The aim of this paper was to engage with the ways in which micro-influencers within the Western Cape construct their online identities on Instagram. Theories of critical political economy of the media, self-branding, and the commodification of the self were applied to the context of micro-influencer identity construction as a means of understanding the mediated relationships between influencers, the brands they collaborate with, the platform Instagram, and the ways in which these relationships effect the construction of their online identities. This study made use of individual interviews with micro-influencers, as well as a micro-influencer focus group session in order uncover the main themes in relation to the influencers' perceptions of their online activity. A qualitative content analysis was also performed on content posted by the sample of micro-influencers that coded for the influencers' uses of platform affordances, photographic content, and their identity construction within their images based on concepts of gender representation in the media by Goffman (1979) and Gill (2000). Central to the micro-influencers' notions of success on the platform, and their perceptions of processes of identity construction, was the concept of authenticity. However, the authenticity referenced by the influencers, focused more on processes of fostering the perception of authenticity within the minds of their audience towards the self they perform online, as opposed to acting in accordance with one's true self. It was also found that their performative online identities were predicated on processes of the commodification of the self. In this sense, the construction of the influencers' profiles was dictated by processes of the commodification of the self, and the influencers understanding of how to create the perception of authenticity within the minds of their followers towards their online self.

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This dissertation analyzes representations of the social media platform YouTube, as described by its community and the company, in order to understand how the platform fits within American narratives of democratic technology. I argue that throughout different descriptions of YouTube, such as the corporate branding of the platform as democratic and the communal understanding of YouTube as outside of mainstream media, the language of democracy functions as a balancing act. The YouTube company, content creators, and regular viewers use democratic rhetoric to negotiate the ideals of community on the platform and capitalist endeavors, such as advertising and brand deals. I argue that democratic narratives of YouTube rely on and reinforce the appearance of authenticity and collaboration to justify the desire of monetary gain as good for the company and community. The fluidity, vagueness, and even contradictoriness of the concepts of democracy and authenticity allow them to soothe any rhetorical tensions because they can maintain different meanings in different representations of YouTube. I contend that YouTube's façade of democracy reinforces values of American exceptionalism as the foundation of modern technology and perpetuates it to a global audience. Through my analysis of YouTube, I examine how American technology stories rely on the emphasis of community and democracy to soothe concerns about power imbalances and capitalism in general.

Social media platforms have offered students—and all of us—more opportunities for self-sponsored writing. In response to calls from researchers to explore students' 21st-century writing practices and their relevance to college writing instruction, this dissertation articulated and applied a feminist teacher research methodology and a mixed-methods research design to explore first-year composition (FYC) students' self-sponsored writing practices, attitudes, and transfer opportunities on a popular, albeit under-examined, social media application: Instagram. This study found that students have developed elaborate, rhetorical, multimodal composing processes that include planning, drafting, evaluating, selecting, and styling images as well as planning, drafting/revising, and styling captions. Additionally, though most survey participants said that audience awareness figured into their composing practices, data from interviews revealed that students often misunderstood or inaccurately specified their audiences. Similarly, while all interviewees used a process-based approach to compose their Instagram posts, significant differences exist regarding students' levels of awareness about their composing decisions. Concerning students' perceptions of transfer opportunities between Instagram and FYC, this study found that most survey respondents did not conceptualize their Instagram writing as writing nor did they see their Instagram writing practices as related to the writing required in FYC. Further, respondents generally disagreed that opportunities to transfer skills and knowledge learned from Instagram to FYC exist. However, student interviewees offered evidence that contradicted survey results. Specifically, all interviewees within the study cited connections between their writing practices on Instagram and FYC composing practices by the end of their interviews. Findings from this study productively extend and nuance prior research on students' extracurricular composing practices, offer new findings that address the lack of empirical data about Instagram and writing process, and have several implications for FYC pedagogy. Particular curricular suggestions are provided along with two guiding principles that extend this dissertation's results.

