Teaching philosophy: Students must be kept abreast of the latest industry knowledge in order to have successful careers. The whole department works in conjunction to implement training of students so that they can understand and demonstrate skills as successful convergent and multimedia journalists during and after their studies at Tshwane University of Technology.

The Internet was a catalyst for refiguring the previous models of media relationships. For many, the Internet is a medium that liberates individuals from the centralised and asymmetrical power structures of traditional mass media and other social institutions in particular, the boundaries set by the nation and the state. For other people, the Internet increases the capacity for surveillance and control. This dissertation argues for a fluid conception of the operations of power and resistance on the Internet that takes into account the various discourses which play a part in determining agency and subjectivity. It examines and balances the narratives of liberation and oppression against each other: for, just as the developments in Internet technology contribute to changes in discourse, so too existing or prior discursive limits and relations of power affect Internet culture and technology. In the process of analysing the interplay of different discourses on the Internet, this dissertation takes into account transnational and national cultural flows and the insights that conceptual work on globalisation, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism can provide. The case studies are concerned with change and centre on the use of the Internet to effect this change; they include: the Singaporean Internet, a ‘thread’ about Asian culture and Australia, the representation of oppression and the formation of Chinese diasporic collectivities, and anti capitalist networks. Through these case studies, the dissertation examines the degree to which the nation-state can regulate and affect the discourses at play on the Internet as well as the agency of participants in countering and maintaining these discourses. This dissertation also analyses activists’ use of the Internet to form transnational networks. It discusses the limitations of their work including problems with representation.

Livestreaming experienced a big leap in viewership over the past few years. Included in the livestreaming entertainment field is the emergence of streamers using VTuber models rather than using their face. VTubers are face-tracking avatars that have been becoming more popular as streamers decide how much of their own privacy they would like to protect while streaming. Following the popularity boom, researchers have become interested in the specific communication phenomena in the livestreaming context. Specifically, practitioners and academics are interested in how live streamers can affect audience perception and potentially make a career out of eliciting positive reactions and creating connections with their audiences. To better understand this phenomenon, this study investigated the effect of visual representation of a streamer on the audience perception of the streamer through an online experiment using three group between-subjects comparisons. Specifically, three short videos in which a female streamer plays Minecraft were developed that have the identical streaming context but with different visual representation of a streamer (No Face, VTuber, and Face). Data were collected from 413 undergraduate students at a large university. Primary finding indicates that visual representation of a streamer has significant impact on the perceived social presence of the streamer. Specifically, VTubers incites significantly less social presence in the dimension of social richness compared to the other conditions. However, the visual representation does not have any notable effect on interpersonal attraction, perceived credibility and parasocial interactions. Collectively, the study contributes to the limited research on VTubers and audience perception in the English-speaking academic field as well as the growing literature on streamers.

A multitude of societal issues associated with the development of technology have emerged over the years including, but not limited to: insufficient personnel for maintenance; a lack of accessibility; the spread of harmful tools; and bias and discrimination against marginalized groups. I propose that a systems perspective is necessary to identify potential leverage points in technology production systems to influence them towards increased social good and evaluate their effectiveness for intervention. Toward this end, I conducted a mixed-methods study of a widely-adopted approach in tech production, free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) development. A survey was distributed to elicit responses from FLOSS project contributors to characterize their perceptions of diversity and corporate involvement as they relate to participation decisions and information gathering activities in online platforms. To complement this, an analysis of data from FLOSS projects on GitHub was completed to model participation dynamics. Survey results indicate that contributors attend to information that is used to infer group diversity and information about corporate decision making related to FLOSS systems. Furthermore, the influence of this information on participation decisions varies on the basis of economic needs and sociopolitical beliefs. Analyses of eighteen project ecosystems, with over 9,000 contributors, reveal that projects with no to some corporate involvement generally have broader contributor and user bases than those that are owned by a company. Taken together, these findings suggest that the internal practices of companies involved in FLOSS can be perceived as opaque and controlling which is detrimental to both the expansion of a project's contributor base and for increasing diversity across FLOSS ecosystems. This research highlights the need to differentiate projects on the basis of corporate involvement and community ethos to design appropriate interventions. A set of recommendations and research propositions are offered to improve inclusivity, equity, and sustainability in tech development.

