Diploma thesis The transformation of communication models within cyberspace deals with the topic of communication on five current social network sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram). First part of the thesis focuses on theoretical background of traditional communication models. Selected models include: Shannon and Weaver Communication Model, Cultural and Ritual Model, Jakobson's Model, Publicity Model and communication model created by Vilem Flusser and Palo Alto School. Networked communication has been undergoing fast development which has caused that some communication models became obsolete. Thus it is necessary to define new communication features on social network sites, since these changes in conjunction with technology development and needs of contemporary society. User activity, cycle and egocentric communication processes, up-to-date and spontaneous content are the characteristic features of current communication on social network sites.

Around 2010, a group of online content creators, commonly referred to as "Youtubers" or "BookTubers," began to emerge on YouTube.com. This community's content revolves around many topics under the realm of literature including book discussions, reviews, genre discussions, and many more. While the group started off small, it has grown significantly over the past decade; some of the most prominent creators have several hundred thousand subscribers. In the ten years since its emergence, the creators and content have transformed, where many in the beginning made video discussions just for fun, and now many of them have grown their channel into a financially successful career and have formed partnerships with publishing companies. Specifically within the BookTube community, young adult author John Green has revolutionized the platform and seen unprecedented amount of success. His novels along with their film and TV adaptations have inspired thousands of Booktube reviews and discussions, and John and his brother Hank Green have gained a massive following on YouTube. This essay examines BookTube as a collaborative community, a marketing platform, and a space for reception theory analysis by examining readers' discussions of John Green's Looking for Alaska. BookTube and other online communities are becoming increasingly important in people's lives, and analyzing these platforms is essential to understanding future generations.

This dissertation studies economic issues in the digital economy with a specific focus on the economic aspects of how firms acquire and use consumer data. Chapter 1 empirically studies the drivers of digital attention in the space of social media applications. In order to do so I conduct an experiment where I comprehensively monitor how participants spend their time on digital services and use parental control software to shut off access to either their Instagram or YouTube. I characterize how participants substitute their time during and after the restrictions. I provide an interpretation of the substitution during the restriction period that allows me to conclude that relevant market definitions may be broader than those currently considered by regulatory authorities, but that the substantial diversion towards non-digital activities indicates significant market power from the perspective of consumers for Instagram and YouTube. I then use the results on substitution after the restriction period to motivate a discrete choice model of time usage with inertia and, using the estimates from this model, conduct merger assessments between social media applications. I find that the inertia channel is important for justifying blocking mergers, which I use to argue that currently debated policies aimed at curbing digital addiction are important not only just in their own right but also from an antitrust perspective and, in particular, as a potential policy tool for promoting competition in these markets. More broadly, my paper highlights the utility of product unavailability experiments for demand and merger analysis of digital goods. I thank Maayan Malter for working together with me on collecting the data for this paper. Chapter 2 then studies the next step in consumer data collection process – the extent to which a firm can collect a consumer’s data depends on privacy preferences and the set of available privacy tools. This chapter studies the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation on the ability of a data-intensive intermediary to collect and use consumer data. We find that the opt-in requirement of GDPR resulted in 12.5% drop in the intermediary-observed consumers, but the remaining consumers are trackable for a longer period of time. These findings are consistent with privacy-conscious consumers substituting away from less efficient privacy protection (e.g, cookie deletion) to explicit opt out—a process that would make opt-in consumers more predictable. Consistent with this hypothesis, the average value of the remaining consumers to advertisers has increased, offsetting some of the losses from consumer opt-outs. This chapter is jointly authored with Yeon-Koo Che and Tobias Salz. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 make up the third portion of the dissertation that studies one of the most prominent uses of consumer data in the digital economy – recommendation systems. This chapter is a combination of several papers studying the economic impact of these systems. The first paper is a joint paper with Duarte Gonçalves which studies a model of strategic interaction between producers and a monopolist platform that employs a recommendation system. We characterize the consumer welfare implications of the platform’s entry into the production market. The platform’s entry induces the platform to bias recommendations to steer consumers towards its own goods, which leads to equilibrium investment adjustments by the producers and lower consumer welfare. Further, we find that a policy separating recommendation and production is not always welfare improving. Our results highlight the ability of integrated recommender systems to foreclose competition on online platforms. The second paper turns towards understanding how such systems impact consumer choices and is joint with Duarte Gonçalves and Shan Sikdar. In this paper we study a model of user decision-making in the context of recommender systems via numerical simulation. Our model provides an explanation for the findings of Nguyen et. al (2014), where, in environments where recommender systems are typically deployed, users consume increasingly similar items over time even without recommendation. We find that recommendation alleviates these natural filter-bubble effects, but that it also leads to an increase in homogeneity across users, resulting in a trade-off between homogenizing across-user consumption and diversifying within-user consumption. Finally, we discuss how our model highlights the importance of collecting data on user beliefs and their evolution over time both to design better recommendations and to further understand their impact.

