Masters Theses
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Browsing Masters Theses by Author "Abbate, Janet E."
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- Executable Texts: Programs as Communications Devices and Their Use in Shaping High-tech CultureMawler, Stuart (Virginia Tech, 2007-01-19)This thesis takes a fresh look at software, treating it as a document, manuscript, corpus, or text to be consumed among communities of programmers and uncovering the social roles of these texts within two specific sub-communities and comparing them. In the paper, the social roles of the texts are placed within the context of the technical and cultural constraints and environments in which programs are written. Within that context, the comments emphasize the metaphoric status of programming languages and the social role of the comments themselves. These social roles are combined with the normative intentions for each comment, creating a dynamic relationship of form and function for both normative and identity-oriented purposes. The relationship of form and function is used as a unifying concept for a more detailed investigation of the construction of comments, including a look at a literary device that relies on the plural pronoun "we" as the subject. The comments used in this analysis are derived from within the source code of the Linux kernel and from a Corporate environment in the US.
- Google AdWords as a Network of Grey SurveillanceRoberts, Harold M. (Virginia Tech, 2010-01-26)Google's AdWords processes information about what sorts of content users are browsing for about a quarter of all web site visits. The significance of AdWords' use of this vast amount of personal data lies not in its use for such obviously authoritarian purposes but instead as a network of grey surveillance with Google acting as the hub and the various publishers, advertisers, and users watching (and controlling) each other in distinct ways. Google's model of collective intelligence in its search and ad ranking systems has so deeply intertwined itself into user experiences online (and offline) that it acts as a shared nervous system. AdWords' use of specific words to target simple ads directly connects advertising topics with the content supported by the advertising, encouraging the content to do more of the work of assigning social meaning traditionally done by the ads themselves. And the AdWords pay-per-click ad auction system greatly increases the level of mechanization within the advertising and content production system, replacing the historical human bureaucracy of the advertising industry with the mechanical bureaucracy that is much more difficult to predict or understand. That mechanical bureaucracy shapes, in constitutive but unpredictable ways, the relationship between content and ads that drives the what content is published online and how advertisers and users interact with that content.
- Selling the Mechanized Household to Black America: Race and Gender in Domestic Technology Advertising, 1945-1980Blanchette, Emily Elizabeth (Virginia Tech, 2011-01-20)In the twentieth century, the target market for household technologies was identified and labeled "Mrs. Consumer," and the lifestyle, values, and ideals attributed to her guided household technology marketing throughout the century. Bonnie Fox conducted an investigation into household technology marketing techniques, using advertisements in Ladies Home Journal (LHJ) as her source material. I argue here that, because of the homogenous, mostly-white readership of LHJ, Fox's use of only LHJ advertisements limited some of the conclusions she could draw about Mrs. Consumer's lifestyle, values, and ideals. This thesis studies household technology advertisements in Ebony magazine and current literature about the black American experience to identify the impact of including race in the evaluation of household technology advertising in twentieth century America. In particular, this thesis addresses Mrs. Consumer's extensibility across race; Ebony's household technology advertisements' treatment of segregation, integration, assimilation, and racial pride; and those advertisements' handling of the public opinion that the twentieth century American black family structure was "pathological." This research identifies similarities and differences between the advertisement practices in Ebony and LHJ in those areas of interest, concluding that the black American housewife's home experience was more likely to be divergent from Mrs. Consumer's attributed reality and that Ebony's advertisers tended toward the aspirational when modeling and scripting household technology advertisements.