Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, June, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-192)

In an age where technology is advancing rapidly, young people are often the technology "natives" who understand and utilize its capabilities better than any other group in our society. Along with changing interaction models, youth are learning to "socialize" differently than any other generation has, absent face-to-face contact via digital interface. These types of connections are affecting America's political and social landscape by changing the way youth are orientated into our culture. Many adults complain about the "distractions" of texting, Facebook, and computer games. Yet, these "distractions" might also be a means to engage young people in civic life. Current research shows the power of these technologies to encourage and foster civic activity outside the traditional venues of schools and civic associations. Technology is also being explored in the classroom for its impact on student interest and performance, both academically and civically. Thus, incorporation of technologies into the classroom may be part of the answer to the declining youth participation in our democracy. This study examines the relationship between in-class use of digital media and measures of civic and political engagement. It utilizes logistic regression to interpret data from an assessment given to the 2008 graduating class at Central City High School (pseudonym). Analysis of this data shows that digital media use in the classroom has a positive effect on overall political knowledge, but leaves questions about its ability to affect students' civic capacity or civic commitment.

Posthumanism is a contested term, seen by some as leading towards a merging of human bodies and technology and by others, more critically, as a renewal of the ethical debate regarding human exceptionalism. Through a study of this critical approach and its potential relation to expanded cinema, a set of propositions is formulated. New knowledge emerges through the application of these propositions towards the expression of critical posthumanism. By looking at formal, conceptual and methodological underpinnings, existing tendencies in expanded cinema are analysed and reviewed. Firstly, aided by Timothy Morton's 'ambient poetics', environmental orientations in artist film and expanded cinema are investigated. Secondly, conceptual ideas 'beyond the human' in this field are discussed. Finally, the environmental footprint of moving image production is considered. Central to this investigation is the desire to change prevailing narratives regarding nature and environment. Instead of regarding environment as a subject outside the cultural domain, environmental immanence and shared consciousness are regarded as central cultural values within a productive posthuman debate. This theoretical approach is set in motion through a practice-based project in which organic processes are applied to generate images on discarded and outdated 35mm film. By using plants, mud and salt in conjunction with alternative photochemistry, images are 'grown' on motion picture film. Moreover, digital images are gathered using a camera extension that allows a point of view beyond the human. Background and foreground are reversed in order to reveal the prominence of natural elements in an urban setting. These images are used in a performative or spatial context that places the viewer within the work. By bringing together theory and practice a conclusion emerges, opening up further possibilities to develop and apply the newly found knowledge, not only in expanded cinema but also to other fields.

While youth media production work has increased dramatically over the past two decades, researchers still lack an adequate theorization of how institutionally-mediated youth production programs instigate democratic acts. Central to this deficiency ares hortcomings in the two dominant frameworks typically used to conceptualize the democratic potential of young people's media work. In response to this, I turn to the work of Hannah Arendt and use her conceptualization of public action as framed in relation to a "pedagogy of natality" to assess the relationship between creative youth practice and democracy. While Arendt's framework offers a compelling vision of democratic action, her model is also invaluable for mapping how production work affects adolescents' democratic experience. It focuses the analytic lens on agonistic struggles that expand the way youth register and pay heed to plurality. I demonstrate this utility through a critical ethnographic study of the Summer Visions Film Institute, an initiative designed around a series of two-week digital video production programs for youth aged 14-19. In examining the Summer Visions program, I address the experience of student video producers but focus close attention on the work and experience of peer-to-peer youth mentors in the program for the following reasons. First, peer education has a role in many youth media programs but there continues to be a dearth of research on peer mentorship in media production settings. Second, while student participants take part in Summer Visions for ten days, the mentors are involved in production work on a daily basis over a seven-week period. Most are also former students of the program and so they offer a more robust set of case studies. Using Arendt, I demonstrate how media production programs contribute in contradictory but nonetheless important ways to the formation of new publics, not because such work leads to straightforward forms of position taking about specific political projects, but because it leads to forms of thoughtfulness that challenge the lure of oblivion that haunts our lives and prevents us from seeing those who are different and yet part of our worlds. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

This thesis is intended to cover two of the most basic, important and highly applied multiple access communication techniques in modern age. It will provide an in-depth literature on the history, evolution, present and future of FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access), TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) and CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). Along with the basics of TDMA and CDMA, this research will also explain the systems implementing these techniques and an active attempt is made to elaborate their fundamentals, operation, parameters, protocols and other relevant details. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science. / Spring Semester, 2004. / April 13, 2004. / DS-CDMA, 3GPP, IS-95, cdma2000, 3G, UTRAN, UMTS, TDMA, CDMA, GSM, WCDMA, 3GPP2 / Includes bibliographical references. / Bruce Harvey, Professor Directing Thesis; Krishna Arora, Committee Member; Simon Foo, Committee Member.

This dissertation explores the blurring of labor and leisure through new technologies, specifically how women are transforming the home into a marketing site — both as sellers of lifestyles and as consumers of market produced goods and narratives. I take up three phenomena that emphasize the spontaneous allure and risk of participating in the aspirational leisure-labor that has resulted from the expansion of work. First, I examine the collective fascination with the hunt for the perfect bridal gown in Say Yes to the Dress — currently running its 17th season — and continued memorialization through the wedding photography featured on the blog Style Me Pretty. Second, I turn to several lifestyle blogs that offer designer-grade Do-It-Yourself projects on a budget and Instagram accounts that adhere to what I coin as a “minimalist, homestead aesthetic.” Third, I turn to Pinterest, the virtual “bookmarking tool” that has taken digital media by storm. Each of these sites offer unique representations of domestic spaces and tasks through public, image-based medias and depict another layer of a re-ritualization of domestic labor. I find that even as capital erodes the domestic sphere, there is a new preoccupation with recovering the home as sacred space through rituals.

