This dissertation examines streaming media both as a technological innovation and cultural practice that co-configures audience and industry. Strategies and tactics provide a theoretical framework for understanding streaming media. Streaming is theorized as a tactic; wherein audiences momentarily buck against the strategic logic of media conglomerates and copyright regimes. However, streaming, concomitantly, is an audience tactic and a strategic logic of an emergent streaming industry. This results in the blurring between first and third party and sanctioned and unsanctioned streaming. In this dissertation, I parse out what are the nascent streaming logics within this burgeoning industry and how they constitutively shape and re-shape audiences and traditional broadcasting logics. Five typologies of streaming serve as conceptual tools for deepening our understanding of streaming media and technology. The first is streaming as a recent technological advancement, divided into software and hardware categories. The second conceptual framework is a typology of streaming that divides streaming into first and third party sanctioned and unsanctioned streaming. The third is streaming as an emergent industry. The fourth is streaming as a discourse, and the final typology divides streaming based on geography as transnational streaming, national streaming, and diasporic streaming. All of these classifications lay the groundwork for the further conceptualization of this important and emergent socio-technical practice.

In my dissertation entitled “The Critical Eye: Re-Viewing 1970s Television,” I argue that TV scholars would benefit greatly by engaging in a more nuanced consideration of the television critic’s industrial position as a key figure of negotiation. As such, critical discourse has often been taken for granted in scholarship without attention to how this discourse may obscure contradictions implicit within the TV industry and the critic’s own identity as both an insider and an outsider to the television business. My dissertation brings the critic to the fore, employing the critic as a lens through which I view television aesthetics, media policy, and technology. This study is grounded in the disciplines of television studies, media industries studies, new media studies, and cultural studies. Yet because the critic’s writing reflects the totality of television as an entertainment and public service medium, the significance of this study expands beyond disciplinary concerns to a reconsideration of the impact of television upon American culture. This project offers a history of the television critic during the 1970s, a decade in which the field of criticism professionalized and expanded dramatically. Methodologically, I am incorporating three approaches, including historical research of the 1970s television industry, textual analysis of critical writing, and interviews with critics working during that decade. I’ve identified the 1970s for a variety of reasons, including its parallels with today’s significant technological and industrial transformations. My central texts will be the industry trade publications, Variety and Broadcasting, and national daily newspapers including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. Viewing TV criticism as a profession, a historical source, and a site of scholarly analysis, this project offers a series of interventions, including a consideration of how critical writing may serve as a primary source for historians and how television studies has overlooked the significance of the critic as an object of analysis in his/her own right.

The aim of this study is to enlighten how todays working environment affects young individuals descriptions of how to reach success in work life, now often titled as ”career”. Our purpose has been to analyse how the term career is constituted discursively among young people in jobs characterized by flexibility. The study is based on six qualitative interviews with young adults in the media industry, all between 20-30 years old. By utilising a Foucaultdian discourse analysis we want to expose how the competing and dominating discourses, that our interviewees’ statements are based on, can be associated with a wider social context.    The study reveals that our interviewees describe career in two separate ways, both positively and negatively. A more traditional definition of career, where the term is described as promotion, is explained to have a negative tone. This traditional definition has in the majority of our interviews been replaced with explanations of career as personal. We can also distinguish that even though not all of our informants describe career as desirable, everyone talks about success in work life as self-fulfilment. The demands from today’s individual work environment appears discursively regardless negatively or positively interpretation of the term career.   Our analysis demonstrates further that all interviewed talks about an increased illness and problems with the balance between work and personal life. It is described to be a problematisation caused by the pursuit of career success, in a work life characterized by flexibility and insecurity.   The results from our study can be derived to recent research regarding a change in work environment. A more flexible and insecure labour market is forcing the individual to take more responsibility and makes success to a personal project. It gives hope of self-fulfilment but also threats of physical and mental illness. / Syftet med vår uppsats har varit att belysa hur en omvandling av arbetslivet kommit att påverka unga individers beskrivning av framgång inom yrkeslivet, vad som numera ofta benämns "karriär". Vår avsikt har varit att analysera hur begreppet karriär konstrueras på diskursiv nivå bland unga vuxna inom yrken som karakteriseras av flexibla arbetsvillkor. Studien grundar sig på sex kvalitativa intervjuer med unga vuxna mellan 20-30 år inom mediabranschen. Intervjuerna har analyserats utifrån ett Foucauldianskt diskursanalytiskt perspektiv, ett verktyg för att belysa vilka konkurrerande och dominerande diskurser som våra informanters utsagor bygger på, kopplade till en större social kontext.   Vår studie påvisar att informanterna beskriver karriär på skilda sätt, både ut positiv och negativ bemärkelse. En mer traditionell syn på karriär, d v s i betydelsen avancemang inom organisationen, beskrivs ”klinga negativt” och i majoriteten av våra intervjufall har denna syn på karriär bytts ut mot beskrivningar av karriären som personlig. Trots att inte alla intervjupersoner beskriver karriären som eftersträvansvärd, kan vi urskilja hur samtliga utsagor om framgång inom yrkeslivet innebär någon form av individuellt självförverkligande. Det individualiserade arbetslivets förväntningar framträder diskursivt oavsett negativ eller positiv tolkning av begreppet karriär. I vår analys framkommer även utsagor från samtliga sex intervjupersoner om ökad ohälsa och obalans mellan arbete och fritid. Det är en problematik som beskrivs uppstå i samband med strävan efter karriär eller framgång, inom det flexibla och osäkra yrkeslivets ramar.   Sammantaget kan våra resultat, utifrån våra teoretiska utgångspunkter, härledas till tidigare forskning som påvisar en omvandling av arbetslivet. Ökad osäkerhet och flexibilitet på arbetsmarknaden lägger ett större ansvar på den enskilda individen och gör framgång till ett personligt projekt med såväl hopp om självförverkligande som hot om ohälsa.

