Includes bibliographical references. / The present study explores the practice of football media viewing in sports bars. It is based on the constructivism research paradigm (Guba & Lincoln, 2005), a conceptualisation of media as a tool for social behaviour (Couldry, 2003) and James Wertsch’s (1998) Mediated Action Theory. The study analyses two dimensions of football media viewing in sports bars: it focuses on the psychological motivations and the socio-cultural structure. The study’s main objective is to understand both the role of media for the practice of football media viewing in sports bars and the constitution of gender during the practice. It is a subject worthy of in-depth examination as there is a lack of holistic, contextualised and critical research in media studies, particularly in the field of football media consumption. The study applied ethnographic observations of two sports bars in a middle-class suburb in Cape Town as well as on-site and off-site interviews. During this time the researcher balanced subjective experiences with social meanings and scientific theories in a reflexive and flexible manner. The results reveal a complex network of individual purposes and socio-cultural tools. On the individual level they explain which media aspects are important to serve patrons’ needs and why male patrons discriminate against women. On the socio-cultural level the results show how media, gender and other tools interact to influence patrons’ behaviour. The study concludes by suggesting how media can be used to create enjoyable social environments and how social structures can be altered to create a more equal society beyond the sports bar environment.

Digital Citizenship Tools for Cause-Based Campaigns: A Broadened Spectrum of Social Media Engagement and Participation-Scale Methodology develops and applies two new tools for understanding, measuring, and recursively adjusting small to medium-size social media-based philanthropic campaigns to better foster participation and engagement—in other words, democratic digital citizenship. First, a theoretical model is offered broadening current binary conceptions of success and failure or impact of campaigns, situating specific participant actions in social media on a spectrum. Then, from that model, a new methodology is provided to measure participation and engagement generated by campaign posts. Recommendations are also offered for recursively adjusting campaign posts to better foster democratic digital citizenship. These tools were developed from data generated by #TheFaceOffChallenge, a research project representative of a typical small to medium-size cause-based campaign. #TheFaceOffChallenge also serves as a sample for analysis illustrating how to use these tools. While explicating these tools, this dissertation explores a broad range of topics related to better understanding democratic digital citizenship: online philanthropy, awareness, and digital activism; viral and memetic transmission; tensions between consumption and creation of ideas, content, and knowledge; public(s), counterpublics, and counter-efforts; literacies and access for engagement and participation in algorithmic environments; and visual communication and semiotics.

In 1989 with the revolution and the development of democracy, Taiwan first time made newspaper advertisement open to public, in 1991 it also lift the restriction to let political party could made advertisement on TV, in 1993 the radio also be allowed, in 1996 the radio and TV could be afforded non-gratuitous president campaign advertisement, in 2007 November the councilor campaign advertisement straightly be opened, in this time the campaign became hot. Especially when the law of TV been published, the tools of campaign had been restricted. Since 1989 Makro entered Taiwan packed goods store market, Carrefour¡BB&Q ¡BCostco¡BGeant¡BTaisuco¡Ketc packed good stores has changed the habits of consumer in Taiwan. Because those stores spread everywhere and technology of media has been improved fast, besides the budget of campaign is restricted by law, how to use tools to contact the voters has become the most important thing to political parties. Advertisements are everywhere, even on 3000 meters mountain you can see the garbage with production log. Because advertisements are such in flood, people start to ignore them. Newspapers and TV are no longer the powerful tools to advertise, since remote control been invented, the number of channels greatly increased and bloody news attract consumers¡¦ attention. In recent years Taiwan VOD technology system became mature, this research is about how to make efficient advertisement when we go to toilet. This thesis is according to primer collecting and secondary information analyzing to discuss the possibility of setting campaign advertisement in public toilets. This thesis comprises 5 chapters as follows¡GChapter 1, discussing the situation of campaign advertisement in Taiwan¡FChapter 2, describing the progress of campaign and its law¡FChapter 3, discussing TV advertisement characters from human mental points¡FChapter 4, to observe upon real investigation and to prove its possibility¡FChapter 5,as conclusion, this thesis comes up with some suggestions and self-criticisms.

