<div>Online gendered collectivities like the Manosphere (an online collection of blogs, forums, and chat spaces devoted to shedding light on perceived social misandry) have provided opportune spaces for regressive forms of gendered organizing to occur. These spaces offer individuals an online network of safe spaces dedicated to antifeminism, misogyny, and pick-up artistry. While Manosphere networks have gained attention with their connections to the emerging Alt-Right activism online, these spaces have been legitimized in and throughout specific social networking platforms. For instance, sites like Reddit (dubbed the ‘Internet Culture Laboratory’) have become known as a hotbed of misogynist behaviors fostered and shared on comment threads and its subcommunities (known as subreddits).</div><div><br></div><div>Whereas previous scholarship pertaining to the Manosphere and The Red Pill have described the larger technocultural spaces that contribute to an increasingly toxic online world, less studied is how these organizations are organized—particularly with a focus on gendered organizing. SubReddits may adopt and take organizational forms wherein organizing occurs primarily through communicative engagement between users in the spaces (e.g., sharing posts, commenting on posts, and supporting some ideas over others through Reddit’s ‘upvote’ currency system). Over time, spaces like The Red Pill are networked, enacted, and organized. With an aim of understanding how organizational identity is organized and enacted on The Red Pill’s subreddit, this study analyzed the Top 100 posts of all time (over 35,000 comments and roughly 6,000 pages of text data) from The Red Pill to understand how conversations and content enacted a masculine organizational identity.</div><div><br></div><div>Using a multi-level analysis, this dissertation examines members’ text-based engagement, the social network, and types of roles influencers adopt to construct an organizational identity for r/TheRedPill. Using the comment threads from the Top 100 posts of all time, text mining and semantic networks were generated to understand how members of r/TheRedPill construct meanings and concepts focused on the organizational identity of the space. Second, using social network analyses, this dissertation illustrated the networks of influence of central users within r/TheRedPill. With a goal of understanding the roles that central users adopted, the dissertation adopted an online observation of the space to create a typology of leadership roles within r/TheRedPill. The findings uncovered three distinct contradictory themes focused on masculinity, sexual activity, and backlash that were central to organizing in The Red Pill. In addition to these three themes, the social network analysis and observation revealed distinct roles that influencers adopted to promote the organizational identity of r/TheRedPill.</div><div><br></div><div>Theoretically, the dissertation contributes to the Communicative Constitution of Organizing online by showcasing how the interconnections between conversations around gender, sexual activity, and backlash ‘scale up’ to construct a gendered organizational identity. Methodologically, this dissertation utilizes multiple levels of analysis to investigate online organizational activity. Pragmatically, these findings help provide a rich portrait of alternative forms of gendered organizing that occurs online. Future directions include examining the broader Red Pill network on Reddit, as well as examining contrastive spaces (e.g., r/TheBluePill or r/ThePurplePill) to investigate how members’ discursive engagement organizes and constitutes organizational activity as a response to r/TheRedPill.</div>

The main purpose of this mixed methods research was to explore and analyze visitors’ overall experience while they attended a museum exhibition, and examine how this experience was affected by previously using a virtual 3dimensional representation of the museum itself. The research measured knowledge acquisition in a virtual museum, and compared this knowledge acquired between a virtual museum versus a real one, employing a series of questionnaires, unobtrusive observations, surveys, personal and group interviews related to the exhibition and the artist. A group of twenty-seven undergraduate students in their first semester at the College of Architecture and Design of the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico participated in the research, and were divided in two groups, one of which used a 3D virtual representation previous to the museum visit. Results show that participants who experienced the virtual museum concurred that using it was a positive experience that prepared them to go to the real museum because they knew already what they were going to find. Most of the participants who experienced the virtual museum exhibited an increased activity during their museum visit, either agreeing, being more participative, concurring and showing acceptance, asking questions, or even giving their opinion and analysis, disagreeing with the guide and showing passive rejection. Also participants from this group showed an increase on their correct answers to the knowledge acquisition questionnaires, going from 27% answers responded correctly in the pre-test, to 67% of correct answers after the virtual museum usage. The research attempted to show that experiencing a virtual museum can be similar to the experience in physical museum visits, not only engaging participants to go to the museum, but sometimes even offering a more functional way to deliver content. Results of this research evidence that using a virtual museum creates a positive impact in users before, during, and after the museum visit, and that it can be a good alternative, not only for educational, but for promotional and recreational and purposes.

The use of the Internet has increased exponentially over the last decade. Individuals across all continents are progressively engaging in cyberspace interactions at work, in education, and for leisure. These online interactions, unconstrained by the limitations of corporeal reality, offer the potential for unique presentations of the self. The general aim of the research described in this thesis was to examine self-presentation in cyberspace. The research focused on MOOs, multi-user, text-based, user-extensible online environments, as a likely site for identity experimentation and play in cyberspace. Two studies are described. In the first quantitative study, 75 university students logged on to the front page of a social MOO where they selected a screen name, chose their gender, and provided a character description. As hypothesised, self-presentations were more likely to be based on actual identity rather than hoped for or feared selves. Contrary to expectation, little evidence was found of gender play. Self-presentations were typically positively biased and results suggested that players also perceived themselves more positively in the online context. Although sex and age were generally unrelated to self-presentation strategies, previous online experience, ethnicity, and personality profiles helped to explain self-presentation behaviour. / A qualitative study of a further 20 students in an educational MOO explored players understanding of their initial self-presentational choices and their management of these self-presentations over a 12-week period. Findings from the second study were consistent with the results from the first quantitative study and confirmed a strong desire for authentic self-presentation. Despite this emphasis on authenticity, the intention to play with identity was manifest in the form of selective self-disclosure, fantasy play, and exaggeration of traits. Participants also reported behaving in less inhibited ways online. A low incidence of gender play was noted. The overt identity play assumed by the cyberspace literature was not found in either study. Rather self-presentation in the online context appears to be governed by essentially similar processes to those that shape self-presentation in the offline world. The implications of the findings for teaching and learning, particularly for educators who want to use MOOs for identity experimentation, are discussed.

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