Forum: New Media & Society

The proportion of North American gamblers who choose to gamble on the internet is increasing at a dramatic rate. Unfortunately, however, relatively little is known about the characteristics of these individuals or their propensity for problem gambling. Past studies predict that internet gamblers are especially at risk for developing gambling problems and that a substantial proportion of them already can be properly classified as problem gamblers. This article investigates this issue using data collected from an internet-based survey administered to 1920 American, Canadian and international internet gamblers. Confirming predictions of a relationship between internet gambling and problem gambling, it finds that 42.7 percent of the internet gamblers in the sample can be classified as problem gamblers. In light of the findings, and bearing in mind the recommendations made by other gambling researchers, it concludes with a discussion of issues and cautions for governments to heed when crafting internet gambling policies.

The nation-state of Sierra Leone crumbled during the 1990s. A decade-long civil war destroyed the state and brutalized the national imaginings. Despite the lack of institutional structure, some members of its society chose to keep the nation alive through discourse on a listserv, an email forum called Leonenet. Using a multi-methodological approach that incorporated content analysis, interviews with cultural informants, ethnography and participant observation, the findings of the study reported in this article indicate that list members had created a virtual nation, defined as any community that communicates in cyberspace, whose collective discourse and/or actions are aimed towards the building, binding, maintenance, rebuilding or rebinding of a nation. Leonenet was a diasporic communicative space where Sierra Leone’s state-related symbols were generated and then held in conceptual escrow, waiting for the institutional structure to return.

Issues pertaining to the production and consumption of corporate websites and online games remain relatively unexplored. This study examines the cultural production of a free, downloadable rugby game and parallel website for Adidas’s sponsorship of the New Zealand All Blacks entitled `Beat Rugby’. Produced by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington to articulate the Adidas brand as globally cool, the promotional apparatus targeted a specific niche of Adidas’s company-wide target market known as the `jeeks’: male, sports-loving and computer literate 12—20-year-olds. More than 43,000 participants downloaded and played in the three-month tournament with the winners, the virtual 15 All Blacks, flown to New Zealand to meet their `real’ counterparts. The game and electronic community facilitated a range of consumption and communication experiences for a transnational audience of post-fans in a branded environment which was monitored by the cultural intermediaries at Saatchi & Saatchi on behalf of their client.

Research has dealt with the consequences of seeking casual partners online, but has been silent about its antecedents. To address this research gap, this study tested two hypotheses. The compensation hypothesis states that people high in dating anxiety and low in physical self-esteem seek casual dates online because the features of online communication (e.g. reduced cues, anonymity, controllability) allow them to compensate for the deficits experienced in offline dating. The recreation hypothesis proposes that sexually-permissive people and high sensation-seekers will look for casual partners online because they value the anonymity of the internet. Multivariate analyses of a survey of 729 Dutch adults supported the recreation hypothesis, but not the compensation hypothesis. Sexually-permissive people and high sensation-seekers looked for casual partners online more frequently than sexually-restrictive people and low sensation-seekers. Dating anxiety and physical self-esteem, in contrast, were unrelated to the seeking of casual partners online.

Media use has changed considerably during the past five years and earlier research has produced contradictory results on how media use links to children’s psychosocial factors. This study charts the access to and use of several media technologies among 825 Norwegian schoolchildren between 10 and 12 years of age. The questionnaire contained items concerning children’s self-concept, parental monitoring and social competence. It found that children engage with different kind of media activities and some of these are significantly related to psychosocial factors, however, these correlations were in general quite small. Entertainment usage was associated with low scholastic competence. Both utility usage and heavy advanced usage of new media were related to self-perceptions of athletic competence. Low social acceptance was linked to Gameboy usage and advanced usage of media. Finally, there was a relationship between experienced parental monitoring and utility usage of media technology. The possible implications for these empirical relations are discussed.

This research conceptualizes behaviors in online commercial transactions as communication acts intended to reduce uncertainty between interactants. Uncertainty reduction theory and predicted outcome value theory are used to contextualize individuals’ motivations and behaviors in the risky and uncertain environment of online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) auctions. Data from 6477 randomly-selected auctions conducted over eBay.com indicate that more commodity information leads to more, and higher, final bids; higher seller reputation results in fewer bids for less money; and greater system security features result in fewer bids. Additionally, holding item type constant, much more variance in final bid price and bid activity can be explained by these factors as item value increases, although important differences in the direction of relations emerge as well. Based on these findings, current theoretical perspectives on uncertainty reduction are extended to the environment of computer-mediated communication and interpretations are offered to explain individuals’ behaviors in initial encounters in online auctions.

Communication studies pay little attention to futures research, while there is a lack of communication knowledge in futures research.This article discusses the function of futures research and ways to embed domain knowledge in predictions. First, it looks at futures research in relation to the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in households in 2010. Second, it incorporates communication knowledge based on the vision of experts. It is interested in the ways in which the contextual factors of the adoption and use of ICT can be taken into account. Scenarios take social changes, political and regulatory trends into account and draw alternative, divergent pictures of a future context within which the adoption, domestication, use and effects of new technologies will take place.Through the use of scenarios different contexts can be described in which the impact of specific technologies can be analysed, making use of the know-how of communication scholars.