Browsing by Subject "Media studies"
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Item The Digital Transformation of Mental Health(2018-08) Bedor Hiland, EmmaThe United States is experiencing a mental healthcare crisis. Alongside growing numbers of mental illness diagnoses we are also faced with the problems of practitioner scarcity, the geographic remoteness of populations in need of mental healthcare, and prohibitive costs for services that might otherwise be within reach. A potential solution to these problems, many technologists, healthcare workers, and others believe, is the integration of technology into the delivery of mental healthcare. This dissertation explores the emergence of a field that seeks to do just that, that I term the digital mental health industry, and which encompasses three areas: telemedicine, applications, and artificial intelligence. Despite the interest that the digital mental health industry attracts, as of yet there has been little study of it unto itself. This project provides not only an examination of the technologies it relies upon, but also its workers’ beliefs as well as the field’s broader social and medical effects. Methodologically this dissertation utilizes a combination of fieldwork, interviews, and textual analysis to tell the story of how the digital mental health industry came to be, how it is changing what it means to be mentally ill or healthy, and how technology mediates processes of self-care.Item Off-Screen scares: the critical-industrial practices of contemporary horror cinema(2013-01) Tompkins, Joseph F.This project examines the marketing and reception discourse of contemporary horror cinema, exploring in particular how Hollywood's "ancillary" media platforms (television, DVD, the Internet, and soundtrack albums) allow for new industrial strategies for mobilizing consumers. It considers how commercial practices of transindustrial synergy, branding, and repurposing affect the circulation and mediation of horror films, and how these practices in turn contribute to a host of new promotional forms (e.g., brand-name auteurs, corporate "re-imaginings," soundtrack albums, conglomerated video-on-demand networks and web 2.0 sites), which are designed to manage an increasingly diversified field of niche markets. Accordingly, the dissertation explores the way the horror genre has increasingly come to function as a transindustrial site for organizing reception and consumer activities across multiple media platforms and entertainment industries. In doing so, it aims to contribute to scholarly understanding of the way film genres are stabilized and reproduced by institutional discourses (critical, industrial, popular), which are essential to the very existence of commercial-film categories.Item Teutonic time-slip: travels in electronic music, technology, and German identity, 1968-2009(2013-04) Nye, Sean Culhane"Teutonic Time-Slip" traces intersections between popular electronic music and German identity from 1968 to 2009, examining identity representations in electronic music both as cultural export and import. Broadly speaking, it traces the transformation of Germany's reputation as a nation of classical music to a nation of electronic music. Its history begins with the forming of Krautrock bands amidst the cultural shifts of 1968 and ends with the self-reflective, though fractured, position of German electronic music in 2009, twenty years after German unification. The project demonstrates that electronic music, often considered a purely international music of the computer age, has represented new forms of regional, national, and European identities both within Germany and abroad. Furthermore, the dissertation examines both the construction and political-social critique of German identity through electronic music. It focuses on how German electronic pop emerged in the constant exchange with two distinct musical traditions: first, pop and rock cultures in the United Kingdom and the United States; and second, German classical music and avant-garde electronic music. Finally, as an American scholar, I frame the cultural constellations of musical sound, modern travel, technology, and performance with an examination of constructions of contemporary Germany identity that have been central to the cultural exchange between the United States and Germany.