This dissertation explores the intersection of new media and narrative, as it is presented through a cinematic aesthetic. The narrative language of film is analyzed through the theoretical framework of Bakhtin’s concepts of Heteroglossia, Chronotope, and Dialogism. Bakhtin’s ideas of classifying language act as strong tools for demonstrating how cinematic narrative can inform and alter the perception of its spectators. Lev Manovich’s principles of New Media, specifically Variability, Modularity, and Automation are also utilized to demonstrate how cinema is a constantly evolving paradigm. Chapter one focuses on the theoretical terminology, outlining the conceptual definitions and illustrating their relevance in precise moments of cinema. This chapter introduces the idea that despite the original conception of Bakhtin and Manovich’s deriving from text and digital processes, their concepts are strongly present in contemporary cinema. Chapter two explores Manovich’s concept of variability in the cinematic genre of Noir. The Coen Brother’s Miller’s Crossing illustrates how the use of pastiche and homage has paved the way for the classic Noir genre to evolve into the genre of Neo-Noir. The aesthetic of Miller’s Crossing is examined in great detail to illuminate the comparisons between the variability of both genres. Chapter three also employs a Neo-Noir aesthetic. In Rian Johnson’s film Brick, the language is as much a character as any of the actors on the screen. A detailed reading of film exploring Bakhtin’s Dialogic concepts is established. The narrative of the film is examined with the idea that multiple meanings exist throughout individual units of speech. Chapter four continues the exploration of new media narrative concepts with a Science Fiction and Noir cinematic hybrid in an investigation of Rian Johnson’s film Looper. The basis of this analysis will be focused on fabula time and how the narrative of the film explores time travel, literally and metaphorically. In Looper the concepts of Chronotope and Modularity are both used to illustrate the director’s stylistic use of narrative sequencing to explore the paradoxes of time travel. Chapter five illustrates Manovich’s principles of new media as demonstrated in a biographical music drama. The documentary 20,000 Days on Earth features 24 hours in the life of Noir rock musician Nick Cave. The use of Cave’s music as a basis for the documentarians’ artful biopic creates an interpretive grid for analyzing the views of the artist and the persona that he has created for himself. Representations of diachrony in Cave’s reflective interviews regarding his evolution as an artist are also examined. The goal of this dissertation is to provide academic consideration for theoretical concepts that have not been traditionally applied to the study of cinema. It should be of interest to scholars seeking to supplement their endeavors within the realms of film studies as well as new media. In the interest of nurturing an interdisciplinary space for literary studies to exist and inform other branches of scholarship, the topics of new media and narratology, when applied to cinema establish a juncture between historical linguistics, digital media concepts and film studies.

This dissertation is the result of in interest in the progression of media-technologies within the urban context. Large media billboards scattered along major vehicular routes, also advertisements and information displayed on the facades of buildings have become synonymous with the urban fabric. The intent of this dissertation is to determine the relationship between media-technologies and the social organizations of the city. Can one consider these technologies as generators for social interaction and the broadening of the urban cultural content? Media-technologies are becoming increasingly popular in the use of public spaces, signifying the ability and opportunity for these systems to create an interactive relationship with the user. The theme of the discourse is the creation of a Music Television production centre in Prinshof, a neglected part of the Pretoria inner city. Establishing an entertainment based development in this already vibrant area, might contribute to the systematic rejuvenation of this lower to middle-income community. The design proposal aims at becoming a social tool, encouraging the development and sustaining of the local cultural identity and realizing the potential of media/interaction technologies within the African context. / Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Architecture / unrestricted

The thesis deals with the phenomenon of new media and its influence on the society. The work especially applies itself to the impact of new media on human conduct and human knowledge. The first part (Chapters: introduction and theoretical bases) of the thesis introduces the dilemma of new media and the society; it deals with a theoretical media frame, communication, knowledge and some selected implications of informatization. The third chapter (Media evolution) tries to map media evolution from the emergence of language until contemporary electronic media with regard to consumer's limitations, society and media itself. The fourth chapter (Impact of new media on human knowledge and human conduct) deals with, from two perspectives, some current topics as the media influence on society. The first view delivers an insight on the relationship of new media and knowledge. It refers to information abundance to the detriment of information quality, the tendency of access acceleration to information and working with information. This chapter in particular cases shows how information can become an effective tool for manipulation of power, political and economic interests. It also indicates risks of wrong human decision making due to misinformation. The second view suggests changes in human behaviour in cyberspace; it indicates what are signs of confluence of "front stage" and "back stage" behaviour. The fifth chapter (Empirical research), with respect to previous parts of this work, defines hypothesis of the new media influence on the knowledge and human conduct; it attempts to prove their validation in this research. The sixth chapter (How to use new media) suggests a way which should be followed by the society providing that education of an individual who stands up to the information and media society shall be the aim of the society. The last chapter (Conclusion) summarizes the basic ideas, provides for possible solutions and outlines a trend which should be, in relation to new media, followed by the society.

