The web browser has become one of the most recognizable software applications on consumer desktops. Yet its utilization and capabilities are often misunderstood. Recent innovations in the web have evolved the Internet into a network of sophisticated applications that defy historical uses of the “browser”; a term that itself has become somewhat of a misnomer. This research studies the evolving set of user expectations for the browser as an application platform and challenges certain anachronistic features, specifically the “back” button, that are unnecessary and confusing given the new environment that browsers are used in. Because of this shift, implicit new user requirements arise around the browser’s user interface. The back button, like other elements in the browser have already demonstrated, should be de-emphasized in modern iterations of web browsers. The study is qualified by an analysis of user behavior within a popular, modern, web application. NOTE: This master's thesis has been removed at request of the author due to it containing experimentation data referencing a branded software application for which the author no longer has permission to share.

Celebrity gossip blogs have quickly established themselves as a new media phenomenon that is transforming celebrity culture. This dissertation is an examination of the impact of the technological and textual shifts engendered by new media on the use of gossip as a form of everyday cultural production. Broadly, I investigate the historical role of gossip media texts in celebrity culture and explore how celebrity gossip blogs have reconfigured audience engagements with celebrity culture. Following Gamson’s (1994) approach to celebrity as a cultural phenomenon, I separate celebrity gossip blogs into three elements—texts, producers, and audiences—and examine the interplay between them using ethnographic methods adapted to the new media setting. I begin with an investigation of what is being said about celebrity on gossip blogs, supported by my five–week online fieldwork observation of six heavily–trafficked, commercially–supported celebrity gossip blogs. I focus on visual images and blogger commentary as the key elements of gossip blogs as media texts. I supplement these observations with oral interviews of the producers of these texts, the gossip bloggers. I argue that the blogger, as the primary author of the site, retains authority as a cultural producer of these texts. The final component of this study focuses on the reading and cultural production practices of celebrity gossip blog audiences using data gathered online and through a qualitative survey. I examine the various ways these practices support the emergence of community within these virtual spaces. While I claim that gossip is an active engagement with celebrity culture well suited to new media's emphasis on immediacy and interactivity, I conclude that an active audience is necessarily a resistant one. Blogs can be seen as a space for intervention into celebrity culture that allows bloggers and readers to challenge the power of the media industry to define celebrity culture. However, gossip blogs often uphold oppressive norms, particularly around questions of gender, race, and sexuality. Gossip is an important area of inquiry because it reveals the way women, the predominant audience for and participants on gossip blogs, may be implicated in the normative ideologies forwarded by the celebrity media.

As the country with biggest Internet population, by December 2011, China had at least 513 million Internet users. As the biggest developing country in the world, in the past three decades China experienced rapid social change and enormous economic development. The impacts of new media and ICT (Information and Communication Technology) on social change and development in China have attracted increasing attention among scholar communities. This dissertation aims to study the new media and ICT for social change and development phenomena in China. It draws upon data from my fieldwork and participant observations in the past three years as well as a nationwide large sample survey of ICT use among Chinese CSOs (civil society organizations). I situate this research primarily in the theoretical framework of communication for development and social change studies (e.g., Servaes, 1999; Servaes, 2008). In this research, new media and ICT for social change phenomena refer to the widely emerging new media and ICT for social change and development policies, projects, or actions initiated by different stakeholders including government, CSOs, and individual activists. Through a case analysis approach, this research analyzes specific new media and ICT for social change cases, conducted by different stakeholders, concerning urgent social change issues such as digital inequality, CSOs empowerment, government accountability and transparency, and hunger/malnutrition using various communication for development and social change theories as well as other new media studies theories and the ICT/new media for social change model that I propose in Chapter two. This research reveals: how different stakeholders engage in new media for social change and development interventions (policies, projects or actions); the communication channels involved in these interventions; the relation and the interactions of different stakeholders in these new media for social change interventions; the sustainability issue of these social change and development interventions. The findings of the research show that the new media for social change model I propose is an effective analytical framework for the study of new media for social change. The research reveals that a multi-channel perspective which incorporates ICTs and other communication channels as well as the interactions between different channels is of great significance in the study of new media for social change. Moreover, the analysis of the interactions between different communication channels shows that in the media environment of convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006), in social change actions, the relation between ICT channels and other communication channels is not an either/or relation. They interact with each and reinforce each other in the social change actions. The research also shows that the multi-stakeholders approach I employed can significantly enrich our knowledge of the new media for social change phenomena. The multi-dimensional relations and interactions between different stakeholders in social change interventions are important issues that the study of new media for social change should address.

The power of losing control: Deconstructing Elfreth’s Alley documentary archive-based aesthetics using image-making experimentation is an interdisciplinary and multimodal media dissertation based on the experience of collecting, transforming, and validating archival information that is the foundation of history: its creation, interpretation, and recording. This research includes a manuscript or monograph, a series of lectures about the investigation, a physical multimedia exhibit of modified archival material from the Alley, and the publication of a creative journal that involves the processes and results of the exhibit in Elfreth’s Alley Museum. Observers have built most public records based on what is present and absent in the assemblage of documents, images, and found objects in particular settings. An example of these processes is the record of traditional and historical sites like Elfreth's Alley in Philadelphia, PA. This Alley is a traditional historical residential street considered a National Historic Landmark for its structures built between 1720 and 1830. This street has been home to everyday Philadelphians for three centuries, and its museum celebrates the working class of America who helped build the country through sweat and commerce. The Alley is still a thriving residential community that is home to artists and artisans, educators, entrepreneurs, and everything in between. While this research starts in this neighborhood, it explores connections that can take us across the city, the nation, and around the globe. In this dissertation, the record of the Alley life has been deconstructed to expose the understanding and perception of personal narratives that offer alternative views of collective memory and public history. The processes and results that deconstruct Elfreth’s Alley archival documentation have been used to analyze and question ideas of presence and absence of ethnic groups, the exercise of power and control, patterns of privilege assigned to race, gender and ethnicity, as well as concerns of domestic and child labor, environment, gentrification, and social networks, offering a rich description of the Alley. The methodology of this work, through its five chapters, is based on the study of analog experimental photographic processes and digital Artificial Intelligence (AI) new media creations with uncontrolled and unpredictable results, their relationship with archival studies from the Alley, and the impact of new contemporary archival creations in the construction of public history and collective memory. These mechanisms were applied to documents, archival and found materials (taken from different sources around the city and the nation) in various experimental artworks. The objects created for the exhibit and the analysis of these archives use pinhole cameras, expired paper, lumen prints and cyanolumens, panoramas with polaroids and chemigrams, stereoscopes and anaglyphs, augmented reality, and AI-algorithmic editions, as well as the existent sources and interdisciplinary collaborative work of the historians and museum professionals of the Alley. The multiple intellectual, theoretical, and creative layers involved in this work build a different record of the Alley. The artworks prepared in this study are a contemporary archival record of the interaction with the community and scholars of this historical place. This interaction, collaborative work, open access to the public, and reflections —consequences from this experimental artistic-creative process— constitute an academic record that expands the studies of historians, ethnographers, and academics, and contribute to an exhaustive analysis in the construction of public history and the collective memory of the city. / Media & Communication

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