I am almost finished with my grad thesis, so I thought I would post the abstract here for the world to read.

Coming into the age of globalised media coverage, major media events once limited to a specific country are now shared across the world. The semiotic and representational systems employed in the media coverage of these events shape our understanding of international relations, power structures, and public opinion. Royal weddings and political demonstrations have recently found a transnational audience, binding them together in a common cause or celebration. This project analyses the local appropriation of global media events, the media coverage that facilitates adoption, and the semiotic translations involved in the process.

Rettberg, J.W. (2009). ‘Freshly generated for you, and Barack Obama’: how social media represent your life. European Journal of Communication, 24(4), 451-466.

The primary point of this article is that the information we give to social media, be it personal, travel-oriented, photographic, or anything, combines to create a narrative surrounding us.  The author uses a personal example of Dopplr.com’s 2008 Personal Annual Report to show the ways location, contacts and chronology intertwine to tell a story. It is argued that the ways in which we document our lives in ‘personal media’ contributes to a type of cultural template that shape these narratives. Included in these templates are the ways in which this information is organized and presented. The media itself shows its users information about their travel, search history, or reading tastes generating what the author calls filtered self-portraits. The author suggests that this may be good as it allows us to see our place in the the cultural templates and larger stories of the world.

Stolley, K. (2009). Integrating social media into existing work environments: The case of
Delicious. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 23(3), 350-371.

This article provides an overview of the social bookmarking site Delicious.com and its functions. The professional use of Delicious is described in terms of activity theory and interaction design, making a case for specific and limited datatypes being particularly useful for technical communicators. The author argues that RSS and APIs allow technical communicators open up a centralized system, but these functions must be integrated into common use applications in order to gain widespread adoption into business workflows, with one proposed solution being the use of third party browser add-ons such as have been made for Firefox. The article then details the technical processes needed to achieve a useful level of integration, effectively opening up that centralized system.