Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 89-96). / This thesis explores a mode of collective meaning making at the intersection of humor, insult, and jest that increasingly occupies social media conversations, online comment sections, and Internet writing far and wide: for lack of a better word, snark. Though akin to the similarly maligned practices of irony and sarcasm, snark is more unwieldy and less refined. To accuse others of snark is to question their intentions, their sincerity, even the validity of their claims. Snark is often seen as destructive. Per the subtitle of critic David Denby's book on the matter, "it's mean, it's personal, and it's ruining our conversations."' In the following pages, I investigate the role of snark in online discourse and attempt to salvage it from its bad reputation. I define and historicize snark as a humor- and insult-based social practice rooted in oral rather than written traditions. I argue that snark can adopt a pro-social role in online environments whose architecture tends to reward vapid or deceptive content (which, per former Gawker writer Tom Scocca, I call smarm and situate within Harry Frankfurt's concept of bullshit). After a discussion of the differences between politeness and civility, I define pro-social snark as impolite yet civil. Lastly, I analyze snark's affective qualities, and specifically its close relationship with paranoia. Utilizing Eve Sedgwick's notions of paranoid and reparative reading, I advocate for a reparative practice of snark that gives back to the culture it ridicules. / by George Tsiveriotis. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 88-92). / Agency is often taken as a given in branching-path stories because they, almost by definition, allow for enhanced user involvement. But this truism hasn't changed as the structure of the worlds that these branching texts exist within have. Transmedia, branching-path texts represent an intersection of both linear media and forking ones and thus, an interesting case study of how player agency can be expanded and re-categorized in these larger universe. By looking at where and how agency is located in three different case studies, we can get a better sense of how agency is changing-and staying the same-in these multi-platform, player-driven worlds. The first chapter in this thesis looks at the intersection of worldbuilding and transmedia and where player agency can hope to fit between these traditions. The second focuses on the Game of Thrones universe, looking to understand the effects that adding the branching-path Telltale game had on this universe. The third chapter looks to Mass Effect and all its related media in an effort to understand how an undefined hero ties the whole universe together. The fourth chapter focuses on Quantum Break, and its groundbreaking, wholly integrated, transmedia structure. The final chapter discusses steps creators in the future can take to expand player agency. By looking at these worlds through an increased understanding of where the player fits in, it becomes clearer how these universes can be expanded in the future while still giving the player the most autonomy over their story. / by Evan Higgins. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 116-122). / Location-based media have always played a key role in defining both spaces and publics. Due to the proliferation of sophisticated locative technologies, location-based media are increasingly ubiquitous in areas including art, gaming, urban planning, marketing, and tourism. While location-based approaches have enormous potential, however, rapid technological change and widely dispersed communities of practice have limited critical discourse. This thesis explores how we can better theorize and create innovative and compelling location-based media. I situate location-based media within the broad category of spatial narrative, identifying key concepts and approaches through historical and contemporary examples. In showing that location-based media have always been a form of augmenting our physical environments, I argue that augmented reality as a concept is far broader than current industry discourse indicates, and suggest location-based media as a lens through which to rethink AR's affordances and potentials. In keeping with an emphasis on new forms of storytelling, I propose a taxonomy for location-based media that distinguishes three different levels of participation and user agency: Consumption, Interaction, and Participation. Participatory works that allow users to shape the narrative-becoming deeply invested as co-creators--challenge traditional notions of authorship, consumption, linearity, and temporality. They embrace the affordances of networked locative technologies, provide a platform for a multitude of voices, and draw on the profound power of both community and place. Three case studies-Round-ware, Yellow Arrow, and the 96 Acres Project-highlight the affordances and challenges of participatory location-based approaches. Throughout this thesis, I endeavor to show that participatory location-based media offer vast creative, social, and political potential. Drawing on the rich tradition of spatial narrative, as well as the affordances of locative technologies, they invite us to reexamine our conceptions of narrative, documentary, and space itself. / by Sue Ding. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 114-125). / This thesis seeks to understand how different groups of people in Puerto Rico and the diaspora deploy internet memes for political critique. In this work, I analyze three case studies focused on how Puerto Rican groups and individuals use internet memes to express political discontent, make calls to action, engage in catharsis, and seek political change. The cases explore critical political meme production under varying circumstances on the island. The first case study, La Junta de Control Fiscal, is a group that uses Facebook to satirize the fiscal control board that was imposed on the island by the US Congress; they do this by making use of satirical socialist realist meme aesthetics, and visual vocabulary. The second case study, Puerto Rican vaporwave, explores the local deployment of an ironic, anti-capitalist aesthetic form of meme production and its transformation into a method of critique of colonialism and recovery of national identity. The third case study, Huracan Maria memes, focuses on how people use internet memes with varying aesthetics to express their frustrations and anger towards federal and state governmental disaster response before, during, and after the 2017 hurricane event. In each case, I gathered an archive of relevant internet memes, conducted content analysis, and interviewed key meme culture participants to get insight into the development process.Together, these case studies showcase the ways that Puerto Rican people make use of memes to tackle issues like climate change, colonialism, disaster response, and austerity measures. This thesis also develops new insights into the collective meme production process. In particular, the work demonstrates that participation within internet meme culture takes different forms. Meme culture participants perform four different types of engagement: original creation, remixing, curation and sharing. Furthermore, this work proves that internet meme production should be seen as a collective storytelling process where the distinct participation patterns shown above play a major role in expressing catharsis, ideas, sensations, and feelings. I conclude with thoughts about how to extend the communicative capabilities of political memes through new media technologies, and suggest new avenues for meme research. / by Aziria D. Rodríguez. