This thesis examines a group of television-makers that aimed to circumvent the regulations affecting standards of content and to reshape the boundaries of permissible violent content. It also examines the regulators who, in a period of significant regulatory restructuring, were required to police those boundaries and protect viewers from ‘harmful’ or ‘offensive’ content, and programme-contributors from ‘unfair’ treatment. In doing so, the aim is to offer a broader, empirically rich understanding of the individual, organisational and external factors that can lead to non-compliance and the relaxation of regulatory affairs over time; and to understand how rules or regulations can get pushed and reshaped. My findings revealed that both regulators and television-makers were confronted by conflicting economic and public interest objectives/responsibilities, and that, due to a variety of individual, organisational and external-level factors, they tended to prioritise their economic obligations, and this led to a loosening of the standards of consumer protection. The factors that influenced television-makers’ and regulators’ decision-making, and thereby this sequence of events, included, but were not limited to, the government’s shift toward deregulation, technological advancements, changing politics, a competitive organisational culture and a lack of sufficient accountability for television-makers.

This study looks at the dominant discourses in the news and documentary coverage of the British military in the occupation of Iraq. It is in these discourses that the justification for the war and occupation rests and in this justification lies the interpretation of the function, efficacy and cost of the military. To do this I have examined the genres of news, news and current affairs documentaries and traditional documentaries to see how these genres favour certain discourses and circumstances which allow certain questions to be asked, but resist others. Evidence from the Chilcot Inquiry is used to illustrate what themes and questions have been silenced in the television coverage. The dominant discourse of coverage is that of the suffering, heroic soldier, taking part in a ‘humanitarian’ war, although what this actually entails is not examined in depth. In this study it is the news and NCA documentaries and not traditional documentaries which provide a deeper context, a wider range of voices, and a more critical view of the military’s role and strategy in Iraq. The nature of the occupation is confused, the junior nature of the British military’s relationship with the Americans is not explained, the financial cost of the occupation is ignored in the elision with the moral cost of death, and the political and governing role of a military occupation is not considered. Although all genres describe the soldiers’ role as humanitarian, there is little visual evidence to illustrate it, and the paradox of soldiers who fight, but can have no enemy as they are there to ‘help’ the Iraqis becomes apparent. The footage of fighting soldiers therefore becomes a representation of soldiers, and where the footage is specific, individual soldiers talk about their betrayal or suffering where the enemy is the British government. The emotional discourse of the suffering soldier inhabits this space between the represented and the reproduced and represses any questions about the military’s responsibility for their actions in Iraq, and hence curtails the civic function of documentary and news to inform.

Chinese cyberspace is vibrant with new expressions created and disseminated by Internet users. Generally light in tone, terms such as 'Grass Mud Horse' and diaosi (literally meaning 'dick strings') have been argued to constitute a playful and satirical form of speech exemplifying grassroots netizens' carnivalesque resistance against the authoritarian party-state. Grounded in and informed by a historical review of the transformations of class and gender relations in China, my doctoral research goes beyond such a dichotomising framework by adopting a critical socio-linguistic perspective. Through extensive original discourse analysis, focus groups and in-depth interviews with a cross-section of the Chinese urban and rural youth population, I sketch out two major ambivalences of online wordplay in Chinese cyberspace, finding that, on the one hand, it simultaneously recognises and disavows the living conditions of the truly underprivileged-migrant manual workers; and, on the other hand, that it both derides the lifestyles of the economically dominant and also displays a desire for middle-class lifestyles. Interviews further reveal that Chinese Internet discourse articulates tensions between the stance of urban young men in the lower-middle class and that of urban young women in the middle class. The former reveals men's anxieties and self-victimisation at what could be called the changing gender order. The latter emphasises women's autonomy and aspirations with regard to ideal masculinities. I conclude that this latter stance is underpinned by an emerging ideology of 'consumerist feminism', which celebrates women's empowerment but limits this to the private realm and to personal consumption. Finally, the thesis also takes into account the co-option of Internet discourse by corporations and party media and the ways in which this shapes the changing connotations of online wordplay and its bearing on the wider social order and power struggles in contemporary China.

