Forum: New Media & Society

This article addresses how young people are represented in popular discourses of mobile phone technology and what this representation implies for the local positioning of youth. After reviewing the ways in which representations of youth and technology have been discussed in previous studies, the research reported in this article analyzes different discursive constructions of young mobile phone users in South Korea between 1997 and 2002. The study finds that the different streams of discourse in government documents, the mass media and consumer culture appear to reflect widespread anxieties in Korea about becoming involved in ‘global’ material culture and seek to counter this tendency through rearticulating hegemonic social relations.

This article explores key US and European Union policy documents to identify the similarities and differences in the way that the digital divide has been defined in both contexts in recent years. To that purpose, a computer-assisted text analysis was conducted, which identified not only the most frequent relevant terms in each document, but also patterns of semantic association among them. While significant differences related to the political specificities of each context were found, both sets of documents revealed a tendency over time to frame access in economic and market-based terms. The article argues that these results provide useful insights into the study of the globalization and homogenization of telecommunications policymaking.

The mp3 lies at the center of important debates around intellectual property and file-sharing, but it is also a cultural artifact in its own right. This article examines the design of the mp3 from both industrial and psychoacoustic perspectives to explain better why mp3s are so easy to exchange and the auditory dimensions of that process of exchange. As a container technology for recorded sound, the mp3 shows that the quality of ‘portability’ is central to the history of auditory representation. As a psychoacoustic technology that literally plays its listeners, the mp3 shows that digital audio culture works according to logics somewhat distinct from digital visual culture.

Singapore was one of the early adopters of e-government initiatives in keeping with its status as one of the few developed Asian countries and has continued to be at the forefront of developing e-government structures. While crediting the city-state for the speed of its development, observers have critiqued that the republic limits pluralism, which directly affects e-governance initiatives. This article draws on two recent government initiatives, the notions of corporatism and communitarianism and the concept of symmetry and asymmetry in communication to present the e-government and e-governance structures in Singapore. Four factors are presented as critical for the creation of a successful e-government infrastructure: an educated citizenry; adequate technical infrastructures; offering e-services that citizens need; and commitment from top government officials to support the necessary changes with financial resources and leadership. However, to have meaningful e-governance there has to be political pluralism, which occurs only when permitted by the state.

This article reports a survey of 4531 users of Itiraf.com (‘Confession.com’), a confessional website based in Istanbul, Turkey, where people make personal confessions, tell stories and establish online and offline relationships with other users. Adopting a uses and gratifications approach to the web-based survey, to determine why the contributors to this website return so regularly and what uses they make of the site, the study adds to the limited information available on Turkish internet users. The major finding of the study is that diversion drives most reading on the site, but social interaction provides the largest gratification to those who participate through writing confessions, commenting on others’ confessions and meeting people offline. Some differences in use patterns were found among Turkish respondents who lived in other countries. A rapidly changing social environment in the country provides a partial explanation of website activity.

This article investigates the levels of consumer awareness and knowledge of digital television (DTV) in the USA. It also explores the consumer perceptions of DTV characteristics, benefits and importance. Various consumer characteristics and DTV perceptions were examined to assess their influence in the adoption of DTV. It was found that the consumers had many misconceptions of DTV and their DTV knowledge level was most related to personality traits and internet usage or tenure. While the desire for bigger screen size, digital video recorder ownership, income and broadband access were the best predictors of intention to adopt DTV sets, desire for better video quality and knowledge of DTV environment were the best predictors of intention to adopt DTV converters.