The dissertation explores the issue of culture and power on the Internet. Specifically, using an ethnographic approach to a website of a Korean drama, primarily its BBS section, the dissertation focuses on examining the utopian discourse of the Internet as free, equal, and democratic space and as a revolutionary user-centered medium. This study finds three aspects of the Internet in terms of culture and power. First, the Internet is a communal but exclusive space: although the participants tend to construct the BBS as a community, the community is not so much free, equal, and democratic as the utopians emphasize. In the process of constructing and maintaining the BBS as a community, the participants create new forms of identities, hierarchies, and disparities within the BBS. And the new forms of identities, hierarchies, and disparities are related to those in embodied world. In other words, the Internet is another hegemonic space and thus another space for hegemonic struggles over power. Second, the Internet is a participatory but one-way space: the users of the website as the audience are very active and even aggressive for interacting with the production side of the drama and for participating in the production process of the drama. However, the production side of the drama has a non-participatory and indifferent attitude to interact with the users. In other words, the website is not an interactive space but still a one-way space. This result problematizes the utopian assumption of the Internet's interactivity and its role as empowering audiences over the production of media content. The result also reminds us that the issue of the interactivity of media should be understood not only as the issue of technology but also as the issue of overall media structure and industry. Third, the Internet is a diverse but hegemonic space: although the participants' interpretations of the drama are diverse, they seem not to be free from the authorship of the drama unlike the utopian assumption of the Internet's hypertextuality and its role. The participants in particular produce an overwhelming number of dominant readings that reinforce dominant Korean culture. Most of the patterns that the participants produce in these dominant readings are significantly related to the logics of the narrative structure of the drama. The results of my research warn us to equate the participants' activeness on the Internet with the participants' power over the production of meanings of hypertexts.

In August of 1974, the French broadcasting system underwent a change in organizational structure. L'Office de Radiodiffusion-Television Francaise was reorganized into seven companies, each with a specific responsibility. The extent of the change is debatable but there is little doubt that Valery Giscard d'Estaing's intent was to effect a system freer from governmental control and bring about fiscal responsibility. The extent of the achievement of these goals is the subject of this dissertation. Chapter One examines the social, cultural, and political climate of France. The chapter reveals a country with contradictory philosophies and a strong desire to hold on to the past. Chapter Two reviews the literature in the related fields of economics, sociology, political science, history, and communications. The historical perspective highlights contradictions in systems theory, especially in the areas of goals and organizational structure. Chapter Three describes the French system with particular emphasis on organizational structure. The West German system is also cited for comparison. Chapter Four examines government documents which indicate that the system does not function efficiently. Financial reports indicate the new system became more and more dependent on commercials and tax revenues. Both increases were counter to the intent of the reorganization. Chapter Five summarizes the dissertation and offers the following conclusions: (1) Reorganization or initiation of a media system must take into account the culture, heritage, economic traits, and political philosophies that have contributed to the uniqueness of that country. (2) Reorganization should be undertaken with consideration of international as well as national implications. (3) Reorganization should involve the entire country rather than a political power structure. (4) Reorganization should begin with a goal-oriented agenda. (5) Reorganization must be structured to permit internal flexibility. (6) The new structure should be technologically compatible to existing systems and if possible to one universally established system.

My short documentary, Grandpa Ernest Speaks (2021), is the creative research portion of my master's degree submission. The film is heavily influenced by post-structuralist theory regarding the archive as an experiential entity as well as posttraumatic cinema discourse (in particular, Joshua Hirsch's phases of posttraumatic cinema). This critical reflection therefore investigates the intersection of these two theoretical paradigms: looking at how archival materials may specifically be used in personal documentary films dealing with family/ancestral trauma and posttraumatic memory, and positing that these films' engagement with the archive fits into the larger framework of posttraumatic cinema. I reflect on Grandpa Ernest Speaks in conversation with two other personal posttraumatic documentaries, The Imam and I (dir. Khalid Shamis, South Africa, 2011) and Stories We Tell ( dir. Sarah Polley, Canada, 2012). I conduct a semiotic and content analysis of portions of all three films in order to both situate them within the posttraumatic imaginary-specifically, within Hirsch's second phase-and examine the role of the archive and artefacts in each. In doing so, I confront the question of record vs. representation in documentary, and argue that-in the archival-based posttraumatic documentary-the distinction between the two lies in the way that the artefact is interpreted or contextualised via meta-textual captioning. This study demonstrates that posttraumatic memory may be nonlinear and non-chronological. The analysis of my film and the two additional case study films examines how this complication of past and present, archival and contemporary, is articulated onscreen: conveying the transmutation of memory as well as the ongoing and self-reflexive act of contributing to the familial archive.

