Browsing by Author "Smith, Tania Sona"

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    “Flooded Timelines: The Communicative Roles & Functions of Twitter in the 2013 Calgary Flood”
    (2020-03-06) Williams, Kimberlyn; Smith, Tania Sona; Curran, Dean; Taylor, Gregory
    This study employs directed content analysis to examine the value and communicative uses of Twitter during the 2013 Calgary Flood from multiple perspectives. Using the Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT) and Houston et al.’s (2014) UGT-based, framework for social media as a theoretical lens, this study finds that Twitter was a very useful tool with several affordances. It was actively used by individual citizens and several types of organizational users, whose psychological dispositions influenced how they interacted with the platform. Given that most previous disaster social media studies are written from the perspective of disaster management organizations utilizing crisis communication, this research contributes a greater understanding of both organizations’ and individuals’ communicative use of disaster social media.
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    The Ideologies of ‘I Do’: Commodification, Consumption, and Identity in the Wedding Industry
    (2020-08-21) Hanslip, Lisa Marie; Smith, Tania Sona; Radford, Scott K.; Stowe, Lisa
    This dissertation investigated the relationship between identity, commodification, and conspicuous consumption in the wedding industry; as well as how these ideologies are promulgated through the media. The broad aim was to contribute to the analysis of the wedding industry within the larger context of how bridal media both informs and reflects its cultural context. Weddingbells was used as a proxy for the wedding industry in Canada; to examine how it engaged cultural ideologies as it advised, and how it exemplified a commodified amalgamation of performance and identity. Wedding magazines function as curators of wedding trends and therefore serve as an example of the voice of the wedding industry. At its core, this project is a historical look at how magazines portrayed the performance and communication elements of a wedding and how that was indicative of a broader societal context, as well as the sheer tenacity of the commodified white wedding. It also offers a historical background of the modern conception of the wedding and outlines the establishment of the wedding industrial complex to allow a good understanding of the power encompassed by the wedding industry in manufacturing, retail, and publishing to better understand the analysis. The development of the editorial curation over a 10-year period (2003-2012) in Weddingbells was analyzed using a critical textual analysis — primarily a content analysis with a look at the rhetorical appeals presented in some of the data — industry-centric rather than the psychology of the reader. The theoretical framework used the theory of conspicuous consumption, spectacle, and theory of identity. The findings offer a unique perspective from a researcher that spent more than a decade in the industry, as well as a theoretical construct in the elevation of the term “white wedding” to encapsulate many of the most important concepts in this dissertation. This research offers valuable insight into the wedding industry at large, as well as indicators of its impact on Canadian culture. As a result, this study generates a new perspective on weddings as communication, what it means to commodify our identity, and weddings as an enactment of identity.
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    The rhetoric of war in the battle of Britain
    (2009) Sambells, Chelsea; Smith, Tania Sona