<p> Young adults&rsquo; use of online social media sites is widespread, making social media a key source of exposure to pro- and anti-tobacco related content, including portrayals of smoking or messages discouraging smoking from peers. Different social media sites have different purposes, audiences, and norms, which may impact the influence social media use has on risk behaviors, including tobacco use. Additionally, peer influence through social media &ndash; given the ability of users to generate, share, and critique content &ndash; may heighten the impact tobacco-related content has on young adults&rsquo; tobacco use behaviors. </p><p> This dissertation utilized survey data from a national sample of approximately 1,000 young adults age 18-24 to identify distinct patterns of social media site use and their relation to health risk behaviors, as well as to examine the relationship between exposure to tobacco-related content in social media and tobacco use behaviors. To further understand the experience of young adults consuming tobacco content in social media, in-depth interviews were conducted with eighteen smokers and nonsmokers. </p><p> Young adults&rsquo; social media site use patterns fell into five distinct classes&mdash;distinguished by low use across all sites, high use across all sites, high use of a professionally focused site, high use of sites known for creative user generation of content, and high use of the most popular sites. These classes differed significantly in their use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs. Exposure to pro-tobacco content in social media was widespread (over 70%, either alone or in combination with anti-tobacco content), more common among smokers, and associated with openness to smoking among nonsmokers, social smoking among smokers with close friends who smoke, and use of cigars and hookah, but not cigarettes. </p><p> The experiences of young adults shared in interviews support and further explain these quantitative findings, revealing the potential existence of distinct networks with differing tobacco use content and norms, with certain young adults (primarily low-income and minority smokers) reporting experiencing group norms that support taking pride in smoking, most young adults reporting experiencing group norms that frown upon taking pride in smoking but support social smoking (especially of cigars and hookah), and hardly any young adults reporting feeling supported in taking an anti-tobacco stance on social media. Young adults interviewed also assumed smoking posts influence their peers, potentially heightening the impact these posts have on their perceptions about the prevalence and acceptability of smoking. These differences in content and norms across networks of young adults might reinforce or even exacerbate existing disparities, as well as high rates of social smoking and use of cigars and hookah among young people. </p><p> Overall, the results of this dissertation highlight the need for innovative social media interventions that disseminate preventive health information based on social media site use patterns associated with specific risk behaviors; target social smoking and cigar and hookah use; address norms related to the acceptability of smoking posts and the presumed influence posts have on peers; and purposefully leverage network characteristics to influence tobacco use behaviors.</p><p>

<p> The Digital Age has brought to light emerging individual, social, and cultural changes that impact how mental health practitioners should approach psychotherapy. As techno-humanistic values permeate society, this thesis explores how online identities have been and can be integrated into the psychotherapeutic process through three primary stages of therapy: diagnosis, assessment, and treatment. Utilizing a hermeneutic methodology, this research explores and defines content spanning the digital world; artificial intelligence; virtual, mixed, and augmented realities; what an online identity is; and how online identities develop individually and collectively. Two overarching research findings emerged: (1) the blurring of online and offline realities and (2) that online identities have their own social and cultural context. Within these findings, new suggested clinical applications of how to incorporate online identities into diagnosis, assessment, and treatment modalities are proposed, most notably through the author's original contribution of the Virtual Identities Integration Therapy Model.</p><p>

<p> Developing online trust is crucial for e-commerce vendors in order to attract new consumers and develop long-term relationships with existing ones. We intended to investigate if consumers from different generational cohorts differ on how they develop online trust when utilizing e-commerce websites. Through the analysis of empirical data collected from 138 users of e-commerce, we examined four drivers of online trust between three generational cohorts in Puerto Rico. We reviewed relevant research related to the effects of security, privacy, navigational elements, feedback mechanisms on online trust and generational cohort theory. Partial least square and structural equation modeling was use for analysis. Results suggest that online trust is developed in dissimilar fashions across generations and differ in what drivers they find important. Our research could hold practical and scholarly significance since its findings can help e-commerce and online service providers in determining the important factors they need to have present in their websites in order to address online trust for their target audience. By investigating the differences in the drivers of online trust across three generational cohorts, this study builds upon previous literature that only compared Millennials against Baby Boomers.</p><p>

<p> In this dissertation, we propose an event detection approach to aid in real-time event detection. Social media generates information about news and events in real-time. Given the vast amount of data available and the rate of information propagation, reliably identifying events can be a challenge. Most state of the art techniques are post hoc techniques, which detect an event after it happened. Our goal is to detect the onset of an event as it is happening, using the user-generated information from Twitter streams. To achieve this goal, we use a discriminative model to identify a sudden change in the pattern of conversations over time. We also use a topic evolution model to identify credible events and propose an approach to eliminate random noise that is prevalent in many of the existing topic detection approaches. The simplicity of our proposed approach allows us to perform fast and efficient event detection, permitting discovery of events within minutes of the first conversation relating to an event started. We also show that this approach is applicable for other social media datasets to detect change over the longer periods of time. We extend the proposed event detection approach to incorporate information from multiple data sources with different velocity and volume. We study the event clusters generated from event detection approach for changes in events over time. We also propose and evaluate a location detection approach to identify the location of a user or an event based on tweets related to them.</p><p>

