Glitch is becoming an important topic both in popular culture and academia. In 2012, Disney cast a glitch as a major character in its movie homage to arcade video games Wreck-It Ralph. More and more studies about glitch are emerging across various disciplines, from media studies to aesthetics. So far, researchers were focusing mostly on theoretical and technological aspects of the glitch. This Master's thesis aims to analyze the "everyday" glitch and the roles it plays in the video game culture, conducting a qualitative content analysis of online discussion forums of three recent hit video games: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Mass Effect 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. The first part of the thesis reviews the literature connected to the glitch and explains its connection to similar scientific concepts: error, noise and emergence. It also introduces different aspects and roles of the glitch, ranging from cheating and metagaming to humor and aberrant use. The second part consists of the analysis of online discussion forums concerning the player definition of the glitch, the process of finding and sharing the glitch and about the main aspects of the glitch from the viewpoint of active participants in online discussions: glitch as an error or a feature, patching the glitch, cheating, metagaming and humor. As...

This study explores the phenomenon of new power as a framework for empowerment for non-profit organizations. The concept is coined by social entrepreneurs Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans in their book New Power (2018), and the aim is to investigate the effects of new media today through analysis of twelve media actors experiences of working in the creative industries. Through a flexible study based on the paradigm of phenomenology, this thesis researched by examining new power as a 'black box’—an object of human perception—to arrive at new understandings of the workings of media environments today. The qualitative data is backed by a case study of a niche community in the form of digital scrapings that reveal characteristics of spreadable mechanisms in a networked community. Drawing on dominating theories about participatory cultures, convergence media, and mediatization, the study found tendencies of new media leading to the subordination to the power of prevailing media actors. It concludes by considering future implications for the evolution of Web 3.0, where digital platforms will evolve into a co-constitutive digital sphere where media actors and individuals alike will take action in shaping the digital culture of media, as in the cases of leading digital companies BuzzFeed and Reddit.Keywords:Media Transformation, Non-profit organization, Web 2.0, Media Transformation, New Media, Participatory Cultures, New Power, Social Mobilization, Digital Promise

Submitted by JOSIANE SANTOS DE OLIVEIRA (josianeso) on 2017-05-23T16:44:53Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Jonas Pilz_.pdf: 4769294 bytes, checksum: 5b2d492fdd595732e9291d96d1a6898f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-23T16:44:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Jonas Pilz_.pdf: 4769294 bytes, checksum: 5b2d492fdd595732e9291d96d1a6898f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-02-23 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Esta dissertação intenta compreender o processo de constituição de determinados sentidos que emergem das conversações em rede a partir de apropriações realizadas por atores sociais com interesses mercadológicos. Neste trabalho, são observadas e analisadas as potencialidades na produção de sentidos oriundos dos acontecimentos denominados “#MeuAmigoSecreto” e #LoveWins, ressignificados pela Universal Pictures do Brasil e Havaianas, respectivamente. A pesquisa é realizada identificando primeiramente os sentidos aplicados pelas organizações como proposta de conversação. Em seguida, propõe-se a organização dos sentidos atribuídos pelos atores sociais, a partir da conversação sobre a apropriação e o acontecimento, em categorias, para que se possa analisar como estes sentidos, de fato, emergem e como se relacionam. A fundamentação para a pesquisa dá-se a partir do entendimento da representatividade adquirida pelos sites de redes sociais e o espalhamento de conteúdos, na proposta de Jenkins, Ford e Green (2014), através das redes sociais digitais. Sob uma perspectiva semiótica, o espalhamento de conteúdos configura um potencial processo de ressignificação, com sentidos gerando outros sentidos, além de relações e interseções entre si. O processo de constituição de sentidos é observado através da metodologia de análise de construção de sentidos em redes digitais, em desenvolvimento no Laboratório de Investigação do Ciberacontecimento. De forma geral, entende-se que essa construção de sentidos é marcada por disputas, sobretudo a disputa de sentidos prevalecentes, sob uma égide de sentidos favoráveis e contrários ao objeto de conversação, em um ambiente de colapso de contextos (BOYD, 2010). Ainda assim, a tentativa aqui é ir além desta perspectiva considerada reducionista diante da complexidade dos acontecimentos e das semioses. / This research aims to understand the process of creation of certain meanings from computer-mediated conversations through cyberevents' appropriations made by social actors with market interests. The potentialities of creation of meaning from cyberevents called #MeuAmigoSecreto and #LoveWins and their appropriations made by Universal Pictures do Brasil and Havaianas are observed and analyzed. First, the research identifies the creation of meaning applied by the organizations as an invite to establish conversations. Following, the meanings from those conversations are organized by categories, in order to analyze how they, in fact, are constituted and how they are related. The theoretical framework of this research begins with the importance acquired by social networking websites and the content spreading -the spreadable media nominated by Jenkins, Ford & Green (2014), through the digital social networks. In a semiotics perspective, the content spreading constitutes a potential process of creation of new meanings, besides relations and intersections among each other. The process is observed through the creation of meaning in social networks methodology, developed by Laboratório de Investigação do Ciberacontecimento. The creation of meaning is constituted by contests, mostly the contests of prevailing meaning, and meanings that support or refute the conversation object, in a context collapse environment. Nevertheless, the attempt there is to analyze those conversations beyond this reductionist perspective in front the complexity of events and Semiosis.

