Thesis advisor: Alan Lawson / Technology should enhance the human experience. Instead, it often alienates people from aspects of life that are considered most important. Artists are separated from their works, friends are separated from each other, and human ingenuity is filtered though computers before it can impact the world. These five short stories focus mainly on alienations inherent to communications and media technology, but also touch on database management and copyright concerns. Some take place in the present day; others present views of the future. All five stories use fiction to explore the truth of humanity's absurd relationship to technology. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2006. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (295-338). / In this dissertation, I trace methods for organizing skilled workers engaged in creative, limited-term projects in the United States between the nineteenth century and the 1950s. Examining eras of system building in technical fields-civil engineering in the nineteenth century, laboratory administration in the 1910s and 1920s, aircraft design in the 1930s, and electronics in the 1950s-I show that recent discourse on the management of innovation and change is a manifestation of a cyclically recurring conversation. This story complicates prevalent views of management theory and practice before World War II by recovering a thread obscured by emphasis on the organization of integrated, divisional companies and operative labor within them. Applying ideas from recent work in organization studies to distill common aspects of the management problems and labor processes individuals have confronted and theorized, I find common patterns: managers of construction firms, engineering departments, and research laboratories have again and again theorized the fast-moving, knowledge-intensive, relational organization, doing so long before these terms were available. Such thinking has been driven both by practical needs and because external pressures have forced explanation of seemingly uncontrolled, irrational work. Practically, the transferability of management techniques among settings such as construction and research has reflected kinships between labor and communication processes: each has involved skilled workers producing complex artifacts in uncertain physical, technical, and social environments. / (cont.) The need to explain such work, though, has been as much about external representation as internal control. From origins in government oversight of appropriations and military use of esprit de corps to cohere organizations under stress, tools used to manage project-based enterprises have been applied in response to the speed, scale, and complexity of the work itself. At the same time, engineers have explained the management of their work to deflect pressures to apply the logics of factory production and Taylorist scientific management to the organization of skilled labor. As explanations of the differences between building and operating and as delineations of points and terms of physical and cultural contact, representations of engineering work in schedules, budgets, organization charts, and narratives have both controlled and insulated work. / by Benjamin W. Pinney. / Ph.D.

Mobile augmented reality has become an influential tool for digital content representation and visualization of media content in terms of enhancing users' experience and improving the adaptability and usability of typical augmented reality applications, such as in e-commerce shopping, virtual museum, or digital heritage scenarios. This research proposes a new Service Oriented Mobile AR Architecture called SOMARA, which includes a novel mobile AR client application. SOMARA takes advantage the ability to integrate third party content through service orientation. The SOMARA architecture enhances traditional standalone mobile AR applications with embedded media content by uniquely integrating a web service framework into an augmented reality client application to create more efficient and flexible mobile augmented reality applications that efficiently supports novel media content acquisition and visualization through appropriate access parameters. The proposed architecture requires access to media content through specific media content service providers, e.g. a museum commissioning an augmented reality based museum interactive — predetermined media content, or any third party with their own service APIs, e.g. the Victoria and Albert Museum API — related external media content. This approach allows relevant third party media content to be ‘mashed' via their public API with museums' augmented reality interactive's ‘embedded' media content in the SOMARA mobile AR client. In this way novel mobile AR interactive applications, such as a museum augmented reality interactive, can be created based on particular museum environment scenarios that integrate a museum visitor's experience with the interactive's cultural objects. Such experiences based on a SOMARA type museum augmented reality interactive can also be saved allowing visitors to take home their museum experience. SOMARA thus allows museum interactive experiences based on visualization of museums and third party media content physically located in the museum to be migrated to the visitor's home environment for further study, enjoyment and understanding. This unique feature, ability to effectively replay the experience at home, of the proposed system utilizes service-orientation to integrate third party media content, which is currently deficient from commercial augmented reality solutions.

This research examines the social use of the Internet at the level of specified online users in conservative Arab societies, who are called in this thesis online lead users. These specified lead users are the ones who are influential in shaping the innovation processes due to their leading role of practice in finding solutions to their needs and problems they have experienced before the emergence of online social networks such as the lack of public sphere and independent civic organizations etc., which led them to utilize the Internet as their new public space to pursue their goals through their online initiatives and collective actions to apply the social change they seek for their societies under the existence of society social norms and censorship. The research has been carried out as mixed-method study, the gathered data done through means of quantitative and qualitative methods, and the chosen country to conduct the research were Saudi Arabia. A survey questionnaire link were distributed among the targeted online lead users in the country under study, and the author chose three cases form the country under study for the qualitative part. The research sought to examine to what extent society social norms and censorship influence online lead user's expression and behaviours, and their effect on the formulation of their online activities and collective actions, and analyzing the characteristics of online lead user's. The significance of this study lies in the fact that it contribute to the gap in the literature on the use of Internet in conservative Arab societies by providing insight into the roles that social norms play in influencing online behaviour, particularly in communities that are seeking to discuss social issues or mobilize collective action, and analysing online lead users characteristic to distinguish between conservative and cosmopolitan ones using the Right-Wing authoritarian measurement.

