In this thesis I survey the terrain of digital interactions between youth, corporations and pop culture texts in order to complicate current visions of participatory culture. I argue that popular images of the empowered young users of a new digital democracy need to be complicated by asking questions about the politics of digital participation: about whose voices are heard, about where attention is centred, about how interactivity is defined, about who is rewarded for creative labour. The opening chapter introduces key issues within a critical examination of digital participation, including commodification, user agency and intellectual property. It also outlines my methodologies and my choice of research site – namely internet television, and the proliferation of corporate and youth practices around digitized television texts. The next two chapters provide case studies that identify and evaluate not only the interactions between corporate producers and young users, but also the power relations between the two. First, I analyze young women‘s video remixes of the program Gossip Girl. I consider the remixes as gendered texts that contribute new aesthetics and concerns, even as they reproduce dominant interpretations of contemporary girlhood. I also consider the distribution of the videos on YouTube, noting how their circulation simultaneously challenges corporate ownership and creates profit and promotion for those same corporate owners. Next, I examine interactions around the The Colbert Report. Focusing on the program‘s official discussion boards, I demonstrate how young fans have taken up Stephen Colbert‘s invitation to join in the parody by creating a vibrant, dialogic and rowdy community that has frequently come into conflict with Comedy Central producers. In their attempts to address these conflicts and create alternative spaces of their own, these young people gesture towards larger tensions over the control of public digital dialogue. The final chapter draws on my research and experience as a teacher to consider how these case studies might help us to frame our own educational projects. I call for a digital literacy curriculum that provides both a place for students to reflect on their daily activities within mediated environments and the opportunity to experiment with digital production.

La collaboration et le contenu généré par les usagers, aussi appelé « Web 2. 0 », sont des phénomènes nouveaux, qui bâtissent sur l'ouverture et le foisonnement d'Internet. Les environnements numériques qui emploient ces moyens mettent à contribution la communauté qui gravite autour d'une présence virtuelle afin d'en enrichir l’expérience. Suivant une approche constructiviste, nous explorons commnent la collaboration peut servir les usagers d'une banque de donnée de jugements en accès libre par Internet, comme le site de l'Institut canadien d'information juridique (www.CanLIT.org). La collaboration s'articule grâce à un gabarit d'analyse que nous nommons «Cadre de diffusion de la collaboration». Il comporte deux classes d'objets, les usagers et les documents, qui interagissent selon quatre relations : les liens documentaires, les échanges entre usagers, l'écriture (de l'usager vers le document) et la consommation (du document vers l'usager). Le Cadre de diffusion de la collaboration met en lumière les modalités de la collaboration comme mécanisme de création de contenu dans un contexte numérique, au profit d'une classe de documents. Suite à une analyse les modalités de la jurisprudence comme système documentaire et d'un exposé illustratif des besoins des usagers de la société civile, le Cadre de diffusion de la collaboration est employé pour explorer les mécanismes à retenir pour enrichir le contenu d'un système diffusant des jugements par Internet. / User generated content and collaboration, also called « Web 2.0 », offer new possibilities in the context of a thriving and open Internet. Digital environments that employ these production mecanisms allow user communities to enrich a virtual space. Using a constructivist approach, we explore how collaboration can serve the users of an open access database of court rulings, namely the Canadian Legal Information Institute's website (www.CanLU.org). Collaboration is set within a framework that we name the « Collaboration Framework ». There are two classes of objects, users and documents, that interact following four relationships: links between documents, exchanges between users, writing (from users to documents) and consumption (from documents to users). In turn, we can better understand how collaboration functions, given a specific class of documents. Following an analysis of court rulings as a system of documents and an illustration of user needs in civil society, the Collaboration Framework is applied to an open access database of court rulings in order to determine how users can enrich the system's content.

This thesis seeks to investigate the role that blogs play in contemporary South African journalism through examining six blogs in the South African blogosphere and their content choices. This thesis draws on four key theoretical frameworks around which the research questions have been formulated: New Media and Journalism, Journalistic Blogging, Audiences and the Public Sphere. There are three key research questions: 1. What is the role played by blogging in contemporary South African journalism? 2. To what extent has the blogosphere become a Public Sphere? 3. How have blogs influenced/changed/impacted on the style and content of South African journalism? The qualitative data collected through blog observation, interviews with blog owner/ editors and concluded focus group discussions with blog readers, is designed to help reveal the role blogs and bloggers play in contemporary South African journalism, and through discussions with the audience and monitoring conversations online, help explore the possibilities of a public sphere. The conclusion of this thesis is that blogs do play a role in contemporary South African journalism and can serve as an effective public sphere. Defining what it means to be a journalist and recognising the differences between blogger and journalist is an issue that needs to be effectively understood before a conclusive agreement is to be reached in the blogger/journalist debate. However, for now the relationship between South African news agents and South African bloggers is promising. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.

