Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 38-04, Section: A, page: 1739. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1977.

Summary in Chinese. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--The Chinese University of Hong Kong. / Includes bibliographies.

No description available.

No description available.

Based on in-depth interviews with eighty-three people who were named in newspapers in the New York City-area and a southwestern city, this dissertation explores the phenomenon of being featured, quoted, or mentioned in a news story, from the subject's point of view. Discussions of news subjects usually begin when the journalist comes on the scene and end with subjects' assessments of accuracy in the articles in which they appear. But I find that news subjects perceive the phenomenon of "making the news" as a broader saga that begins with their involvement in an event or issue, often only later deemed newsworthy by journalists, and extends to the repercussions of the coverage in their lives, including feedback they receive from others and effects on their digital reputations. Subjects interpret their news coverage, including its accuracy, in light of the trigger events that brought them to journalists' attention in the first place and the coverage's ensuing effects. Individual chapters focus on subjects' reasons for wanting or not wanting to speak to reporters; their interactions with reporters; their reactions to the news content in which they were named; and repercussions of news appearances. I conclude that the assumption that news subjects are all victims of the press is both reductive and, often, from the subject's own point of view, inaccurate. While common wisdom suggests that people who seek news attention do so for petty or poorly considered reasons, I find that interviewees often did consider the pros and cons of speaking to the press before agreeing to do so. For most participants the attraction could be summarized as the opportunity to address or display themselves before a large audience, which they saw as rare and elusive, even in today's web 2.0 world. At the same time, most subjects understood, at least in theory, the main risks involved: that they were giving up control over their stories to reporters, but would nonetheless bear the repercussions of having had their names in the news. But the majority concluded--even after seeing the, often imperfect, resulting articles--that the benefits outweighed the risks. Subjects were often pleased with their news appearances even despite inaccuracies in the content because they found that, unless they were portrayed extremely negatively, appearing in the news conferred status, which was often not just psychologically but materially beneficial. Those subjects who were left dissatisfied with their experiences appearing in the news only rarely felt misled or outright betrayed by journalists. It was far more common that subjects felt journalists were unacceptably aggressive or exploitative. Other subjects traced their discontent not to their interactions with journalists but to the content of the resulting news stories, whether because inaccuracies derailed their objectives for appearing in the news in the first place, or because the content had stigmatizing effects. This is the ugly obverse of status conferral: subjects who were portrayed as behavioral deviants--criminals for instance--found that not only was their status not enhanced by their news appearances, their social standing and professional prospects were badly damaged. I conclude that both the status and stigma conferred by the news media are magnified by the digital publication, circulation, and searchability of news articles, which can now continue to have profound effects on subjects' lives far into the future.

There is a paradox in our understanding of the media today. Popular accounts often proclaim that mass media is dead while newspapers routinely report that new Hollywood box-office records have been smashed. In this dissertation I aim to resolve this paradox and to determine whether or not mass media is in fact in terminal decline. I propose two new concepts - the principle of cheap publicity and the mass media tendency - and I use a computer simulation to demonstrate that these provide a parsimonious explanation of the paradoxical structure of today's dominant media. This leads me to the conclusion that mass media is not in terminal decline; rather, there has been a shift in the social locus of mass media. Throughout most of the American 20th century, massification played a central role in the guiding logic of media firms. Beginning in the 1970s though, these firms began adopting strategies of audience segmentation. In the decades since this rupture mass media has lived on as the emergent outcome of audience behavior rather than as an innate characteristic of media technologies or institutions. I discuss the implications of this finding for the structure of the contemporary American public sphere and for the experience of publicity today.

No description available.

The study explores reasons for certain events trending on Sina Weibo - the most popular Chinese micro-blogging site - and cultural meanings of consumption in trending topics. Conceptually, it indicates that social media practice is more than a technical product, but it is also a cultural phenomenon that conveys cultural meanings. Multiple data were collected through a pilot study, a two-month online observation focusing on three trending topics and 34 in-depth face-to-face interviews. This e-ethnography study finds that Weibo is a Chinese cultural product in the global trend of high technology, mobile Internet and social networking. Also, it roots in the overall political and economic environment of Chinese media industry. Freedom of choices and equality in market are two doxa found in this field. The Weibo rituals present a negotiation of prosumers' political, economic and cultural identities. Neo-liberal elites become crucial agents lead in this field. The Weibo field demonstrates the social media relying on money line to push the Party line. In general, this dissertation argues a cultural paradigm of studying social media phenomena. It demonstrates how media phenomena are culturally constructed for society members to make meanings of their social lives. It goes beyond the limitation of a normative paradigm that makes judgments about whether media are contributing to--or harming--democracy. Instead, it provides a conceptual foundation to: begin to understand media phenomena by placing them within their original social context instead of a different context; to conclude the interpretation of the phenomena by integrating them with the bigger conceptual picture; and to eventually enable theoretical conclusions which will be transferable to other contexts.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 40-06, Section: A, page: 2981. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1979.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 36-06, Section: A, page: 3215. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1975.