The aim of this study is to understand how leaders in the Canadian radio industry perceive the nascent personalized music streaming service industry, and how those perceptions inform their current business decisions. Over the last few years, Internet-based music services like Deezer and Rdio have launched in Canada, providing listeners with the opportunity of an alternative music experience to conventional broadcast radio. Through five interviews with experts representing terrestrial radio, on-demand services and regulation, three scenarios are presented for the future of conventional radio. In addition, a conceptualized listener profile is created using Grounded Theory Method. This profile buttresses the central finding of this research: should key political, economic and social factors remain in place, conventional radio is likely to continue to dominate as the leading commercial audio platform for Canadians in the years to come.

This thesis presents an investigation into the process of new forms of installation art; an exploration of the shifting of artistic activities from conventional studios and fine artist practices to installation art practices. A combined approach was taken whilst undertaking research by studying literature within the field, engaging with other practicing artists and conducting practical analysis. There is also a discussion of new technology in the field of abstract expressionist painting and a dialogue on the differences between traditional and digital abstract painting with regard to their processes. The reflective and issue finding processes undertaken by the researcher in this investigation are discussed in relation to the changes in his practice. The artist’s experimentation with materials and processes and the implications of this as regards the relationship between the artwork and the viewer are also discussed. The thesis is divided into seven chapters of text and images with an accompanying DVD including the main abstract new media installation. The first chapter includes an introduction to the research with the methodology applied. The second chapter involves using the computer to produce abstract painting. The third chapter then focuses on the differences between digital and traditional abstract painting. Moving on from this the fourth chapter covers multimedia installation and its associated processes. The fifth chapter deals with the reflections on the practice element of this investigation. The sixth chapter engages with the evaluation of and feedback from the field trip and with notes from artists with regard to practical production. The final chapter draws conclusions from this research with suggestions for further studies. This thesis will make the following contributions to knowledge: developing the process of animation from 2D abstract painting to a 3D environment with the inclusion of animation; using new technology as a creative tool to enable artists to gain new insights into creative art practices which provide audiences with new experiences of new and multimedia installation; advancing the creative process of new and multimedia artworks taking account of new techniques relating to the manipulation of viewpoints, picture planes and pigment surface as related to traditional methods of image creation and recording and their new media counterparts.

Thesis advisor: Lad Tobin / This study examines the emergence of place blogging as an online genre designed to foster a deeper sense of place and to share local knowledge. Focusing on a period between 2003 and 2006, it spotlights a transitional moment in web culture when the relationship between online life and offline life is undergoing an important shift. The bloggers highlighted in this study offer a ground-level view of how ordinary writers and readers participate in the transition to what Eric Gordon calls "network locality," a condition in which the experience of place is increasingly mediated by networked technologies. Because networked life creates an information-saturated environment in which place must compete with everything else for an increasingly scarce resource--human attention--place bloggers redefine blogging as a way to more deliberately and regularly invest attention in place. To do so, they remediate older genres to create a blogging style that differs from the political and technology blogs that were popular at the time: some draw on nature writing and diary writing (essayistic place bloggers) while others tend to draw more heavily on genres of local journalism (journalistic place bloggers). A rhetorical analysis reveals how genre remediation offers place bloggers a range of strategies for managing the flow of attention between self, place, and audience as they interact around digital objects in the network. These insights offer important contributions to scholarly conversions interested in examining how online forms of rhetoric continue to evolve and how our ideas about place are adapting to life in a networked society. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

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acase@tulane.edu / “Unknown Knowns” explore the psychological landscapes of this phenomenon, collapsing footage from news broadcasts, Defense Department archives, political rallies, and other sources into undulating landscapes. Axes of time and space indexed in the source materials are here collapsed into simultaneous and continuous planes. The viewer is placed on the precipice of knowing and unknowing in a way that echoes the background noise of American life; even when you seem to grasp a whole, the specificity and context of any given image remains elusive. / 1 / Wiley Aker

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