<p> While we believe our perceptions drive our reality, it is our sense of presence that ultimately determines how real an experience truly is. Whether we are fully immersed in a virtual world or captivated by conversation, presence governs our neurological processing, our psychological belief, and our physiological confirmation of all our experiences. Over the last several decades researchers have developed various study paradigms to qualify specific aspects of presence. However, little progress has been made in promoting a comprehensive framework that captures both self-reported responses as well as a full complement of correlative neurological and physiological sensor-based measurements. In this study, I employ a custom three-phase, proof-of-concept schema bridging multiple methodologies. First, exposure to an immersive media experience while collecting ECG and GSR sensor data. Second, administration of the Temple Presence Inventory with FACS and eye-tracking. Third, neurophysiological sensor measurements with EEG, eye-tracking, and FACS, along with ECG and GSR retests, during a randomized viewing of recordings from Phase I self-experience, others-experience, and a neutral-experience, to control for position bias and habituation. This phased correlation-meta-analysis, using sensor-fusion, will also introduce self-actuated mirror neuron response. In all, this study will prove that a holistic, multi-sensor measurement schema is best able to estimate the activation and relative intensity of personal presence and provide an objective assessment of mediated reality experiences. Keywords: presence, perception, augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, AR, VR, MR, narrative transportation theory, flow theory, illusions, proprioception, somatosensory response, vestibular system, haptics, visual system, auditory system, immersion, measurement, mirror neurons, EEG, ECG, GSR, eye-tracking, FACS, reality metaphor </p>

<p> This quantitative study investigates the relationship between video game usage, video game addiction, compulsive Internet use, and subjective well-being. The key variables were measured using three different scales: The Game Addiction Scale; the Compulsive Internet Use Scale; and the Flourishing scale. 121 participants over the age of 18 partook in the study. The empirical results demonstrate a statistically significant, negative correlation between addictive video game usage and well-being. Video game addiction and compulsive Internet use were both found to be negatively correlated with subjective well-being.</p>

<p> This dissertation explains and highlights a scholar-artist-practitioner research model that blends existing theories rooted in social constructionist, narrative, and creative arts therapies with cutting edge digital art practices that better serve the needs of transition age youth (TAY) within the foster care system. This dissertation is an accumulation of work that traverses the fields of child welfare, mental health, and digital media learning. Two research questions are answered in this dissertation (a) What does a digital artistic intervention look like? and (b) How can digital media art be used in therapeutic group sessions with TAY?</p><p> This dissertation draws on my background in behavioral health with youth, work as a videographer and my experience in the realm of hip-hop culture as a disc jockey (DJ). Throughout this dissertation an emphasis is placed on the idea and application of <i>remixing.</i> DJs use remixing as a technique of expression, taking existing songs and mixing them up (blending, cutting, fading, and scratching) to create something new and powerful in return. This dissertation uses the word <i>remix</i> as a metaphor for therapeutic techniques that play with the idea of narrative transformation.</p><p> In particular, I demonstrate how to use iPad applications and a process called digital storytelling (mixing audio and video formats) for the purpose of evoking a client&rsquo;s personal story construction and story transformation through a remix process. Two underlying themes comprise the framework of this dissertation: (a) the construction of narratives and (b) the remix (or creative transformation) of narratives using various forms of digital media.</p><p> The literature review discusses the disciplines of art therapy, expressive arts therapy, narrative therapy, and digital media art and digital art therapy. I also discuss a portion of the foster care system called TAY, and finally I discuss how personal stories and belief systems are subjectively created but more importantly remixed or recreated using the strategies highlighted in this study. The methodology of this dissertation is broken down into three sections: a pilot study, a case study, and a vignette, which display how digital media art is used as a therapeutic intervention.</p>

<p>This dissertation began as an attempt to understand how biomedical concepts and practices, which undermine the salience of norms drawn from the ?natural order? are relayed through mass media and inform self-understanding, social being, self-care, and practices of everyday life. The project tracks makeover TV?s valorization of the metamorphic or transformative body as an ideal that emerges through, and across, various contexts in science and popular culture. This genre of programming is one of the few sites at which the aesthetics of biotechnology are made visible in non-fiction representations and are depicted as part of everyday life. Each of this dissertation?s televisual case studies is exemplary of how popular culture absorbs and makes visible ideas from biomedicine, and how this relates to public policy, economic conditions, and developments in biomedicine. Harnessing biomedicine has aided in television?s recreation of itself as an essential element of ?new? media. It has done so by presenting itself as a technology for managed health care at a distance, and by presenting the body as a primary medium of self-expression. Television encourages ideas about the body as ?transmedial continuity? or form of media, both physical and symbolic, represented through and across variable sites, objects and platforms. Under the aegis of ?health,? medical makeover programs establish a direct relationship between body-based visual identity and life, promote biomedicine as a ubiquitous means of conceiving of the self and body, and posit biotechnology as a tool for transformation and self-care. In this context, health becomes a visual ideal and an organizing principle for self-care, which are framed as prerequisites for social, economic, and political legibility. Although biomedicine challenges essentialist models of ?natural order? through which misogynist and racist norms have been justified in modern culture, its appearances in narratives of self-transformation are overwhelmingly framed by politically retrogressive ideals of embodiment, which it aids in achieving. Given the pervasiveness of visual media and its centrality in refiguring norms that have social, biological and political significance, media literacy and critical acuity are crucial to preserving both cultural and bio diversity.

