Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / This thesis proposes the study of rumor as a guide to the battle for hearts and minds in Iraq. It reviews existing rumor theory to identify how rumors function and what we can learn from them. Rumors often serve as a window into a community, and can provide valuable information for developing a campaign to assess, monitor, and gain the support necessary to defeat insurgents. This thesis employs two distinct typologies to analyze over ten months of rumors in Baghdad, Iraq. The motivation typology provides indications of Iraqi sentiment, and suggests unrelieved anxiety and fear is likely contributing to widespread hostility towards the US-led Coalition. Indications of unrealistic expectations are also evident, potentially contributing to hostility levels as they go unrealized. The subject typology identifies overarching concerns of the Iraqi people, and suggests there are specific fears inhibiting cooperation with US counterinsurgency efforts. This thesis then examines rumor remedies. Because they rely on effective communication skills, American and Arab cultural communication styles are contrasted and integrated into tailored remedies for Iraq. The findings in this thesis could assist Coalition information campaigns by alerting them to existing Iraqi perceptions so they can tailor messages to address significant concerns and fears. / Captain, United States Air Force

Thesis advisor: Ted Gaiser / This study explores the alteration of gossip as a result of new technology. Specifically, this study examines the social implications of Facebook, a popular social networking website, on college students using the Boston College undergraduate population as a lens to study the college student population in general. Drawing from the theories of Simmel, Mead, and Goffman, and others, I outline how college students present themselves on Facebook’s online environment. I employed a mixed-method research approach, collecting data from a survey of Boston College undergraduates and, subsequently, conducting a series of in-depth face-to-face interviews in order to gain an understanding of how Facebook altered the social scene and, specifically, how Facebook affects gossip. Facebook is a communication tool widely used by college students in order to present themselves online and maintain relationships. I found that due to the pervasive nature of Facebook, in junction with the simplicity of posting information about oneself and others on Facebook, an important shift occurs in which private matters are publicized to a large audience. This shift facilitates the flow of gossip amongst college students. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology Honors Program. / Discipline: Sociology.

Whether as a distinct cultural form, or as a problem exaggerated and imagined by a paranoid interpretive bent, “rumor” (al-ishāʿa) claims a place in the writings of many Egyptian intellectuals, littérateurs, journalists, and politicians in the twentieth century that has yet to be adequately addressed and theorized. At the intersection of cultural studies and Arabic literature, this dissertation investigates rumor as a fiercely contested mode of reading and writing public culture in Egypt since 1952. Eschewing the legislative trend in the modern social and clinical sciences that has positioned rumor as an object to be combatted, or reduced it to the mechanisms and motives of mass psychology, I examine some of the many ways in which it generates, animates, or interferes with scenes in the lives of social actors as they move between the centers and peripheries of power. Rumor possesses both affirmative and destructive powers, often inseparably, and in order to theorize its complex imbrications with character, community, and culture beyond the urge to evaluative critique, I develop a host of concepts – such as noise, play, paranoia, and parody – capable of bringing this oft-neglected ambivalence into view. Notoriously resistant to analysis, whether due to is conceptual vagueness or ephemeral phenomenological status, rumor and the scenes it makes require a rethinking of the modes of scholarly writing that dominate the humanities and social sciences. A degree of mobility and eclecticism, drawn from the object itself in its flight across history and culture, imbues the organization and style of this dissertation: rumor is the object, and inspires the mode, of my investigation. Each of the three Parts of the dissertation investigates a different field of public culture in post-1952 Egypt. Part 1 analyzes the rhetoric and interpretive practices deployed by state actors in their confrontation with what they call “rumors.” Three historical events are taken as significant: the rhetorical and dramatic performances of the Free Officers in the early revolutionary period (1952-1954), the social scientific celebration of “planning” (takhṭīṭ) in 1964, and the Mubarak death rumors of 2007. While here rumor comes into view as the object of state discipline and paranoid interpretation, the remaining two Parts investigate its role in the performances of artists, littérateurs, and bloggers. Part 2 analyzes the literary texts of Gamal al-Ghitani, which are unique in their simultaneous recording and performing of rumors in Egyptian cultural politics at the turn of the millennium. Finally, Part 3 examines intersections between play, parody, and the paranoid style of interpretation in cyberspace, including an investigation into the blogging campaign “Mubarak Mat” (“Mubarak has Died,” 2008) and Ashraf Hamdi’s response to rumors spun by the counterrevolution (2011-2012). While rumor, across these many contexts, is deplored as a destructive force, it also, I contend, salvages possibility from necessity, explores alternatives to the status quo, and serves as an unexpected catalyst for innovative cultural and political forms. As noise, it creates disorder and generates a new order. It is at once in public culture, and making public culture. / text

This thesis presents the findings of a small-scale, qualitative study of attitudes toward AIDS and AIDS education campaigns in the village of Sota in central Benin. Through a language ideology framework, this study reviews the overlap and disparity between AIDS discourse and other systems of meaning in Sota, particularly rumors and religious beliefs. The portrait that emerges from this analysis of the social construction of AIDS by multiple discourses suggests that the impact of AIDS education may be limited only in part because the intended recipients fail to understand the information being provided. More importantly, the context and underlying assumptions of educational presentations about HIV/AIDS are not formulated in ways that are compatible with, or directly meaningful to, lived experience.