The public relations practices of the government of Alberta have elicited substantial controversy, particularly under the administration of Premier Klein. However existing analyses have been insufficiently comparative. This dissertation is a within-case comparison of the evolution of government public relations practices under the three Progressive Conservative administrations of Premiers Lougheed, Getty and Klein. The theoretical framework rejects democratic justifications for government public relations, but accepts an “administrative imperative” that recognizes the use of government public relations techniques to accomplish particular policy goals. At the same time, it recognizes that these practices are often linked to important transformations in the broader political economy. A model of incentives and opportunities of why politicians use public relations strategies to accomplish their goals is introduced to examine the particular evolution in the Alberta case. Premier Lougheed’s administration created a new public relations agency dedicated to improving the administrative efficiency of the government’s public relations function. It was marked by restrained forms of government advertising and a documented commitment to a distinct space for government public relations, insulated from the political demands of the elected level of government. Periodic television appearances by the premier appear to be the most aggressive forms of public relations activities. Premier Getty adopted this model, despite a substantially transformed political environment and despite documented advice to change his government’s practices. Premier Klein recognized this transformed political landscape and substantially reformed government public relations, increasing public opinion research, adopting manipulative and aggressive news management tactics, politicizing and centralizing the public relations staff and integrating the entire range of public relations techniques into regular politically contentious advertising campaigns. These reforms help to explain some of Premier Klein’s political and policy successes. The dissertation concludes with some of the deleterious consequences of extensive public relations practices by governments in Canada and some recommendations as to how to mitigate against those consequences. / Thesis (Ph.D, Political Studies) -- Queen's University, 2008-12-06 11:35:00.169

The metaphor of politics-as-performance is commonly found in the political vernacular, from political ‘actors’ on the world ‘stage’ to the phenomenon of actors-turned-politicians. This interdisciplinary thesis comprises an extended exploration of the metaphor of politics-as-performance to generate a thick description of how political actors are represented in the visible public sphere. Performance theory has a strong heritage in other disciplines within social science, notably sociology (Goffman) and social anthropology (Turner), but has had more limited application in political science. Taking this limitation as a starting point, the thesis will argue that the metaphor of politics-as-performance is more than a banal turn of phrase. It can be a powerful analytical and theoretical tool in exploring the role, form and content of political information in a deliberative democracy. The thesis sets up and draws upon four UK-based case studies: the 2007 Blair-Brown premiership handover; the Scottish National Party’s 2007 election campaign; the Faslane 365 nuclear blockade in 2006-2007; and the London ‘7/7’ terrorist attack in 2005. These cases generate a thick description of the metaphor by combining ethnographic participant-observation and document analysis with the analytical tools and concepts of performance analysis such as staging, scripting and body work analysis. The analysis of the empirical research highlights the complexity of the practice of political representation in an increasingly mediatised public sphere, as well as providing an experiential account of lived deliberation. In the case of the Blair-Brown handover, the thesis shows how the scripted characterisation and iterative rituals of national identity reinforce each political actor’s representative authority. This is contrasted with the more playful, ludic performance of the Scottish National Party’s election campaign based on the ‘presence’ of key actors. The thesis also shows how unconventional political actors used more visceral and embodied performance techniques to gain visibility in the public sphere. The Faslane protestors, as well as incorporating devices such as humour and music into their performance, focus on transformations of their performing bodies and use themselves as representations of resistance. This theme of representing resistance is developed in the London terror attack case where the performance enforces violent transformations not only of the political actors’ bodies and symbolically-resonant spaces but of the audience as well. The empirical cases thus provide a richly textured account of the techniques that both conventional and unconventional political actors use to insert themselves into the public sphere. In conclusion, the thesis offers a descriptive construction of the metaphor of politics-as-performance. This demonstrates its applicability to the political sphere and highlights the performative aspects of deliberation.

