Forum: New Media & Society

Despite the many arguments which imply a fallibility inherent in the information contained within a photograph there is a tendency for audiences to treat the photographic still as a witness and the reputation of the press image is dependent on this. There has been a widespread integration of computer technology into newspaper production over the last 10 years and this has led to the production of images through qualitatively different production techniques. This article will examine, through fieldwork, the practices of photographic journalism, the transformation of picture desks into electronic environments for image control and the perception of picture producers as to the feasibility of enhancing the aesthetic quality of a photograph without tampering with its other qualities.

In the last few years, new multimedia products have been designed in order to attract female users. Some of these products even reflect some kind of feminist programme to make girls and young women more interested and better qualified to exploit new information and communication technologies. The article analyses two Norwegian examples of such initiatives, a CD-ROM called JenteROM and a webservice called HjemmeNett, based on interviews with the most prominent actors of the respective design constituencies. The analysis focuses on the ways gender is constructed in multimedia form and content, in order to explicate gender as a process of social learning. What is observed is a set of ongoing transformations of gender as well as computers, related to controversies about proper definitions of gender and femininity as well as about how new media content and form should be designed in order to cater to women’s interests.

This article takes a social learning perspective to examine the development of a community information service in terms of the changing computer interfaces used and their relations to a variety of more or less competing discourses around the related concepts of community, access and service. We show how both the enthusiasm of internet proponents and the pessimism of writers such as Castells does not take account of the complex interplay of local and global concepts of what the information society can be. Taking a sceptical middle course between, we show how some of the debates around the `information society’ elide some crucial distinctions in the development of community information services. Through an ethnographic analysis we show how these discourses have been worked out in struggles around the development of appropriate interfaces for a community information service.

It is often suggested that new media may provide a new means to preserve the diversity of cultural identities in an increasingly global media environment. In order to address this suggestion, this article first analyses different conceptions of new media/multimedia and how the dominant discourses at a national and European level tend to focus on the economic and technological potential of multimedia rather than its wider social or cultural role. The article continues by analysing how these wider discourses and trends interact with more local factors to shape the form and content of multimedia artefacts produced in four organizations based in Ireland. These organizations were attempting to produce multimedia artefacts specifically designed for Irish, French and German users. The article explicates the processes by which global technologies are actively shaped within local production and consumption contexts and highlights a number of important political, economic and social factors which actively shape attempts by organizations to develop diverse forms of multimedia content.

A number of different theories have been proposed to explain the relationship between technological development and social change, including: technological determinism, symptomatic development and social constructionism. A popular and influential theory describing this relationship is technological determinism. An examination of the history of the computer’s graphical user interface reveals that the original inventors of this technology were influenced by theorists associated with the determinist perspective. However, when creating their actual interfaces, early designers Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay utilized methods that support a social constructionist view of technology development. Moreover, as new social interfaces emerge that incorporate software agents into the process of computer interaction, these new designs continue to support a constructionist approach. This article will describe the relationship between theories of technological determinism and the development of graphical user interfaces to argue that a social constructionist approach bridges the gap between theory and invention.