Com o intuito de mapear o território e os limites éticos e morais numa indústria da comunicação que passa por mudanças estruturais, o estudo recupera dilemas capazes de nortear a atuação do comunicador e aprofunda a discussão da moralidade na mídia, por conta de um vácuo na formação do comunicador em relação à ética e à moral na perspectiva da história do conhecimento. Com o uso de exemplos clássicos da literatura, da dramaturgia ou da própria comunicação, o resultado é um itinerário que perpassa momentos relevantes para a mídia com o objetivo de revelar diferenças entre conceitos sólidos da modernidade e a fluidez que estes mesmos conceitos encontram tanto na modernidade quanto no que se convencionou chamar de pós-modernismo. Ao mesmo tempo, detalha como se edifica uma nova mídia enquanto se delineia a concentração global da indústria da comunicação, assentada na dispersão dos indivíduos. O trabalho também pretende endereçar a questão do futuro das comunicações, qual a importância do jornalista no momento em que qualquer indivíduo, cidadão ou instituição tem facilmente às mãos os meios tecnológicos capazes de lhe dar poder para fazer comunicação local ou de massa além de analisar como ética e moral se inserem neste contexto. / In order to draw up the ethical and moral boundaries of a communication industry that goes through structural changes, the study gets back to dilemmas that both drives the communicators behavior and deepens the discussion of morality in the media space due to the a void in the formation of the communicator with respect to ethics and morality in the context of the history of knowledge. With examples of classic literature, dramaturgy or communication, the study is a journey that passes through relevant moments for the media industry in order to reveal differences between solid concepts of modernity and fluidity that these same concepts come across on modernity and even what it was designated as post-modernism. At the same time, it details the build up of the new media while it outlines the global concentration of the communications industry, founded in the dispersion of individuals. The work also intends to answer the question about the future of communications: what is the importance of the journalist at a time that any individual, citizen or institution has easily in his hands the technological resources appropriate to provide power to make local or mass communication, in addition to analyze how ethics and moral fit in this context.

With the development of technology, the communication between people has changed rapidly. Social media is a type of digital network designed to share content with other internet users based on their preferences and associations. The purpose of this research was to understand how industry press and the professional market place frame social media today. Moreover, this research showed the explored current social media pedagogy in business and communication programs to see if it matches the need of industry expectations. This study was a content analysis of the text-based study that uses a qualitative software-Leximancer to analyze data. The result suggested both industry press and the job market expect professionals to understand the skills of how to master the social media platforms, especially Facebook. Finally, universities offer few courses about social media, with primary objective of marketing and communication programs focusing on teaching students to be professional in business and organizations.

The purpose of this study was to examine faculty members' perception of the status of technology support and services, their attitudes towards the incorporation of technology in general and with specific applications, and the barriers they perceive to technology use. Additionally, the study focused on the association among the predictor variables of faculty members' gender, age, professional status, years of higher education teaching experience, and tenure versus nontenure status with their degree of technology use. An online survey was designed to collect data to address the research questions in the study. The survey consisted of 44 questions, including areas for comments. Two-hundred ninety faculty members out of a possible 867 responded to the survey. Based on the results, conclusions have been drawn. According to the literature, the results of this study both contradict and support previous studies. Dimension 1, perceived technology support and services, and Dimension 2, perceived barriers to technology use, provided no significant difference when considering the demographic variables of age, gender, years of experience, faculty rank, and tenure versus nontenure status. Though, Dimension 3, attitudes towards the use of technology and specific applications, provided no significant difference when considering the demographic variable of age, faculty rank, and tenure versus nontenure status but there was a slight indication of significance based on years of experience. In addition, gender differences appeared among attitudes toward the use of technology and specific applications. Based on the results, females have been shown to have better attitudes toward the use of technology and specific applications, an area historically dominated by men. Also, faculty members with 1-9 to 10-19 years of experience have better attitudes toward the use of technology. While faculty members with 20 or more years of experience attitude is not significantly affected by years of experience. Additional research needs to be established to include: 1) research faculty members in other southeast states to determine whether or not findings from this study could be generalized, 2) research to include all community colleges within the Tennessee Board of Regents higher education system, and 3) research faculty members responses regarding community colleges role in providing technology training.

