Posting for Points: Edublogs in the JMC Curriculum

Despite the spread of blogs in the media and in academia, little scholarly work has explored their use within the journalism and mass communication curriculum. This study, based on incorporation of blogs in 10 classes over five semesters -- undergraduate and graduate, skills and conceptual – examines student use of the format in relation to theories of social and blended learning. The findings suggest that although students tend to approach blogging as yet another assignment, the blogs do facilitate their engagement with the material and one another

The Representation of Nonmonogamy on Feminist Blogs

When young women look to enhance their understanding or knowledge about sexuality and relationships they often seek out internet resources. Young women, who are looking for knowledge that challenges norms surrounding relationships and sexuality, can go to feminist blogs to discuss and discern these topics. Therefore, it is important to note what these blogs are offering the women who read them and how the blogs challenge compulsory norms in our society. This thesis will combine a study of content pertaining to nonmonogamy on feminist blogs and a literary analysis of cyberfeminist theories. Through these findings I will determine what information is presented and neglected about nonmonogamy on feminist blogs as a resource for young women

Blogging Chronic Illness and Negotiating Patient-hood: Online Narratives of Women with MS

Personal narratives about women\u27s everyday lives with chronic illness are mapped onto the landscape of social media through blogging. Social media is facilitating an already-existing shift in patients\u27 roles as they are increasingly enabled and expected to self-educate themselves about their illness, collaborate with providers, self-manage their care, and engage in health activism. The health care industry has seized on the widespread use of social media to bolster rhetoric that the accelerated knowledge development made possible through social media has the potential to revolutionize the practice of medicine. Critics, however, argue that responsibility and activism via digital technologies has become an obligation of patient-hood that reproduces and masks neoliberal disciplinary practices that are embedded in health care. Lost between the divergent viewpoints of industry advocates and academic critics is the voice of patients whose use of social media blurs the boundaries of these ideological distinctions through their lived experience. Women with chronic illness practice patient-hood in part by using social media in the negotiation between the opportunities available to them and expectations placed on them. Blogging can be understood as multiple concurrent practices: empowering, resistant, and disciplinary. As an empowering practice, bloggers seek and find mutual understanding, form social networks, share experience, and create new knowledge. As a resistant practice, bloggers challenge medical authority, negotiate social expectations, and direct new narratives that may help to de-stigmatize serious illness. As an act of participatory patient-hood, blogging reproduces the disciplinary practices characteristic of the neoliberal shift in health care and support services from collective to individual responsibility. Specifically, this study examined blogs written by women with Multiple Sclerosis using a three-part methodology: an ethnographic content analysis and close reading of blogs as life narratives (N=40); a survey of bloggers (n=20) about their blogging activities; and a five-week online discussion forum with bloggers (n=9) about their experiences with blogging about their lives with a chronic illness. In addition, the research envisions the online environment as a material, co-created and mediated space in which bloggers enact these complementary and contradictory practices

Social Role Transitions and Technology: Societal Change and Coping in Online Communities

Technological and societal changes unfold in relation to one another. Many events like becoming a parent, getting divorced, or getting a medical diagnosis dictate a change in one’s social role. Social role transition can have negative consequences including stress, stigmatization, and disempowerment. Social interactions, especially communicating with allies and those facing similar conditions, can alleviate the psychological burden of these challenges. The goal of this dissertation is to understand how people use technology to cope with social role change, and how the features of different online communities provide a range of ways to make sense of their social role transition, find support, and advocate for change. In the first study (Chapter 3), I qualitatively analyze interviews with fathers and a sam- ple of father blogs to show how fathers use do-it-yourself (DIY) language on blogs and in their online interactions as a means of redefining fatherhood. Fathers use the DIY concept to build their own father-centric online communities in order to manage some of the disad- vantages associated with the lack of parenting online communities that cater to them. This new framing of fatherhood allows fathers to make sense of their new role as parents, and at the same time, to redefine the social norms around fatherhood. In Chapter 4, I study how parents use social media sites at scale using natural language processing. The focus of the analysis is on Reddit, a social media site that allows users to comment under pseudonyms. I find that parents use pseudonymous social media sites to discuss topics that might otherwise be considered too sensitive to discuss on real-name social media sites such as Facebook (e.g., breastfeeding and sleep training). This study also outlines similarities and differences in discussion topics among mothers and father on Reddit (e.g., mothers discussing breastfeeding and fathers discussing divorce and custody). Finally, in Chapter 5, I use computational and qualitative methods to study how anony- mous accounts on Reddit (throwaway accounts) provide parents with varying levels of anonymity as they cope with social role changes by sharing potentially stigmatizing infor- mation (e.g., postpartum depression) or advocating for stigmatized identities (e.g., divorced fathers). Finally, based on my findings, I present design recommendations that could pro- mote better social support on platforms beyond Reddit.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162933/1/tawfiqam_1.pd