Forum: New Media & Society

‘Privacy’is an ambiguous notion, encompassing personal autonomy, democratic participation, identity management, and social coordination. Each of these privacy ideals reflect different sets of social concerns. Laws operationalize privacy in terms of ‘personally identifiable information’. Technologies reify that definition. This has implications for the constitution of identity and social life. It may empower data holders to rationalize populations and create selfserving social categories, while permitting individuals to negotiate these categories outside of panoptic vision. It may facilitate public awareness of, and resistance to, these created social categories. A more expansive understanding of identification and privacy should inform policy discourse.

The internet has tremendous potential to achieve greater social equity and empowerment and improve everyday life for those on the margins of society. This article presents the findings from three digital divide studies, each of which represents a different group of marginalized society members. Low-income families, sexual minorities and African-American women are represented in the three studies that employ different research approaches towards a common aim of contextualizing internet use in the everyday social practice of society’s ‘have-nots’. The aim is to step outside simple digital divide categories to understand how marginalized members of society incorporate computers and the internet into their daily lives in ways that are meaningful to them. An important goal is also to learn about how internet researchers can contribute to closing the digital divide in ways that converge with the goals, meanings and practices of people living on society’s margins.

This article analyzes the evolution of the internet, with special emphasis on its impact on older media in their struggle to survive. The analysis is based on a 6-stage, natural life cycle model of new media evolution, comprising birth (technical invention), penetration, growth, maturity, self-defense, and adaptation, convergence or obsolescence. Our universal model melds several elements of previous theories and analyses from disparate fields such as media history, marketing, technological diffusion and convergence, while adding a few new aspects as well. The model’s three contributions lie in expanding the scope –quantitatively and qualitatively –of new media’s development stages (beyond the three or four stages noted by others); emphasizing the interaction and struggle between old and new media; and analyzing ‘functional-life after appliance-death’of media transformed/co-opted into something old/new. Applying this model to the internet enables us to better understand its future evolution and the survival chances of older mass media.

The computer represents a new resource in developing social capital that previously did not exist among migrants. The relationship between physical space and cyberspace is discussed using the experience of migrants from Newfoundland who, although dispersed from their homeland, use the computer to maintain ties with both their homeland and others in diaspora. Three phases in the migration cycle are identified (pre-migrant, post-migrant, settled migrant) and four categories of computer usage are linked to each phase. Three types of online relationships can be identified among diasporic peoples that result in developing new ties, nourishing old ties and rediscovering lost ties. The processes of verification, telepresence, hyperreality and attribution are discovered and illustrated from online data and interviews which indicate how computermediated communication is related to both social networking and identity among migrants.

The increased attention to environmentalism in western societies has been accompanied by a rise in ecotourism, i.e. ecologically sensitive travel to remote areas to learn about ecosystems, as well as in cultural tourism, focusing on the people who are a part of ecosystems. Increasingly, the internet has partnered with ecotourism companies to provide information about destinations and facilitate travel arrangements. This study reviews the literature linking ecotourism and sustainable development, as well as prior research showing that cultures have been historically commodified in tourism advertising for developing countries destinations. We examine seven websites advertising ecotourism and cultural tourism and conclude that: (1) advertisements for natural and cultural spaces are not always consistent with the discourse of sustainability; and (2) earlier critiques of the commodification of culture in print advertising extend to internet advertising also.