The study of alternative video has been characterized by micro analyses of individual experiences and a proliferation of imprecise terms. This dissertation is a macro level study of the phenomenon of alternative video, based on the analysis of 72 organizations, accessed through documents and interviews with 42 representatives of organizations and leaders from around the world. The relationship between video technology and progressive social practices is theorized. The various concepts being used in the alternative video literature and their corresponding practices are defined and systematized. The development of the alternative video movement worldwide is described and analyzed. Appendices present a detailed listing of the different types of alternative video organizations studied, a systematization of the distinct practices which make up alternative video, and a listing of national, regional, and global alternative video organizations and organizational structures. This dissertation argues that video's potential to mediate time, if actualized, is key to the development of collective praxis. The concept of extended participation is advanced, and the concepts of video process and video product are redefined. Popular video and alternative video are theorized in relation to grassroots struggles, the opposition to mainstream commercial television, and the development of a social project against hegemony. It is argued that a global movement of alternative video is forming, and that this movement is standing at a crossroads between two strategies. The first is a participatory strategy based on uses of video articulated with grassroots struggles. The second is a mass video strategy based on video tactics seeking infiltration into existing structures of television. This dissertation recommends a third videotelevision strategy combining principles of popular participation with the widespread reach necessary for the development of an anti-hegemonic project of society. The dissertation concludes that the alternative video movement suggests the possibility of a global alternative to hegemonic global forces.

This dissertation is a genealogy of the discursive mechanisms of censorship that govern newsmedia representations of Indigenous peoples on national television news in Australia. Beginning with a discussion of the colonial constitution of Australian nationalism, its spatiotemporal predications, and the contestation of this colonial nationalism in the struggle for Indigenous rights, this dissertation traces an analytic of the relations of power that inform national television news discourses of Aboriginality in Australia. Based on this analytic, this dissertation maps a genealogy of the discursive mechanisms of censorship that have governed national television newsmedia representations of three newsevents (1996–1999): the Port Arthur massacre, Mirrar opposition to mining at Jabiluka, and the Wik debate. Readings of these newsevents point to a need for the articulation of intellectual and cultural property rights in the formulation of policies regarding Indigenous access to communications technologies in Australia.

Gay marketing has been both welcomed as offering increased gay visibility and criticized as risking the assimilation of gay subcultures into the mainstream. Using interviews with marketers, presentations on the gay market, articles from the marketing trade and popular press, and other documents, I analyze how the gay market came to acquire its particular contours, in what contexts, and with what effects. In my historical overview, I compare the formation of the gay market with that of the African American market decades earlier, arguing that marketers built upon earlier experiences of market formation to produce a respectable and profitable gay market. I look at gay-identified marketers' professional culture, assessing the importance of gay-specific expertise and a “polite politics” in protecting their employment. I outline the venues in which gay marketing appears, arguing that marketers must navigate between producing recognizably “gay” appeals while resisting offensive stereotypes. I address marketers' working model of gay consumers as usually urban, trendsetting, affluent, white men, how recent research has challenged this view, and how responses from gay and other audiences of gay advertising have helped to shape marketers' appeals. I delve into the gender specificity of the gay market, arguing that lesbians have been largely ignored by marketers because of the difficulty of reaching them in sufficient numbers, but also because of the failure of dominant discourses to imagine lesbian desire. Yet, conversely, since overt queer sexuality is seen as incompatible with gay marketing, the stereotype of the hypersexual gay man has required a rigorous curtailment of eroticism in gay publications. I look at the relation between sex, class, and consumption, arguing that in order to produce a profitable gay market, marketers have emphasized only the most sexually and class-respectable elements of gay subcultures and have disavowed their more politically, culturally, and erotically challenging aspects. I conclude that gay marketing is problematic not because it erases distinctions between gays and heterosexuals, as critics of assimilationism fear, but because it emphasizes the distinctions between privileged gays and others. Affluent, apolitical, sexually respectable gays increasingly represent “gayness” in marketing and elsewhere.

The rapid growth of hedge funds in recent years has been accompanied by cases of severe failure. Since the aftermath of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), investors recognize that hedge funds may provide high expected returns but they might be exposed to a huge downside risk that is not easily detected by traditional risk measures. My dissertation consists of three essays on the risk of hedge funds. In the first essay, I use a cross-sectional approach to analyze the risk-return trade-off. I compare semi-deviation, value-at-risk (VaR), Expected Shortfall (ES) and Tail Risk (TR) with standard deviation. Using the Fama and French (1992) methodology and TASS data, I find that the left-tail risk captured by Expected Shortfall (ES) explains the cross-sectional variation in hedge fund returns very well, while the other risk measures provide insignificant results. During 1995–2004, hedge funds with high ES outperform those with low ES by an annual return difference of 7%. In the second essay, I implement a survival analysis based on the Cox proportional hazard (PH) model to compare downside risk measures with standard deviation in predicting hedge fund failure. I find that funds with high ES have a high hazard rate when controlling for the style effect, performance, fund age, size, lockup, high-water mark (HWM) provision, and leverage. Standard deviation, however, loses the explanatory power when the other explanatory variables are included. As I find that liquidation does not necessarily mean failure in the hedge fund universe, I suggest simple criteria such as the last six-month return and change in fund size rather than the stated drop reasons to calibrate hedge fund failure. I reexamine the attrition rate of hedge funds based on these findings and argue that the real failure rate of hedge funds (3.1%) is lower than the attrition rate (8.7%). In the third essay, I focus on the liquidity risk premium. I examine the relationship between hedge fund share restrictions and liquidity premium by comparing offshore and onshore hedge funds. Due to tax provisions, offshore and onshore hedge funds have different legal structures, which lead to differences in share restrictions. On average, offshore funds impose less share restrictions, hence they underperform their onshore counterparts due to illiquidity premium, consistent with Aragon (2007). However, I find that once offshore funds impose share restrictions the illiquidity premium is higher because of a tighter relation between share illiquidity and asset illiquidity in offshore funds. Introducing the lockup provision increases the abnormal return by 4.4% per year for offshore funds compared with only 2.7% for onshore funds. I also find that share illiquidity premium becomes lower when an offshore fund is affected by its onshore equivalence through a master-feeder structure.