The Internet has been lauded as an open and free platform from which one is able to engage with, and share large amounts of information (Stallman, 1997). As one witnesses the shift from analogue media to digitalism, so too is it possible to note a change in cultural practices of media consumers. Users of the media can now be viewed as “prosumers”, producing as well as consuming media products (Marshall, 2004). Digital media users have been given the ability to engineer their own unique media experiences, especially within the realms of the Internet. However, this process has seemingly led to mass copyright infringement as Internet users appropriate various movies, music, television programmes, photographs and animations in order to create such an experience. The art of digital mashing in particular, has been deemed an explicit exploitation of intellectual property rights as it re-cuts, re-mixes and re-broadcasts popular media in a number of alternative ways. YouTube especially has been at the forefront of the copyright furore surrounding digital mash-ups because it allows online users the facility to post and share these video clips freely with other online users. While YouTube claims that they do not promote the illegal use of copyrighted material, they simultaneously acknowledge that they do not actively patrol that which is posted on their website. As such, copyright infringement appears seemingly rife as users share their own versions of popular media through the art of digital mashing. This dissertation however, explores the concept that the creation of mash-ups is not undermining intellectual property rights, but instead produces a new avenue from which culture can emerge. It highlights how Internet users are utilising the culture which surrounds them in an attempt to navigate the new social structures of the online, subsequently arguing that mash-ups are an important element of defining a new postmodern culture, and that the traditional copyright laws of analogue need to be modified in order to secure the development of new and emerging societal structures. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2010.

In this thesis I survey the terrain of digital interactions between youth, corporations and pop culture texts in order to complicate current visions of participatory culture. I argue that popular images of the empowered young users of a new digital democracy need to be complicated by asking questions about the politics of digital participation: about whose voices are heard, about where attention is centred, about how interactivity is defined, about who is rewarded for creative labour. The opening chapter introduces key issues within a critical examination of digital participation, including commodification, user agency and intellectual property. It also outlines my methodologies and my choice of research site – namely internet television, and the proliferation of corporate and youth practices around digitized television texts. The next two chapters provide case studies that identify and evaluate not only the interactions between corporate producers and young users, but also the power relations between the two. First, I analyze young women‘s video remixes of the program Gossip Girl. I consider the remixes as gendered texts that contribute new aesthetics and concerns, even as they reproduce dominant interpretations of contemporary girlhood. I also consider the distribution of the videos on YouTube, noting how their circulation simultaneously challenges corporate ownership and creates profit and promotion for those same corporate owners. Next, I examine interactions around the The Colbert Report. Focusing on the program‘s official discussion boards, I demonstrate how young fans have taken up Stephen Colbert‘s invitation to join in the parody by creating a vibrant, dialogic and rowdy community that has frequently come into conflict with Comedy Central producers. In their attempts to address these conflicts and create alternative spaces of their own, these young people gesture towards larger tensions over the control of public digital dialogue. The final chapter draws on my research and experience as a teacher to consider how these case studies might help us to frame our own educational projects. I call for a digital literacy curriculum that provides both a place for students to reflect on their daily activities within mediated environments and the opportunity to experiment with digital production.

無 / Following an exploration of the CBC’s history and role in Canadian society, this study offers an empirical examination of user generated content (UGC) at cbc.ca measuring the comment type, interactive exchange level, address features and national identity relevance of user comments. The entire comment threads of eleven stories from early 2010 are sampled and content analyzed. Results demonstrate that the vast majority of UGC at cbc.ca is not one-way as opposed to two-wayin nature and that – contrary to the CBC’s historic role – the national discussion is divisive as opposed to unifying. Finally, a discussion of how the CBC could improve its interactive functionalityis presented. Suggestions include recommending that the CBC clearly state the intention for interactive functionality, that the government re-formulate the CBC’s mandate and budget, and, most importantly, that the CBC consider a re-design of its interactive functionality.

