Forum: New Media & Society

Electronic journalism offers readers new interpretative possibilities, explored here in Malaysia. Ludic hermeneutic accounts of media reception posit engaging in games as a metaphorical model for an audience creatively forming the meaning of a screen text. Accessing the internet, web users’ comprehension of virtual content is a seriously play-like process. Reading online is fundamentally purposeful or teleological (‘goal-directed’, albeit not by duty); concerned with other than the mundane (‘extracted’ from the everyday); projecting a ‘fore-structure’ for understanding, securing meaning; holistic (moving ‘to and fro’), integrating aspects of a text; and constructing cultural identity and power (‘fortifying’ self and status). But the ludic focus on developing meaning intrinsic to the virtual web co-exists with material world concerns. Marginalizing the former, internet users emphasize securing extrinsic goals: talk of mundane duty is foregrounded. Reading the screen, still productive of understanding (identity and insight), becomes liminally ludic, sometimes laborious.

According to diffusion theory, consumer beliefs or perceptions of innovation attributes, along with external socioeconomic and media exposures, influence the decision to adopt an innovation. To examine the relative influence of beliefs, attitudes, and external variables, the current study synthesizes perspectives from the Technology Adoption Model (TAM) and diffusion theory, and presents an integrated model of consumer adoption. The article reports the results of a survey investigating the measurement model in predicting potential adoption by late adopters of cellular phones. The model confirms the importance of attitudes towards potential adoption. Also significant are the influence of media ownership on perceptions of advantage, observability, and compatibility of the innovation. Media use and change agent contacts significantly influence perceptions of complexity of the innovation. Age, income and occupation were the sociodemographic variables that indirectly influenced adoption intention.

In this article, we evaluate the ways in which computer-mediated communication (CMC) has thus far been conceptualized, proposing an alternative approach. It is argued that traditional perspectives ignore participants’ everyday understanding of media use and media characteristics by relying on an individualistic and cognitive framework. The SIDE model, while improving on the definition of what may count as ‘social’ in CMC, still disregards the way in which identity is constructed and managed in everyday talk and text. To fill this gap, we offer a discursive psychological approach to online interaction. Presented here are the materials from an online discussion forum on depression. It is shown that participants’ identities do not so much mirror their inner worlds but are discourse practices in their own right. More specifically, we demonstrate how participants attend to ‘contradictory’ normative requirements when requesting support, thus performing the kind of identity work typically obscured in cognitive models.

This article introduces critical perspective into the discussion of the digital divide, which is commonly defined as the gap separating those individuals who have access to new forms of information technology from those who do not. The analysis is distinguished from other undertakings addressing this matter, insofar as it does not document the empirical problems of unequal access but considers the terminology, logical structure, and form that define and direct work on this important social and ethical issue. The investigation employs the tools of critical theory and targets extant texts, reports, and studies. In this way, the analysis does not dispute the basic facts gathered in recent empirical studies of computer usage and internet access. On the contrary, its purpose is to assist these and other endeavors by making evident their common starting point, stakes, and consequences.

In this study we investigated how people using different languages interact and communicate in an internet-based virtual environment, Active Worlds. The focus was on situations where a new language is introduced in a conversation held in another language. With this we wanted to establish an understanding of: (1) the intentions of introducing a new language; (2) the response to this language introduction; (3) the consequences of language introduction; and (4) the factors influencing rejection or acceptance of language introduction. We found that the response to language introduction depends mainly on: (1) type of language; (2) character of the setting; and (3) perceived intention of language introducers. We found that non-English speakers and regular English-speaking users in less public, ‘themed’ settings are most tolerant to other languages. Apart from national languages, we also studied encounters between users familiar with ‘insider’ jargon – as against users not familiar with it.

