A Scene Without A Name: Indie Classical and American New Music in the Twenty-First Century

This dissertation represents the first study of indie classical, a significant subset of new music in the twenty-first century United States. The definition of “indie classical” has been a point of controversy among musicians: I thus examine the phrase in its multiplicity, providing a framework to understand its many meanings and practices. Indie classical offers a lens through which to study the social: the web of relations through which new music is structured, comprised in a heterogeneous array of actors, from composers and performers to journalists and publicists to blog posts and music venues. This study reveals the mechanisms through which a musical movement establishes itself in American cultural life; demonstrates how intermediaries such as performers, administrators, critics, and publicists fundamentally shape artistic discourses; and offers a model for analyzing institutional identity and understanding the essential role of institutions in new music. Three chapters each consider indie classical through a different set of practices: as a young generation of musicians that constructed itself in shared institutional backgrounds and performative acts of grouping; as an identity for New Amsterdam Records that powerfully shaped the record label’s music and its dissemination; and as a collaboration between the ensemble yMusic and Duke University that sheds light on the twenty-first century status of the new-music ensemble and the composition PhD program. Combining archival and digital research, reception history, interviews, and fieldwork, I uncover the flows of cultural and economic capital that govern how classical and new music operate in the present day.Doctor of Philosoph

Does NME even know what a music blog is?: The Rhetoric and Social Meaning of MP3 Blogs

MP3 blogs and their aggregators, which have risen to prominence over the past four years, are presenting an alternative way of promoting and discovering new music. I will argue that MP3 files greatly affect MP3 blogs in terms of shaping them as: a genre separate from general weblogs and music blogs without MP3s, especially due to the impact of MP3 blog aggregators such as The Hype Machine and Elbows; a particular form of rhetoric illuminated by Kenneth Burke's dramatistic ratios of agency-purpose, purpose-act and scene-act; and as a potentially subversive subculture, which like other subcultures, exists in a symbiotic relationship with the traditional media it defines itself against. Using excerpts from multiple MP3 blogs and their forums, interviews with MP3 bloggers and Anthony Volodkin (creator of The Hype Machine), references to MP3 blogs in traditional press, and Burke's theory of dramatism and Hodge and Kress's theories of social semiotics, I will demonstrate that the MP3 file is not only changing the way music is consumed and circulated, but also the way music is promoted and discussed

The Impact of the Internet on the Public Sphere and on the Culture Industry. A study of blogs, social news sites and discussion forums

This thesis analyses how certain services of online communication (blogs, discussion forums, social news and bookmarking sites) contribute to the public sphere and to the culture industry. The concept of public sphere is derived from Jürgen Habermas' idea that political power can only be legitimate if it is applied in accordance with the best, common interests of the society – but these interests can only be crystallized in discursive debates between members of the society. However, contemporary national public spheres are said to be distorted and detached from real interests of citizens. The internet, through offering the possibility of democratic and reflexive communication, holds the potential of improving the state of public spheres. The concept of culture industry holds that the capitalization of the production of cultural products (i.e. works of art) rids societies of authoritative art, the one channel through which real individual freedom can be established. “Culture industry” is instrumental, through the promotion of consumption, to the capitalist domination of a few over masses. This, in turn, affects the general state of the public spheres. Once again, the internet has the potential to democratize this over-encompassing culture industry, through increasing cultural diversity via its several new channels of information and distribution. The analysis of blogs, discussion forums and social bookmarking and news sites confirms the democratic potential inherent in these services, but it also points out certain problems that hinder the actualization of this potential. It is established that the use of the generalizing category of “blogs” is misleading, because of the fake underlying dichotomy of “blogs vs traditional media.” The large, fragmented and asymmetrically interlinked (small, influential core and large, extremely fragmented periphery) totality of blogs is found to be contributive to the public sphere mostly as an alternative and very fast channel of information dissemination. The role of discussion forums is found to be ambiguous, certain forums being absolutely irrelevant, while others establishing powerful advocacy media and global issue publics. Social news sites are found to be potentially most constructive from the point of view of the public sphere, because they tend to effectively promote reasoned argumentation.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