Abstract not available

The Internet has a hidden history. It is revealed by application of social history and Cultural Studies theories of media technology development. Perspectives from resistance studies and the critical international political economy of communication must be applied to understanding Internet history. In this context there have been four precursor domains to the Internet of the twenty-first century: public/government; corporate; civil society; social movement. Public Cyberspace was evolved from cold war necessities and gifted to the commercial sector. Corporate Cyberspace evolved from access to public research and grew through the finance industry. Civil Society Cyberspace emerged from attempts to deliver public cyberspace to all taxpayers. Social Movement Cyberspace emerged from non-governmental organization attempts to use the medium for advocacy action. In the case of Social Movement Cyberspace, there were two initial phases. Between 1981 and 1990 non-governmental organizations from North America, Western Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia implemented an international protocol called the Velletri Agreement and formed Interdoc as a vehicle fostering the first global Social Movement computer networks. In a second period between 1991 and 1993 groups from throughout the world of NGOs agreed to support a global network dedicated to activism, Association for Progressive Communications.

Abstract not available

This study of American news media coverage of the Vietnam War, detailed chronologically, demonstrates the fractionalization of the Saigon press corps, the government tactics to obfruscate communication and the problems of journalists operating within the commercial confines of their craft. As institutions, the American news media and the U.S. military never demonstrated that they knew what to do in Vietnam, so they did what they knew how to do. The military experimented with firepower at the expense of civic action programs, while the journalists covered the action and generally ignored analysis, interpretation or investigative reporting. Vietnam was covered mostly as a sports event or a police beat, with many brave, but few intellectually aggressive reporters challenging the basic premise of the war or receiving any encouragement to do so from editors in the United States. Throughout the 15-year American phase of the revolution in Vietnam, the news media reacted to actions and statements by government spokesmen in both Washington and Saigon, and rarely initiated the agenda for reportage. This was caused by six main factors. The journalistic philosophy that reporting reflects the social environment and generally does not advocate pro-social behavior or function as commercial aspects of American journalism which, in conjunction with the gate-keeping functions integral to the process and the use of material by news agency and network clients, severely confined the press corps in Indochina to covering news events and topics to which it had easy access. The professional expertise of press corps members was diversified and many did not substantive background in either Vietnam or military tactics. The massive amounts of information disseminated by the U.S. government could not be analyzed rapidly by the limited bureau staffs in Saigon and resulted in limited interpretative articles which competed with more colorful and timely reports which were usually initiated by the government. The failure of professional journalistic organizations in the United States to consistently support efforts by reporters in Saigon during their struggle to make the American government more accountable for its actions or any institutional journalistic attempt to mount a lobbying effort on behalf of the reporters to pressure the government into adopting a more liberal information policy. The public confusion caused by the inconsistency of news organizations in transmitting reports from Indochina while simultaneously disseminating conflicting reports without properly analyzing the divergent views or including the incongruent statements and interpretation.

To provide normative data and assess the impact of teacher use of rhetorical questions on student evaluations of teachers, 101 randomly selected college class sessions were audio tape recorded with teacher consent (while naive about true researcher intent). Questions were classified as interrogative or rhetorical and, if rhetorical, further labeled as agreement, concession, or information questions. Up to three students per class session rated their teachers on scales from -10 to 10 representing teaching dimensions. The ratings and teacher question use were compared by correlation and regression analysis. Findings revealed frequent use of all types except concession questions. Weak negative associations between teacher use of rhetorical questions and student ratings of teachers did not support the conclusions of previous experimental research.

Television programming has not been subjected to close critical analysis of its underlying structure. Four tenets of structural analysis: transformation, intelligibility, self-regulation, and formalization, are drawn from the theories of Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Jean Piaget and applied to television situation comedy. Preliminary examination of the genre establishes that it is more closely alligned to radio than film, while a survey of literary comedy reveals transformations which demonstrate the importance of analyzing television on its own terms. Analysis of "I Love Lucy," "McHale's Navy," and "All in the Family," establishes three precepts basic to television structure. Serial chronology represents television's way of structuring time. Rather than compressing time, television fragments it. Changes occur gradually and mimick real life as when Lucy becomes pregnant in "I Love Lucy." Technical experimentation in the sixties, illustrated by "McHale's Navy," led to a temporary dissolution of exploitation of serial chronology as a structural component. "All in the Family" heralds a return to capitalizing on serial chronology by extending action as well as character over time. Telemythic scope represents television's characteristic scale, which is limited in terms of setting and tends to make images recede into abstraction. This is illustrated in "I Love Lucy" by confinement of characters to the Ricardo living room and the focus on domestic events. In the sixties, illustrated by "McHale's Navy", producers attempted to expand scope using exotic settings. In the seventies, illustrated by "All in the Family," extreme close-ups, as well as the concentration of action and scene, show an appreciation of scope. The electron factor represents television's way of recomposing reality so that it becomes abstract and symbolic without losing its immediacy. It is present in diluted form in "I Love Lucy," which used cinematic techniques. It is most evident in "McHale's Navy" in dream scenes. In "All in the Family," videotape approximates the immediacy of live transmission which, along with topicality, works to capitalize on the vitality and abstraction of the electron factor.