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.