Forum: New Media & Society

This study examined the way in which television genres in the Netherlands make use of additional communication channels in terms of interactivity and genre modification and whether the availability of additional communication channels in genres corresponds to audience age. Expert interviews were held with representatives of Dutch broadcasting organizations and a secondary analysis of Audience Research data was conducted. It was found that compared to other genres, short message service (SMS) is added most frequently to reality programmes, email and websites to the information genre, teletext to sports programmes and merchandizing to children’s programmes. In addition, it was found that only SMS is added more often to programmes attracting a younger audience. The extent to which the additional communication channels represented real innovation varied from maintenance to the elaboration and modification of genres.

This study examines how individual differences in the consumption of computer games intersect with gender and how games and gender mutually constitute each other. The study focused on adult women with particular attention to differences in level of play, as well as genre preferences. Three levels of game consumption were identified. For power gamers, technology and gender are most highly integrated. These women enjoy multiple pleasures from the gaming experience, including mastery of game-based skills and competition. Moderate gamers play games in order to cope with their real lives. These women reported taking pleasure in controlling the gaming environment, or alternately that games provide a needed distraction from the pressures of their daily lives. Finally, the non-gamers who participated in the study expressed strong criticisms about game-playing and gaming culture. For these women, games are a waste of time, a limited commodity better spent on other activities.

This article analyzes representations of feminism and sexuality on Suicide Girls (www.suicidegirls.com), a commercial site which features the online journals, profiles and nude photographs of young, heavily tattooed, punk women. It highlights the ways in which this site attempts to subvert the male gaze by changing contemporary photographic practices. It also interrogates the way in which the feminist potential of this site remains constrained by its inclusion of only a limited number of women of colour and only as a marketing `strategy’ of diversity. It argues that rather than a critical race feminist commitment to inclusivity and structural change, this strategy of `diversity’ is reflective of the internet tenet which holds that `content diversity is good business’. Thus, it concludes that rather than a feminist site which operates in the hope of broadening understandings of female sexuality, this site prioritizes profit to the detriment of feminist content.

Little academic and policy attention has addressed the `digital divide’ among children and young people. This article analyses findings from a national survey of UK 9—19-year-olds that reveal inequalities by age, gender and socioeconomic status in relation to their quality of access to and use of the internet. Since both the extent of use and the reasons for low- and non-use of the internet vary by age, a different explanation for the digital divide is required for children compared with adults. Looking beyond the idea of a binary divide, we propose instead a continuum of digital inclusion. Gradations in frequency of internet use (from non and low users through to weekly and daily users) are found to map onto a progression in the take-up of online opportunities among young people (from basic through moderate to broad and then all-round users), thus beginning to explain why differences in internet use matter, contributing to inclusion and exclusion. Demographic, use and expertise variables are all shown to play a role in accounting for variations in the breadth and depth of internet use.

This article explores the use of mediated communication among Norwegian children aged between 10 and 12 years. The analysis is based on a survey and 88 qualitative interviews with 130 children about their use of different types of communication technologies. This allowed a sketch of connections between the nature of the childrens’ social relationships, mediated content and various means of communication employed. Six main content categories of mediated communication were identified. The study points out that new media technologies offer the children new ways of communicating content and meaning which were not easily communicated by children before; both aggressive and emotionally positive content are exchanged more easily through digital technologies than face-to-face. Above all, the children use communication technologies to build and strengthen relationships for the benefit of their schoolmates and friends. Whether the use of new communication technologies, Short Message Service (SMS) in particular, is accelerating the ongoing process of individualization of the family, is discussed.

Suggestions that the internet has facilitated existing trends towards the increasing disconnection of individuals from substantive communities have been balanced by a variety of empirical case studies demonstrating significant communal features on some online discussion forums. While recognizing the role of discussion forums in facilitating community, this article seeks to shift the focus of debate towards the rapidly increasing use of online journal style web logs (`blogs’) as a form of social interaction. Ostensibly centred upon the individual rather than the group, yet increasingly interactive and socially oriented, interactive online journals appear particularly consistent with the notion of individualistic rather than group-centred patterns of sociability. The article explores this possibility in relation to case study research focused on the recent take-up of online journals by a group of individuals who previously participated in discussion forums associated with a music and fashion subculture known as the `goth’ scene.