Forum: New Media & Society

Much of the rhetoric that surrounds the so-called `electronic frontier’ of the new communication technologies has emerged at a moment when discourses about borders, margins and exiles are also proliferating in the arts and in critical writing. What Mark Poster has called the `second media age’, which he sees as constituting a mode of information fundamentally different to broadcast media, can also be seen as defining a period in which electronic technologies service individuals and populations who are culturally and geographically displaced on a scale previously unknown in history.The article critically interrogates the writings of Mark Poster, Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen as theorists of the new media and draws from different articulations of exile by Edward Said, Theodor Adorno and Hamid Naficy to present an alternative theoretical response to contemporary electronic culture.

The internet is often seen as a significant contributor to the globalization of culture and the economy. It is also seen as an inherently international medium, unimpeded by national borders and removed from the jurisdiction of the nation-state. This paper argues that although geographic borders may be removed from cyberspace, the social structures found in the `real’ world are inscribed in online networks. By surveying 4000 web sites, it is determined that the organization of the world wide web conforms to some degree to traditional national borders. Web sites are, in most cases more likely to link to another site hosted in the same country than to cross national borders. When they do cross national borders, they are more likely to lead to pages hosted in the United States than to pages anywhere else in the world.

Digital audio technology, though only a decade old in broadcasting, is being so comprehensively integrated into control rooms and studios that the time for wake-up calls to critics and theorists is past. Based on eight years’ observation at BBC Radio and Danmarks Radio studios, this article speculates on how the new technology of radio is shaped by the old: how the process and texture of digital radio production influences the aesthetic decisions, and political economy, of radio producers.

The advent of caller identification (CID) services has brought additional complexity to the issue of telephone privacy. Federal hearings and other documents written between 1988 and 1996 are analyzed to create a typology of possible harms caused by CID, including the potential for CID to be used in the stalking of women by abusive men.Four examples of CID usage that led to a murder of a spouse or lover were located through NEXIS searches of electronic newspaper archives. Analysis of these cases suggest that: stalking has not been a common feature of murder cases involving CID; men have been equally likely to be victims as women; half of the cases have taken place in one of the two states with no restrictions on CID; in half the cases it was the misinterpretation of CID information, rather than the data itself, that led to the murders; and in half the cases the victim’s CID device was used against them.

This article focuses on two issues with regard to the policy debate on the regulation of access of communication systems. The first issue deals with the concepts that are commonly used in communication policy with regard to the regulation of `access’, i.e. universal service and public service. The article then goes on to challenge the validity and usefulness of these concepts in the new communications environments. The analysis points at many shortcomings in this respect. Attention is focused consequently on what communication policy in a networked society – or information society – should take into account. Here the main argument is that communication policy has to shift from media policy to social policy. What this means for regulating access, and its two main concepts, will be briefly outlined.