Love Conquers All: The Power of the Indian Film to Free the Audience from Orientalism

Indian film and the way it interacts with the non-Indian fan community for Indian film presents an alternative to Oriantalist discourses by reaching out on an emotional level. Through surveys and interviews, this study shows how the fans find the films, find a community, and build a connection to India based on their initial massive emotional reaction to the films. By first looking at other scholarship on the topic, then the history of Indian film, it becomes apparent that this connection is outside of Said’s “network of interests” (3) that controls how the Orient is viewed, as the films have always been denigrated and ignored by the powerful both in India and abroad. Further, a study of the demographics of the fans and their history with the films shows how the emotional content allows the films to spread outside of their original audience and therefore introduce westerners to a human connection with India through the films

Integrated media in change

Media is a concept as mobile and flexible as media themselves. Media are global, but at the same time local. They are used by individuals, but also by the masses. They are shared, as well as private. The media landscape is moving and changing. Traditional journalism is being integrated into social media. Once created merely to inform us, media today have chosen to entertain us as well. It is to illuminate this movement and diversity that Integrated Media in Change was written. The publication owes its inspiration to the project “Integrated Media”, which brought together Nordic researchers who shared a curiosity about the topic and opened up new co-operation between the media in Finland, Sweden and Norway. The work featured in the present volume embraces two aims: to present the information structures underlying design and visual communication and to outline the relationship between traditional and social media. The contributing authors are professors, lecturers and scholars in of media, visual communication, the social sciences and media technology.publishedVersio

Detecting Political Framing Shifts and the Adversarial Phrases within\\ Rival Factions and Ranking Temporal Snapshot Contents in Social Media

abstract: Social Computing is an area of computer science concerned with dynamics of communities and cultures, created through computer-mediated social interaction. Various social media platforms, such as social network services and microblogging, enable users to come together and create social movements expressing their opinions on diverse sets of issues, events, complaints, grievances, and goals. Methods for monitoring and summarizing these types of sociopolitical trends, its leaders and followers, messages, and dynamics are needed. In this dissertation, a framework comprising of community and content-based computational methods is presented to provide insights for multilingual and noisy political social media content. First, a model is developed to predict the emergence of viral hashtag breakouts, using network features. Next, another model is developed to detect and compare individual and organizational accounts, by using a set of domain and language-independent features. The third model exposes contentious issues, driving reactionary dynamics between opposing camps. The fourth model develops community detection and visualization methods to reveal underlying dynamics and key messages that drive dynamics. The final model presents a use case methodology for detecting and monitoring foreign influence, wherein a state actor and news media under its control attempt to shift public opinion by framing information to support multiple adversarial narratives that facilitate their goals. In each case, a discussion of novel aspects and contributions of the models is presented, as well as quantitative and qualitative evaluations. An analysis of multiple conflict situations will be conducted, covering areas in the UK, Bangladesh, Libya and the Ukraine where adversarial framing lead to polarization, declines in social cohesion, social unrest, and even civil wars (e.g., Libya and the Ukraine).Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Women and queer British South Asian Instagrammers

The following thesis centers the socio-digital lives of women and queer members from the British South Asian digital diaspora, providing an account of the ambivalent nature of digital identity work. More specifically, it is invested in engaging participants in reflecting on their own engagements and the engagements of others on Instagram. I then critically analyse how they simultaneously resist and reproduce neoliberal logics of social media platforms. I involve participants in reflective interviews related to their digital usage. This approach is a tool underpinned by three theoretical strands that make fluid diaspora experience and digital experience, as well as centering the affective dimensions of social media platforms through the method of in-depth interviews. Practically, I argue that it serves as an animated space within which to analyse data and imaginatively build a community for research purposes. Unlike digital counterpublics like Black Twitter, my participants are individual users and I therefore have created an analytical space through which I can define them as a particular set of users who will have different as well as similar behaviours and opinions. In contextualising participant perceptions within discourses concerning South Asian digital diasporas, I explore how the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and caste are centered and obscured and what this tells us about contemporary configurations of British South Asian identities nationally and globally. Further contextualising these perceptions within wider discourses of neoliberal logics of social media and platform capitalism, I analyse how this technological social mode shapes and is shaped by its users

Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods: How to Protect the Global Civic Body from Disinformation and Misinformation

This open access book deconstructs the core features of online misinformation and disinformation. It finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. The chapters distil societal harms, evaluate solutions, and consider what must be done to strengthen societies as new biometric forms of emotion profiling emerge. Based on a rich, empirical, and interdisciplinary literature that examines multiple countries, the book will be of interest to scholars and students of Communications, Journalism, Politics, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Information Science, as well as global and local policymakers and ordinary citizens interested in how to prevent the spread of false information worldwide, both now and in the future

The Superfluousness of Big Brother: Charting the Evolution of Surveillance in Twentieth and Twenty First Century American and Global Anglophone Literature and Television

This dissertation charts the evolution of surveillance as presented in twentieth and twenty-first century American and Global Anglophone literature and television. It analyzes six exemplary works: 1984, The Circle, Black Mirror, Purity, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and The Lowland. It seeks to move beyond the scope of Benthamite and Foucauldian approaches to surveillance studies in order to examine the post-panoptic structures of the synopticon and the banopticon. To this end, this dissertation argues the six illustrative works mentioned above help underscore the shift from the few watching the many to the many watching the few. It seeks to explain the paradox whereby the televisual capabilities have never been more powerful yet the need for them has been rendered superfluous by an attitudinal, paradigmatic shift in western society. Finally, this dissertation endeavors to explain how literature productively complicates the issue of watching and how, paradoxically, we have never been better connected while simultaneously never been more alone. It posits another paradox as a solution: that we can know someone better by reading their words than by connecting with them through “social media.

Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods

This open access book deconstructs the core features of online misinformation and disinformation. It finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. The chapters distil societal harms, evaluate solutions, and consider what must be done to strengthen societies as new biometric forms of emotion profiling emerge. Based on a rich, empirical, and interdisciplinary literature that examines multiple countries, the book will be of interest to scholars and students of Communications, Journalism, Politics, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Information Science, as well as global and local policymakers and ordinary citizens interested in how to prevent the spread of false information worldwide, both now and in the future