<p> Over twenty-five years ago, Henry Jenkins (1992) wrote that fan fiction writing is evidence of &ldquo;exceptional reading&rdquo; (p. 284) in that the fan text reflects a reader&rsquo;s commentary. This investigation examined the ways in which crossover fan fiction, fan-written fiction that mixes elements of two or more well-known fictional worlds, might reveal evidence of this &ldquo;exceptional reading.&rdquo; Using a qualitative content analysis of 5 crossover texts that remix Rowling&rsquo;s <i>Harry Potter</i> series and Austen&rsquo;s <i>Pride and Prejudice,</i> the study focused on fan writers-as-readers of the source texts. Drawing on Rosenblatt&rsquo;s (1988) transactional theory of reading, which posits that meaning resides in the transactions between reader, text, and writer, and that the meaning produced is a &ldquo;new event,&rdquo; this research concluded that the fan fiction writers&rsquo; crossover texts were, in part, a written record of some of the fan writers&rsquo; transactions with the source texts, a partial record of the &ldquo;new event.&rdquo; Furthermore, this analysis provided evidence that these fan readers-turned-writers demonstrated a powerful understanding of their intended and anticipated audience, a commanding and controlled use of emulation, and a calculated mingling of worlds&mdash;both to sustain and to disrupt the fan canon&mdash;in order to present their own interpretations of, comments on, and admiration for the source texts. The crossovers are evidence of &ldquo;exceptional reading&rdquo; in that they demonstrate the fan writers&rsquo; reading transactions.</p>

Abstract not available.

Identifying effective strategies for encouraging individuals to disclose their personal information on the Internet is important for marketers. In today's information-based economy, access to consumer data is imperative for organizations in conducting marketing activities. However, the extant privacy literature has found conflicting results regarding the effectiveness of safety cues (e.g., privacy policies) and rewards (e.g., discounts) for encouraging consumers to provide their personal information to Web sites (Andrade et al. 2002). There is also scant research on the implications of compensating consumers for their information, and its subsequent impact on privacy control expectations. This dissertation consists of two essays that examine how consumers respond to marketers' strategies for encouraging self-disclosure on the Internet, and how these strategies affect expectations for privacy control. Essay 1 employs regulatory focus theory for investigating the impact of consumers' goals (privacy protection vs. acquisition of benefits) on how they respond to marketers' online influence strategies and brand reputation. The use of safety cues, rewards, and brand reputation have been identified in the privacy literature as important factors that influence consumers' trust, privacy concern, and willingness to provide personal information (Milne and Culnan 2004). Essay 2 draws on theories of social exchange and social contracts for examining how the value and type of compensation received influences the degree to which consumers believe they own the information provided to marketers and their expectations for control over how their information is used. Although consumers frequently trade their personal information for benefits online, it has been suggested in the privacy literature that the point at which consumers own and control information about themselves and when that information becomes the property of marketers is unclear (Sheehan and Hoy 2000). This dissertation employs a mixed methods approach that includes a series of scenario-based experiments using survey panel data, and in-depth interviews. The results of essay 1 provide evidence of the importance of consumer goals in decisions to disclose personal information to marketers. Findings from essay 2 reveal that privacy exchanges may affect the degree to which consumers believe ownership and control over their information is shared with marketers.

My dissertation is an ethnographic study of Asian-American users on the social network site, Xanga. Based on my analysis of online texts, responses to texts, and participants’ discussions of their writing motivations, my research strongly suggests that examining digital writing through participants’ complex and overlapping constructions of their community and public(s) can help the field reconsider digital writing as a site of Asian-American rhetoric and as a process of constructing and transforming racial identities and relations. In particular, I examine how community and public, as interconnected and shifting writing imaginaries on Xanga, afford Asian-American users on this site the opportunity to write, explore, and circulate their racial and ethnic identities for multiple purposes and various audiences. Race and ethnicity, as many scholars argue, are shifting and unstable concepts and experiences. Therefore, writing about race and ethnicity may be done best in environments that can accommodate complex and multiple acts of racial and ethnic formations. While my research demonstrates how participants “want to be heard” on their own terms, whom they imagine (or want to imagine) as listening/reading significantly informs their writing. That is, participants’ conceptions of their writing goals and their audiences are multiple and simultaneous—these racial and ethnic writing acts are often inflected by intersecting issues of gender, sexuality, class, culture, and intergenerational tensions—and, hence, traditional writing genres that limit such goals, audiences, and complexity do not always reflect how writers conceive of their own racial and ethnic experiences and their writing in the world. This study, then, examines Xanga as a flexible writing ecology that affords Asian-American users opportunities to compose their continuously transforming and complex racial and ethnic identities across multiple niches of representational sites and, specifically, in public and community spaces.

Constructing family history integrates the discourses between an individual, family members and the historical record. When facts are missing, there are other paths to create the family story. The reconstruction of family history through autoethnography is an alternative way to facilitate forms of identity and create a deeper connection to the events of another time. In this thesis, I hope to show the genealogy of meanings and values producing forms of socio-political identity of the Salsedo family members in the present moment. How can one resolve the challenges of a belief system when the controversial socio-political family narrative is contradicted and incomplete? This study investigated how autoethnography applied through digital multimedia can be utilized to reconstruct a family history. The case study of Andrea Salsedo was conducted, whose untimely death on May 2, 1920 at the age of 38 was related to and preceded the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti. For this study, qualitative research methods were used. This included: archival research, interviews and autoethnography as informed by Ellis and Bochner (2000) and Reed-Danahay (1997). A digital interactive DVD was produced as a component of this research project. Keywords: Autoethnography, Family History, Autobiography, Cultural Identity, Anarchy, Andrea Salsedo, Sacco and Vanzetti, Digital Multimedia, Hypermedia, Interactive DVD Rom

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