Collegiate newsrooms serve two functions: to provide news and information to their campuses and to provide hands-on career preparation for student journalists. Student media professionals face having to do the latter in a way that keeps up with changing demands on entry-level employees, influenced by evolving technology and role consolidation within professional media. This study provides perspective from recent graduates with student media experience on the skills they felt most confident in upon graduating, where they gained those skills, and how they feel their student media experiences prepared them for the workplace. Using Everett Rogers’ theory of innovation diffusion to frame the issue, results show that student media professionals must recognize their roles as the change agent in shaping and pushing the opportunities to develop digital skills expected of entry-level journalists.

Meaning-making in today's digital culture, using digital media, raises the need for enhanced critical thinking and analytical skills. To be literate in digital media, one must know how to use digital tools, but one is also required to develop intellectual, social, and cultural competencies to be able to interpret messages in multimodal texts, which include written text, sound, and images. This research explored the experiences of two foreign students in higher education who participated in a six-week online workshop called "improving your digital-media skills." In the online workshop, the students completed a project-based activity in which each week they worked on one step toward finishing their projects. The weekly curriculum aimed to develop particular skill of digital-media literacy to access, analyze, evaluate, and create digital media materials. Throughout this study, the data was gathered and analyzed to answer two general questions: 1) How does a project-based activity of digital media creation and consumption impact students' critical thinking and analytical skills in the digital culture? 2) How does students' awareness of cultural diversity influence the choices they make in digital media production? Seeking answers to these two questions, the study employed qualitative case study methods including participant-observation, field notes, questionnaires, interviews, and digital media products analysis. The analysis revealed that the workshop had a great impact on the students' critical analysis and evaluation skills than on critical thinking skills. There was also a noticeable increase in the students' critical thinking skills when using digital media out of the academic settings. Both participants were affected by their experience of living abroad, and this factor influenced their thinking and teaching methods. Cultural identities appeared in their thinking and choices in some parts of the workshop. This study was an initial inquiry into the importance of acquiring cultural competencies along with critical digital-media literacy in order to accept the diversity in education and appreciate our differences.

This document investigates a set of projects I call DIY Infrastructure, in which designers are building alternative infrastructural systems. Through these projects, new actors-often non-experts-reveal and re-imagine long-established social and technological relationships which were previously off limits to them. These projects are significant to the study of design and digital media for the following reasons: First, they detail a new area of design. The designers of DIY infrastructure present an expansion of the scope of design coupled with a nuanced and almost paradoxical understanding of infrastructure as an intractable and exceedingly complex problem. At the same time, their work reveals the extensive social and political effects of existing design decisions-the far-reaching consequences of the design decisions which formed existing infrastructure. These decisions are in play across a variety of scales of time and space, affecting individual bodies as much as continental ecosystems, and shaping personal behavior as much as global commerce and trade. Second, they expand the scope of digital media studies. Digital media studies often overlook infrastructure, in spite of their interdependence. Digital media are involved in areas including the control and monitoring of the electrical system, the treatment and movement of water and sewage, and the routing of freight through intermodal shipping systems. The study of DIY infrastructure design, and infrastructure more broadly, exposes the role of digital media in shaping these overlooked aspects of modern life. There is an invisible relationship between digital media, infrastructure, and political authority, and it includes the interdependence of infrastructure and the contingent nature of our ongoing reliance on these complex sociotechnical systems. For example, Cloacina is the project of two activists developing a new municipal waste disposal system in which a decentralized networked system significantly lessens the amount of water used in processing human waste. Another project, Feral Trade Courier, employs the sort of shipping database we might associate with FedEx or UPS to facilitate an alternative shipping infrastructure, in which volunteers transport goods in an ad hoc freight network. I begin by surveying and defining DIY practice, delineating the properties of infrastructure, and determining the ways that those properties and practices can be augmented or diminished by the affordances of digital media. Next, I review the attributes that these DIY infrastructure projects share before revealing their significance through in-depth case studies. Finally, each of these case studies highlights a particular lesson from DIY infrastructure. Feral Trade Courier exposes the role of the social and the subjective in the design of logistics systems. Village Telco and Fluid Nexus show us that the relationship between established infrastructure and DIY infrastructure can be both complementary and antagonistic. Cloacina provides us an example of a way that DIY infrastructure might scale up and effect lasting sociotechnical change. Whether motivated to reveal or overcome dependence on infrastructure, address flaws in its design, or correct externalities generated by its use, new designers have begun to engage with the problem of infrastructure in new ways. This document analyzes these design projects through a series of case studies, synthesizing a new perspective on the study of infrastructure through design and on the scope of digital media research along the way.

I believe that the concept of the absurd, as described in philosophy and reflected in works of drama and literature, provides an unusual and helpful perspective from which to view the emerging field of digital media. In my opinion, absurd principles can help us understand the mixed feelings we may have when engaging with digital media: joy and frustration, play and despair, significance and nonsense. I intend to explore the concept of the absurd through a handful of authors and works, including the philosophy of Camus and the literature and drama of Pinter, Beckett, Roussel, and the Oulipo. I will use these works to analyze characteristics of absurdist works and then extend this analysis to characteristics and theory of digital media. I believe an absurdist analysis may bring a new vantage point to the study of digital media, from which we can see not only the advantages and liberation it offers but also the ever-present threat of nonsense it entails.