<p> Social networking sites (SNS) have become the major media through which millions of college students develop and maintain their personal online networks. Several recent studies have explored why college students use social networking sites and the factors that affect users joining these sites. However, little is known about the relationship between the amount of SNS use and an under-represented community college student's academic success. The main objective of this study was to examine relationships between SNS activities, academic performance, the type and frequency of SNS use, student engagement, and other socio-psychological characteristics that may affect school achievement. This study surveyed 567 low-income students enrolled in six community colleges in Southern California. This cross-sectional structured survey used a sample of 567 low-income students enrolled in six community colleges in Southern California that are predominantly attended by low-income students. Both bivariate (ANOVA and Chi-Squared test) and multivariate (logistic regression) techniques were employed. The present research study clearly detected a strong association between SNS and college performance among community college students, even after demographic and socio-economic characteristics were held statistically constant. This study documented an excessive use of SNS is associated with poor performance in college. While it was expected that the excessive use of SNS associated with college performance; however, it is interesting that many college students realized this potential negative association between inappropriate use of SNS and college performance. Yet, it seems that motivation and skills to modify their behaviors associated with excessive use of SNS are not in place. SNS usage has great potential to prepare students for college by bridging their online social life with the world of academic discourse. It is important to design, develop, and implement educational curriculum that encourage use of SNS as an alternative and substitute for excessive use of SNS for non-educational purposes. Educational interventional projects are needed to promote knowledge and awareness of students of potential negative impact of SNS on their college performance, particularly among students that are using SNS extensively for non-educational purpose. Leadership at higher educational institutions also needs to be encouraged to promote use of SNS for educational use.</p>

<p> This dissertation explores the role soft control plays in the relationship between the television industry and short forms of digital media. Following James Beniger and Tizianna Terranova, I define soft control as the purposive movement by the television industry towards shaping audience attention toward predetermined goals through a range of interactions where development happens somewhat autonomously, while being interjected with commands over time. I define such things as media environment design, branding, and data collection as soft control practices. I focus on television as a way to understand how an industry historically patterned around more rigid forms of audience control deals with a digital media environment often cited for its lack of control features. And while there is already a robust discussion on the shifting strategies for the online distribution of shows, there is less of a focus on the increasing importance of shorter forms of digital media to the everyday operation of the television industry. Shorter forms of media include digitally circulated short videos, songs, casual digital games, and even social media, which is itself a platform for the distribution of shorter forms of media. I refer to all these forms of short media as "micromedia" and focus my interest on how various television companies are dealing with media environments saturated with it. </p><p> To do this I look at, for instance, how television companies use the data available on Twitter and appropriate the user-generated content of audiences, as well as how standard digital communication interfaces are utilized to more easily retrofit previous audience retention practices into new digital environments. Through the investigation of how television creates and appropriates micromedia as a way to reconfigure practices into the everyday lives of participatory audiences, I argue that we can see soft control elements at work in structuring the industry-audience relationship. These soft control features call into question the emancipatory role attributed to participatory audiences and digital technologies alike. If we think about media forms in their specific contexts, making sure to focus on their intermedial connections and their materiality, we can complicate ideas about what the categories of audience or industrial control mean.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, School of Business, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 12, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4791. Adviser: Michael R. Baye.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Computer Science, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 20, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: B, page: 7684. Adviser: Filippo Menczer.

