Over recent decades several competing descriptions of the media and cultural industries have been put forward. The media and cultural industries have been described as creative industries, copyright industries, and as constitutive of an experience economy. One key element in these descriptions has been the importance of copyright law in a postindustrial economy. The present study is an analysis of an emerging idea of an industry that functions, in part, outside of the market created by copyright law, and by exploiting, or by building markets on top of, digital, cultural and informational commons. The study is about how this idea is expressed in various forms by business organisations, companies, consultants and policymakers. I have invented the concept of the openness industry to denote the businesses that these organisations and policy makers claim are forerunners and promoters of the idea of ‘openness’ as a business model for the media industry. The purpose of the thesis is to analyse the governmentality and ideology of the openness industry. A key element in the idea of the openness industry is that internet users can be persuaded to produce symbolic products for it by other means than the economic incentives provided by copyright. Another key element is the high value placed on single individuals in the creation of economic value; but in contrast to how the copyright industries are thought to be dependent on ‘authors’, the openness industry relies on the ‘entrepreneur’. Previous notions of the media and cultural industries have given publishers and producers of film, music and games a central role.The companies that are seminal to the idea of the openness industry are internet and technology companies.

Syfte: Uppsatsens syfte är att problematisera och göra ett försök på att visa på varför och hur informationsspridning via internet kan gynna respektive missgynna de symboliska maktstrukturer som finns inom olika fält bland Jehovas Vittnen och ex-Jehovas Vittnen. Frågeställningar: Varför har ex-Jehovas Vittnen behov av att sprida information om samfundet och sina liv och hur fungerar denna spridning? Teori: Inom teoridelen används två teorier som har många likheter med varandra men som trots detta tillhör två, till viss del, olika tanketraditioner. Det ena är den sociologiska traditionen och det andra är den sociobiologiska traditionen. Inledningsvis presenteras sociologin då denna ligger närmast uppsatsens första frågeställning, för att sedan gå över till en teori kallad memetik. Metod: Metoddelen utgår ifrån den hermeneutiska traditionen och via denna utförs etnografiska observationer av klipp på Youtube med komparativ och relationell analytisk inriktning. Resultat: Resultatet visar på att den symboliska makt ett samfund som Jehovas Vittnen har över sina medlemmar, mycket väl kan sättas ur balans av att tillgängligheten av information med kritisk karaktär, sprids via internet. Det är relativt svårt för ett samfund som Jehovas Vittnen att övervaka och begränsa alla individer som befinner sig inom samfundets fält från att komma i kontakt med exempelvis ex-Jehovas Vittnen.

Min hemstad Säffle har varit medialt exponerad i dokusåpor sedan början av 2000-talet. På webbplatsen YouTube läggs privata klipp upp om staden och människorna som lever där. Vad får exponeringen för konsekvenser? Undersökningens syfte vill synliggöra på vilka sätt en mindre stad presenteras och konstrueras i rörliga bildmedier. Hur ser några av Säffles ungdomar på hur deras hemstad framställs och de dokusåpadeltagare som representerar staden? Jag reste till Säffle för att intervjua fyra elevinformanter som går i årskurs nio på en grundskola om hur de ser på mediernas framställning av staden. De analyserade också YouTube-klipp om staden Säffle i ett filmsamtal. Informanterna introducerades efter intervjun till att själva skapa en reflekterande dokumentation med filmkamera om sin hemstad. Deras filmmaterial presenteras i undersökningens gestaltningsdel. Diskursanalys har använts som verktyg för att synliggöra vad som gör att mediebilden av Säffle presenteras inom konventionella och stereotypa ramar. Undersökningen visar att språket och dialekten är en viktig ingrediens för vem som äger rätt att vara den trovärdiga säfflebon, snarare än visuella attribut. Framför allt TV-medierna verkar vilja få oss att med exotisk blick betrakta landsortens lustiga karaktärer, som tycks skapa bättre TV med utpräglad dialekt. Medierna förstärker dokusåpornas deltagare med hjälp av musik, redigering och utsätter dem för planerade ”lekar” i programmen. På så sätt skapar mediernas berättelser hyperreella karaktärer där gränsen mellan det verkliga och fiktiva upplöses, på samma sätt som en lögnaktig men underhållande skröna. Undersökningen visar att Säffle framställs i medierna som en stad där invånarna gör bort sig och är pinsamma, trots programmens lättsamt humoristiska underhållningsanspråk. Många av de YouTube-klipp som används i undersökningens filmsamtal stämmer väl överens med hur Säffle är, enligt informanterna. Kanske är det så att gränsen mellan ”såpans” konstruktion och dokumentärens ”verklighet” är så hårfin att den knappt är märkbar, även för kritiska säfflebor. Två filmer (Informantfilm och Säffle på YouTube) finns tillgängliga som hör till examensarbetet.

