geography, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

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