The sustainable future of film festivals in Africa is a vital issue based on the critical role that film festivals play in African filmmaking, and yet has not been widely investigated. This thesis identifies four key factors that I argue are essential to this sustainable future. These factors are: community and identity, the various mechanisms by which a festival's selfdefined identity or brand is developed and expressed; physicality and place, the concept of the lived and physical spatial nature of film festivals; technology, how innovations in technology are having an impact on film festivals; and financing and funding, the ability of film festivals to attract funding and finance. Each of these factors is discussed from both a theoretical perspective that draws on the history of film festivals as well as relevant areas of scholarship. Additionally, this thesis draws upon my years of professional experience working with film festivals in Africa. Through this auto-ethnographic approach I am able to complement the theoretical analysis of each of these factors with real-world examples and applications. This investigation makes it clear that the trajectory of African film festivals is distinctly different to those in the West, mainly due to localised factors such as the lack of cinema infrastructure and accessible internet connectivity, but also due to the existence of a global film festival hierarchical network, within which film festivals in Africa sit near the bottom. It is also apparent from this analysis that to become sustainable film festivals in Africa must effectively leverage these four factors through authentic claims to community and identity, accessible physical spaces, adaptation and inclusion of technology and disruption, and a diversity of funding models.

From 2019 until 2021, I directed and produced a twenty-two-minute film about a housing occupation in Cape Town, South Africa. Setting out on this project, I had several concerns. One, the ethics of being an outsider filmmaker making a film about a community from which I'm neither from, nor to which I belong. Two, I did not want to contribute to a long-practiced, Western documentary tradition of making images of people in need of saving. Although I'm neither the first nor last to raise these dilemmas in documentary filmmaking, I was interested in making the film ethically by drawing on a set of practices and ideas from participatory and collaborative filmmaking. In the making of this film I was also influenced by my own values and political commitments. This paper will first examine what the ‘participatory' term means – both the origins and development of the term and its varied significance – and then situate the Cissie Gool House project within this mode of representation and reflect on the filmmaking process.

This thesis examined media and NGO representation of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur over an eighteen-month period between January 2004 and June 2005. It concentrated on three key questions. The first question relates to the 'noise' graph of emergencies. What factors - and what actors - were involved in determining the newsworthiness of Darfur? This first key question concerns the graph of media coverage of Darfur, through an escalation phase, an abundant phase, and finally a gradually diminishing phase. Ideally, the diminishing phase of media coverage should correlate with the diminishing stage of the actual emergency. This is rarely the case and so logically other dynamics must exist. The second question examines media representation of the Darfur crisis compared with what was actually occurred. How accurate was the reporting, and what were some of the effects of inaccuracy? The final question is one of perception. To what extent was the crisis in Darfur misperceived; who was primarily responsible for generating that misperception; and was a degree of misperception inevitable? This question encompasses both the representation offered by the international media and that offered by NGO media and public relations departments. The study is framed within the notion of the 'crisis triangle' (UNDP, 1997), which is composed of policymakers, humanitarian actors and the international media. It analyses NGO media functions within the framework of the NGO crisis triangle, composed of internal NGO conflicts between fundraising, advocacy and operational aid. Darfur revealed beyond doubt that the factors involved in determining newsworthiness are complex and, furthermore, not necessarily controlled by any one actor or any one side of the crisis triangle. US political interests significantly contributed to escalating Darfur to the status of 'worst humanitarian crisis in the world', but equally so did the genocide question, and no one actor manipulated the timing of the tenth anniversary of Rwanda to coincide with a campaign of ethnic cleansing taking place in Darfur. One of the most important factors identified was that of simplicity, which explains how media attention was engaged, but not necessarily why. The simplicity also ensured that media and NGO representation of Darfur was unavoidably inaccurate. The media influenced the political will of the international community towards Darfur only indirectly, although it could just as convincingly be argued that the political will of the international community was one of the primary factors influencing the media. There were two identified practical lessons from the examination of the representation of Darfur. The first was that if NGOs were to accept a short-term fall in funding for the longer-term benefit of raising awareness then both a more accurate perception and possibly more sustainable funding could be generated. The second was that if media institutions were to adhere to the Red Cross code of conduct when reporting from disaster situations then a more accurate perception would be generated. This would result in the necessary illusions of disaster reporting not being quite so necessary.