<p> Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), a genre of transmedia experiences, are a recent phenomenon, with the first recognized ARG being <i>The Beast </i> (2001), a promotion for the film <i>A.I.: Artificial Intelligence </i> (2001). This dissertation seeks to more clearly define and investigate contexts of transmedia narratives and games, specifically ARGs. ARGs differ from more popular and well-known contemporary forms of gaming in several ways, perhaps most importantly by intensive use of multiple media. Whereas a player may experience most or all of a conventional video game through a single medium, participants in ARGs must navigate multiple media and technical platforms&mdash; networks of websites, digital graphics, audio recordings, videos, text and graphics in print, physical objects, etc.&mdash; in order to participate in the experience of the ARG. After establishing a history of ARGs, the author defines both transmedia and ARGs and begins to build typologies to help distinguish individual examples of the genres. Then, after building the above framework for analyzing transmedia and ARGs, the author explores the relevance of the ARG genre within three specific contexts. These contexts serve as tools to excavate potential motivators from creative and participatory standpoints. The author refers to these motivations as three logics of ARGs: industrial, cultural, and educational. The industrial logic examines the advantages of transmedia and ARG production from the entertainment industry standpoint, in terms of an alternative to franchising and as a way to extend intellectual property (IP), as well as offering interactive possibilities to an engaged audience. The cultural logic examines the relationship between the emergence of digital media, transmedia, and ARGs and the aesthetic appeal of the form and genre as paranoia, puzzle-solving, and collective meaning making within a shifting representation of reality through networked embodiment and challenging long-held assumptions of ontological and phenomenological experiences. Finally, the educational logic of ARGs analyzes the potential and use of the genre as an immersive, constructivist learning space that fosters self-motivated individual and collaborative analysis, interpretation, and problem-solving. </p><p>

<p> This study examines the relationships between celebrities and their followers through social networking sites (SNS). A total of 239 participants completed the survey through MTurk. The results show that celebrities&rsquo; self-disclosure on SNS increases their Parasocial Interaction (PI) with fans. In addition, when a celebrity is perceived as trustworthy, s/he would have a higher PI with fans. Meanwhile, celebrities&rsquo; self-disclosure was not associated with trustworthiness. Furthermore, time spent on SNS was also not associated with PI. </p><p> This study also found that type of celebrity does not determine the degree of influence they have on the followers. People have almost same parasocial interaction with their favorite celebrity whether the celebrity is a singer, athlete, actor, or any other. Additionally, there is no specific social networking site on which people have a stronger PI with celebrities. PI with celebrities on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and the other platforms is almost the same.</p><p>

<p> The objective of this thesis was to explore the topic of scalable web development, and it answered the question, &ldquo;How do you scale a website to handle more traffic at peak times without wasting resources?&rdquo; This is important research to any web company that has issues with rising costs as demand for their website increases. It would be wise for every online business to be prepared for more web traffic, before it occurs, without spending the budget of a multi-million user web company in low traffic periods. The last thing you want is an error as your customer base starts to arrive, giving them a bad experience for their first impressions, which would result in lost revenue.</p><p> Scalable software development architectures, including microservices, big data, and Kubernetes were studied, in addition to similar web service companies including Facebook, Twitter, and Match.com. A scalable architecture was designed for a social media web service, MeAndYou, using the big data configuration with a shared Aurora database, which was configured using an auto-scaling group attached to a load balancer in Amazon Web Services (AWS). It was tested using a custom threaded Selenium-based Python script that applied simulated user load to the servers. As the load was applied, AWS added more Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances running a virtual disk image of the web server. After the load was removed, the instances were terminated automatically by AWS to save costs.</p><p> Countless steps were taken to make the web service bigger and more scalable than it originally was, before testing, including adding more fields to user profiles, adding more search types, and separating the layers of code into different Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) files in the front-end. A version control system was configured on the servers using GitHub and rsync. The systems architecture designed suggests the Match Engine should use a stream processing message queue, which would allow the system to factor searches one at a time as they are created, with horizontal scaling capabilities, rather than grabbing the entire database and storing it in memory. The backend Match Engine was also tested for accuracy using Structured Query Language (SQL) injection, which determined how the match algorithm should be improved in the future.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation focuses on the everyday life information practices of teens in the Nerdfighter online fan community known as Nerdfighteria. Nerdfighteria is the community of fans of vloggers John and Hank Green. This study examines aspects of everyday life information seeking (ELIS) by 1) focusing on an understudied demographic, teens between the ages of 13 to 17; 2) focusing on a fan community, Nerdfighteria, which has many members, but has been rarely studied in the academic literature; and 3) investigating everyday life information practices using a single community that utilizes multiple online platforms (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and YouTube), rather than centering on a single platform. </p><p> This dissertation is a case study incorporating a survey of 241 teens and semi-structured interviews with 15 teens about their experiences in Nerdfighteria, followed by a month-long diary activities. The study also included observations of public communities and review of documents related to the Nerdfighter community. Data analysis was iterative and incorporated grounded theory techniques. </p><p> This study finds that teen Nerdfighters use their fan community to engage in a wide variety of everyday life information seeking around topics that are related to their personal development. Social, cognitive, emotional, and fan topics were predominant. Teen Nerdfighters engaged across platforms and were likely to switch platforms to find the optimal technical affordances while staying in Nerdfighteria. The teens viewed these changes as staying within the community rather than changing from one platform to another&mdash;illustrating the primacy of the community to the teens in meeting their information needs. Teens were drawn to Nerdfighteria because they believed it to be a unique place on the Internet, which valued intellectualism, positivity, and kindness. In many cases, teens preferred to observe other&rsquo;s interactions in order to gain the information they needed or wanted, and waited to engage via posting or responding when certain criteria were met. These findings describe the complicated interplay of the ELIS topics sought, the preferred practices for meeting an information need, and the reasons for choosing one community over another.</p><p>