The Map and The Territory: Russian Social Media Networks and Society

This dissertation uses Russian social media as a lens for exploring the historically, culturally, socially and politically situated relationship between individuals and online communication technologies. I propose a framework for comparative international analysis that leverages three interconnected elements – history, network structure and media ecology. On the basis of these three elements, this dissertation examines Russia’s social media ecology and its relationship to Russia’s broader socio-political environment, articulating the various factors that have influenced the specific network structure and nature of social media in Russia, its role within the broader online and traditional media ecologies, and its implications for Russian society and politics in general. In the first part, I outline the features of Russia’s distinct social media ecology, and examine the various historic and social factors that have shaped its evolution, highlighting the implications of the intertwined development of the Internet and social media in Russia. In the second section, I present the findings of my case study of the network structure of Russian social media, examining the culture of Russia’s online social networks and providing a detailed analysis of the network structure and patterns of attention in Russian social media between 2009- 2010. In the final section, I consider these findings within the broader context of Russia’s media ecology, highlighting the distinction between “Internet Russia” and “TV Russia” and evaluating the role of Russian social media networks in offline action, particularly the tumultuous events of 2012. Russian social media networks are not a microcosm, reflection or “map” of Russian society. They are created and pursued by an as yet elite, but growing, segment of the population - active and engaged social media users for whom the relatively uncensored Internet serves not only as an independent source of information, but, more significantly, as an avenue for interpersonal connection and communication. Civil participation in Russia, I conclude, has its roots in these interpersonal social networks. My historically, socially and culturally rooted exploration of Russian social media ecology recognizes it as an interpersonal space as well as a public sphere, highlighting the communication and coordination aspect of social media, as much as the informational one. This approach explains the immediate success, “like a fish to water,” of LiveJournal’s social network based blogging platform in Russia, and provides a foundation for understanding the unique structure and nature of Russian social media networks. Finally, it offers context and insight for a more nuanced understanding of the offline social and political ramifications of social media in Russia, as well as a matrix for cross cultural comparison

The Map and The Territory: Russian Social Media Networks and Society

This dissertation uses Russian social media as a lens for exploring the historically, culturally, socially and politically situated relationship between individuals and online communication technologies. I propose a framework for comparative international analysis that leverages three interconnected elements – history, network structure and media ecology. On the basis of these three elements, this dissertation examines Russia’s social media ecology and its relationship to Russia’s broader socio-political environment, articulating the various factors that have influenced the specific network structure and nature of social media in Russia, its role within the broader online and traditional media ecologies, and its implications for Russian society and politics in general. In the first part, I outline the features of Russia’s distinct social media ecology, and examine the various historic and social factors that have shaped its evolution, highlighting the implications of the intertwined development of the Internet and social media in Russia. In the second section, I present the findings of my case study of the network structure of Russian social media, examining the culture of Russia’s online social networks and providing a detailed analysis of the network structure and patterns of attention in Russian social media between 2009- 2010. In the final section, I consider these findings within the broader context of Russia’s media ecology, highlighting the distinction between “Internet Russia” and “TV Russia” and evaluating the role of Russian social media networks in offline action, particularly the tumultuous events of 2012. Russian social media networks are not a microcosm, reflection or “map” of Russian society. They are created and pursued by an as yet elite, but growing, segment of the population - active and engaged social media users for whom the relatively uncensored Internet serves not only as an independent source of information, but, more significantly, as an avenue for interpersonal connection and communication. Civil participation in Russia, I conclude, has its roots in these interpersonal social networks. My historically, socially and culturally rooted exploration of Russian social media ecology recognizes it as an interpersonal space as well as a public sphere, highlighting the communication and coordination aspect of social media, as much as the informational one. This approach explains the immediate success, “like a fish to water,” of LiveJournal’s social network based blogging platform in Russia, and provides a foundation for understanding the unique structure and nature of Russian social media networks. Finally, it offers context and insight for a more nuanced understanding of the offline social and political ramifications of social media in Russia, as well as a matrix for cross cultural comparison

A sentiment based approach to pattern discovery and classification in social media

