Forum: New Media & Society

As people integrate use of the cell phone into their lives, do they view it as just an update of the fixed telephone or assign it special values? This study explores that question in the framework of gratifications sought and their relationship both to differential cell phone use and to social connectedness. Based on a survey of Taiwanese college students, we found that the cell phone supplements the fixed telephone as a means of strengthening users’ family bonds, expanding their psychological neighborhoods, and facilitating symbolic proximity to the people they call. Thus, the cell phone has evolved from a luxury for businesspeople into an important facilitator of many users’ social relationships. For the poorly connected socially, the cell phone offers a unique advantage: it confers instant membership in a community. Finally, gender was found to mediate how users exploit the cell phone to maintain social ties.

Analyzing autobiographical essays written by 72 young adult college students, this study investigates how coming of age concurrently with the internet and related technologies has influenced these young people’s lives. An understanding of how the technology is influencing the various domains of their lives provides a window on what internet use may be like for future generations. Essays revealed insights into four primary domains: self, family, real communities, and virtual communities. Within each of these domains, participants’ responses tended to focus on key dualities. Additionally, these young people report a growing dependency on the internet for activities ranging from managing their daily lives to building and maintaining virtual communities.

The available research indicates mixed results regarding the internet’s role in social relations. The article contributes to this research by studying the provision of support in egocentred social networks. Data regarding size, structure and communication channels were assessed through two specially designed surveys. The results show that the internet has a relatively limited impact on social relationships. Internet users have slightly larger social networks only in certain socially de-privileged segments (e.g. divorced, less educated). However, they reveal some specifics with respect to the structure of networks (more friends and less kin, weaker ties) and communication channels (typically the internet is used as a complement). The article also illustrates certain serious problems when drawing a causal inference from non-experimental data.

Drawing upon cognitive science and systems theory, this article examines a number of issues commonly undertaken in theorizing ‘online communities.’ The thesis is that current approaches to online community that focus on specific online ‘places,’ such as LamdaMOO, may overlook the actual practices engaged in by current internet users, which focus on ad-hoc interactions with a distributed community. Systems theory, as developed by Vilem Flusser, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, is used to examine the relationship between communication and community. Through this examination a definition of community as a distributed communications systems, in which individuals function as nodes in the overall system, is developed. The conclusion considers the significance of this definition for the evaluation of the internet as a tool for political action and self-realization.

This article examines the ways in which recent theorizations of interactivity work to reconceive the author-text-audience relationship. Suggesting that all media forms – historical and contemporary – can be reconceptualized in light of recent understandings of interactivity, it is argued that control over the text and its narrative as mythically ‘finished’ products is struggled over between an authorial desire for finality and an audience desire for control over the arrangement, (re)configuration and (re)distribution of the text. This struggle takes place across the sites of technological developments of textual control versus full interactivity, and in the realms of both media theory and media law.

This article argues that the contemporary console video game industry is a hybrid encompassing a mixture of Japanese and American businesses and (more importantly) cultures to a degree unseen in other media industries, especially in regard to US popular culture. The particularities of the video game industry and culture can be recognized in the transnational corporations that contribute to its formation and development; in the global audience for its products; and in the complex mixing of format, style and content within games. As an exemplar of this process, the Japanese game publisher Square Enix is the focus of this case study, as it has been successful in contributing to global culture as well as to the digital games industry through its glocal methods. That achievement by a non-Western corporation is indicative of the hybridization of the digital games industry, and it is examined here as one indicator of the complexities and challenges, as well as future potentials, of global media culture.

This article explores the early stages of the Digital Video Recorder (DVR) market, with particular attention paid to brand leader TiVo. The television industry, which relies on schedules to organize the audience commodity, faces threats from DVR technology. Initially, broadcasters and advertisers reacted with fear, but also came to realize the potential of using the technology for data collection and target marketing. These firms employed a mix of investment and litigation to shape the developing industry. Simultaneously, TiVo characterized its relationship to broadcasters and advertisers as advantageous rather than contentious. As a result, the emerging DVR model offers users greater control through time-shifting and increased functionality with content playback, while presenting existing television firms with a platform for audience surveillance.