Ο στόχος της διπλωματικής εργασίας είναι διττός: 1.Εξαγωγή απόψεων που αφορούν τα προϊόντα 2.Περίληψη των απόψεων Η εξαγωγή απόψεων αναφέρεται σε μια ευρεία περιοχή επεξεργασίας της φυσικής γλώσσας, υπολογιστικής γλωσσολογίας και εξόρυξης κειμένου. Σε γενικές γραμμές, έχει ως στόχο να εντοπίσει τη στάση του ομιλητή ή συγγραφέα σε σχέση με κάποιο θέμα. Οι απόψεις του μπορούν να εκφράζουν κρίση ή αξιολόγηση, τη συναισθηματική του κατάσταση ή την προβλεπόμενη συναισθηματική επικοινωνία. H αυτόματη εξαγωγή περίληψης είναι η δημιουργία μιας συντομευμένης εκδοχής του αρχικού κειμένου. Η συνεισφορά της συγκεκριμένης διπλωματικής εργασίας εντοπίζεται στα ακόλουθα σημεία. Αρχικά βοηθά τον ενδιαφερόμενο αγοραστή κάποιου προϊόντος να σχηματίσει μια γενική εικόνα για το προϊόν. Επίσης, δίνει την δυνατότητα στον κατασκευαστή να δει τις εντυπώσεις των χρηστών για το συγκεκριμένο προϊόν και αναλόγως να προχωρήσει σε βελτιώσεις του ή να επιλύσει διάφορα προβλήματα που μπορεί να παρουσιάζει. / In recent years the nancial transactions via the web increase. This leads the Internet to become an important mean of nancial transactions. Transactions on the Internet di er from traditional in many ways including: communication, market segmentation, distribution costs and price. An expression of such transactions is electronic commerce (e-commerce). E-commerce refers in buying and selling products or services through electronic systems. A large percentage of electronic commerce conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as access to content on a site, but the bulk of e-commerce business involves the transportation of tangible assets such as products. The recent increase is the content generated by users (User Generated Content), dramatically reshaping the marketing. Internet users today can cite comments and views on various issues. Part of such views out and e-commerce. Each user buys a product, can write his opinion on this and thus carry information to other users who might be interested. The objective of this thesis is twofold: • Export of major coreference chains of the comments related to products • Text summary based on the sentences from the candidate set of chains The chains export refers to a wide range of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining. In general, aims to identify the main subject of the comment by using the references, also where the writer is referred in each sentence (a general view of the product or for a speci c element) and calculating the coherence of the summary (text coherence). H automatic synthesis of the abstract is to create an abridged version of the original text from one software. The product of this process still contains the most important points of the original text. The phenomenon of information overload means that access to consistent and well-developed summaries are vital. As the access to data increases, so does the interest in automatic summarization. In the proposed research there should be studied and solved speci c challenges in this scope. An example might be the fact that the data are dynamic and change over time. Also, users can update their reviews for the same product or even replace them entirely with a new perspective. Another challenge is the fact that the products are upgraded over time and hence the views that evaluate or criticize respectively. The contribution of this thesis lies in the following points. Originally helps the potential buyer of a product to get a general picture of the product without having to read all the comments made. It also enables the manufacturer to see the user experience on the product and accordingly proceed to improvements or to resolve various problems that may be.