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This thesis examines the kinds of stories about teenage sexual violence that are enabled (or not) by US and British teen television drama series between 1990 and 2008. This genre is centrally concerned with issues of sexuality and, in particular, sexual vulnerability as teenage characters negotiate the transition from childhood to adulthood. Sexual violence narratives are common within this context. This thesis argues that a fuller understanding of representations of sexual violence is enabled by contextualising these narratives in relation to overall series’ and generic contexts. I employ a structural methodology to map where these storylines occur within series’ and generic structures across fourteen texts, uncovering striking patterns that point to the value of analysing several programmes alongside one another. This then provides the starting point for a deeper textual analysis of how sexual violence functions narratively and ideologically. Through doing this, I am able to provide insights into a variety of different forces that shape how these narratives are framed. Contextualising my analysis of representations of sexual violence allows me to account for the specificities of episodic and serial narrative forms, the generic hybridity of individual programmes, the wider conventions of the teen drama series genre, the gender of the series’ protagonist and US and British contexts. Additionally, I identify the genre’s dominant sexual norms and explore how these norms intersect with representations of sexual violence.

The abundance of social data and the constant development of new models of personalized suggestions are rewriting the way in which consumption is experienced. Not only are consumers now immersed in an information mediated context - decoupled from physical and socio-cultural constrains - but they also experience other consumers and themselves differently, embracing the prescriptions of a technological medium made by algorithmic suggestions and software instructions. A single case study of a social shopping platform in its start up phase has served as the empirical object of this thesis. The company investigated represents a typical case in the field of data driven consumption. The case has been conducted following the company’s infrastructure design and implementation for over a year. The analysis of the case has revealed the distinctive computational logic embedded in the platform system. The system uses the data produced by user selection as representation of consumer choice. On this account it structures social and individual consumption patterns and computes personalized suggestion. This study shows that technological information and software systems disassemble traditional practices of consumption and reassemble consumers in new and unseen ways. The research investigates technology’s role as a medium, by exposing and deconstructing the processes through which data aggregation and personalization mechanics reconfigure discovery, selection and experience of fashion. This thesis illustrates how consumption is now produced on the basis of social data structuration and how consumers are constructed out of data assemblages. Consumers select products they are suggested to like or expected to buy reacting to what social media platforms construct, compute, and fed back to them. Personalization allows consumers to see themselves as individual against the background of a computed sociality. Ultimately thus, the study discusses the impact of computational consumption as individuation process, considering its implications for consumer identity articulation and marketing practices.

This thesis is an invitation to investigate social issues in times when technologies are a social construction that is very much taken for granted. Who is in front of the screen and what it means to individuals can be easily overlooked, particularly when the subject is migrant women, part of a minority. When people shape and appropriate a technology the relationship is not unidirectional; their interpretations and practices also forge their transnational experiences as there are no standardised migrant experiences, nor standardised uses of technology. Hence it is crucial to problematise the users and to deconstruct the social and cultural context of their appropriations. Therefore by challenging domestication theory and applying it to users who are part of a transnational arena, with this thesis I investigate which concepts and rationale of this approach are useful for deconstructing the role of technologies in the lives of migrant women. The questions that guide this thesis are how the internet gains a place and a meaning by being appropriated in a transnational home, and how this influences women’s daily experiences. The theoretical contribution is firstly to bring together notions of internet appropriation in everyday life with those of the transnational literature and migration, and furthermore to contribute by tackling aspects of digital inclusion and how disadvantaged populations appropriate technologies from a cultural standpoint, highlighting the relevance of their condition as migrants with transnational links. Therefore I provide an ethnographic account of migrant Latinas in vulnerable conditions in London, and their internet experiences, by following a qualitative methodology that incorporates in-depth interviews with thirty-seven women and participant observation in two community centres as well as five participants’ households. The main conclusion is that although their levels of digital engagement and degrees of technological expertise were dissimilar, the internet was present in all their discourses and had an important role in their migrant situation, either by enabling them to continue their consumption practices and communications, and/or by empowering them to be part of this technological stream for the first time. Notwithstanding that there is not just one aspect which is responsible for how they construct their internet, their migration status and vulnerabilities enriched the approach by contributing to depicting their everyday, social and cultural context. Therefore the properties these women perceived were strongly connected with their current needs and interests as immigrants in a marginalisation stream. From a theoretical standpoint the main gap in understanding migrants’ domestication of technologies was the scant attention paid to both their cultural appropriation and the nuances of their hybrid context, as well as to spaces of belonging and digital location going beyond geographical limits. This was pivotal in the creation of cultural meanings, and of the context within which the technologies were (re)appropriated.

