Theses
The full complement of CMS graduate student theses — on television, games, activism, education, and more.
Theses are also available at DSpace (both CMS and Science Writing), MIT’s own repository for its community’s academic publications.
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The Cultural Life of Suicide: Observing Care and Death at MIT
Drawing on field observations with the student-run texting help line Lean On Me, as well as interviews of students and administrators working in campus mental health organizations, I then explore how mental health organizations approach their work within an environment where suicide is ambient and infrastructural.
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Internet Killed the Michelin Star: The Motives of Narrative and Style in Food Text Creation on Social Media
While the underlying purpose of the construction and consumption of food texts remain the same from analog to digital form, the authority of food culture and its complimentary narrative control has shifted as a result of the convergence of food texts and digital media affordances.
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Just Say No to “Just Say No”: Tensions in Organizational Approaches to Youth and Online Privacy in the Americas
This thesis examines organizational practices in the field of youth online privacy in the Americas. Mariel García-Montes describes harms created by protective, universalist, individualistic approaches that pose youth as conditional citizens, and makes a case for approaches based instead on youth agency, intersectional views of privacy, collective responsibility, and the recognition of youth as subjects of rights today.
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The Print that Binds: Local Journalism, Civic Life and the Public Sphere
Local journalism is critical as a tool for informing citizens so they can be civically engaged and hold the powerful accountable, as well as keeping communities together.
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When to Start Freaking Out: Audience Engagement on Social Media During Disease Outbreaks
Sensationalism, gatekeeping, and media figurations mean audience engagement is not merely a journalistic, revenue‐oriented concern — it is a public health concern too.
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Intimate Worlds: Reading for Intimate Affects in Contemporary Video Games
Video games have a unique capacity to generate intimate affects, and my games of choice push us to rethink our assumptions about what constitutes intimacy more broadly.
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When All You Have is a Banhammer: The Social and Communicative Work of Volunteer Moderators
Drawing upon interviews, participant observation, and my own experiences as a volunteer community moderator on Reddit, I propose that a significant portion of work performed by volunteer moderators is social and communicative in nature.
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Seizing the Memes of Production: Political Memes in Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican Diaspora
“This thesis seeks to understand how different groups of people in Puerto Rico and the diaspora deploy internet memes for political critique. In this work, I analyze three case studies focused on how Puerto Rican groups and individuals use internet memes to express political discontent, make calls to action, engage in catharsis, and seek political change.”
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Critical Breaking
Utilizing critical and feminist science and technology studies methods, this thesis offers a new framework, called critical breaking, to allow for reflective and critical examination and analysis of instances of error, breakdown, and failure in digital systems.
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The Allure of Choice: Agency and Worldbuilding in Branching-Path Transmedia Universes
Agency is often taken as a given in branching-path stories because they, almost by definition, allow for enhanced user involvement. But this truism hasn’t changed as the structure of the worlds that these branching texts exist within have.
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From Trump Tower to the White House, in 140 Characters: The Hyper-Mediated Election of a Paranoid Populist President
Trump’s political communications reached a wider audience, on a sturdier basis, than earlier figures who had similarly adopted a “paranoid populist” philosophy.
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Technology Against Technocracy: Toward Design Strategies for Critical Community Technology
This thesis develops an intersectional, critical analysis of the field of practice known as Civic Tech and highlights other relevant community-organizing and activist practices that utilize technology as a central component.
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Everything is Awful: Snark as Ritualized Social Practice in Online Discourse
Snark can adopt a pro-social role in online environments whose architecture tends to reward vapid or deceptive content.
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Frontlines of Crisis, Forefront of Change: Climate Justice as an Intervention into (Neo)colonial Climate Action Narratives and Practices
Radical media strategies, on the streets and on the airwaves, are central to the articulation of climate justice and the contestation of hegemonic meanings of climate action that legitimise colonial violence.
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Narrative as an Aid for the Doctor-Patient Relationship in China
In China, when doctor-patient tension intensifies, some news media tend to blame the doctors, using misleading narratives to create sensationalism, thereby aggravating the antagonism between the society and medical professionals.