Although public internet access in London is dominated by the large chain easy Internet Cafe, outside the central areas many small independent internet cafés are catering to local populations. This article examines the ways in which two of these cafés operate. Participant observation and interviews provide the data for this study of the ways in which both the local and the global are embedded into the internet cultures which are found in such settings. Patterns of migration and local demographics are found to be just as important as the layout of the space or the technological infrastructure. It is suggested that these spaces merit more study and that the standardized easy Internet café should not become the dominant unit of analysis for the study of London internet cafés, despite its significant presence in the city.

Finland is said to be at the forefront of information society development. However, the rhetoric has been deterministic, presenting an inevitable phenomenon to which all citizens have to adapt. There has been a tendency to ignore all social, regional and local differences. The province of North Karelia aspires to be a more citizen-oriented information society. The Joensuu Community Resource Centre (CRC) Netcafé is a place which provides the opportunity (but not the necessity) for spontaneous involvement and participation in (the information) society. It creates space for local interpretations and views about information society and technology. The research is based on a questionnaire and interviews. When information technology is combined with the CRC’s various other activities, it cannot be an independent, self-governed phenomenon. The CRC provides a context that allows a sense of proportion to develop in relation to information technology and the rhetoric of information society strategy.

The cybercafé is located as an innovative site of e-access emerging in the 1990s. Accounts of its novelty are reviewed. Its distinctiveness as a site linking the `real’ and the `virtual’ is theorized in terms of social networks and Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. The growth and nature of cybercafés in the UK are investigated using data from a number of surveys. The detailed practices of a sample of cybercafés are examined using data from on-site interviews and observations. It is shown that the properties of a heterotopia are expressed in cybercafés, but to differing degrees explained by contrasting types of boundary-spanning practice. It argued that this analysis has implications for the future management and facilitation of e-access in cybercafés.

This article analyses how internet cafés, understood as technosocial spaces, are configured in the intersection of human and non-human actants. Based on empirical studies in Scotland and Norway, the article shows how internet cafés are not just adapting a universal concept in the process of configuration, but that some shared images are played with in different ways. The nerdy, trendy and healthy are translocal images that are played with in the configuration process, creating locally specific and embedded spaces. The article further looks at the various ways the internet is used in the cafés, identifying two forms of extenders, as well as players, who in different ways create new social spaces based on the internet café. The article concludes that the internet café is neither a footloose space nor entirely locally embedded, but that spaces are configured in the intersection of translocal images and local circumstances.

This audience research was designed to interrogate the UK fans of Big Brother so as to present evidence that might shed light on the audience’s understanding of the `reality’ in this form of reality television. Using quantitative and qualitative data obtained from a web-based questionnaire linked to Big Brother’s UK web site over three years, I investigate how the fan audiences negotiate what I have called `personalised reality contracts’ with the contributors, and how this affects their understanding of what they are seeing as `real’ or `constructed’. I argue that it is Big Brother’s constructedness that serves to liberate its content, allowing the viewer freedom to navigate past the performative elements typical of the docu-soap genre. I outline how this form of multi-platform TV creatively involves viewers on a number of levels, allowing them to develop strategies for watching that satisfy the desire to witness `the real’ through the lens of the camera. This is set within the context of the larger debate surrounding the change in status of factual programming.

All users must access the internet through ISPs on the basis of contracts known as `terms of service’ or `acceptable use policies’ that are becoming de facto law for internet communications. This article examines contracts fr om over two dozen ISPs. Findings include a knowledge differ ential between users and ISPs regarding rules and their applications. User s have liability irrespective of intention, while ISPs do not. User s must license content to ISPs. And ISP agreements disregard constitutional standar ds regarding freedom of expr ession and privacy. Public forum analysis provides a legal foundation for seeking ter ms of service more protective of constitutionally-based civil liberties and intellectual property rights.

