NEW MEDIA & STORYTELLING RESEARCH

Upon arrival in Germany, refugees face the challenge of acculturating to the German culture and language. While German authorities have attempted to aid these processes, many challenges remain. In that context, new media applications have shown to play a vital role in refugees’ self-directed language acculturation processes, holding the potential to both facilitate and hinder these processes.

In this master’s thesis, a qualitative study with 12 refugees from Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gambia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina is presented in order to investigate their uses and perceptions of new media applications in language acculturation processes in Germany. 

The results indicate that new media applications are employed by refugees in Germany in active language learning processes, play a vital role in subconscious processes of language acculturation, and have inherent characteristics that influence both of those processes.

Past research on wildlife documentaries and their storytelling choices mainly focussed on understanding how audiences make sense of and react to sustainability narratives (Ahn, 2021; Aitchison et al., 2021; Ulstein, 2021). However, what seemed to be lacking in academia was a profound understanding of how media are building and ordering these stories to achieve persuasion (Yeo & Silberg, 2021).

By carrying out a structural narrative analysis, this paper aimed to fill this research gap by analysing how Netflix is constructing a sustainability narrative through their environmental documentaries ‘Our Planet’ and ‘Breaking Boundaries: The science behind our planet’.

The results show that Netflix actively employs emotionalising elements in their structural, textual and videographic choices to drive behavioural change among their viewers, calling them to action and showing them how to adopt sustainable behaviours.

As the successors of gen z, members of generation alpha (α) – born after 2009 – represent the next cohort of university students (Ziatdinov & Cilliers, 2021). Early insights show that gen α will be the best educated, wealthiest, and most technologically immersed generation ever (Pinsker, 2020).

This paper addresses decision-makers at Erasmus University Rotterdam. The purpose of this paper is to propose a strategy responding to the scenario described in which higher education is personalised through the adoption of immersive technologies and artificial intelligence, to create and sustain a competitive advantage. Therefore, a curriculum model for 2030 is proposed in which the manner of instruction is tailored to members of gen α and their educational demands in a potential future of higher education.

This thesis was written in cooperation with Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences (HKA) which amidst their corporate rebranding was seeking to present their degree programmes in informative, attractive and innovative multimedia stories.

Based on the theoretical basis in content marketing and digital storytelling, and a survey among the target groups (n=200), a prototypical multimedia story was developed in two narrative structures. The prototypes were tested for their functionality, design and user experience in cross-device usability scenarios among high school and university students.

Based on these results, a guideline was developed for HKA to meet the growing challenge of presenting a realistic, informative and modern image of a degree programme online and thus making it easier for applicants to make an informed decision.