The recognition that YouTube, a free-access video sharing website, is being widely used as a source of public information has lead medical researchers to conduct studies on health-related videos. However, it appears that educational researchers have not explored YouTube videos about reading instruction, given that no published studies could be located on this topic. The current study conducted controlled searches related to the “big five” areas of early elementary reading instruction as identified by the National Reading Panel (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension). Search results were recorded and the top 40 “most relevant” videos on each topic were analyzed to determine information about viewership, format, content, and creators of the videos. Results indicated that while YouTube videos addressing all five areas of reading instruction were prolific and highly viewed, users would need to be critical, informed, and tech-savvy in order to find relevant videos from credible sources.

The recognition that YouTube, a free-access video sharing website, is being widely used as a source of public information has lead medical researchers to conduct studies on health-related videos. However, it appears that educational researchers have not explored YouTube videos about reading instruction, given that no published studies could be located on this topic. The current study conducted controlled searches related to the “big five” areas of early elementary reading instruction as identified by the National Reading Panel (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension). Search results were recorded and the top 40 “most relevant” videos on each topic were analyzed to determine information about viewership, format, content, and creators of the videos. Results indicated that while YouTube videos addressing all five areas of reading instruction were prolific and highly viewed, users would need to be critical, informed, and tech-savvy in order to find relevant videos from credible sources.

Understanding the growth pattern of content popularity has become a subject of immense interest to Internet service providers, content makers and on-line advertisers. This understanding is also important for the sustainable development of content distribution systems. As an approach to comprehend the characteristics of this growth pattern, a significant amount of research has been done in analyzing the popularity growth patterns of YouTube videos. Unfortunately, no work has been done that intensively investigates the popularity patterns of YouTube videos based on video object category. In this thesis, an in-depth analysis of the popularity pattern of YouTube videos is performed, considering the categories of videos. Metadata and request patterns were collected by employing category-specific YouTube crawlers. The request patterns were observed for a period of five months. Results confirm that the time varying popularity of di fferent YouTube categories are conspicuously diff erent, in spite of having sets of categories with very similar viewing patterns. In particular, News and Sports exhibit similar growth curves, as do Music and Film. While for some categories views at early ages can be used to predict future popularity, for some others predicting future popularity is a challenging task and require more sophisticated techniques, e.g., time-series clustering. The outcomes of these analyses are instrumental towards designing a reliable workload generator, which can be further used to evaluate diff erent caching policies for YouTube and similar sites. In this thesis, workload generators for four of the YouTube categories are developed. Performance of these workload generators suggest that a complete category-specific workload generator can be developed using time-series clustering. Patterns of users' interaction with YouTube videos are also analyzed from a dataset collected in a local network. This shows the possible ways of improving the performance of Peer-to-Peer video distribution technique along with a new video recommendation method.

Online video accounts for a large and growing portion of all Internet traffic. In order to cut bandwidth costs, it is necessary to use the available bandwidth of users to offload video downloads. Assuming that users can only keep and distribute one video at any given time, it is necessary to determine the global user cache distribution with the goal of achieving maximum peer traffic. The system model contains three different parties: viewers, idlers and servers. Viewers are those peers who are currently viewing a video. Idlers are those peers who are currently not viewing a video but are available to upload to others. Finally, servers can upload any video to any user and has infinite capacity. Every video maintains a first-in-first-out viewer queue which contains all the viewers for that video. Each viewer downloads from the peer that arrived before it, with the earliest arriving peer downloading from the server. Thus, the server must upload to one peer whenever the viewer queue is not empty. The aim of the idlers is to act as a server for a particular video, thereby eliminating all server traffic for that video. By using the popularity of videos, the number of idlers and some assumptions on the viewer arrival process, the optimal global video distribution in the user caches can be determined.

