This essay aim to study the hashtag and trend #MedievalTikTok, popular on the TikTok mobileapplication starting late summer 2020. The trend will get looked at through concepts like use of history (historiebruk). Some of the main ways the trend uses history is for entertainment, socialization and commercialization. Michael Nordberg’s book "Den dynamiska medeltiden" is also central for the text and works as an academical and theoretical basis. Nordbergs workquestions the idea of the ”dark middle ages”, disproving many unfavorable misconceptions about the period. #MedievalTikTok centers on users acting out the middle ages through simple costumes, shakespearean language, TikTok’s in-app editing features and medieval style covers of pop songs. Bardcore, as this genre of music is called, exploded in popularity in early summer2020. Artist Stantough’s cover of Shakira’s ”Hips don’t lie” is particularly significant in relation to the trend. #MedievalTikTok tends to replicate the same ideas that Nordberg questions. For example the prevalence of witch hunts is greatly exaggerated as well as the absolute rigidity of gender roles and class. The middle ages depicted in the trend is also very geographically limited, with Western Europe being the centerpiece. Northern Europe and vikings are for example overlooked. Other signifiers of the trend is a compression of time and mixups with preceding and following eras such as the early modern period. Popculture, limited school hours dedicated to the middle ages and comedic overstatements influence the trends dated portrayal of the medieval period.

Two years after the COVID-19 pandemic it appears that the consumer behaviour oftourism is returning to pre-pandemic unsustainable behaviour. Whereas scholarscontinually stress that tourism needs to transform if it is to remain a viable option forfuture generations. Additionally, the rapid innovations of technology in thisdigitalising society are affecting how tourism is managed and experienced, especially,the current rise of visual content. Therefore, this thesis aimed to investigate thedynamic relationship between visual content and the tourist identity to find nudgingareas for social change. A netnographic study was conducted of travel posts onCyprus and the main findings were that the tourist identity is mainly constructedthrough user generated content and official promotional material have little influence.The main content categories belonging to Cyprus’ tourist identity are the beach, wateractivities, historic villages, food, and partying. Indicating that nudging tourists inthese categories will be most effective.

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the reactions to Canadian public health organizations' messaging through a social media analysis by answering the following two research questions: 1) How did different levels of government use social media communication to inform the public of COVID-19 information during the reopening phase? 2) What was the public response to the lifting of COVID-19 measures? COVID-19-related Tweets posted by Ottawa Public Health (OPH), Public Health Ontario (PHO), and Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada (HC & PHAC) and their replies were collected using the Twitter API through Python. Sentiment analysis of the data was conducted using the VADER tool. This was followed by a thematic analysis of Twitter threads to identify patterns in the Tweets posted by each organization and their respective replies. Results of the VADER sentiment analysis indicate OPH Tweets were mostly positive, whereas HC & PHAC Tweets were slightly more positive than neutral. PHO Tweets were mostly neutral. Public social media replies to the selected public health organizations were also measured; replies to both OPH and HC & PHAC were more negative than positive, although replies to OPH were slightly more positive compared to replies to HC & PHAC. Thematic analysis revealed five themes regarding public health organizations' use of social media communications and eight themes relating to the public response to information posted by the selected public health organizations. The results from both sentiment and thematic analysis can help inform recommendations to enhance communication by Canadian governmental organizations, especially in public health systems, and offer recommendations for public health social media communication to inform future disaster response policies.

The popularity of Taylor Swift has been growing rapidly on social media after the release of her ‘Midnights’ album on 21 October 2022. The lead single of the album, ‘Anti- Hero’ and the ‘Anti-Hero Challenge’ initiated by the singer inspired 17 thousand fans (Swifties) to share their own anti-heroic stories inspired by the song. The aim of the study is to examine the contribution of the Swifties online fan community to the ‘Anti-Hero Challenge’ on YouTube Shorts. The research interests revolve around Swifties’ prosumption practices in a dialogical relationship with the original music media material, the fan community, the platform, and the artist. The goal of the analysis is to demonstrate how Swifties use YouTube Shorts for both personal and communal expression by means of prosumption. Prosumption refers to the synchronous production and consumption of media content in the field of Media and Communication Studies (Zajc 2015:29). The thesis illustrates how online performances, interactions, and discussions nurtured by prosumption practices shape and maintain the Swifties fan community on YouTube Shorts. The study applies the Uses and Gratifications Theory and Netnography to scrutinize how Swifties reuse Taylor Swift’s song ‘Anti-Hero’ to make their own media products, and give each other feedback. The findings indicate that online fan prosumption and discussion practices not only foster entertaining, humorous, creative, and challenging self-expression but also provide pathways for communal exchange.  Swifties fan community members play a dual role in not only being active audiences and critics of ‘Anti-Hero’ but also of fellow fan prosumers. Swiftie prosumers and commenters of the ‘Anti-Hero Challenge’ videos also draw attention to controversial societal problems and call for change. The findings indicate the beginning of an era where the boundaries between music production and consumption dissolve. The thesis calls for further scientific inquiry into music fan communities’ prosumption practices online and offline.

