Donald Trump’s tweets have become prevalent in today’s society. Because college students use social media so often, it would be incumbent for the researcher to examine the impact Donald Trump’s tweets might have on these young adults’, civic engagement and how the tweets may be affecting his perceived credibility and expertise. The researcher administered a questionnaire to 350 college students from a private medium sized west coast university using various modified scales examining credibility, expertise and civic engagement. Civic engagement was measured using an adapted version of several civic engagement instruments. The researcher used a correlation analysis to offer answers for the proposed research questions. It was found that Donald Trump’s tweets have a significant positive impact on the way college students perceive him to be credible while also effecting their perception of his level of expertise. The tweets did not indicate a correlation to civic engagement, but further research concluded that specific tweets have the ability to have a significant negative correlation on civic attitudes and behaviors. The correlation analysis also found that there was a significant negative correlation between which form of media students use the most and their civic engagement. A regression analysis was performed to see if the tweets had predicting power on college student perception of his credibility and expertise. The tweets demonstrated predicting power. A regression analysis was done to see if the tweets had predicting power on college student civic engagement; the regression results showed no significant predicting power between the two. These results suggest that tweets from a United States President have a significant influence on how he is perceived to be credible, the perception of his level of expertise and how his tweets may be affecting civic engagement on college campuses.

Background: Podcasts are an emerging medium with a steadily growing audience, which is particularly popular among younger generations. This makes them a promising advertising tool that companies can use to reach potential target groups. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how to successfully reach the audience through podcast advertising. Specifically, the listener’s perception of the advertisement and the design of the advertisement are relevant factors. The current market situation with its strong competition calls for special measures, such as celebrity endorsements. People often imitate celebrities and rely on their recommendations. This study applies the concept of celebrity endorsement to podcast advertising as a relationship develops between the listener and the podcast hosts. The host becomes a trusted and valued person to their audience during podcast consumption, which can have a significant impact on the listenership. Purpose: Only a limited number of prior studies did research on the podcast listener’s perception of podcast advertising. Additionally, there is a lack of understanding about the specific design elements of podcast advertising that lead to positive outcomes. Furthermore, there is a gap in academic literature when it comes to exploring the host-listener relationship within the context of podcast advertising. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to investigate how individuals perceive podcast advertising, identify the key design elements that contribute to positive podcast advertising effects, and comprehend the role and influence of podcast hosts in podcast advertising. Method: To achieve this purpose, qualitative research methods are employed. Individual interviews and a focus group are conducted with 20 participants who belong to the younger generations, namely Generation Y and Generation Z, and listen to podcasts at least once a week. Thematic analysis is used to structure the data, which involves coding, analyzing, and interpreting the data. Conclusion: The study concludes with the conceptual framework “Podcast Advertising Evoking Positive Effect”, which is based on the concept of celebrity endorsement, specifically the meaning transfer model. This framework highlights the various aspects that lead to positive advertising effects. These include the attributes of podcast hosts as well as the perceived relationship between the audience and the podcast host. Furthermore, the framework clarifies listeners advertising demands and how commercial messages within podcasts should be presented to achieve favorable advertising outcomes such as a positive change in attitude, purchasing behavior, brand recall, and acceptance of the advertisement.

“Women’s Celebrity in Canada: Contexts and Memoirs, 1908-2011” is equal parts cultural history and literary analysis. It examines the cultural contexts and conditions that shaped the emergence and development of modern celebrity in English Canada, focusing in particular on the role of mass media and bureaucratic policy in the production, dissemination, and consumption of celebrity by Canadians across the twentieth century. Reading celebrity as a function or mode of being and moving in the public sphere, this project historicizes women’s access to that sphere: it examines how ideological constructions of gender and fame have shaped how women in Canada have been able to access and use the tools and technologies of celebrity, and it argues that these conditions have had an impact on how women represent themselves in public life-writing texts. These celebrity autobiographies, this project demonstrates, not only narrate gendered experiences of celebrity but, in their rhetorical strategies and publication conditions, reveal the cultural climate of being and speaking as a famous woman at different historical junctures. In tracing the trends, tactics, and experiments in self-representation over the century, this project is able to uncover and examine the ideological and cultural pressures exerted on public women to perform particular identities and how these women attempted to manage, contest, and negotiate these conditions. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / "Women's Celebrity in Canada: Contexts and Memoirs, 1908-2011" examines the autobiographies produced by famous Canadian women across the twentieth century. It contextualizes the production of these texts by documenting the conditions under which women cultivated fame in Canada. The autobiographies of these women are read as tools for managing celebrity and their form and content is examined for what they can tell us about the condition of being and speaking as a famous woman at different historical junctures.

