Among college students in Ghana, the new media app WhatsApp has been widely adopted as a medium for both communication and sexual exploration. Drawing on a classical media effects theory Uses and Gratifications, this mixed method research is designed to investigate sexual practices staged on WhatsApp among college students in Ghana. This study surveyed 314 students, along with in-depth interviews with eight respondents from the African University College of Communications in Accra, Ghana, to investigate the practice of viewing and circulating sexually explicit materials on WhatsApp. Key findings from this study with the exception of impact of sexual content on both male and female college students, point to no statistically significant differences in sexual gratifications on WhatsApp. This thesis delineates the various forms of motivations regarding the use of WhatsApp as a sexual gratification platform.

Internet-based new media—social media platforms in particular—have profoundly altered the boundaries and contours of civic and political life by offering new opportunities for participation and challenge, as well as new perils of communal competition, surveillance, counter-influence and disruption. Additionally, new media technologies have shown unprecedented capabilities for political communication to cross national boundaries. This project considers the complex factors that impact participation by members of a diaspora in the politics of the homeland—in this case Indian immigrants in the United States. A combined approach of historical inquiry and applied survey research attempts to disaggregate the influence of the digital media ecosystem (social networking platforms in particular), as well as core dynamics of personal identity and the dislocation associated with geographic migration. The tested hypotheses examine whether respondents are more or less likely to consider future political participation based on indexed independent variables related to identity, geographic migration and social media platform usage. Additionally, respondents’ sensitivity to exposure to certain types of news information is also considered through an experiment using hypothetical news stories that vary in content, geography and actor identity. These approaches reflect on the existing scholarship, but more importantly, builds new lines of questioning that span across previously disconnected streams of research, offering a more holistic appraisal that more accurately reflects the large, complex, varied mediascape in which migrants see, share and respond to many different forms of online information, communication and interactivity. Online recruitment of resident Indian and Non-Resident Indian (NRI) survey respondents provided two population samples that allows for comparative examination prior and subsequent to the event of migration. The survey questions themselves encompassed of a broad range of questions addressing socioeconomic status, prior civic activity, social media usage, perceptions about political institutions and expectations of future participation in the form of voting. The implications for this research may yield insights into the shape of possible future transnational phenomena, most notably the prospect of absentee voting in the near future. The specific questions and influences on diasporic participation are considered in this context, and recommendations for follow-up research are provided.

In the four decades since Stanley Cohen (1972) first theorised the ‘moral panic’, there has been immense technological change in the field of communications and media. Whilst Cohen’s original model relies on elite-driven mediated narratives, I argue that moral panics have taken on a memetic quality in the convergent and participatory mediascape. In other words: in an age of social media, moral panic discourses are increasingly open to contestation, reinterpretation, and recirculation by multiple actors and groups. In this thesis, I examine one such group – the web’s largest white nationalist (WN) forum, Stormfront. To do so, I trace three racialized media events as they circulate on and through the Forum. Here, I show how the mechanics of the moral panic have fundamentally shifted in the digital age. I explore the means by which Stormfront users exploit this semi-democratised mediascape in an attempt to ‘manage’ and exploit moral panics surrounding episodes of racialized violence. To this end, I explore the topologically entangled shuttling back and forth of ‘online’ and ‘offline’ lives and spaces to argue for a more-than-digital geography of computer mediated communication. Here, I show how the Forum’s ‘collective voice’ is often given expression through selective quotation by mainstream media surrounding racialized moral panics. This process of remediation, I argue, allows explicitly racist groups fugitive access to mainstream discourse, and turns mainstream media outlets into unwitting nodes in a white nationalist broadcast network. However, I argue that this public-facing process, opens WNs up to increased scrutiny, leading to strategic and contingent deployments of contradictory repertoires of race. In doing so, I examine repertoires of race in such WN interventions - highlighting their flexible and contingent construction of racialized categories in the negotiation of contemporary structures of feeling (Williams 1977; Anderson 2014). I contend that a digitally-inflected antiracism must attend to the contingent, translocal, and assembled nature of racism online if it is to be effective.