This study aims at understanding how Internet being a particular technology, integrates into daily practices in a small town. By doing this, it follows a theoretically informed ethnography based research concluding that the relationship between technology and society cannot be grasped by analysing both as separate entities. Hence, it attempts to develop a theoretical and methodological framework that is constantly aware of problems raised by dualistic assumptions analysing technology-society or human-nonhuman as separate entities one impinging upon other. It is this awareness that led the study to apply Bourdieu&rsquo / s concept of habitus and Latour&rsquo / s concept of actant into its field of inquiry. These two notions promote an understanding that takes into account the contingency of practices and provides researchers with the analytical means to comprehend technologies within the contexts of their &ldquo / use&rdquo / . It is also denoted by the findings of the study that a particular &lsquo / technology&rsquo / does not create a &lsquo / social impact&rsquo / but as itself being social, it allows this already occurring practice to find an avenue for its expression.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 144-154). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

This study aims at understanding how Internet being a particular technology, integrates into daily practices in a small town. By doing this, it follows a theoretically informed ethnography based research concluding that the relationship between technology and society cannot be grasped by analysing both as separate entities. Hence, it attempts to develop a theoretical and methodological framework that is constantly aware of problems raised by dualistic assumptions analysing technology-society or human-nonhuman as separate entities one impinging upon other. It is this awareness that led the study to apply Bourdieu&rsquo / s concept of habitus and Latour&rsquo / s concept of actant into its field of inquiry. These two notions promote an understanding that takes into account the contingency of practices and provides researchers with the analytical means to comprehend technologies within the contexts of their &ldquo / use&rdquo / . It is also denoted by the findings of the study that a particular &lsquo / technology&rsquo / does not create a &lsquo / social impact&rsquo / but as itself being social, it allows this already occurring practice to find an avenue for its expression.

abstract: This dissertation research investigates the social implications of computing artifacts that make use of sensor driven self-quantification to implicitly or explicitly direct user behaviors. These technologies are referred to here as self-sensoring prescriptive applications (SSPA’s). This genre of technological application has a strong presence in healthcare as a means to monitor health, modify behavior, improve health outcomes, and reduce medical costs. However, the commercial sector is quickly adopting SSPA’s as a means to monitor and/or modify consumer behaviors as well (Swan, 2013). These wearable devices typically monitor factors such as movement, heartrate, and respiration; ostensibly to guide the users to better or more informed choices about their physical fitness (Lee & Drake, 2013; Swan, 2012b). However, applications that claim to use biosensor data to assist in mood maintenance and control are entering the market (Bolluyt, 2015), and applications to aid in decision making about consumer products are on the horizon as well (Swan, 2012b). Interestingly, there is little existing research that investigates the direct impact biosensor data have on decision making, nor on the risks, benefits, or regulation of such technologies. The research presented here is inspired by a number of separate but related gaps in existing literature about the social implications of SSPA’s. First, how SSPA’s impact individual and group decision making and attitude formation within non-medical-care domains (e.g. will a message about what product to buy be more persuasive if it claims to have based the recommendation on your biometric information?). Second, how the design and designers of SSPA’s shape social behaviors and third, how these factors are or are not being considered in future design and public policy decisions. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Psychology 2016

This thesis is a critical, exploratory analysis of the impacts to the banking industry in South Africa, in light of the wave of technological change and emergence, termed in popular discourse as the Fourth Industrial Revolution or 4IR. The 4IR has been argued to offer the transformative potential to change and disrupt current societal organization and provide opportunities for developing countries such as South Africa to “leapfrog” into development. Many argue that as technology advances and progresses, it can be used to address socio-economic, developmental challenges and deliver services. In the banking sector, particularly in the context of developing countries, as large portions of the population remain excluded from formal financial services, digital banking methods premised on the technologies of the 4IR have emerged as potential “solutions”. What is often understated, however, that this study highlights, is that such technological advancements hold challenges. Moreover, as they are presented as solutions to the socioeconomic difficulties of developing countries, like financial exclusion, it is important that this is understood contextually, and critically and such challenges are presented. Through primarily qualitative case studies of two banks, Standard Bank and TymeBank, the study aimed to uncover the processes of digitisation occurring as well as the social processes that underlie them. Findings show that indeed, tangible examples of “4IR”/digitisation are identified at the two banks through technical application of emerging technologies, such as cloud computing and machine learning. However, more concerning are the social processes and strategic decisions that result in and out of their adoption. The 4IR in the context of this study appears to replicate ongoing social and economic inequalities, through inadequate digital infrastructures, and omni-present interests of neoliberalism presenting as digital capitalism. Additionally, carrying concern of adverse effects to the employment and labour landscape, the 4IR is deconstructed for its rhetorical meaning which contrasts with the reality. Hegemonic representations of a 4IR and its proposed ‘transformative benefits' do not correspond with actual phenomena and risk the neglecting of fundamental social challenges that are deepened by and new ones emerging out of digitisation.

This dissertation explores how the rise of widely available digital technology impacts the way music is produced, distributed, promoted, and consumed, with a specific focus on the changing nature of the relationship between artists and audiences new technology has engendered. Through in-depth interviewing, focus group interviewing, and discourse analysis, this case study explores the contemporary artist-audience relationship. This study demonstrates that digital technology impacts the relationship by making it closer and more multidimensional. This is intensified by the fact that everyone is participating; the audience and artist actively engage each other. The omnipresence of music culture combined with the omnipresence of technology is particularly salient. Media consumers are simultaneously engaged with music through technology, and technology through music and this happens on many different levels. Taken as a whole, artist and audience's musical lives are fragmented as they occur in multiple online and offline places, at multiple times, and are continuous. They create, download, stream, listen, share, burn, and build upon content while engaging in multiple personal and social practices. And, in the process, they experience rich meaning making attached to particular life events, people, places, and times. Engagement in a music community is not just listening to music, or consuming music, but participating in a culture. The nature of contemporary music culture is best characterized by community and as such, this dissertation argues we might better think of the audience as accomplices to the artist. / Mass Media and Communication