Submitted by Erika Demachki (erikademachki@gmail.com) on 2014-11-13T16:45:09Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Daniel Antônio Mendonça da Silva - 2013.pdf: 1681960 bytes, checksum: 045f2940a2c8539d589a5c6227cf55e6 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Erika Demachki (erikademachki@gmail.com) on 2014-11-13T16:45:43Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Daniel Antônio Mendonça da Silva - 2013.pdf: 1681960 bytes, checksum: 045f2940a2c8539d589a5c6227cf55e6 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2014-11-13T16:45:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Daniel Antônio Mendonça da Silva - 2013.pdf: 1681960 bytes, checksum: 045f2940a2c8539d589a5c6227cf55e6 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-08-23 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This work has the main objective to study a of the propagation of information sets N e Z:We consider three models of spreading information. The first model takes into account the power of each individual in transmitting information. The second model takes into account the power of every individual to receive information. In the third model this power is given by the amount of life and the probability that individuals have to jump right. / O trabalho tem como objetivo principal, o estudo da propagação de uma informação sobre os conjuntos N e Z: Consideramos três modelos de propagação da informação. O primeiro modelo leva em conta o poder de cada indivíduo em transmitir uma informação. O segundo modelo leva em conta o poder de cada indivíduo em receber informação. No terceiro modelo este poder é dado pela quantidade de vida e pelas probabilidades que os indivíduos têm de saltar para direita.

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo apresentar o resultado da análise e identificação de padrões e comportamentos de postagens na rede social Twitter monitorando um termo específico em um período definido de tempo. Após a extração e tratamento dos dados obtidos do Twitter, explicitando dentre as postagens quais são oriundas de usuários geradores de notícias, foram analisadas informações de topologia da rede de usuários do experimento, inclusive com o detalhamento das informações de propagação e duração das postagens: dados e comportamentos os quais buscamos reproduzir utilizando simulação por agentes / The present work aims to present the result of the analysis and identification of patterns and behaviors of Twitter posts monitoring a specific term in a period. After the extraction and treatment of the data obtained from Twitter, emphasizing among the posts which are generated from news agency users, were analyzed the topology information about the network of users of the experiment, including details of propagation information and duration of the posts: data and behaviors that we seek to reproduce using agent simulation

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo apresentar o resultado da análise e identificação de padrões e comportamentos de postagens na rede social Twitter monitorando um termo específico em um período definido de tempo. Após a extração e tratamento dos dados obtidos do Twitter, explicitando dentre as postagens quais são oriundas de usuários geradores de notícias, foram analisadas informações de topologia da rede de usuários do experimento, inclusive com o detalhamento das informações de propagação e duração das postagens: dados e comportamentos os quais buscamos reproduzir utilizando simulação por agentes / The present work aims to present the result of the analysis and identification of patterns and behaviors of Twitter posts monitoring a specific term in a period. After the extraction and treatment of the data obtained from Twitter, emphasizing among the posts which are generated from news agency users, were analyzed the topology information about the network of users of the experiment, including details of propagation information and duration of the posts: data and behaviors that we seek to reproduce using agent simulation

I situate Škvorecký’s novel as both a primary document in the historical record of transitional justice and as a literary creation in the author’s larger oeuvre. In creating this work of autobiographical fiction, Škvorecký deals with the ambiguities of a tumultuous historico-political moment and creates an appropriately complex work of art. I combine social science research with close-reading of the text in the tradition of new historicism. In the introduction I explain the historico-political background, specifically transitional justice and lustration in Czech Republic in the early 1990s, that engendered Two Murders. In my first chapter, I examine the book reviews, Czech and English, that appeared following the two language-respective publications of Two Murders. In the remaining three chapters I present my analysis of the novel based on close-reading and applied historical information. Chapters two and three discuss different but interconnected manifestations of distance. Chapter two examines memory as the temporal distance of the mind, while chapter three explores exile as spatial distance. Škvorecký invests memory and exile with enormous significance, and uses both concepts to depict his characters’ isolation. In the final chapter, I discuss rumor and reputation in the novel’s two distinct story-lines, demonstrating how they come together to create a cohesive artistic work. Approaching the novel as both a historical document and a work of art, I hope to critically examine this complicated historical moment and appraise Škvorecký’s contribution to the post-communist Czech dialogue. / text

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 35-40).

Thesis (M.S.W.)--Smith College School for Social Work, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 34-38)