Nearly five years have passed since the political upheaval that swept through many Middle East and North African (MENA) countries began. Syria was caught in the grip of this revolutionary moment, one that drove the country to a civil war with no apparent way out. Analysts advanced a number of explanations for this event, which included the demographic profile of the younger generations and the economic difficulties they experienced, corruption of the government, the use of techniques from successful campaigns and the coordination of dissent through traditional/offline and new/online forms of contention. The employment of the new media by anti and pro-government groups has reached an unthinkable scale, to the point that the media have become instruments not limited to the purpose of informing, planning and coordinating the protest, but “performing” in the conflict, exacerbating the fight, instilling fear in the enemy and intimidating the adversary, while proselytising. By going beyond the dichotomy that frames the media as a deus ex machina of the uprising or, conversely, as a means of its expression, this thesis demonstrates how the new media did not simply play a crucial role at the time of the uprising and subsequent civil war, but an even more decisive role in the years that predated the uprising. The underlining argument of this research is that during the decade leading up to the uprising in Syria a (silent) form of mobilisation got underway as an effect of contextual factors (economic, institutional and social conditions), conditioned by people’s access to the new media. The new media became the mobilising structures of Syria’s pre-uprising social movement, the tools that changed people’s access to information and encouraged civic engagement in a period of structural friction and social ferment. The media are here contemplated as a microcosm, which affects and is affected by other different, hitherto unrelated (f)actors. Ultimately, in light of the growing popular mobilisations that are taking place around the globe and the leading role that the new media technologies are playing within these, the thesis offers perspectives of analysis on the role that the new media technologies are offering citizens to contest political authority as well as opposing social and economic inequalities worldwide.

This thesis explores the persuasive effects of literature both personally and socially, via the codification of character archetypes in fiction (exemplified here in high fantasy fiction). This thesis firstly explores the manner in which literature can affect individuals' beliefs, and how certain representations of groups (in this case, women) can be inherited and maintained through genre norms, themselves maintained through traditional publishing models and financial concerns. Next, this thesis offers an analysis of self-published novels' responses to the archetypal representations of women within high fantasy, as exemplified in two popular high fantasy works, The Lord of the Rings and A Game of Thrones, and four self-published novels (including the author's own). It then focuses on whether self-publishing allows for the highlighted genre norms to be more easily subverted due to the nature of the new publishing model. It concludes with a discussion on the possibility of a new form of literary understanding, termed by the author 'multiliteraryism'. Building on debates in the field of world literature and multilingualism, multiliteraryism, it is suggested, can offer a new method of understanding multiple voices and representations, absent any denigration in terms of the means of publication.

Studies exploring the first wave of digital performance foregrounded technology by cataloging experimentation and novel interactions between liveness, projections and code. As exercises in medium, these high tech spectacles demonstrate the aesthetic potential of digital media while introducing key media concepts. Jennifer Haley is a writer with one foot in theatre and one in code. She is uniquely positioned in two interdependent spheres, which makes her particularly suited to engineer a theatrical bridge into the virtual, because at the heart of the contemporary technological revolution is a new level of writing and media literacy. Theatre has been effectively accessing the virtual imagination for millennia, and new technologies create new intricacies for engaging the virtual within theatrical space. Each is a medium defined by action, which host other media, and provide in depth simulations. Haley’s plays push beyond the fascination and spectacle of technology to incorporate the mundane reality of the digital into the structure of her work. Haley writes plays specifically to resonate with the similarities she sees between theatre and virtual worlds. Utilizing techniques and tropes from other media and then framing the narrative from within a theatrical world Haley exploits the essence of an active, critical audience and opens a dialog between virtual worlds and the perceptions of the audience. She treats her media generated worlds as places. Other digital theatre plays may peer through a window into the virtual by dramatizing a conversation through media; Haley sends an expedition over the threshold into another world. A flesh version of an avatar breathing before the audience establishes a material existence unattainable in two dimensional screen media. Haley illuminates the constructed nature of mediatized communication, but she does it dramaturgically deemphasizing the technology and re-centering the human within the virtual drama. Her approach builds a metaphorical bridge between theatre and virtual digital realities. Through a close reading of Haley’s plays I will demonstrate how Haley takes the artistic next step for computer technology and theatre.