There have been a lot of studies dedicated to investigating nation branding as a set of political discourses and practices deploying analysis of objects of symbolic nature: logotypes, brand books, slogans and commercials. The present thesis aims to study nation branding as a form of communicative labour through investigating volunteering as a form of media work that is used as a tool of the nation branding campaign in Ukraine during the Eurovision Song Contest in 2017. By using the theoretical concepts of nation branding, values and motivations of free labour in media industries, the thesis analyses the role of volunteers in the nation branding campaign during ESC 2017, volunteering as a specific form of media work and the motivation tools employed by the organisers and volunteers themselves to make sense of their involvement in the event. The analysis suggests that the roles assigned to volunteers as bearers of the nation brand are of great importance but the volunteers’ understanding of this process is rather confused and blurred. Another point highlighted in the thesis is how is volunteering was organised in terms of training and motivation on the side of organisers and what kind of motivations were of the crucial significance to volunteers themselves.

Denna studie behandlar reklambyråers användning av sociala medier i rekryteringsprocessen av tillsvidareanställda respektive frilansare. Syftet är att förstå hur sociala medier används förrekrytering och hur arbetsgivare inom mediebranschen resonerar kring detta. För att undersöka detta användes kvalitativ semi-strukturerad intervju som genomfördes med fyra olika personer med rekryteringsansvar på fyra olika reklambyråer i Malmö. Studien visar att respondenterna använder sociala medier för att annonsera och söka efter potentiella framtida anställda och frilansare. Fördelen med sociala medier är att det kan vara ett sätt att nå utanför byråernas egna nätverk. Till skillnad från tidigare studier använder respondenterna i denna studie inte sociala medier för bakgrundsinformation om kandidater. Det kan ses som positivt eftersom det innebär en mindre risk för att information tas ur kontext och leder till diskriminerande beslut. Den största skillnaden mellan rekrytering av tillsvidareanställda och frilansare verkar vara betydelsen av kandidaternas personlighet, som i sin tur påverkar hur formell rekryteringsprocessen blir. / This study covers advertising agencies’ use of social media in the process of recruiting full time employees and freelancers respectively. The aim is to gain an understanding of how social media is utilized and how employers discuss the use of social media channels. The method used in this study was semi-structured qualitative interviews and the interviews were carried out with four people with recruiting responsibility at four different advertising agencies in Malmö. The study shows that the respondents predominantly use social media to advertise jobs and search for potential employees and freelancers. The advantage of social media is that it provides a way to reach outside of the agencies’ own network. In contrast to what other studies have found the respondents in this study does not use social media to gain personal background information about candidates. This can be seen as positive as it lessens the risk of information being taken out of context and leading to discriminating decisions. The main difference between recruiting employees and recruiting freelancers seems to be the importance of the applicant’s personality which in turn affect the formality of the recruiting process.