Online video accounts for a large and growing portion of all Internet traffic. In order to cut bandwidth costs, it is necessary to use the available bandwidth of users to offload video downloads. Assuming that users can only keep and distribute one video at any given time, it is necessary to determine the global user cache distribution with the goal of achieving maximum peer traffic. The system model contains three different parties: viewers, idlers and servers. Viewers are those peers who are currently viewing a video. Idlers are those peers who are currently not viewing a video but are available to upload to others. Finally, servers can upload any video to any user and has infinite capacity. Every video maintains a first-in-first-out viewer queue which contains all the viewers for that video. Each viewer downloads from the peer that arrived before it, with the earliest arriving peer downloading from the server. Thus, the server must upload to one peer whenever the viewer queue is not empty. The aim of the idlers is to act as a server for a particular video, thereby eliminating all server traffic for that video. By using the popularity of videos, the number of idlers and some assumptions on the viewer arrival process, the optimal global video distribution in the user caches can be determined.

Background: In the past decade, Social Media has been an interesting Internet phenomenon. Social Media has increased the ability for Internet users to communicate and interact with one another, allowing them to overcome boundaries that once made communication difficult and slow. It has become a big part of everyday life and has fundamentally changed the way we send and receive information. This transformation has led to businesses acknowledging the need for a change in the way they communicate with their customers. The purpose of this thesis is to understand what makes a business successful in Social Media and what are the tools that businesses may use in order to communicate with their consumer community. Method: This study is exploratory and qualitative in nature. Authors conducted a case study research and used an inductive approach in order to answer research questions. Several methods of gathering data are used in the thesis for the full analysis of the case study: interview, survey, netnography (“internet – based ethnography”). Qualitative measures are used to draw conclusions regarding Social Media metrics and consumer engagement. Conclusion: Authors state that there is no universal communication strategy suitable for every company, but the appropriate one may be build according to the company goals and means. Process of creating the communication strategy should focus on several targets which companies may identify by themselves or with the help of guides. One of those targets is identifying appropriate ways of engaging with the customers with the combination of Brand Awareness, Brand Engagement and Word of Mouth. Three main parts of the communication strategy are interconnected: Brand Awareness, Brand Engagement and Word of Mouth. Effectiveness of communication strategy (different combination of Brand Awareness, Brand Engagement and Word of Mouth) may be measured by specific metrics or statistical ones. Increasing those interconnected metrics depends on ability to follow the customer needs and the quality of content. Main B2C Social Media tools nowadays are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. This thesis found out strong relationship between those three (“Social Media Triangle” model). Company having accounts in each of those networks should use it as a whole and not as separate tools.

Internet har förändrat sättet att kommunicera, och numera erbjuds ett vidsträckt spektrum av kommunikationsalternativ att sprida information genom. Ett av alternativen utgörs av YouTube, som också visat sig utgöra ett starkt medium för företag att nyttja i marknadsföringssyfte. Frågan är emellertid om formatet passar företag som enkom opererar på renodlade industriella marknader, så kallade B2B-företag. Avsikten med studien är att undersöka detta, och därigenom bidra till förståelsen för hur B2B-marknadsföring ser ut på Internet. Undersökningen utförs genom en kartläggning av de nordiska industriföretagens närvaro på YouTube, samt via en innehållsanalys av videokommunikationen ur ett varumärkesperspektiv. Resultatet visar att YouTube-användandet är etablerat bland nordiska industriföretag och att största delen av kommunikationen är fokuserad kring produkter, följt av innehåll som beskriver verksamheten i stort. Även kommunikation med ett medarbetarperspektiv förekommer. I studien framkommer dessutom intressanta iakttagelser vilka renderar i införandet av ytterligare en innehållsrelaterad dimension. Dels återfinns en profilerande typ av kommunikation, som pekar ut företagens strävan efter att uppfattas som exklusiva, dels framkommer en kommunikation med ett normaliserande innehåll som pekar ut företagens strävan efter legitimitet. Med hjälp av fyndet framträder en mer nyanserad bild av innehållet, som vidare möjliggör att kommunikationens övergripande syfte bättre kan urskiljas. Studien lämnar ett bidrag till den teoretiska diskussionen kring varumärkeskonceptet, samtidigt som det medför förslag till framtida forskning och implikationer på ett praktiskt plan.