As a first-generation Georgian to be born the year after Soviet Union collapsed, I carry the weight of the uncertainty and the shared memory of the years before my birth that is engraved in the minds of the people around me. Through the years of chaos that had to come later, I always thought that me and my country grew up and matured together, as the peers of same age. Transition from a strictly Atheistic society into predominantly fundamental Orthodox Christian nation has been the process that I witnessed while growing up. Being raised by an Orthodox iconographer father, working on frescoes and icons have left the permanent mark on my identity as an artist. My work, through the range of media, deals with this clash of radical ideologies, while drawing from Orthodox iconography and compositions, I transport the images into a neutral, sterile state where they are re-examined and re-evaluated. Even though my work deals with social issues in Georgia, I see most of it as an autobiographical narrative that addresses the local space that I come from.

Karst terrains are landscapes with a distinctive hydrology and set of landforms that arise from a combination of high bedrock solubility and well-developed secondary (fracture) porosity. Karst areas are easily polluted due to the rapid transport of unfiltered percolating water through the systems. While many individuals are able to identify karst landforms such as sinkholes and caves, an understanding of the interconnectedness of the surface and subsurface in karst landscapes, as well as the vulnerability of karst areas to degradation, is often limited. Show caves, which are caves made accessible to visitation by humans through built infrastructure, can serve as an excellent venue through which to educate large quantities of people about the importance of these landscapes and sensitivities of them to degradation. Using Carter Caves State Park as a case study site, this study revealed that mobile eye-tracking technology can be used to develop cave tours that are both educational and entertaining by identifying greatest visitor interest at stops and along tour routes (i.e., where a visitors’ gaze falls throughout the tours).

This dissertation is a qualitative and interpretive project aimed at understanding the historical relationship between new media and religion. My primary research question asks how religious institutions handle the excitement and threat of new technology. To answer this question I conduct a series of case studies of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ (LDS/Mormon) relationship with three of the most important twentieth-century media: emerging radio, television, and Internet technologies. More specifically, I analyze how these electronic media were understood through their organizational histories, how they were talked about in their novelty and transitional states, and their religious institutionalization over time. This dissertation argues that Mormon media are best understood through the concept of Zion: a sacred city and a holy people. As a social, cultural, theological, and material endeavor, Zion is impossible without modern technology. The history of Mormon media is a history of a people’s perpetual attempts to be in the world but not of the world--to stand apart in uniqueness and unity while yet remaining close enough to promote positive change. This is the paradox of Zion, and the paradox of twentieth-century media: both rely on the very things they seek to transcend. It is through media that Mormonism was founded, struggles, and thrives. Through case studies of radio, television, and the Internet it is clear that media function as the material and metaphysical infrastructure of the religion and the interface through which Mormonism positions itself in relation to the world. This dissertation argues that understanding media, and ultimately ourselves by extension, is a process of discovery and creation guided by experimentation, trial and error, entrepreneurial pragmatism, and improvisation. Mormonism teaches that understanding media requires discipline, work, and faith. Media are fundamentally agents of compromise.

This study compared how four English-language newspapers in the United States and South Korea covered the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA). A content analysis using QDA Miner was conducted for 354 articles from the New York Time, the Washington Post, the Korea Herald, and the Korea Times to determine how each paper framed the topic. Overall the newspapers’ media framing aligned with their national concerns and interests. The literature review supported the idea that identifying frames in natural language articles and investigating the relative highlighting of issues was important in analyzing news coverage. The two Korean newspapers gave the issue of the KORUS FTA four times more news coverage than the two U.S. papers. The Korean public showed their concerns by rallies against the KORUS FTA during the negotiations. Opinion pieces of the U.S. newspapers gave their audiences generalized information on this issue while opinion stories of Korean papers focused on for-or-against debates about the KORUS FTA. The U.S. and Korean newspapers covered various industries differently reflecting the relative importance of those industries to each country if the treaty were approved eventually by the U.S. Congress and the Korean National Assembly. In addition, this research found that news stories in papers from both nations followed episodic frames, whereas opinion articles used thematic frames. This study provided empirical evidence to contribute to journalism scholars, journalists, and audiences for a better understanding of media framing.