This thesis explores the management of social media networks through a specific interpretive lens. It views social media as networks organised for information production and managed through the development of complex data structures and underpinning technological solutions. The development of social media networks chiefly characterised by the open and distributed participation of many diverse individuals through the intermediation of specific technological solutions – seems to give shape to new organisational forms and data management practices, impacting in many domains. Despite vivid interest in these participatory organisational forms, we do not fully understand how social media technology is leveraged to organise member communities, standardising processes and structuring interaction. In this research I build on the case of PatientsLikeMe, a prominent and innovative social media network constructing medical scientific knowledge through the data-based contributions of its open and distributed member base. By drawing on the findings of an intensive, participatory case research, the thesis makes a contribution on several levels. The thesis demonstrates that the management of social media networks is characterised by the need to achieve steady, reliable and comprehensive production of information and associated data collection by means of complex data architectures and user reporting. I illustrate these conditions by highlighting the challenges that characterise the development of a system able to engage productively with the member base and by describing the mechanisms and techniques through which the organisation seeks to address them. Data and data structures figure prominently throughout the research as organisational devices of critical importance for the management of social media networks. The thesis also indicates and comments on the implications of these innovative modes of organising knowledge production. It finds that social media support considerable innovation in the arrangements by which scientific knowledge can be produced, with a consistent inclusion of once marginalised actors in data management practices, and elaborates on effects on the relationship with research institutions and professions. At the same time, the thesis shows that social media technology, because of the challenges and strategies associated with information production, ambiguously supports the project of a wider inclusion that it seems to afford at first sight. Finally, the thesis claims that developing social media gives rise to specific techniques of construction and governance of the social, and the associated kinds of sociality where socialisation, computation and the production of knowledge objects are inextricably enmeshed.

Excessive internet use and its problematic outcomes is a growing focus of research, receiving attention from academics, journalists, health workers, policymakers and the public. However, surprisingly little has yet been accomplished in terms of understanding the causes and consequences of this phenomenon. I argue that this is due to the framing of excessive internet use as an addiction, which leads researchers to neglect people’s reasons and motivations for excessive internet use. The perspective taken in this thesis is that excessive internet use may help people to cope with difficult life situations. This explains why people keep using the internet excessively despite problematic outcomes: the overall experience is positive because worse problems are alleviated. Based on the relationship between a person’s well-being, which is the focal point of literature on excessive internet use, and the motivations for media use grounded in uses and gratifications research, this thesis proposes a combined framework to examine if excessive internet use may be explained as a coping strategy taken to excess. This question was asked in relation to three online activities: World of Warcraft; Facebook; and online poker. Each group was surveyed about their psychosocial well-being, motivations for internet use, and any problematic outcomes. Findings showed that interactions between motivations for use and psychosocial well-being were important explanatory factors for problematic outcomes. Respondents with low self-esteem or high stress experienced more problematic outcomes when gaming or gambling to escape negative feelings, while escapist use was less problematic for players with high self-esteem or low stress. This has implications for how society needs to respond to cases of excessive internet use, since such behaviour can be both helpful and harmful. Future studies may usefully move beyond theories of addiction and consider excessive internet use as a coping behaviour that has both positive and negative outcomes.

The technological, sociological and cultural position of television, as a method of delivering content, has been the subject of much academic debate in the past twenty years. Perceived threats to television have emerged through the convergence of technologies, which has enabled traditional media forms to take on the characteristics of each other. As a result there is no such thing as a dominant communications medium in the 21st Century, as shared technological characteristics mean that the user can access a multitude of content through one single device. Some believe that television is on the wane, leading to dire predictions of the ‘death’ of television. For others, if television is to survive and develop as a communications medium, it needs to take on one element of convergence by becoming more interactive. There is a substantial amount of academic work which suggests how television can achieve this and what the content provided will do. However, these are merely suggestions, as there is no research which looks at what interactive content actually is. The assumption for scholars, who believe that interactive television is a viable format, is that it is inevitable that interactivity will become an everyday element of television use. Ideas as to how this can be achieved have been put forward but have not been followed up. This research aims to fill that empirical gap and is informed not by what could be but what is. It is clear that digital television has allowed for an additional stream of information to be accessed, through the red button on the remote control. This content provides a variety of options for the viewer, however, the key question, which this research is addressing, is how much of it is interactive? Additional research is now needed to establish just how much of this content exists, what the red button allows the audience member to do and how. Therefore it is necessary to measure and quantify the amount of red button content across a sample of channels, which represent the three types of broadcasting comprising the British broadcasting landscape; public service (the BBC), commercial (ITV) and subscription (Sky).