Forum: New Media & Society

As the internet continues to expand globally, the understanding of the micro-level connections between culture and online interaction is vital from a scientific perspective. This article explores the effects of societal values of interpersonal trust on online interactions. Using data from the World Values Survey and Inglehart’s (1997) scores on interpersonal trust, the study compares the effect of seller feedback ratings on online auction participation in three economically similar but culturally distinct countries, Canada, France, and Germany. The results indicate a significant interaction between culture, interpersonal trust levels, and seller ratings on bidder participants. Cultures that exhibit high levels of interpersonal trust tend to participate in online auctions irrespective of the sellers’ feedback ratings. However, in low trust cultures, seller ratings have a significant effect on bidders. The extent of the effect seems to depend on the degree of trust and the variation in seller ratings.

The new media rhetoric, with its emphasis on radical breaks from old media, often masks the degree to which continuity goes hand-in-hand with change. Moreover, the industry’s vision of convergence ignores the competing versions of, and struggles over, the digital future. Against this background, this article focuses on an inter-media site, broadcasters’ websites, seeks to identify the changes and continuities in the notion of the audience, and interprets these in the light of inter-media competition. Using a variant of discourse analysis, which makes hyperlinks its unit of analysis, this study has identified six understandings of the audience online: spectators, fans, consumers, citizens, students, and cybernauts. These reveal that television has merely expanded online, but not really changed its understandings of audiences, suggesting that in its struggle for dominance, television has chosen to stamp the internet with the televisual, rather than making full use of the internet’s potential.

The proponents of cyberspace promise that online discourse will increase political participation and pave the road for a democratic utopia. This article explores the potential for civil discourse in cyberspace by examining the level of civility in 287 discussion threads in political newsgroups. While scholars often use civility and politeness interchangeably, this study argues that this conflation ignores the democratic merit of robust and heated discussion. Therefore, civility was defined in a broader sense, by identifying as civil behaviors that enhance democratic conversation. In support of this distinction, the study results revealed that most messages posted on political newsgroups were civil, and further suggested that because the absence of face-to-face communication fostered more heated discussion, cyberspace might actually promote Lyotard’s vision of democratic emancipation through disagreement and anarchy (Lyotard, 1984). Thus, this study supported the internet’s potential to revive the public sphere, provided that greater diversity and volume of discussion is present.

This article analyzes the transformation in our conception of hacking over the past few decades to the current point where hackers are conceived as miscreants, vandals, criminals, and even terrorists. It argues that this transformation is more a function of contextual shifts than of changes in hacking itself. In particular, the hacker ethic, which eschews centralized, restricted access to computers and information, is inimical to the interests of established corporate and government powers, including particularly intellectual property and order. Central to this article’s argument is that the transformation has been achieved not through direct public debate over conflicting ideals and interests, but through an ontological shift mediated by supportive agents of key societal institutions: legislative bodies, the courts, and the popular media.

Using Rogers’ diffusion of innovation model, this study attempts to compare the adoption of internet shopping with that of cable television shopping in Taiwan. Rogers’ diffusion model has been criticized for its pro-innovation bias, and thus this study expects that the adoption of internet shopping will be consistent with the predictions of Rogers’ model, while the adoption of cable television shopping will not. A telephone survey with 1227 valid interviews was used to collect data for this study. As expected, most findings regarding internet shopping follow the predictions of this model. However, the diffusion process in relation to cable television shopping digresses from the path predicted by Rogers’ model. The detailed findings of the study are discussed in the article.

This article uses the Social Shaping of Technology (SST) framework to analyze the case of a Canadian internet company called iCraveTV, which captured broadcast television signals off the air and retransmitted them over the internet. The case study identifies and discusses the social and legal mechanisms by which relevant social groups can exert substantial force on the development of the web. The example of iCraveTV directs attention to questions about the interactions of domestic and transnational forces in the shaping of internet and world wide web technologies. The article concludes that the path of development of the internet and the world wide web remains open to potential intervention and regulation.