Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Quality and Inequity in Digital Security Education(2019) Redmiles, Elissa M; Mazurek, Michelle L; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Few users have a formal, authoritative introduction to digital security. Rather, digital security skills are often learned haphazardly, as users filter through an overwhelming quantity of security education from a multitude of sources, hoping they're implementing the right set of behaviors that will keep them safe. In this thesis, I use computational, interview, and survey methods to investigate how users learn digital security behaviors, how security education impacts security outcomes, and how inequity in security education can create a digital divide. As a first step toward remedying this divide, I conduct a large-scale measurement of the quality of the digital security education content (i.e., security advice) that is available to users through one of their most cited sources of education: the Internet. The results of this evaluation suggest a security education ecosystem in crisis: security experts are unable or unwilling to narrow down which behaviors are most important for users' security, leaving end-users -- especially those with the least resources -- to attempt to implement the hundreds of security behaviors advised by educational materials.Item The Promise of Access: Hope and Inequality in the Information Economy(2016) Greene, Daniel Marcus; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 2013, a series of posters began appearing in Washington, DC’s Metro system. Each declared “The internet: Your future depends on it” next to a photo of a middle-aged black Washingtonian, and an advertisement for the municipal government’s digital training resources. This hopeful discourse is familiar but where exactly does it come from? And how are our public institutions reorganized to approach the problem of poverty as a problem of technology? The Clinton administration’s ‘digital divide’ policy program popularized this hopeful discourse about personal computing powering social mobility, positioned internet startups as the ‘right’ side of the divide, and charged institutions of social reproduction such as schools and libraries with closing the gap and upgrading themselves in the image of internet startups. After introducing the development regime that builds this idea into the urban landscape through what I call the ‘political economy of hope’, and tracing the origin of the digital divide frame, this dissertation draws on three years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in startups, schools, and libraries to explore how this hope is reproduced in daily life, becoming the common sense that drives our understanding of and interaction with economic inequality and reproduces that inequality in turn. I show that the hope in personal computing to power social mobility becomes a method of securing legitimacy and resources for both white émigré technologists and institutions of social reproduction struggling to understand and manage the persistent poverty of the information economy. I track the movement of this common sense between institutions, showing how the political economy of hope transforms them as part of a larger development project. This dissertation models a new, relational direction for digital divide research that grounds the politics of economic inequality with an empirical focus on technologies of poverty management. It demands a conceptual shift that sees the digital divide not as a bug within the information economy, but a feature of it.Item THE POWER OF INFORMATION: THE INTERNET AND THE RISE OF SOFT POWER(2009) Shin, Yookyoung; Schreurs, Miranda A; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how the Internet changes the concept of political power. It focuses on information as a source of political power, and the relationship between information and power. As a conceptual analysis of the impact of the Internet on political power shift, it argues that the Internet transforms the concept of power from hard to soft. This dissertation argues: (i) the Internet changes power sources from material, such as military or economic, to non-material, such as information or policies; (ii) the Internet promotes the rise of soft power in international relations. This dissertation aims to improve theoretical as well as empirical understanding of information as a source of political power, and to conceptualize political power from hard to soft. According to Nye, soft power is defined as "the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion." This study begins with an analysis of the concept of power in politics, and continues to analyze the impact of the Internet on the conceptualization of political power. This dissertation examines the Internet as a new form of communication media with particular emphasis on the political use of the Internet. Then, it explores digital divide, and discusses some implications of the changed concept of power for two Koreas and the U.S.