Social media allows people to participate, express opinions, mediate their own content and interact with other users. As such, sentiment information has become an integral part of social media. This thesis presents a sentiment-based approach to analyse content and social relationships in social media.First, this thesis aims to construct building blocks for sentiment analysis in social media, using sentiment in the form of mood. To that end, the problem of supervised mood classification is investigated. This line of work provides insights into what features in a generic document classification problem can be transferred to a mood classification problem in social media. As data in social media is normally large scale, novel scalable feature sets are introduced for this task. In particular, a novel set of psycholinguistic features is proposed and validated, which does not require a supervised feature selection phase and can therefore be applied for mood analysis at a large scale. Next, under an unsupervised setting, this thesis explores the new problem of pattern discovery in social media using sentiment information. The result is the discovery of intrinsic patterns of moods, each of which can be considered as a group of moods similar to a basic emotion studied in psychology, and therefore providing valuable empirical evidence about the structure of human emotion in the social media domain in a data-driven approach.The second major contribution of this thesis explores the use of sentiment information conveyed in on-line social diaries for detection of real-world events in a large scale setting. In particular, this thesis introduces the novel concept of 'sentiment burst' and employs a stochastic model for detection, and subsequent extraction, of events in social media. The resultant model is a powerful bursty detection algorithm suitable for on-line deployment on ever-growing datasets such as social media. An additional contribution in this line of work is an effective method for evaluating and ranking events using Google Timeline. This offers an objective measure by which to evaluate event detection a topic that is largely under explored in the current literature due to a general lack of human groundtruth.Next, under an egocentric analysis, sentiment information is used to study the impact of the demographics and personalities of users on the messages they create. In particular, we examine how the age and social connectivity of on-line users correlate with the affective, topical and psycholinguistic features of the texts they author. Using a large, ground-truthed dataset of millions of users and on-line diaries, we investigate various important questions posed in social media analysis, psychology and sociology. For example, is there a difference with regard to topic, psycholinguistic features and mood in the messages written by old versus young users? What features are predictive of a user's personality? Of extraversion and introversion? Are there features that are predictive of influence? The results obtained by our sentiment-based approach are encouraging, do not require an expensive feature selection phase and thus suggest a new and promising approach for egocentric analysis in the social media domain.Finally, the sentiment information conveyed in media content is investigated with respect to the networking and interaction aspects of a social media system. Sentiment information is studied in parallel with two other common aspects of social media content: topics and linguistic styles. Sentiment information is proved in this thesis to provide additional insights into the process of community formation. It is also shown to be a powerful predictor of community membership for a message or a user at a lighter computational cost

The Politicization of Art on the Internet: From net.art to post-internet art

Este estudo tem como objetivo apresentar uma breve perspetiva sobre as manifestações socioculturais que se propagaram a partir do surgimento da Web; tendo como principal foco de análise o desenvolvimento da produção de Internet Arte na Europa e na América do Norte ao longo dos últimos 30 anos. Estruturado como um estudo de caso, três conceitos-chave fundamentam a base desta pesquisa: uma breve história da Internet, o desenvolvimento do termo hacker e a produção de arte web-based; da net.art até a Arte Pós-Internet. Em abordagem cronológica, estes campos serão descritos e posteriormente utilizados como guias para um final encadeamento comparativo que visa sustentar a hipótese da gradual dissolução de um ciberespaço utópico até o distópico cenário corporativo que constitui a Internet dos dias atuais.This study aims to present a brief perspective of the sociocultural manifestations that emerged after the Web birth, focusing on the development of Internet Art and the countercultural movements that emerged inside Europe and North America over the last 30 years. Under a case study structure, three fundamental subjects will be firstly explained: Internet history, the development of hacker concept and the web-based Art transformations: from net.art till Post-Internet Art. Chronologically described, these fields will lead to a final comparison of chained events that aim to sustain the hypothesis of the gradual dissolution of the early cyberspace utopias till the dystopic scene existent in nowadays Internet

Conceptualizing the Electronic Word-of-Mouth Process: What We Know and Need to Know About eWOM Creation, Exposure, and Evaluation

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) is a prevalent consumer practice that has undeniable effects on the company bottom line, yet it remains an over-labeled and under-theorized concept. Thus, marketers could benefit from a practical, science-based roadmap to maximize its business value. Building on the consumer motivation–opportunity–ability framework, this study conceptualizes three distinct stages in the eWOM process: eWOM creation, eWOM exposure, and eWOM evaluation. For each stage, we adopt a dual lens—from the perspective of the consumer (who sends and receives eWOM) and that of the marketer (who amplifies and manages eWOM for business results)—to synthesize key research insights and propose a research agenda based on a multidisciplinary systematic review of 1050 academic publications on eWOM published between 1996 and 2019. We conclude with a discussion of the future of eWOM research and practice