Since the personal computing revolution began in the 1980s, digital technologies have become more powerful, affordable, and portable. Those tools have made possible the information age and new ways of communicating. When we connect, we encounter prompts to post, comment, edit, tweet, snap, capture, collaborate, and share. Within an app loaded on a device close at hand are the tools necessary to create and bring together images, videos, sounds, animations, and text. When we mix forms of communication in this way, we create multimodal compositions. Teachers, students, politicians, corporations, universities, journalists, employers, artists, authors, role models, and friends now communicate with multimodal compositions. The growing significance of multimodal compositions suggests the importance of learning how to consume and create these new media. Many educators consider such skills essential to literacy in the information age. In the context of higher education, rhetoric and composition courses increasingly take on the responsibility of teaching future leaders to make effective and responsible use of multimodal compositions in their communication. This study considers how college-level composition and rhetoric teachers and their students experience a time of transition between traditional speaking and writing assignments and multimodal composition projects that ask students to integrate different ways of communicating. I use qualitative methods to examine three levels of the composition curriculum: a single assignment, a single course, and a single department. The results point to possible advantages, obstacles, and complications of using multimodality as an approach to college-level literacy teaching and learning.

New technologies, such as virtual reality, often draw to itself myths from other fields of interest and discourses. One such myth that has attached itself to virtual reality is the notion that virtual reality can provide a utopia for the mind, or true self, if the body can be cast off. It is this discarding of the body that my thesis aims to investigate in terms of Girardian sacrifice. Girard?s notion of sacrifice is built upon the observation of various cultures throughout history. It stands to reason that in our contemporary, digitally influenced, society, sacrifice, in some form, still persists. I argue that the body, when viewed as disposable, through the use of virtual reality, exhibits the same traits as the selected sacrificial victim. As the myth of a utopia for the mind, or true self, exists prior to the advent of virtual reality, traces of it, as well as the sacrifice I argue it entails, can be found in other texts as well. One such a text is The Chrysalids (Wyndham 1955). This text presents the reader with characters which I argue represent both the mind and body separately. The Chrysalids culminates in the characters representing the mind leaving for a utopian city whilst the character who, I argue, is most strongly associated with the body, Sophie Wender, is killed. It is also argued here in that the notion of abandoning the body is simply a myth since the inability to abandon the body is also discussed in terms of phenomenology, pointing out that the body can ultimately not be completely removed from the making of meaning. This phenomenological acknowledgement of the body, along with a critique The Chrysalids and cyber-utopia?s view of the body, forms the basis of my practical body of work. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Visual Arts / MA / Unrestricted

Bibliografický záznam LABANTOVÁ, Zuzana. Mediální konvergence v prostředí internetu. Praha, 2011. 126 s. Diplomová práce (Mgr.) Univerzita Karlova, Fakulta sociálních věd, Institut komunikačních studií a žurnalistiky. Katedra mediálních studií. Vedoucí diplomové práce Mgr. Jaroslav Švelch Abstract Media convergence - continuous merging of media determined by new technologies development - is one of the most significant phenomenons nowadays. The theoretical portion of this thesis describes technological, economical and content aspects of convergence. It is emphasizing Henry Jenkins's definition, which characterizes convergence as change in audience behavior, their active media content consumption. This contrast between passive audience of old traditional media and active audience of convergence media is a premise of following empirical portion of the thesis. It aims to assign socio- demographic characteristics to these contradictory descriptions. Audience of MF DNES, Rádio Impuls and TV Nova are elected as representatives of traditional audience and their profile is compared with iDnes.cz, Impuls.cz and nova.cz users characteristics. Methodologically, the thesis uses a quantitative analyze of dates gained from continuous big media researches realized in the Czech Republic. The thesis focuses also on these...

Magister Commercii - MCom / In May 2019, South Africa held its sixth democratic national and provincial elections. 48 political parties participated in this general election compared to the 19 that participated in 2014. Thus, the 2019 elections witnessed a significant broadening of political options that could appeal to the electorate. At the same time mechanisms for political parties to communicate and engage with voters have also evolved. Research has shown that ‘new media’, commonly known as social media (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for example), have increasingly become part of the political communication methods within electoral democracies. Given this, the study aimed to conduct a deep analysis of the use of Twitter as a communication tool by the African National Congress (ANC), Democratic Alliance (DA) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) during the election campaign period of 2019. The study adopted a qualitative method, by having a virtual ethnography approach to collect Twitter feeds. In addition, a Twitter survey was conducted in order to understand how the users received the political campaigns on the platform. The analysis was guided by the theoretical framework of Foot and Schneider (2006) which outlines and discusses four pillars (or functions) of online campaigning namely: “informing, involving, connecting and mobilizing”.