This article explores the reasons why internet researchers should contemplate their responsibility for encountering distressing disclosure in the course of their online research. `Distressing’ disclosure refers specifically to information that indicates an online communicant is considering harming him/herself or another/others (e.g. online users’ announcements of suicide intentions, threats to kill another person, etc). Given both the nature of online communication and research, those who study internet users and communities may find themselves particularly likely to come across distressing information in their research. Using personal homepages as a case in point, this article inquires: are researchers legally accountable for reacting in some way to the distressing online self-disclosure of those they study? Absent a legal responsibility, do researchers have any ethical or moral obligation to intervene? If an ethical responsibility does suggest itself, what are the barriers to intervention? Finally, how might online researchers prepare themselves for their encounters with distressing self-disclosure?

As domestic access to the internet reaches the mass market in industrialized countries, this article identifies and evaluates the emerging research agenda, focusing particularly on children and young people. The nature of children’s internet use generates public anxieties which both guide and undermine research, complicating the already challenging study of children within the privacy of the home. The body of empirical work reviewed is still small, but already key questions of academic and policy significance are being addressed regarding the opportunities and dangers of internet use. Such opportunities include communication, identity and participation, and education, learning and literacy; dangers arising from exclusion and the digital divide, and from certain kinds of use relating to inappropriate or undesirable contact, content and commercialism. In each of these domains, research strengths and gaps for future research are identified. The article concludes by noting areas of theoretical consensus and uncertainty framing the research agenda in this field.

Elderly people in Japan are becoming part of virtual communities. This article explores the online experience of such people, how they interact with others and how they construct social support relationships via computer-mediated communication (CMC). This ethnographic research, through participant observation and in-depth interviews, reveals that these elderly people enjoy interaction in a variety of language forms, ranging from haiku to emoticons, by combining traditional text-based Japanese culture with a new virtual culture, despite the limitations of text-based communication. Also, both the immediacy and asynchrony of CMC helps them to construct real human relationships in the virtual community, including social connectedness to others as well as supportive and companionship relationships. The elderly people could create a sense of greater propinquity by sharing their old stories and memories.

This article critiques a number of recent attempts to outline a contemporary theory of panoptic surveillance. It argues that an updated Foucaultian thesis must take into consideration the decentered and networked aspects of information technologies in an attempt to explain how consumer `choice’ is shaped by both rewards and punishments. Drawing upon the work of Foucault, Varela, Deleuze and Guattari, a diagrammatic theory of surveillance is developed, one that questions the interconnection between consumer, sales, distribution, and production data.

New media have been widely used by radical groups of both Left and Right to advance their political projects. The aim of this article to provide a theoretical framework, through developing the concepts of public sphere and counter-public sphere, which allows us to understand the growing importance of alternative media in society and to indicate how this framework might generate questions for empirical research.

The internet – specifically its graphic interface, the world wide web – has had a major impact on all levels of (information) societies throughout the world. Specifically for journalism as it is practiced online, we can now identify the effect that this has had on the profession and its culture(s). This article defines four particular types of online journalism and discusses them in terms of key characteristics of online publishing – hypertextuality, interactivity, multimediality – and considers the current and potential impacts that these online journalisms can have on the ways in which one can define journalism as it functions in elective democracies worldwide. It is argued that the application of particular online characteristics not only has consequences for the type of journalism produced on the web, but that these characteristics and online journalisms indeed connect to broader and more profound changes and redefinitions of professional journalism and its (news) culture as a whole.

This article discusses the development, reliability, and validity of real-time measures of mobile phone use by means of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, in comparison with traditional questionnaire-generated recall measures. The sample consisted of 211 Israeli adult mobile phone subscribers subdivided by gender and by the amount of airtime that they normally use. The measurements were applied to three questions to which the participants responded via IVR following their incoming and outgoing mobile phone calls during a five-day period: the identity of the person with whom they spoke; their location during the call; and the urgency of the call. These data were compared with recall measures obtained earlier from questionnaires. The article discusses the merits of the IVR real-time data versus those obtained from traditional recall questions asking for past or habitual behaviors.

