Forum: New Media & Society

This article examines the emerging phenomenon of humanoid social robots and human-humanoid interactions. A central argument of this article is that humanoid social robots belong to a special type of robotic technology used for communicating and interacting with humans. These robotic entities, which can be in either mechanical or digital form, are autonomous, interactive and humanlike. Some of them are used to interact with humans for utilitarian purposes and others are designed to trigger human emotions. Incorporation of such robotic entities into the realm of social life invariably alters the condition as well as the dynamics of human interaction, giving rise to a synthetic society in which humans co-mingle with humanoids. More research is needed to investigate the social and cultural impact of this unfolding robotic revolution.

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term ‘third place’ or ‘great good places’ to describe the public spaces used for informal social interaction outside of the home and workplace. Oldenburg’s conceptualization has been used consistently to describe the communication of computer-mediated contexts such as chatrooms and multi user environments. This analysis examines the accuracy, utility and potential pitfalls of Oldenburg’s concept for computer-mediated communication scholarship. Further, it offers the necessary conditions for creating viable ‘virtual’ third places on the world wide web. Finally, it identifies directions for continued research as well as theoretical implications for scholars interested in digital communication technologies.

First and second wave digital divide research underemphasizes the digital labor force divide and overestimates the impact of access to and skill in digital technology. Such emphasis deprives digital divide scholarship of its democratizing potential by muting structural critique and recasting the divide as a problem of diffusion. To the extent that it promotes diffusion over equality, the digital divide debate serves marketing rather than socially constructive ends. This article argues that improved technical training and access cannot overcome the digital labor force divide, because gaps in pay, security, and dignity cleave the high-tech job market. Examination of the high-tech labor force in Seattle demonstrates the need to foreground the digital labor force divide. Eliminating economic and political disparities requires us to work through the digital workforce divide rather than labor underneath it.

The general equation between the virtual and new media which prevailed during much of the 1990s is now openly regarded as untenable. Yet another sense of the virtual remains operative in the eventfulness of new media as cultural-technological processes. This article analyses the practices of ‘the virtual’ at work in the production, circulation and representation of the internet programming language and software platform, Java. Drawing from recent theories of post-social relationality (Shields, Lister et al., Massumi), it describes slippages in Java that trigger divergent, ongoing, generative transformations. Examining the circulation, interpretations, coding practices, branding and implementation of Java, the article suggests that a notion of practical virtuality as ongoing incompleteness can help to explain the dynamism of new media as open-ended cultural-technical relationalities.

Scholars have expressed increasing interest in understanding the conceptual and technological roots of contemporary new media. Yet, to date, accounts of the history of media technologies have ignored the rise, fall, and transformation of one innovation whose applications in the first half of the 20th century parallel recent developments in WiFi internet, mobile telephony, telework, telemedicine, online publishing, and video-on-demand. This article introduces scholars to the history of the fax machine, and suggests how the technology provides an important comparison point for analyzing technological developments, past and present. The conclusion explores how positioning this innovation more prominently within the common disciplinary wisdom about the rise of new media opens a door for scholars to deliberate about the historiographical boundaries of the ‘old media studies’ in the era of new media: what technological systems have received disproportionate attention, and what new histories of old media might be written.

This article discusses reactions to two forms of ‘dangerous’ digital entertainment: ethnic humor and online pornography. It compares the way in which the dangers of these entertainments are socially constructed in online discussions by Dutch and American internet users. Ethnic humor is virtually absent and widely considered dangerous on the Dutch part of the internet, but circulates widely on the Anglophone internet. Online pornography is considered dangerous but mostly manageable by Dutch internet users, but has become the subject of moral panic in the United States. The comparisons between the four cases show the influence of ‘national cultures’ on the transnational internet, as well as the mechanisms involved in the social construction of online dangers; they show how these concerns can be defused and normalized as well as inflated and dramatized into moral panic.

This article synthesizes a range of sociological views on time and space, and presents a departure point for future research on cyber social reality. Using basic sociological categories of culture, structure, and interaction, the cyber social reality is drawn into a matrix that further illustrates the embeddedness in technology, time, and space. The matrix is a theoretically and empirically grounded tool for exploring, describing, analyzing, and comparing the variety existing within online communities and communication. In the article, the matrix is illustrated step by step to show its inherent dimensions, and in conclusion it is proposed to be a useful systematic for, on the one hand, ensuring ethnographically thick descriptions of online social life, and on the other, comparing the various reality constructions found.