Forum: New Media & Society

This study focuses on three email lists — one used by a professional organization (Friends of the Earth) and two by grass roots, street-level participants (Direct Action Network and People’s Global Action) — in the Seattle World Trade Organization protests. Each list was examined in terms of how it contributed to the expression of collective identities online. Each group’s list employed at least one of three processes identified here as key to collective identity: the Friends of the Earth list emphasized cognitive framing of the event; Direct Action Network focused on emotional investments among list members; and People’s Global Action stressed setting boundaries among movement participants.Yet overall, none of the lists was entirely successful as a vehicle for expressing movement identities, suggesting that while the internet may facilitate certain organizational activities of social movements, it appears to have less impact on their symbolic ones.

What does the US public believe about the credibility of institutional actors when it comes to protecting information privacy online? Drawing on perspectives of environmental risk, this article addresses the question through a nationally representative telephone survey of 1200 adults who go online at home. A key result is that a substantial percentage of internet users believes that major corporate or government institutions will both help them to protect information privacy and take that privacy away by disclosing information to other parties without permission. This finding and others raise questions about the dynamics of risk-perception and institutional trust on the web.

Community technology centers (CTCs) are potentially a critical component in the communication environment of urban communities. They have been investigated extensively as instruments of technology-based public policy and social service capacity-building, yet they have not been subject to research that posits these centers as integral components of larger communication systems essential to civic participation and empowerment. This article describes how communication theory, communication infrastructure theory and community technology centers contribute to solving the inequalities addressed in previous studies of the `digital divide’. The article presents the communication infrastructure theory perspective as a way to reconcile alternative prescriptions for the way in which community technology interventions can lead to positive outcomes for local community-building and social mobility enhancement. This project re-situates the CTC as a communication-centric phenomenon, focusing on the linkages between the community-building capacity of CTCs and their role as an integral component of a community’s communication infrastructure.

Data from 574 participants were used to assess perceptions of message, site, and sponsor credibility across four genres of websites; to explore the extent and effects of verifying web-based information; and to measure the relative influence of sponsor familiarity and site attributes on perceived credibility.The results show that perceptions of credibility differed, such that news organization websites were rated highest and personal websites lowest, in terms of message, sponsor, and overall site credibility, with e-commerce and special interest sites rated between these, for the most part.The results also indicated that credibility assessments appear to be primarily due to website attributes (e.g. design features, depth of content, site complexity) rather than to familiarity with website sponsors. Finally, there was a negative relationship between self-reported and observed information verification behavior and a positive relationship between self-reported verification and internet/web experience.The findings are used to inform the theoretical development of perceived web credibility.

This article focuses on which variables predict instant messenger (IM) use. A model was tested with a sample of 329 undergraduate participants. Results indicated a strong link between internet self-efficacy and perceived usefulness of IM. Subsequently, one’s attitude toward using IM was impacted by the perceived usefulness of IM. Also, a peer groups’ subjective norm about IM accurately predicted their intention to use IM. However, intention did not predict IM use for users, and attitude toward using IM did not predict intention to use IM for either group. Finally, the data were judged to be inconsistent with the model.

This article deals with ICT availability among ethnic minority groups in the Netherlands and Flanders. The rapid spread of ICT applications has affected various aspects of digital citizenship. The study results suggest that the world of ethnic minority youths in the Netherlands and Flanders, as with other western countries, is being digitized gradually. This is an irreversible evolution with tangible effects in new trends in communication and consumption. Ethnic minority youths orient themselves to the country where they live (bridging between cultures) as well as to their parents’ country of origin (bonding of social capital). This article examines whether differences in information and communication technology access and use can be explained by culture-specific characteristics such as ethnocultural position, religion and language proficiency, apart from the usual sociodemographic characteristics (age, sex and socio-economic status). Examining the online activities of ethnic minority

Drawing from the theoretical orientation of apparatgeist, this article explores the cultural similarities and differences in perceptions and uses of mobile telephony. A sample of college students from Hawaii, Japan, Sweden,Taiwan and the US mainland was surveyed to assess: (1) perceptions of the mobile phone as fashion;(2) attitudes about mobile phone use in public settings; (3) use of the mobile phone for safety/security; (4) use of the mobile phone for instrumental purposes; and (5) use of the mobile phone for expressive purposes.The results indicate some differences and several similarities among the cultural groupings and help to lay the groundwork for future research and theory-building.

This article discusses how interactive media threaten informational privacy, especially in a legal environment that fails to protect individuals’ right to receive and use content without being scrutinized by private and government institutions.The article observes that as information about media consumption habits make up an increasingly large share of the stock of data that institutions can use in order to make inferences about individuals, it becomes increasingly more difficult for individuals to determine which types of behaviors would cause them to be assigned to a high-risk category. In the light of this observation, the article concludes by proposing that in order to address the uncertainty that individuals face in trying to figure out how institutions use personal information to categorize them into different risk groups, a privacy protection scheme that increases the accountability of these automated and manual interpretation processes is needed.