Internet studies researchers should consider how internet spectators are addressed and encouraged to engage. In this article, I offer some basic comments about internet spectatorship and present a detailed analysis of the ways in which spectatorship operates in the women’s webcam form. Webcam spectators may have less control than they expect because women webcam operators exert authority and achieve agency through their visibility. Feminist considerations of spectatorship and the gaze offer important methods for considering these representations, and suggest how viewing positions are being revised. Spectators are in a position that has been associated with women and is believed to be undesirable because of their nearness to the computer screen. The cultural and technological reconceptualization of spectatorship and the particular aspects of women’s webcams offer some unique opportunities to intervene in the ways that looking at and categorizing bodies produces gender and sexual difference.

The internet has evolved to have a complex top-level domain name system, in which generic top-level domains such as .com and .org coexist with country-code top-level domains such as .UK and .JP. In this article, the history and significance of this hybrid naming system is examined, with specific attention directed to the manner in which it simultaneously reproduces claims to globalism, state sovereignty, and the presumption of United States hegemony. It is found that the domain name system affirms the centrality of the sovereign state while concurrently challenging its underlying basis in an idealized nexus of nation, government, and territory. These themes are explored through case studies of two Pacific island microstate domains: .PN (Pitcairn Island) and .NU (Niue).

Researchers examining ‘flaming’ – defined as hostile and aggressive interactions via text-based computer mediated-communication – have proposed theoretical frameworks to explain possible causes. However, precise conceptual and operational definitions of ‘flaming’ have yet to be established, which has implications for understanding this phenomenon. Consequently, we propose an interactional- normative framework that focuses on interpretations of messages from multiple perspectives in the situated and evolving context of appropriateness norms. This framework incorporates intentionality and individuals’ strategic choices in language use and channel selection. We discuss the implications of this framework for research on flaming and other problematic interactions.

Building upon work that suggests an oral cultural dimension to cyberspace within real-time chat modes, this article supports that contention by examining traditional oral folklore as it exists within the textual context of the online environment. Specifically, this study is a formal analysis of online discussion groups devoted to the perpetuation and analysis of a particular type of oral folklore – urban legends – and the cultural significance of their existence in the online realm. As mediated human communication becomes more and more non-linear, decentralized, and rooted in multimedia, the distinction between orality and literacy becomes less evident and less important. The proliferation of urban legends online demonstrates the idea that cyberspace can serve as a locus for a primary oral culture and its attendant humanity and sociability in a simultaneously textual environment.

This paper presents a case study of a community technology center (CTC) located in a lower income neighborhood of a high-tech city. Participant observation and interview-based research determined that while the CTC was popular among its targeted constituents, its use was not consistent with what the center’s supporters and policymakers envisioned. The emergent discrepancy between policymaker rhetoric and actual use is analyzed in light of different understandings of how internet access is perceived as a social good by policymakers, funders, and among disadvantaged communities. The article raises questions and suggests policy implications regarding how those most at-risk use community technology centers, how those centers may be funded, and how the relationship of computers and the social good must be reconceptualized to better address the issues of the digital divide that extend beyond the technological realm.

When members of an online, distributed learning community revealed that understanding local patterns of communication purpose and form was key to learning how to operate in this environment, we turned to writers on genre and persistent conversation for help in understanding the basis of this community. We derive from genre literature the idea that radicals, that is root characteristics, of presentation exist in computer-mediated environments and define important aspects of conversation via such media. We propose three radicals of presentation that revolve around speaker-audience relations and identify areas of concern for communicators engaging in persistent, online conversations: visibility, addressing primarily speakers’ concerns with the means, methods and opportunites for self-presentation; relation, addressing the speaker’s concerns with the range and identity of the audience, and audience members’ concerns about relations with each other; and co-presence, addressing concerns relating to the temporal, virtual, and/or physical co-presence of speaking and listening participants.