Byron's reception in one of the nineteenth century's largest and most culturally significant post-colonial outposts, Brazil, has been virtually ignored in English studies. The implications of Lord Byron's influence in Brazil are extensive since he was overwhelmingly popular among poets but also subversive to the nationalistic aims of Brazilian Romanticism. Nearly all of the well known Brazilian Romantics were not only influenced by him, but translated him. Their notion of what it meant to be "Byronic," however, differed from ideas held in Europe. The Brazilian Byronic hero was more extreme, macabre, and sentimental, lonelier, darker, and deadlier. Byron had various cult followings in Brazil that established rites and ceremonies and performed Manfred-like rituals. Brazilian Romantic culture had such a marked effect on translations of Byron's work and perceptions of the poet that it provides an exciting context for considering the interplay of social energies between text, author, and culture. This thesis has two primary aims. First, it follows the evolution of Byron's influence in Brazil: starting with its European beginnings, tracing the arrival of Byron's image in Brazil, exploring the explosion of his influence evidenced in Brazilian literature, and considering the cultural obsession that reproduced his image ritualistically in the lives of Brazilian Romantics. Second, the chapters loosely map out several aspects of his celebrity image, or several ways of viewing Byron, including Byron as the rogue debauchee; Byron as the cosmopolitan; Byron as the eccentric, disillusioned poet; and Byron as the satanic Romantic. For Brazil, and much of Europe too, Lord Byron was the embodiment of Romanticism. The way Brazilian Romantics saw Byron, therefore, reflected what they thought English Romanticism to be. Especially in a contemporary critical climate that continues to respond to Jerome McGann's The Romantic Ideology, a Brazilian notion of English Romanticism, which turns out to be so polar to the contemporary English idea of its own just-past Romantic era, further disrupts the idea of stable periodization and a universally codified Romantic movement.

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The purpose of this essay is to investigate whether the audience's views on ethics and moralitytend to change after watching the TV program "Förrädarna" (The Traitors). By analyzing and exploring this program, we aim to understand how viewers perceive the content. The essay examines how this entertainment program might possibly influence an individual's perception of ethical and moral issues, using qualitative methods. By employing the qualitative method off focus groups, this study explores how the audience experiences the program and how their ethics and morals have changed. The participants in the focus groups were selected from students aged 20-25. The results subsequently showed that despite the actions of the celebrities in the program, the audience's fundamental ethical and moral values did not change. The focus group discussions reveal that the audience was contradictory in their opinions about which actions were ethical and moral. They believed it is morally right to follow the rules of the game, which may involve lying, but still perceived the celebrities actions as immoral when they lied, creating a contradictory statement.

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Video games are often thought of as a type of social media, yet social media are not often thought of as a type of video game. Due to the fact that both are media that arguably play a large role in identity formation and perception of reality, this paper argues that social media should be looked at as providing a type of video game experience. While the study is not limited in its scope to teens, they play an important role. This paper explores identity as being social and interactive and also affected by media. The relationship between representation and reality is also explored and applied to the current celebrity culture. Social media and video games are explored through their similarities, including their goals of becoming a hero/celebrity, exemplified in social media through users acting like their own paparazzi. A systematic analysis is conducted to compare research regarding identity and reality in social media and video games since 2005. While similar themes emerged, the way that these themes are studied within video games and social media differ. These gaps in research lead me to four new research area suggestions for social media: mirrors, stereotypes, immersion and definitions. Through these new research areas, I propose five possible future studies. / Mass Media and Communication