<p> What is community? What defines it, and what creates it? What&mdash;or who&mdash;is the gay community? Is the gay community the same as it was ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago? Those are some of the questions I will be answering as I explore the creation, expansion, and subsequent integration of the physical gay community into one that embraces an online, fragmented community. I will explore the creation and evolution of the gay community, examining its early years and the challenges it faced as a marginalized group. To help define community, I will use the concept of identity theory by incorporating the theory of play and weaving the idea of claiming public space into my argument to show how the physical, economic, social creation of the gay community is dependent upon a geographic and virtual community. Those examples will set up my argument that the idea of community has changed in part to the commonality of technology and social applications. I argue that the idea of the traditional gay and lesbian community, which relied heavily on where you lived, has become fragmented and disjointed because of the reliance of an online, virtual community which, in turn, has led to a lack of interpersonal connections among individuals of this marginalized group.</p>

The increasing power and ubiquity of mobile wireless devices is enabling real-time information delivery for many diverse applications. A crucial question is how to allocate finite network resources efficiently and fairly despite the uncertainty common in highly dynamic mobile ad hoc networks. We propose a set of routing protocols, Self-Balancing Supply/Demand (SBSD), to address that question. The SBSD model is based on economic principles; the supply of requested information is increased (by being available at more nodes) in accordance with the number of network participants requesting it. / Each replica of a message is assigned a utility value that reflects the estimated network congestion caused by all replicas of that message. This utility function is designed to reflect the expected changes in network congestion over time. We derive mathematical proofs to demonstrate properties of SBSD, including maximum flooding depth, fair allocation of bandwidth over competing messages, and the relationship between utility and network congestion. We also present simulation results for scenarios including random and vehicular mobility as well as extensions for high-density environments.

Within social media and popular culture, new and diverse forms of online identity representation are emerging in virtual spaces. As traditional literacy practices yield to newer literacies, these forms of identity representation require and receive critical scrutiny. Personalized avatars are one such form. They provide a site through which individuals may represent themselves as a constructed product of identity and the discursive practices that contribute to it. / This qualitative study explores the cultural politics of representation with ten teenaged girls who constructed personalized avatars for social networking sites. Its purpose is to investigate the truth effects about representation, girlhood identity and culture, and to analyze the power structures present in the narrative and graphic images of girlhood self-representation. As part of this analysis, personalized avatars are deconstructed as forms of visual language within a broader context of critical media literacy. / The ubiquitous character of social networking places girls and their images under a scrutiny within which they become objects of a regulatory gaze. Drawing from a cultural studies methodology, this study utilizes critical ethnography informed by feminist poststructuralism to examine the politics of this gaze and to articulate the tensions between attempting to be true to lived experience while remaining cognizant of the always partial and ever political nature of representation. This framework challenges normative notions of the self and attempts to expose how power structures within a site of avatar production intersect with girlhood performative desire. / This study finds that normative discourses around gender, ability, class, ethnicity, and beauty govern representation for teenaged girls in online spaces in a manner similar to real life locations. Despite a widely held belief that girls have an expanded capacity to represent themselves through online forums of individual creativity, this study suggests that structures of social media continue to contribute to the power of these regulatory discourses. This study finds that girls report a constant insecurity and questioning around their self-representations and, as such, these findings have implications for critical media education as well as future research related to girlhood identities in new media spaces.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-154). Also available in print.

<p> Turkey's most controversial religious figure is the Muslim cleric and author Fethullah G&uuml;len, whose followers have established around one thousand schools in 135 countries. Since 2003, the G&uuml;len-affiliated educational non-profit T&Uuml;RK&Ccedil;EDER has organized the International Turkish Olympiad, a competition for children enrolled in the G&uuml;len schools. The showpiece of this event is its song contest, in which students perform well-known Turkish songs before live audiences of thousands in cities all over Turkey and reach millions more via television broadcasts and the Internet. While the contest resembles American Idol in its focus on individual singers and Eurovision in its nationalistic overtones, the fact that the singers are performing songs associated with a nationality not their own raises intriguing questions about the intended message of the competition as well as about its publics. To answer these questions, I analyzed YouTube videos of the competition and examined YouTube comments, popular websites, and newspaper opinion columns. I conclude that the performers themselves are meant to feel an affinity with Turkish culture and values, while Turkish audiences receive a demonstration that G&uuml;len's brand of Islam is compatible with Turkish nationalism. Moreover, the competition reaches a multiplicity of publics both within and beyond Turkey. While some of these can be characterized as essentially oppositional counterpublics, I find that, in the case of the Turkish Olympiad, the dichotomy between rational public and emotional or irrational counterpublic established collectively by such theorists of publics as J&uuml;rgen Habermas and Michael Warner begins to break down.</p>

published_or_final_version / China Development Studies / Master / Master of Arts in China Development Studies