<p> This study is an analysis of comments left on the Instagram posts of Black female celebrities, particularly those within Hip-Hop. This analysis put the comments in conversation with Patricia Hill-Collins&rsquo;s theory of the new racism as well as previous scholarship concerning the jezebel stereotype and imagery. Previous research concerning the jezebel stereotype, including Hill-Collins&rsquo;s work Black Sexual Politics, limit their analysis to traditional mass media outlets, including television, news, film, and music. This study was intended to interrogate social media&rsquo;s function as a form of mass media and to analyze how the jezebel stereotype can be seen in interactions therein. A data set of 800 comments, 200 each from four subjects, was created and coded using a grounded theory approach. It was found that all four subjects of the study were associated with the jezebel stereotype, but the commenters&rsquo; responses to the individual women were markedly different along axes of motherhood, class, and status within Hip-Hop. Two significant code families were created through grouping codes together according to place and method of occurrence: Bodily Motherhood and Othering &amp; Affiliation. Within Bodily Motherhood, it was found that pregnancy and motherhood are not only antitheses to the jezebel stereotype, but the subject must be forced back into the jezebel status through regulation of the physical body as well as pejorative acknowledgement of motherhood. The second code family of Othering and Affiliating speaks to the commenters&rsquo; acknowledgement of subjectivity for some of the women, but not all, as well as how the commenters attempted to Affiliate themselves with two of the subjects even though they were relegated to jezebel status. Through these results, this study determined that social media and the interactions within are indicative of the new racism described by Hill-Collins even though they do not function within a traditional mass media platform; the results also show that the jezebel stereotype and those who participate in its evolution work constantly and consistently at all points of a woman&rsquo;s life to relegate her to such status. Through engaging with how the jezebel stereotype, an example of intersectional oppression, functions in current day society, we hope to open possibilities of scholarly thought and actionable change. By acknowledging the methods through which women are successfully fighting or owning the public&rsquo;s perception of them as jezebel, we acknowledge that Black women are neither passive participants in their lives nor passive victims of a racism that attacks their body and attempts to steal their agency.</p><p>

<p> Growing polarization of political discourse in America has resulted in a populace and representatives that are ineffective in persuasive rhetoric and are in many cases at an impasse. With more politicians&mdash;and more Americans in general&mdash;using computer mediated social media to discuss politics, these media are no doubt having an effect on the way we conduct our political discourse. This study is an examination of the interactions related to four different posts on the social media Twitter and Facebook. The study includes a rhetorical analysis to determine how social media users engage in persuasive rhetoric according to Aristotle. The ensuing analysis demonstrates how social media have affected users as technological determinism suggests, and discusses behavioral markers and indicators. This analysis increases understanding of persuasive rhetoric and the effect of computer mediated social media. </p><p>