Thesis Univ. of East Anglia (Norwich), 2006. / Originaltitel: Curtain raisers, Titel der Diss. Includes bibliographical references and index.

The thesis deals with the influence of media on social work. Emphasis is placed on the media and the ethical principles of mass communication. The aim is to explore the mechanisms that the media use to influence the recipients, which functions the media have in society, how we can classify recipients of media messages, what can influence the final form of communication, and whether the ethical principles of journalism and the ethical principles of social work have the same foundation so media can serve the fulfilment of the mission of social work. The work is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the characteristics of the media, the public and media communications. The basic concepts of media studies are mentioned. The second part focuses on the ethics of the media. A normative theory of media behaviour is introduced and also why it is important that the media should be responsible for their behaviour and their messages and should be controlled by ethical instruments have e. g. in the form of Ethical Code of Journalists in the Czech Republic. The third part is more focused on social work and clarifies the relationship between media and social work. The last part includes current topics that fall into social work activities and which are widely publicized. The aim is to interpret the behaviour of the media in relation to social work.

The thesis thematizes the antihero phenomenon in current television series, whereas the phenomenon mentioned is attempted to be explained by a qualitative reception research regarding the television series called Breaking Bad. Therefore, the aim of this research is to understand the motivations of viewers for selecting and watching series featuring a main protagonist that might be described as an antihero. It is thus a type of audience research that is attempting to identify the aspects that are the most attractive for audience of these kinds of narratives. Furthermore this thesis is trying to clarify viewer's attitudes towards antihero as a type of serial character, as it becomes apparent that these characters are becoming more popular than ever before. The results of this research offer an evaluation of viewer's motivations for watching the series featuring antiheroes and identification of aspects that are the most attractive for audience of these kinds of narratives.

Dating online applications have fundamentally changed the form of online dating. They are available on a mobile phone and are based on spatial proximity of users and ease of use. This diploma thesis focuses on users of these applications. This thesis is based on the assumptions of the uses and gratifications theory, which assumes that the media audience is active and uses the media to satisfy its needs. The aim of this thesis is to find out how individuals use the dating applications and what their reasons for using are. To collect data, I chose a combination of quantitative and qualitative approach. First, an on-line questionnaire survey was conducted, followed by semi- structured interviews with applications users. Research has shown that the reason for using and the attitude of users varies with each individual and can change during use. Keywords dating applications, Tinder, online dating, uses and gratifications theory, active audience, mixed methods research

The aim of this thesis was to analyse the reception of the Fifty Shades book trilogy and a film adaptation of its first part from the perspective of a female audience - both women who like the books and/or the film and women who do not like them. The thesis sought to describe the fundamental ways of the reception of the Fifty Shades phenomenon and to connect them to media and public discourse about the trilogy. The research questions were particularly focused on women's motivations to reading the books and/or watching the film, their approach to and evaluation of the trilogy. A part of the thesis was also a comparison of the two groups of female readers and viewers regarding the questions mentioned above and a connection of those questions with media and public discourse about Fifty Shades. During the conducted research 13 individual semistructured interviews with female readers and viewers of Fifty Shades have been done. The gained data were analysed by using the grounded theory method (particularly in vivo coding and axial coding). The outcome of the analysis is a description of two different ways of reception and interpretation of Fifty Shades which show persisting ambiguity of romantic fictions for women. The analysis also revealed an impact of media and public discourse about the trilogy on...

Diploma thesis "Media as an Agent of National Self-Confidence: Analysis of the Victory of the Czechoslovak Ice Hockey Players at the 1947 World Championship" deals with the reflection of the major sport event in the Czechoslovak media and how this reflection inspired the audience. The goal of this diploma thesis is to describe the dependance between the media coverage and the national self-confidence, which results from the national identity. Therefore, I focused on the chosen newspaper titles to analyze the content they produced during the 1947 Ice Hockey World Championship. I defined a hypothesis, based on observation and scholarly literature, that the media used the coverage to strengthen the national self-confidence and redefine the national identity. My second hypothesis was the idea, that this kind of coverage led to an active response among the audience. Before I started analyzing the three chosen titles (Lidova demokracie, Rude Pravo, Prace), I delivered complex structure of theoretical concepts, describing the influence media have towards the audience and also reasons why the members of the audience use media in their everyday life. I also focused on the historical and political context, as well as the media landscape that shaped the content of that time. I conducted the analysis and...

The diploma thesis will be devoted to the theme of traditional and new media, that are becoming dominates the media world and an important part of everyday life. The text aims to introduce television as a medium that is constantly evolving, as well as the and its audience. Based on this assumption, we will examine television from the perspective of several main media theorists. In fact, there are several basically different views on this medium and its audience. Especially older writers such as Pierre Bourdieu, Neil Postman, Jeremy Orlebar or Guy Debord, have become accustomed to television and the overall medial platform as manipulative and television audience passive. On the other hand, there are also several authors, who see media in progress, digitization and the emergence of new media as new possibilities. We are talking about Pierre Levy, Don Tapscott and Axel Bruns. Between the two opposites are still moving Stuart Hall and John Fiske. Special attention will be devoted to the issue of the gradual development of television as a medium and its audience. Television is in fact considered as one of the traditional (old) media, however, it is changing with technological developments and respond to innovation. I will try to answer the question of what television as we know it today, uses of old and...

The target of the thesis Relation between Textual Devices and Popularity of Media Text on the Example of Radio Series "Tlučhořovi" is to reveal if there exist any connection between significant textual devices used in the series and its popularity and success. As methods there are used semiotic analysis of sample of the series episodes and "respondent interview" with the listeners. In the first there is focus mainly on particular textual devices and in the second on what respondents consider to be reasons why they do listen to the series. Significant textual devices are one of the central themes of cultural studies and this work sets itself a task to deduce from findings conclusion which would be generalizable to relation between media texts and their audiences universally.

In den letzten Jahren hat die russische Musikwissenschaft die internationalen Ursprünge der russischen Musikkultur erneut zum Gegenstand ihres Interesses gemacht. Das betrifft insbesondere St. Petersburg, die \"europäischste\" Stadt Rußlands, die seit ihrer Gründung 1703 ausländische Mentalitäten gleichsam in sich aufsog.

1 Abstract The diploma thesis will focus on television as a constantly evolving medium and the question whether the present TV audience is still a viewer and is suitable for the classic mass media, or that television is so close to the new media that it would be more convenient to talk about its "users ". Based on the assumption that society's access to television has changed over the years of its existence, we will archaeologically investigate television from the perspective of several leading media theorists over the past decades. We will examine first of all how the interface between the television medium and the viewer has changed, and especially the possibilities that television offers to its audience. At first, we will focus on the perspective of Marshall McLuhan, the theme of the remedation of the authors Jay D. Bolter and Richard Grusin. Subsequently, we will focus on the research direction of media archeology, based on the work of Michael Foucault's Archeology of Knowledge, and will examine the television and the discourse it is part of. We will focus on the ideas of writers such as Jussi Parikka, Siegfried Zielinski, William Uricchio and Axel Bruns. The work of Lva Manoviche and others will also appear. Particular attention will be paid to the gradual development of television as a medium and its...