Every year, during the month of October, hundreds of Christian churches throughout the United States open the doors of their Hell House to surrounding communities. Hell Houses are Christian haunted houses designed to literally scare the Hell out of visitors so they will accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. In the place of vampires or zombies, Hell Houses portray the sins Satan is mostly likely to tempt teenagers to commit. Scenes include young girls receiving abortions, young men believing lies that they were born gay, and careless individuals drinking and driving. As para-theatrical performances, Hell Houses lead guests from one vignette to the next until they reach Heaven and Hell to show the eternal consequences of one's behavior. A Hell House is a medium of proselytization. Believers within the larger USAmerican Evangelical Christian community organize these events to facilitate the conversion of others. In this thesis, I explore how the use of Hell Houses and other mediums of proselytization are justified within religious-based communities through the implementation of what I refer to as a discourse of neutrality. According to religious-based communities because mediums of proselytization simply convey spiritual truth and reality to those outside of the community, they depict "how things really are." However, I argue that the use of each medium both reflects a perception of reality and contributes to the creation of that reality. Describing and discussing the mediums as "neutral" to the processes of creating reality and meaning generates an authoritative power to legitimately define the politics and boundaries of the religious community's identity. Furthermore, it masks the role each medium plays in the creation of reality as well as the tensions within the community to authoritatively define the "Evangelical Christian" identity. In this thesis, I explore Hell Houses as mediums of proselytization where Evangelical Christians perform their identity politics. To conduct this analysis, I examine how other mediums of proselytization associated with Hell Houses (i.e., the physical body, conversation-based evangelism, and the Internet) each depend upon their own discourse of neutrality to thrive in the community. Because each medium is seen as neutral, those who champion its usage garner an authoritative legitimacy to define the community's identity and Christianity along the lines of reality as informed by the supposedly neutral medium. Here, I detail the dynamics of the tensions within a significant and complex religious group in contemporary America and how performative practices within the community inform its identity politics.

This project interrogates the status of documentary film as an oppositional force and conduit for radical social and political change. The first two chapters examine the interconnected transnational history of the radical or "committed" documentary. This historical inquiry leads me to construct a set of parameters for how the radical documentary was defined and codified between 1926 and 1990. My investigation is particularly attuned to how documentary filmmakers in this tradition moved away from a didactic mode of address that sought to educate a state sanctioned "citizen subject." Instead, I argue that the radical documentary tradition grew out of the modernist avant-garde movement and activated a "revolutionary subject" in opposition to the state. To date, there have only been a handful of accounts locating post-1990s documentary practices within the domain of radical political concerns and the possibilities presented by the intersection of documentary and new media technology. The second part of the dissertation examines how such practices extend and challenge the aforementioned historical definitions while intervening in a diverse range of contexts. The final three chapters focus on an eclectic corpus of films and videos that include the work of the video advocacy organizations WITNESS and B'Tselem, student documentaries made in Iraq, and interactive documentary projects by new media artists Zohar Kfir and Sharon Daniel. I argue that these groups and artists create an "activist subject" that intervenes within specific social and political situations during wars, occupations, and cases of human rights abuses. Ultimately, I conclude that the radical power of documentary film lies not in and of itself as singular object of art or evidence, but in the discourses it engenders and within the discourses and contexts in which it is placed. In the increasingly post-digital age of new media, the study and practice of radical documentary demands a multi-faceted approach as well as an openness to expanding definitional boundaries of what a documentary is, how it functions, how it circulates, and how its impact is measured.

Modern organizations face many significant challenges because of turbulent environments and a competitive global economy. These competitive demands have forced many organizations to increase levels of flexibility and adaptability through the use of virtual environments, and global teams are prevalent in business organizations. Although significant research has been conducted on virtual teams, the development of shared understanding among the members of these teams has not been studied adequately. Time/space barriers, communication complexities, and team diversity hinder the development of shared understanding in these teams. Based on the Media Synchronicity Theory (MST), a new theoretical model was created that used the constructs use of communication media, mode of interaction and team diversity to ascertain the influence shared understanding in global virtual teams. Additionally, the research model examined the relationship between shared understanding and team performance. The developed, web-based survey measured the participants’ use of communication media, mode of interaction, diversity, shared understanding, and team performance in virtual environments. The survey was administered through SurveyMonkey and distributed to a pool of opt-in respondents from firms with virtual teams. A total of 118 respondents participated in the study. The findings of this study indicate that use of communication and familiarity with systems are strong determinants of shared understanding, and subsequently shared understanding is a strong predictor of team performance. The study also indicates that mode of interaction is less of a predictor of shared understanding, and that cultural diversity, modified diversity construct, did not influence shared understanding. As virtual teams continue to proliferate, executive leaders and managers must ensure that teams and environments are designed for collaboration through use of communication technologies that promote synchronicity, and that its members are familiar with systems which subsequently promotes shared understanding.