Diploma thesis " New media as a key factor of the electoral marketing " deals with the role of new media in the electoral marketing. The author of this thesis tries to demonstrate the influence of new media on the success of candidates in the elections. Specifically, the author works with the Presidential elections in 2013 in the Czech Republic. On thi example author tries to verificate the hypothesis that without the use of new media in the election campaign, candidates can not succeed in the campaign . To confirm the hypothesis, author uses the QCA - quantitative comparative analysis. This type of analysis brings mathematical elements to the social sciences. The main tool for this analysis is to statements manner , as we know from mathematics. In addition to the analysis itself, diploma thesis also describes the functioning of the new media , specifically social networks: Facebook , Twitter and Youtube, that is social networks, which are used by most Czech Republic . Without a comprehensive understanding of how the social networks work can not truly understand their potential for a political marketing. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

A number of incidents such as the "Obama-is-a-Muslim" rumor during the 2008 presidential election suggest that influential political blogs are playing a major role in setting the agenda of the legacy media. The power of the political blogosphere is forcing media practitioners, communication scholars and political theorists to re-conceptualize how issues arrive on the political and public agenda. This new phenomenon challenges the fundamental assumptions of agenda-setting theory to the extent that the 42-year old model, including the notion of a shared public agenda, should be reevaluated. By situating news agenda research within a larger intellectual context of agenda setting, this dissertation explored the intermedia agenda-setting relationship between political blogs and legacy news media, such as newspapers, network TV, and cable TV channels. Analyzing the contents count data of political blogs and legacy media and Internet Search Volume Index (SVI) data, this dissertation explored how coverage of a certain issue by top-ranking and influential political blogs may predict the coverage of the same issue by legacy news media. Employing a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, the results of the study revealed that political blogs significantly predicted the coverage of the legacy media on the "Obama-is-a-Muslim" rumor over a period of five days. The results also showed that the coverage of the rumor by both the political blogs and legacy media significantly predicted the level of Internet searches related to the rumor on all five days. The study also found positive and statistically significant correlations between the coverage by the political blogs and legacy media on the Obama-is-a-Muslim rumor and the volume of Internet searches on that rumor. The correlation was high on day 1, and decreased on each subsequent day. The study also found bi-directional agenda-setting relationships between the coverage of the political blogs and legacy media on the `Obama-is-a-Muslim' rumor. However, there was hardly any bi-directional relationship between the coverage of political blogs of the rumor and the volume of Internet searches related to the rumor. Although, the study found bi-directional relationship between the coverage of the legacy media on the rumor and the volume of Internet searched related to the rumor, the relationship faded away quickly. However, the study findings suggest that the perceived power of political blogs should be seen as trivial and ephemeral while that of the legacy news media should be seen as substantial and indelible in setting the public agenda. These findings may broaden our understanding of intermedia agenda-setting.

This dissertation project seeks to answer questions at the intersection of performance and new media with special attention to aesthetic practice. Primarily, the central issue at stake is the issue of material relationships between bodies and technologies as put into practice in a variety of aesthetic forms, including net art, staged performance, and internet memes. After an introduction, the second chapter discusses the method of analysis, schizoanalysis, in depth, drawing from the work of both Deleuze and Guattari as collaborators and Guattari’s extensive solo work. The next chapter addresses the new materialist paradigm that acts as the foundational commitment for seeing staged performances and digital performances as overlapping categories of phenomena. From there, the analysis shifts to questions of ontology, including the impact of naming certain behaviors on the understanding of those behaviors as well as the nature of performance itself. Just as Peggy Phelan asserts that performance is ephemeral, immediate, and nonreproducible, one can see encounters with new media under this same framework. The following three chapters act as specific case studies, using screen theory to understand staged performances, sequential art theory to explain the relationships between disparate parts of both new mediated and staged performance, and theories of identity and gender to understand selfies as constructive digital performances. Though this project offers no guarantees or certitudes, certain themes did emerge through the analysis, such as the place of the body in discourses of technology; connections between the audience and the art object, the art object and its environment, and the audience and the environment; and the impact of time, especially immediacy, on the understanding of both staged and mediated works. The hope of this project is necessarily one of offering answer, but instead of point to new questions and offering some starting points for further consideration.