Purpose: The authors have found a common interest to investigate how the use and impact of reviews online can be applied within the subject of tourism. The purpose of the study is to investigate how consumers use reviews in their information search process. The purpose is also to investigate how and if consumers are influenced by online reviews regarding hotel stays. Method: The study is based on a qualitative method in the form of ten semi structured interviews as primary collection. The study has a support from secondary data consisting of a literature review in the chapter of previous research. Theory: The theoretical background is based on three theories. The theories are The PrePurchase-Information process, The Major Influences On Individual Travel Behaviour and the theory From Word-Of-Mouth to Electronic Word-Of-Mouth. Empiricism: The empiricism consists of a presentation of ten semi structured interviews with anonymous respondents regarding their own experiences and beliefs about the topic of the study. The chapter also includes an overview of the previous research about the topic to support and enhance the primary empirical interview material. Findings: The digital society has led to an increased online presence, critical thinking and interest on how consumers travel and what hotels they choose. Impact is constantly present in their contact with reviews and surroundings. The individuals own interpretation and perception of reality is based primarily on how they use and are influenced by reviews. In combination with critical thinking there is an insight that anyone, can write anything.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-11T14:03:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DISSERTACAO JOAO DA MATA.pdf: 5833486 bytes, checksum: fd81987d9b1e9ac8f9bb648058db273b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-03-22 / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Amazonas / Scalability and high demand for resources are the main challenges that content providers face to deploy Video-on-Demand applications. The most popular site for sharing videos, YouTube, has over 4 billion videos viewed a day and 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute. Hybrid systems (CDN-P2P) have been proposed as a scalable and cost effective solution for VoD distribution. In these systems, peers share their resources decreasing demand on the content distribution network infrastructure (CDN). On the other hand, the CDN s servers guarantee the availability of content when peers contributions are limited by churn. However, in these systems, the content distributed must be managed so that the CDN servers workload is minimized. An issue to be investigated is the impact of churn, i.e the effect of cycle of peers join and leave, on management policies. Carried studies showed that the performance of policies improves as the storage capacity of peers increases. However, this increasement does not impact proportionately the performance of policies. Later on, we proposed, implemented and evaluated four object management policies derived from data in YouTube video collections. These policies use information left by users or generated by the video distribution system to measure the value of objects. We found that the proposed policies were able to improve the availability of content in more than 70%, compared to the LFU policy, and more than 50% compared to GDSP policy. / A escalabilidade e a alta demanda por recursos s ao os principais desafios que os provedores de conte´udo enfrentam na viabiliza¸c ao de aplica¸c oes de v´ıdeos sob demanda (VoD). O site mais popular de compartilhamento de v´ıdeos, o YouTube, tem mais de 4 bilh oes de visualiza¸c oes por dia e 60 horas de v´ıdeo s ao armazenadas a cada minuto em seus servidores. Sistemas h´ıbridos (CDN-P2P) t em sido apresentado como uma solu¸c ao escal´avel para distribui¸c ao de VoD. Nesses sistemas, pares compartilham seus recursos diminuindo a demanda sobre a infraestrutura da rede de distribui¸c ao de conte´udo (CDN). Por outro lado, os servidores da CDN garantem a disponibilidade de conte´udo quando as contribui¸c oes dos pares s ao limitadas pelo churn, ou quando o conte´udo for in´edito aos pares da rede par a par (P2P). No entanto, o conte´udo distribu´ıdo nesses sistemas precisa ser gerenciado, de forma que a carga de trabalho submetida aos servidores da CDN seja minimizada. Uma quest ao a ser investigada nesse sistema ´e o impacto do churn, isto ´e, o efeito criado pelo ciclo de entrada e sa´ıda dos pares sobre os mecanismos de ger encia do conte´udo distribu´ıdo pelo sistema. Nesta disserta¸c ao avalia-se o impacto do churn no desempenho de pol´ıticas de gerenciamento de objetos em sistemas CDN-P2P; verificou-se que o impacto no desempenho das pol´ıticas diminui com o aumento da capacidade de armazenamento dos pares, no entanto, esse aumento n ao impacta proporcionalmente a performance das pol´ıticas. Em seguida, s ao propostas, implementadas e avaliadas quatro pol´ıticas de gerenciamento de objetos derivadas a partir de dados reais obtidos de cole¸c oes de v´ıdeos do YouTube. Essas pol´ıticas exploram informa¸c oes deixadas pelos usu´arios ou geradas pelo sistema de distribui¸c ao dos v´ıdeos para mensurar o valor de um objeto. A suposi¸c ao acerca da efetividade dessas informa¸c oes na valora¸c ao dos objetos ´e devido `a influ encia do sistema de recomenda¸c ao do YouTube no acesso a seu conte´udo, pois esse sistema utiliza-se dessas informa¸c oes para indicar v´ıdeos aos usu´arios. As pol´ıticas propostas foram capazes de melhorar a disponibilidade do conte´udo em mais de 70%, comparada `a disponibilidade proporcionada pela pol´ıtica LFU e mais de 50%, comparada `a pol´ıtica GDSP.

The paper explores the rise of digital cartography and subsequently location-based services, using Foursquare as case study. In fact, the rise of smartphones and wireless technologies have made Internet ubiquitous and online services accessible from anywhere. In this context, I address the changes in carthography and how it has been remediated on digital media. I then analyze some of the developments brought by the Web 2.0 in relation to location-based services, especially user-generated content, social networking websites, tagging and geotagging. Foursquare's content is created by its users, therefore enabling them to map the(ir) world. Foursquare remediates maps and travel guides, and it uses game dynamics to foster usage and sharing. The concept of online identity-building will be also addressed in relation to the sharing of one's location and how these factors enhance performative aspects. I conclude by investigating how the geotagging tendency on social networking platforms could be as well seen as a tool for enhancing user-generated surveillance.