Social platforms are becoming an increasingly larger part of everyday life, with many people spending their days sharing information about their lives online. Youtube is a platform based on individual users “broadcasting themselves”, which often means sharing a lot of personal information. This can lead to a sense of closeness, and some viewers develop one-sided relationships through the screen. This study aims to give insight in these one-sided relationships, known as parasocial relationships. Interviews were conducted to get the perspective of Youtube fans as to what motivates them to start, continue and stop watching Youtubers. Using a qualitative research method we have been able to get a deeper understanding of possible patterns concerning the lifecycle of these relationships, such as how and why they begin, continue and end. As earlier research implies we found that parasocial relationships are created and treated in a similar way mutual relationships are. The finding of this study suggest that parasocial attachment is not only normal and common, but that they can provide a kind of social outlet for those who experience them. This study can hopefully be used to understand broader trends in media consumption online.

This study aims to investigate how professional fitness trainers use four different social platforms; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube professionally and what type of content they create. It also explores the specific aspects of each social platform in terms of features or general perception that affect how professional fitness trainers experience them and use them in their professional practice. The qualitative study revealed that professional fitness trainers use all social platforms professionally; to build and sustain their social media community, to educate themselves with fitness knowledge, to make social connections and to advertise themselves as expert fitness trainers. The qualitative study also revealed the unique features of each social platform and how professional fitness trainers engage with same activities differently from one platform to another. The findings support the use of social platforms for fitness purpose professionally and can also inform the design of technology that uses social media to help people stay fit and share fitness information.

As media organisations dedicate less money and resources to journalism covering issuesrelating to development and social change, NGO’s are becoming increasingly visible as newscreators, funders and enablers. NGOs and media organisations are now frequentlycollaborating and even making partnerships to produce news content, which is having wide-ranging effects on the field of journalism.These phenomena coincide with the wide diversification of the news media landscape overthe past 2 decades, with a generation of ‘new media’ organisations rising up to challengethe dominance of legacy media entities, and bringing with them new practices andunderstandings of journalistic values.Where previous research has centred on the ‘blurring of roles’ between traditionalmainstream media outlets and NGOs, this thesis explores partnerships between NGOs and‘new media’ organisations which are not necessarily grounded upon the core practices ofprofessional journalism, using a case study of a recent ‘content partnership’ between the UShuman rights NGO Human Rights Watch, and the viral content website Upworthy.Given the vertiginous rise of digital media organisations over the past two decades, suchpartnerships could have a significant impact on how both NGOs communicate, and howmedia entities interact with NGOs, raising questions over journalistic standards, the powerdynamics between NGOs and the media, and even the viability of ‘objective’ news coveragein the future.To interrogate these issues, this thesis studies articles and videos produced as part of thepartnership between Human Rights Watch and Upworthy through statistical and textualanalyses, taking primary theoretical inspiration from Kate Wright’s “Moral Economies:Interrogating the Interactions of NGOs, Journalists and Freelancers”, (2016) and MatthewPowers’ Beyond Boon or Bane; Using normative theories to evaluate the newsmakingefforts of NGOs (2017).The findings of this study could be of use to NGO practitioners and journalists who areconsidering engaging in an NGO-media partnership, as well as to journalism, media anddevelopment researchers.