PURPOSE - The issue of drug markets on social media platforms are under-researched. To help address the research gap, this paper accounts for the emerging drug dealing trends surrounding the community on TikTok. The purpose of this paper is to understand how drug dealers use a trending social media platform, namely TikTok, to advertise and sell illegal drugs and how the environment on TikTok facilitates drug promotions on the platform. METHOD - Data were gathered during seven weeks of netnographic fieldwork conducted among Swedish accounts on TikTok marketing drugs through video- and image posts. All evidence of content in which drug marketing was evident, including drug dealer profiles and open interactions of drug dealers and customers in the comment sections, was saved, coded and analyzed. The concepts of routine activity theory were applied and discussed in relation to the prevalence of the drug markets on TikTok. FINDINGS - In total, 116 posts with content of advertisements of illegal drugs were identified, divided into 43 Sweden-based profiles. Some drug dealer profiles were more professional than others and offered various drug types and services. Drug dealers adopted several marketing strategies, facilitated by the functions and algorithms of TikTok, to promote their drug dealing profiles and promotions. KEYWORDS -  netnography, cyber-environment, drug promotion, sale of drugs, algorithms, social media platforms, drug dealing activity. / TikTok, a social media platform which has grown to be one of the most popular communities globally to create and share short videos and live streams with millions of viewers everyday has recently become a new way of promoting the sale and distribution of illegal drugs. Drug dealing on TikTok has recently caught the attention of the Swedish news media, since Swedish Police Officers have reported observing increasingly more drug advertisements flourish in the comment sections with various code words for drugs, such as snow emojis symbolizing cocaine (Dagens Nyheter, 2021; Aftonbladet, 2021). This trend is an urgent issue; not only because of the increasingly strategic marketing strategies targeting young users on the platform with readily available menus of illegal drugs in supply available 24/7, but considering the thousands of minors who may be influenced by the increasingly more approachable promotions and readily available distribution offers; and the consequences of young people's health and well-being that follows. By exploring the settings of TikTok through a netnographic method, this study aims to identify the marketing and sale of drugs on TikTok and account for characteristics surrounding the drug dealing activity.

The dynamic development of new technologies influences consumers in many different ways reaching far beyond the shift in consumption patterns, challenging the way consumers live their lives. The role of new information technologies is continually growing in our daily lives changing the way we see the self and the world around us. Consequently, the advent of the computer culture incites a radical rethinking of who we are and the nature of being human, which clearly illustrates the postmodern age. As a result, over the past decades consumer research has moved away from simply viewing consumers as information processors to consumers as socially conceptualized beings. This Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) movement views consumers and consumer behaviour as articulations of meanings and materiality within the productive of complex cultural milieu. This ethnographic thesis focuses on the three-dimensional virtual world of Second Life, which is a ¿Real Life¿ simulation and where the residents represent themselves through ¿avatars¿, creating a kind of virtual materiality. This raises interesting questions for consumer researchers, not just about how consumption is enacted, produced and articulated within this environment, but also in relation to theoretical and methodological issues. More specifically, this thesis critically examines the development of interpretive consumer research and the emergence of the Consumer Culture Theory framework in the context of the juxtaposition of reality and hyperreality and takes a position which goes beyond the 'body in the net/physical body' binary. Therefore, this thesis places the ¿avatar-as-consumer¿ at the centre of the research focus. The current thesis develops a theoretical framework which examines the role of consumption in resolving key paradoxes. Moreover, it extends the netnography framework from mainly text based research to the visual characteristics of virtual worlds so that it can be useful for the study of complex online environments and as a result, how the role of the researcher goes beyond netnography to virtualography is discussed.