This thesis addresses the concept and forms of dissemination in political communication and news media. It investigates the new age of dissemination of global communication manifested in a new relationship between political communication and media systems. The broad aim of this project is to investigate the ‘media reality’ of political communication in this new age of dissemination. Working within the sphere of political communication and interconnected media systems, the thesis examines how the information in news source texts and responses to them is recontextualised and disseminated worldwide, and fed back again through recursive communication. Specifically, the thesis also considers ways in which the aims of the political phenomenon of Hezbollah are disseminated and connected across various news media outlets. In particular, the process of recursive dissemination of communication is analysed in three news media outlets, namely Al-Jazeera, the BBC, and CNN. The project has three principal conceptual building blocks: dissemination, political communication, and discourse and intertexts. The theoretical framework has determined the methods used to undertake a qualitative analysis of the data. Discourse analysis is used to consider intertexts and sub-texts, legitimation processes, framing, representation, and schematisation in the data. These dimensions are highly useful tools in identifying shifts across the three media organisations. This thesis has three specific objectives. Its first aim is to reconceptualise communication, establish a communicative model characterised by recursivity (one in which political communication and media systems play back on each other in feedback and feed-forward loops, which add intensity), and show how recursivity has gained in importance in the context of mass mediatisation, bringing about a new age of dissemination. That is, the political messages of Hassan Nasrallah, which polarise representations, are recontextualised and disseminated across media contexts in complex processes involving recursive media interplays. These processes have a direct link with the historical context in the sense that political communication and media systems play back on each other in feedback and feed-forward loops. The second aim is to investigate the appropriate approaches for the study of that communication in terms of the relationship between intertextuality, discourse, ideology as belief systems, framings, and competing framings which create new realities; this connects well with the conceptual framework of recursivity and dissemination. The third aim is to achieve in the data analysis a more sophisticated understanding of Hezbollah as a highly significant political actor, by creating a multicontextual analysis of recursive framing. The thesis demonstrates the complexity of recursivity and dissemination of political communication. It sets out to improve our understanding both of Hezbollah and of the politics the Middle East. The core of this thesis lies in its concern in reconceptualising political communication and applying it to the analysis of Nasrallah’s speeches and their recontextualisation in the above three global media organisations.

This study analyzes the use of social media by state legislative bodies, broken down by a combination of legislative body (House, Senate, or general legislature) and by party (Republican or Democrat). I analyzed Twitter and Facebook posts for each of these groups during the week of January 11-15, 2016, specifically looking for four improvements: transparency, policy making, public services, and knowledge management and cross-agency cooperation. The research questions are: RQ1: Which social media platforms are state legislatures using? RQ2: What improvements are the state legislatures using in their social media output? RQ3: Is there a significant difference in the improvements presented on Facebook and Twitter? The results revealed that 52.9% of 700 groups had created Twitter and Facebook accounts, with 55% of those accounts on Twitter. The analysis also showed that upcoming events are more common than expected on Twitter, and that posts asking for support on an issue are more common than expected on Facebook. This study is important because it relates to voting trends of the 18-24 age group in the United States. An overwhelming majority of this age group uses social media, but this group has very low voting rates. If governmental bodies can utilize social media to communicate with this population, then it is possible that they would be better informed and more motivated to vote and be civically engaged.

Sustained academic and popular interest in the Holocaust depends largely on the ability of educators to communicate its universality. At Holocaust memorials around the world, educators make strategic rhetorical choices in pursuit of this imperative. However, as communicators present narratives, documentation, and visual rhetoric at memorials, they filter each message through a unique cultural lens. This unavoidable human tendency raises questions concerning the degree to which culture shapes Holocaust narratives. Given that Holocaust memorials may offer pivot insights into modern and future genocides, cultural influences on Holocaust rhetoric seem worthy of renewed evaluation. Burke's dramatistic pentad provides a valuable tool with which a scholar can evaluate the rhetoric at Holocaust memorials. The pentad preserves unique facets of the communication acts, enabling a rhetor to identify differences between the memorials, while providing a universally applicable framework through which to view the memorials. This pentadic analysis reveals that Holocaust memorials address many of the same universal questions. The answers to these questions, however, depend on the culture surrounding the memorial. Such a finding seems to indicate that a global event such as the Holocaust will stimulate the same questions in citizens across a variety of cultures, but that citizens will reach different conclusions about the event based on the influences of their culture.

In this thesis, the“NewModerates” communications strategy used by The Moderate Party and the representation of social practices and social conditions by Alliance for Sweden-coalition in the 2006 and 2010 Swedish election campaigns are analyzed.The campaigns are placed in the context of current research on modern political communication and analyzed through Fairclough´s Critical Discourse Analysis framework.The results indicate that The Moderate Party wanted to encourage voters to reassess their opinion of the party through the “NewModerates”-strategy, by indicating considerable changes in their policies.Official guidelines for which discursive and social practices should be utilized in party communication to achieve these goals were issued.The Moderate Party positioned themselves against The Social Democratic Party, partially by referring to themselves as the “new worker’s party” of Sweden.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-79).