This diploma thesis deals with the phenomenon of Internet memes. The theory of memes came from the evolutionary biologist R. Dawkins in the late 1970s, as a cultural analogy of genes. Decades later, the term "meme" began to appear in Internet culture in conjuction with Internet jokes. This thesis works with the concepts of meme, virality, spreadable media and media convegence. All of these terms define the current Internet environment. The diploma thesis is based mainly on books by L. Shifman: Memes in Digital Culture, H. Jenkins: Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (co-authored) and K. Nahon and J. Hemsley: Going Viral. This diploma thesis deals with the definition of the term meme and its differentiation from the term virality, because for the average Internet user, these two terms are synonymous. The thesis describes meme genres, phases of the creation of Internet memes, which arise mainly from spreadble media and on the basis of which principles are memes created and what factors contribute to their spread in cyberspace. The analytical part consists of a contextual analysis of selected Internet memes, which demonstrates how digital manipulation changes the context of memes in which the meme can be used and how this...

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This thesis deals with humour on Facebook, I examine the themes and practices of humorous posts that are related to the direct election of the President of the Czech Republic,in particular to the two candidates who got into the second round of presidential elections, Karel Schwarzenberg and Miloš Zeman. In the theoretical part I introduce humour from a theoretical point of view. I identify three central theories, types of jokes and function of laugh. In subsequent chapters I define the basic assumptions that lead to the involvement of fans in the creation of online posts, which can circulate through social networks. I present new tools in online political marketing and summarize the basic topics of the official campaigns of both candidates. In the practical part I analyze, using the grounded theory, how and why Facebook users worked with humour in posts which respond to the presidential election. The material which was searched, can be described as illustrated jokes, photos with or without text, collages, comics or cartoons from official and unofficial Facebook pages of both candidates. The research showed that humour had primarily negative role during the campaign. Humour was a tool to defame and ridicule the candidate, jokes showed his shortcomings. It also warned voters what could happen in the...

Participatory culture inside a filter bubble – A content analysis of the network society Twitch.tv’s external communication. The aim of this essay was to study how user-generated content is being used and how it is presented by Twitch Interactive, Inc. in its external communication, more specifically how the discourse of this content is shaped on Twitter. To gather the information needed a quantity based content analysis was made, ranging from 1-31st of October 2015. From this data patterns where detected and a discourse analysis based on Berglez version of van Dijks model was conducted on six of the Twitter posts that followed said pattern. This was done to answer how the discourse was shaped and what the consequences could be of using such a pattern. Analyzing the results was done using theory from strategic marketing researchers such as Larsåke Larsson, Lars Palm, Ulf Dahlqvist and Magnus Linde. Furthermore theorist like Gripsrud, Pariser, Lindgren, Jenkins, Ford and Green were used to describe and analyze the field of culture, more specifically participatory and popular culture. The conclusion of the study was that Twitch representation of user-generated material and the culture it represents was unjustified and could be seen as a filter bubble. The results showed that the majority of content was young white male gamers where as other research on the field of gaming culture shows a more equal split between genders. The individuals that where represented in the content could be seen as objects of admiration and association. Discussion led to the belief that Twitch may not possess the power to change to discourse due to the strong economic need of the consumers. This need was concluded to arise from the fact that the platform and its culture is much like participatory culture and where this culture has been taken to a commercial level.