This study aims to analyze the effect of an improvised user-generated health awareness campaign which was based on a personal narrative and first-hand experience with the B12 deficiency symptoms in babies and toddlers. The campaign was conducted in 2015 with a follow-up video in 2016 and shared through social media outlets, informing about the topic and empowering individuals to take responsibility for their own or their child’s health by providing information that could serve as a guideline for early diagnosis and intervention and by presenting an outlook of how people with similar issues manage the condition.The impact of the campaign is being qualitatively and quantitatively accessed by interviews with medical professionals and respectively survey data from a national survey and statistics from the YouTube console. In consideration has been taken the trust the respondents have in the medical service and the usual access to health information both online and offline The quantitative data were collected using a national online survey in which 1185 individuals took part. It aimed to additionally identify the general public attitude towards medical service in and the awareness about the vitamin B12. Four people participated in the interviews, divided into two groups - parents of children, who had symptoms similar to those, shown in the videos; and health practitioners who have seen the videos and comment on its qualities as a self-diagnosing material as well as the effect that attention to the issue created on their medical practices. The results confirmed that the personal narrative of a campaign could help to create identification and thus be more persuasive and with further increased sharing potential of the message through social media. The concrete campaign reached cumulatively over 167.000 people through YouTube, which is around 2.4% of the population of Bulgaria and possibly creating a lasting impact on the public attitude towards vitamin/mineral and other deficiencies. We found out that social media and YouTube could serve as an impactful medium for disseminating health-related information online when accurate and persuasive information is being used. When addressing a wide audience with little or no prior knowledge of the subject the personal narrative or testimonial could create more impact than a neutral fact-providing material.

This thesis looks into a current trend within the Christian community online, namely Christian YouTube channels. The thesis revolves around the channel Coffee and Bible Time, a channel run by three women, and asks two main researh questions: 1. Which theological arguments or values are expressed in Coffee and Bible Time regarding God, the Bible, and view of women, and how does the channel argue for these? and 2. What criticism can be aimed at the channel from a queer-feminist theological perspective? The theory and perspective used to research these questions is a queer-feminist theology, mainly inspired by theologians Linn Marie Tonstad and Susannah Cornwall. For this thesis, an analysis of ideas is used as the method for discovering the channel's views. Regarding the result, in sum, the channel has a high regard of the Bible as the highest authority in life, which impacts their view of God and of women. God is also the one with power in relation to human beings, while humans are viewed as sinful and weak. Women are usually talked about in relation to men, in future marital relationships.  Coffee and Bible Time is an interesting example of women who have authority online, and who are theologically serious. Their theological background is Evangelical Christianity, which usually has a conservative view regarding same-sex relationships. The queer-feminist theological critique looks at the channel's upholding of gender binaries, how the women talk (or do not talk) about same-sex relationships, alternative interpretations of the Bible, and the (sometimes harmful) power of sexuality.

The aim of this thesis is to provide insight into how YouTube audiences perceive the professionalization of vlog production styles and what happens to the parasocial relationship between viewer and vlogger, especially in relation to authenticity, in relation to this. This is done by a thematic analysis of comments on Valeria Lipovetsky’s YouTube video “We Need To Talk”, which serves as a case study. The analysis is done in background to theories of professionalization of influencers, parasocial relationships and authenticity. The results show that there is a tension between the perceived authenticity of the vlogger and the professionalization of vlog production style that is affecting the parasocial relationship between viewer and vlogger negatively. The distinguished themes point to vlogs filmed by a camera team being perceived to resemble reality television which is making the viewers feel disconnected with the vlogger. It is revealed that the audience prefers vlogs where the vlogger is holding the camera themselves, asthat is perceived as more personal and authentic.

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