No description available.

No description available.

ABSTRACT Title: The new Public Service Authors: Hanna Haeggström, Sara Marklund, Madeleine Olsson Level: Bachelor thesis in Media and Communications Studies Supervisor: Olof Hultén Location: School of Communication and Design, University of Kalmar, spring 2008 Language: Swedish Number of pages: 55 There is an ongoing change of the media industry where new types of media emerge as a result of technological advancements. The audience and their use of the media have changed where available range has expanded while the size of the audience has remained the same. For media companies this implies a fight for the audience, where the right approach is vital for keeping as well as attracting new customers. Public service is an issue under current debate and its future role in the media industry has been brought into question. This survey investigates the roll of public service in Scandinavia in a new and changing media industry and how they should act to be important for their audience. The thesis targets how the public service phenomena works with new media channel, how they approach the change in how the audience consume media. The probable scenarios is based on the change between the current public service situation in the Nordic region and the future, where we put the future role of public service in a changing market into question. The study focuses on public service and is based on relevant theoretic frameworks and in-depth interviews. The theoretic-oriented framework is based on the phenomena from a change in media supply, a change in media consumption as well as how public service ought adjust to be in order for its survival. The interviews make out the core of the study, where key individuals from the industry have been interviewed. The direction of the interviews has been towards public service, emerging media, change in the audience, public service’s approach to their surroundings and how it can develop and become an organization adapted to today’s development. The conclusion of the study is that in order for public service to retain a function in the changing media environment have to maintain a high grade of audience utility. In order to do so, public service has to revaluate and change their strategy as the audience and their relation to and consumption of media services and products has changed.

In this dissertation, using the tool of a political economy of communication analysis gives us an important way to conceptualize the challenges confronting Chinese media workers, especially editors, due to media reform and social transformation. I will accomplish this by examining three different but inter-related processes: commodification, structuration, and spatialization. First, I will analyze the ways in which the deepening of the media commodification process has forced Chinese media workers to serve the political interests of the state, and at the same time, to generate profit for their companies and promote political and social reforms. Second, I will explore the structuration process by analyzing how fundamental social, technological, political, and economic changes—especially those in class relations and power dynamics—have produced five critical problems for the Chinese media workers. Third, I will explore the media spatialization process by addressing its three indispensable components: globalization, neoliberalism, and the global division of labour. When China is increasingly integrated into the global political economy, most Chinese media workers have faced great changes in their value systems and their daily work processes. As a result, the privileged existence of workers as the “masters” of the Communist society has been transformed in many ways (Rocca 2003). In the last chapter, I will suggest plausible solutions to the problems of Chinese media workers, addressing the benefits of labour convergence, the basic functions and major limitations of worker organizations and trade unions, and how they can further help Chinese media workers better deal with the challenges associated with current media reform when labour unrest is on the rise. To conclude, this dissertation concentrates on the trajectories of the labour process transformation of Chinese media workers; their changing social, economic, and political roles; and their dilemma, challenges, and opportunities associated with current social reform and China’s more integration into the global political economy. Through the political economic analysis of Chinese media workers, I aim to better understand the broader social and economic transformations, particularly the network of power relations and institutional contexts in which Chinese media workers are situated, that have been taking place in China since the late 1970s. / Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2012-06-18 17:01:26.92

From 2001 to 2011, there were a number of significant changes, such as increased audience fragmentation and new media technologies, which impacted the television industry and continue to threaten the financial strength and success of cable television networks. The cable television industry employed branding as a major combatant to manage such challenges. Branding is the most important tool in the post-network era, yet networks use it in ways that challenge previously held scholarly assumptions about the cable television industry. Cable television network branding functions in two main ways – one as a performance intended for competitors, distributors, and other key industry players; and two as a means of rationalization, essentially a tool that network executives can wield whenever they want or need to justify a decision, action or behavior. Through interviews with television industry executives, attendance at major industry events and an analysis of trade publications, I examine the branding and promotional strategies of TBS, TNT and HBO. Industrial strategies in the post-network era are fragile and uncertain with regards to technology, partnerships, economics, programming and distribution. Thus, cable networks turn to branding as a mechanism to work through institutional, industrial, economic and technological issues that have been and continue to shift. In this analysis of how and why cable networks use branding, I explore the currently evolving post-network era and television’s future.