The thesis examines the subcultural activities and online fan community of Drainers (fans of the music collective Drain Gang) through TikTok. A netnographic analysis of fans’ engagement and community cultivation through prosumption is done through participation observation.  Samples taken using a non-probability purposive sampling method are analyzed, categorized, and coded. By using theories of prosumption, uses and gratifications and a contemporary online take on subcultural theory from Bennet (2004) as well as Genova et al. (2022), the samples provide an insight into Drainers and their subculture.  Results from the study suggest that community within TikTok is easy to find, yet difficult to regulate. It can thus be both a space for creative participation and opportunity for exploring identity as much as it can be for receiving negative comments and further stigmatization. Regardless of the app’s implications and limitations, it does successfully provide a platform for fans to connect, bond, share ideas and create authentic identity and a subcultural status.  While plenty of previous research concerning fans and their communities exist, this study is through researcher’s immersion opening up a discussion about Drain Gang’s subculture and fans, which is essentially an untouched area of research. Although limitations are present such as lack of possibility to pick samples on TikTok based on publication date, as well as bias while collecting samples, it provides an insight into the online community and subculture which can be used to further explore the topic.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has led to the emergence of deepfake, digital media that has been manipulated to replace a person's likeness with another. This technology has seen significant improvements, becoming easier to use and producing results increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality. This development has raised ethical discussions surrounding its deceiving nature. Furthermore, deepfakes have had a considerable impact and application on social media, enabling their spread. Despite this, the public discourse on social media, along with its societal and personal values associated with deepfakes, remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by examining social media discourse and perception surrounding the prominent ethical concerns of deepfakes, and situating these concerns within the broader landscape of AI ethics. Through a qualitative method resembling netnography, 320 posts from Reddit and Youtube were thematically analyzed through a passive observation, along with their respective comment section. The findings reveal various concerns, surrounding misinformation and consent to deeper fears about deepfakes' role in fostering distrust, as well as more abstract apprehensions regarding the technology's abuse and harmful applications. These concerns further revealed how generalized established AI ethical principles might be interpreted in the deepfake context, also showing how and why these principles might be violated by this technology. Particularly it revealed terms how principles such as dignity, transparency, privacy and non-maleficence might be diverged in deepfake applications.

This study aims to examine how Swedish fans of the TV-series Skam use the Facebook group Kosegruppa Sverige in order to construct and maintain a fandom, and how fan practices can contribute in creating identity among the members of the group. Theories related to fan research, discourse psychology and intersectionality were applied, as well as a brief overview of earlier research results related to these areas. By using a netnographic approach combined with a discourse analyses, posts made by fans on Kosegruppa Sverige during December 2016 were examined and analyzed. Three main fan practices were found to be used in constructing fandom in the group; fans made their own material such as edits, videos and attire that had a connection to the narrative, they acted out on their fandom both by adapting their language and looks, and finally by buying and selling merchandise and thus collecting things related to the series. Identity was created through intersectional perspectives of gender, sexuality and age. Finally, the study concluded that fandom could be seen as an integral tool within media production, which blurs the line between producers and consumers.

國內電子商務市場隨著上網人口逐漸增加，在市場中依照商品提供者與消費者來分，B2C的市場中以旅遊及金融商品營業規模最大，而在C2C的市場中，服務則是缺乏相關的研究。本研究將探討透過網路所販售的服務中，最需要審慎評估的服務商品-新娘秘書。 本研究透過網路民族誌的方法搜尋相關消費者分享的經驗，此方法可以在最少干擾下了解消費者在選購此類商品時所考量的相關因素。不足的部分透過深度訪談來補足。從交易成本角度的「外顯單位效益」、「資訊搜尋」以及「道德危機」三方面來了解為何新娘會在婚禮籌備過程中選擇新娘秘書服務，以及選定某位特殊服務提供者的因素。 研究結果得知，在交易成本中，最重要的是道德危機成本，因為婚禮不能重來，所以只能透過多元的作品集來評估新秘的經驗，另外面對面的試妝，可以了解彼此溝通是否順暢。另外所提供效益是新娘考量選購此服務的重要因素，新娘秘書的貼心服務，可以免去新娘在結婚的過程中的舟車勞頓，以及可能會產生「不完美」的疑慮。對於類似性質的網路服務業，也就是能把作品透過照片、影像具體化的行業，如會場布置、表演活動、活動攝影，都可以透過相同的模式來經營。