The film of tomorrow: a cultural history of videoblogging

Videoblogging is a form of cultural production that emerged in the early 2000s as a result of the increasing availability of cheap digital recording equipment, new videoediting software, video website hosting and innovative distribution networks across the internet. This thesis explores the close entanglement of culture and technology in this early and under-examined area of media production – most notably in the self-definition and development of a specific community around video practices and technologies between 2004-2009. These videobloggers’ digital works are presented as an original case study of material digital culture on the internet, which also produced a distinctive aesthetic style. The thesis traces the discourses and technological infrastructures that were developed both within and around the community of videobloggers and that created the important pre-conditions for the video artefacts they produced. Through an ethnographically-informed cultural history of the practices and technologies of videoblogging, this thesis engages with the way in which new forms of cultural and technical hybrids have emerged in an increasingly digital age. The ethnographic research is informed by histories of film and video, which contribute to the theoretical understanding and contextualisation of videoblogging – as an early digital community – which has been somewhat neglected in favour of research on mainstream online video websites, such as YouTube. The thesis also contributes to scholarly understanding of contemporary digital video practices, and explores how the history of earlier amateur and semi-professional film and video has been influential on the practices, technologies and aesthetic styles of the videobloggers. It is also shown how their aesthetic has been drawn on and amplified in network culture, mainstream media, and contemporary media and cultural production. Through a critical mapping of the socio-technical structures of videoblogging, the thesis argues that the trajectories of future media and cultural production draws heavily from the practices and aesthetics of these early hybrid networked cultural-technical communities

Towards a virtual constituency? : comparative dimensions of MEPs' offline-online constituency orientations

Defence date: 25 March 2014Examining Board: Professor Alexander H. Trechsel, European University Institute (Supervisor) Professor Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, for Prof. Peter Mair (†), EUI Professor David Farrell, University College Dublin Professor Thomas Poguntke, University of Düsseldorf.European Union institutions have been notoriously criticized for their lack of day-to-day linkage with European citizenry. The European Parliament as the only directly elected EU institution is logically one of the 'closest' linkage institutions to the European electorate. However, little is known about how its representatives - Members' of the European Parliament (MEP) - connect, service and cultivate relations with their constituencies between two elections points. This thesis attempts to fill in this missing link. Using original data from the author's self-administered 2009 MEP survey (N=145), this thesis empirically traces MEP's constituency orientations in three steps. It first maps out MEP constituency orientations in terms of MEP's attitudes / how they think about a their constituencies, the importance they attach to constituency work and the types of activities they pursue in their constituency work. Given that MEP function in an ICT era, in addition to mapping MEP's constituency outreach offline, as part of the second step, the thesis also evaluates how MEP incorporate ICTs and Internet platforms in their constituency outreach. Could it be that the various interactive, transactional and asynchronous features that the Internet provides prompt MEP to use their websites, blogs or social networking sites as quasi virtual constituency offices? In view that a fair degree of variation was found in MEP's constituency outreach, the third last step looks at the determinant of this variation. Overall, the thesis' findings demonstrate that in spite the low institutional and electoral incentives for them to engage in constituency work, MEP conduct a wide range of constituency outreach activities both offline and online. Moreover, citizens contact MEP with diverse types of casework. At the same time data also showed that majority of MEP still prioritize and attach more importance to their legislative duties as oppose to their constituency work. With respect to MEP's Internet usage, the thesis findings further suggest that it is yet premature to conclude that the 'virtual constituency office' is replacing the conventional constituency (offline)