The task of documenting the evolution of the self over time has been attempted by women artists throughout history. The practice of this documentation has been greatly enhanced in the last several years by the progression of new technologies for the capture of digital images, the advent of the internet as a common textual and visual communication device, and the availability of free resources to publish and disseminate the resulting constructions. Women artists now have the tools needed to document the life of the self, and to publish it immediately to an audience. Most of the women documenting their lives on-line, in real time, do not consider themselves to be artists, and the art world has yet to embrace their practice as artistic activity. But as documents of women's performance, these sites are important historical, visual and cultural occurrences. In addition to containing both textual and visual elements, these endeavors incorporate and elucidate the concept of performativity of gender. In watching these sites (cams and blogs) of women's performance over time, it becomes clear that identities are complex constitutive creations, on both sides of the computer screen. The women of this study are doing, making and inventing a way to assemble the stories of their lives for a reading and looking audience in a manner that calls attention to the way all subjects are made by language and culture. The sites of these productions, located in the space of the internet, offer the spectator an opportunity to interface and form relationships with visual materials and contents. In the space opened up between viewer and artist/performer, identity work can be accomplished and the masquerade of femininity can be critically assessed in new and engaging ways. The challenge and the promise of this research: the journey into the spaces of these sites, with all of their varied formations of identity and performance as woman, will provide a document that both claims these practices as unique artistic performances of self and delineates new possibilities for looking.

Since the late 20th century, nature-based tourism, an alternative to mass tourism with a focus on natural environments, has steadily grown in popularity. Nature-based tourism areas are considered a platform for informal education and exemplify principles of environmental stewardship and conservation. Iceland, an island nation in the North Atlantic, is one area of the world that has seen dramatic growth in its nature-based tourism industry in recent years; tourists are drawn to Iceland in numbers five times the total population of the Country. The pressures of economic development have resulted in the continued promotion of Icelandic tourism, and, subsequently, the rapid, sometimes detrimental, development of tourist destinations. This study used a triangulated mixed methods approach including post-visitation assessments, mobile eye-tracking (MET), GPS footpath collection, and observational analysis to assess visitor experience and behavior in two popular Icelandic tourist destinations: Sólheimajökull and Þingvellir. Through the use of MET, a greater understanding of visitor behavior was developed in these areas. Results suggest that the infrastructure development which has occurred at Þingvellir is effective at managing tourist behavior; however, the less developed and more authentic environment of Sólheimajökull appeals more to visitor expectations of Icelandic tourism. Observing the strengths and weaknesses of the study sites revealed ways to guide the future development of the sites in ways that promote both education and conservation. Furthermore, the critical evaluation of the original methodology developed for this study also presents a technique by which the development of other nature-based tourism destinations can be assessed.

Using an adaptation of O’Connor and Shumate’s (2018) theoretical propositions, this research examines interorganizational communication through the lens of multidimensional networks. Twitter data was crawled from a selection of emergency management organization accounts to measure affinity, representational, flow, and semantic networks. These data included the organizations’ followed accounts, retweets, replies, and mentions. A thematic analysis of the organizations’ mission statements was also conducted in order to inform the examination of the semantic networks. The results show a significant relationship between the number of accounts an organization follows and the likelihood of having its message shared. This research provides a further theoretical application of a network analysis method of studying interorganizational communication as well as a practical application for organizations seeking to increase their engagement on Twitter.

Over the past few years, video games have served as a catalyst for virtual reality (VR) technology to become more accessible to the average consumer, resulting in an increased interest in VR’s potential applications across several disciplines. To best capitalize on these applications, however, researchers require a thorough understanding of the user’s experience in virtual environments. And while many studies on VR experiences tend to focus on presence, video games offer another angle of approach: immersion. This study uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the relationships between the VR experience of presence and the gaming experience of immersion. First, a focus group of individuals with VR gaming experience explored variables impacting presence. Then a survey questionnaire consisting of items from the multimodal presence scale (MPS), Jennett et al.’s (2008) immersion questionnaire, and the focus group was distributed online. Finally, the collected data was analyzed using factor analysis and linear regression to explore the relationships between presence and immersion. Results of the analysis identified involvement to be an important factor impacting a user’s perceived presence in a VR gaming experience.