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, 2018. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 101-113). / Digital representations of food (food texts) have become mainstream content on social media sites and digital streaming sites. While they accomplish some similar goals to their analog counterparts (e.g. in-print cookbooks), like communicating information about the food's preparation or what its consumption would be like, the surplus of food texts has been ushered in by a transformation of media infrastructure such as the internet, cameras on cheap mobile phones, and digital social network platforms. The creators of the bulk of food texts have shifted from authority figures in the field to anyone who dines out and goes online. With this shift in media ownership comes a change in status -- from expert to everyone. As a result, the dynamics of food discourse has also changed. I use interviews and ethnographies with fine dining chefs, food industry professionals, and media makers to illustrate these convergences and divergences in the creation and consumption of food texts today. TL;DR: While the underlying purpose of the construction and consumption of food texts remain the same from analog to digital form, the authority of food culture and its complimentary narrative control has shifted as a result of the convergence of food texts and digital media affordances. / by Victoria (Vicky) Jean Zeamer. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, 2018. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 85-86). / The popular understanding of moderation online is that moderation is inherently reactive, where moderators see and then react to content generated by users, typically by removing it; in order to understand the work already being performed by moderators, we need to expand our understanding of what that work entails. Drawing upon interviews, participant observation, and my own experiences as a volunteer community moderator on Reddit, I propose that a significant portion of work performed by volunteer moderators is social and communicative in nature. Even the chosen case studies of large-scale esports events on Twitch, where the most visible and intense tasks given to volunteer moderators consists of reacting and removing user-generated chat messages, exposes faults in the reactive model of moderation. A better appreciation of the full scope of moderation work will be vital in guiding future research, design, and development efforts in this field. / by Claudia Lo. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 103-109). / When we think of pleasures to be found in video games, we often talk about power, control, agency, and fun. But to center these pleasures is to privilege certain stories, players, actions and possibility spaces. This thesis uses the framework of intimacy to closely examine three games for their capacity to create pleasure in vulnerability, the loss of control, dependence on others, and precarity. Drawing from Deleuzian affect theory and feminist, queer and posthuman theorists, I read for intimate affects in the formal, aesthetic, proprioceptive and structural elements of Overwatch, The Last Guardian and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Ultimately, I argue two points: that video games have a unique capacity to generate intimate affects, and that my games of choice push us to rethink our assumptions about what constitutes intimacy more broadly. / by Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Thesis: S.B. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, 2018 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 56-61). / Four undergraduate students died by suicide during my enrollment at MIT between 2013 and 2017. I document the ways in which suicide becomes more than the event of death itself, embedding itself back into everyday life. Suicide becomes what I describe as ambient and infrastructural, articulated through community traditions, announcement emails, Facebook posts, publicity posters, awareness flags, and all the other structures and artifacts of daily life in the MIT community. Drawing on field observations with the student-run texting help line Lean On Me, as well as interviews of students and administrators working in campus mental health organizations, I then explore how mental health organizations approach their work within an environment where suicide is ambient and infrastructural. / by Allan Ko. / S.B. in Comparative Media Studies / S.B. in Comparative Media Studies Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-115). / Our interactions with cities are increasingly mediated through a complex array of technologies, including location-aware mobile devices and a vast number of online platforms. However, we often also use these tools to create content about the places that we live in and travel through. My thesis examines what I define as "place-based media," that is, user-generated content produced about place. This content - photos of street life, overheard quotes, and local reviews, for example - emerges out of daily routines, and has a reciprocal relationship with the urban environment, both contributing to, as well as reflecting the life of the city. In this thesis, I aim to explore the relationship between the technologies and practices involved in the production of place-based media. In my approach, I situate place-based media within relevant historical precedents, such as street photography. In addition, I examine content produced about a single neighborhood, Central Square, Cambridge, in order to better understand the social and affective qualities of content that is created in dialogue with place. Ultimately, this project examines the production of place-based media as an everyday urban practice, with an eye towards the potential implications these media could have for contemporary cities and city neighborhoods. / by Amar K. Boghani. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Vita. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 137-145). / This thesis examines the history, development, theory, and practice of distributed denial of service actions as a tactic of political activism. DDOS actions have been used in online political activism since the early 1990s, though the tactic has recently attracted significant public attention with the actions of Anonymous and Operation Payback in December 2010. Guiding this work is the overarching question of how civil disobedience and disruptive activism can be practiced in the current online space. The internet acts as a vital arena of communication, self expression, and interpersonal organizing. When there is a message to convey, words to get out, people to organize, many will turn to the internet as the zone of that activity. Online, people sign petitions, investigate stories and rumors, amplify links and videos, donate money, and show their support for causes in a variety of ways. But as familiar and widely accepted activist tools-petitions, fundraisers, mass letter-writing, call-in campaigns and others-find equivalent practices in the online space, is there also room for the tactics of disruption and civil disobedience that are equally familiar from the realm of street marches, occupations, and sit-ins? This thesis grounds activist DDOS historically, focusing on early deployments of the tactic as well as modern instances to trace its development over time, both in theory and in practice. Through that examination, as well as tool design and development, participant identity, and state and corporate responses, this thesis presents an account of the development and current state of activist DDOS actions. It ends by presenting an analytical framework for the analysis of activist DDOS actions. / by Molly Sauter. / S.M.