Browsing by Subject "New Media"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Casual Encounters: Constructing Sexual Deviance on Craigslist.org
    (2017-05) Reynolds, Chelsea
    Despite the prevalence of dating websites and hookup applications, mass communication scholars have largely ignored news coverage of sex in the digital age. Research about online sexuality has built on early theories of cyber identity, in which the Internet was conceptualized as a great emancipator. Online, it was argued, people could explore “disembodied” sexualities with little interference from offline reality. This dissertation builds a research line that investigates journalistic discourse about online sexuality using more than a decade of coverage of Craigslist sex forums as a case study. It also examines user activity on Craigslist sex forums, testing dominant theories of online identity. For journalists, Internet-mediated sexuality represents a compound moral threat. Since 2003, national U.S. newspapers have consistently identified the classified ads website Craigslist as a hotbed for sexual deviants — people whose sexual interests mainstream culture deems immoral or even illegal. Newspaper journalists call on police and government sources to frame Craigslist users as prostitutes, violent criminals, and cheating politicians. By relying on elite sources, news media surveil social deviance for the public. This is an outcome of normative reporting practices. Representational scholars have argued that media made by marginalized groups will provide more nuanced narratives than the mainstream press. But in stories about Craigslist sex forums, alternative media reproduce stigma about online sexuality. Popular LGBTQ and feminist online magazines describe Craigslist sex forums as catalysts for illegal and immoral activity. They sometimes privilege sex workers’ voices and cover the experiences of sexual minorities, but they contribute to the same deviance-defining discourse about Craigslist sex forums as does the mainstream press. Media across the ideological spectrum police social deviance and reinforce cultural norms — online and off. Mass media surveillance of online sexuality encourages people to surveil their own behavior online. Ads on Craigslist sex forums reflect dominant cultural norms about sex despite posters’ attempts to explore their “unusual” fantasies. The Craigslist Casual Encounters forum provides a productive outlet for people to fantasize about kink, non-monogamy, race, and sexuality. But it also reflects the politics of its white male user base. Sexism, homophobia, and gendered logics saturate the forums. Offline stigmas about sexuality bleed into online sexual expression. This dissertation theorizes the role of normalizing judgment in determining media representations of online sexuality. It offers perspectives from journalism sociology and cultural studies to help explain why media paint Craigslist sex forums as spaces that foster illegal and immoral sex. The dissertation concludes that online sexuality must be added to definitions of deviance in news. It problematizes theories of representations of sexuality by alternative media, and it demonstrates that online sexuality is deeply intertwined with offline identity.
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    Connected isolation: screens, mobility, and globalized media culture
    (2008-12) Groening, Stephen Francis
    >"Connected Isolation: Screens, Mobility, and Globalized Media Culture" is an analysis of the implications of individualized media forms that increasingly constitute and encroach upon what was previously regarded as public space. I argue that the role of screens in non-theatrical contexts requires that we reassess the importance of media distribution and flows. The reconfiguration of social spaces caused by the proliferation of screens leads to new aesthetic modes and new forms of sociality. The push and pull of those media forms results in a social order I call "connected isolation," a predicament in which subjects must isolate themselves in order to connect to the world through media technologies. These technologies compel separation from the local in order to achieve immediacy with the global, thereby reconfiguring long-standing categories of space. The unresolved tensions between public and private produced by these devices (the use of cellular phones in public areas, for example) express the emergent social order of connected isolation. My dissertation provides a deeper understanding of a larger cultural problematic - the role of communication technologies in structuring social belonging - through a focus on the tensions between community and technological innovation in a social milieu structured by mass media. To describe the emergence of connected isolation as a new social order, I engage four theoretical constructs: distraction, the "space of flows," "mobile-privatization," and the aesthetic of liveness. As specific objects of analysis, I examine corporate training films from the silent era, in-flight entertainment, cellular phones, and television screens in public spaces. This dissertation, then, moves between the sociology of culture, economic geography and social theory to arrive at some conclusions regarding electronic communications technologies and the proliferation of screens.
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    Imagining the Posthuman: Art, Technology, and Living in the Future
    (2013-08) Myers, Cerise
    This project examines works of contemporary performance, digital, and bio- art that reflect the blurring of boundaries once perceived as impermeable, whether between art and science, organism and machine, or the natural and modified. They reflect what has been called posthumanism, which, broadly defined, sees past the isolated, self-contained individual subject celebrated by liberal humanism to understand humans as bound to and shaped by their organic and technological others. As increasing scientific knowledge and rapidly expanding digital and communications technologies render increasingly obsolete the boundaries between humans and animals, organisms and machines, scholars including Cary Wolfe, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway have wrestled with what this posthuman present means, yet have largely failed to address a critical aspect of understanding and imagining the posthuman: the visual. In a posthuman environment in which distinctions are created or obscured by means of what can or cannot be seen, and in which lives are increasingly mediated by ubiquitous screens and images, understanding the role the visual plays is crucial. Examining works by artists Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Orlan, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Char Davies, and Stelarc, this project focuses on how technologies of sight reveal and structure the posthuman experience; how artistic practice shapes and is shaped by a posthuman world; how the body is viewed as modifiable or even replaceable; and what posthuman ways of seeing and creating imagery mean for human interaction, understanding, and agency. Recognizing posthumanism as a way of seeing and being seen allows not only a more complex understanding thereof, but has real-world implications for the freedom, movement, and agency of those human subjects interacting in a posthuman world.