Forum: New Media & Society

This article deals with current attempts by copyright industries (music, motion pictures and computer software) to challenge and criminalize practices of piracy and copyright theft, especially in relation to internet usage. A number of anti-piracy campaigns, all aimed at schoolchildren, are critically examined. It is argued that their advocacy of copyright and their corresponding objections to piracy rest on a number of rhetorical strategies which encode capitalist and individualist conceptions of property, creativity and rights. These strategies are elucidated and examined so as to draw attention to their contingent, partial and mythical character. Alternative understandings of intellectual expression are mobilized so as to delineate a case for legitimizing, rather than demonizing, cultural copying practices.

Political campaigns have learned how to take advantage of online tools not only to communicate their message, but also, and more importantly, to mobilize supporters and provide opportunities for e-volunteers to become engaged in the process. Among the most significant developments in the 2004 US presidential election were strategies and tools designed to facilitate the transition from online to off-line engagement, thus strengthening field operations in a campaign where the ground game proved to be a crucial asset. These topics are addressed through in-depth qualitative interviews with senior aides to the e-campaigns of George W. Bush and John F. Kerry. Online political communication professionals predict that in the future the internet will become an increasingly relevant tool in campaigns and that its functions will be adopted all through the campaign organization.

This article examines how online political groups are co-opting internet technology from commercial interests to amplify various cooperative processes. After formulating a framework for praxis-based democratic theories of technology, I select four internet-based groups as institutional exemplars for analysis: Democratic Underground, Free Republic, Indymedia, and Move On. These groups implement distinct types of democratic applications of internet technology and embody specific strands of democratic theory. I conclude by commenting on the direction of internet-based democratic practices, their political efficacy in terms of strategy and tactics, and how they figure within US political culture.

Using a case study of The Post newspaper in Cameroon, this article examines an alternative model through which a media organization located within the `have not’ side of the digital divide is publishing online. A skills inadequacy in the newsroom and a relatively weak telecommunications infrastructure in the country have prompted the newspaper’s online version to not only target a diasporic audience, but rely on the expertise and resources of this audience in the development and administration of its website. Illustrating this mode of collaboration between the diasporic audience and the newspaper and detailing its implications for news production and editorial decision-making, this article argues that this model of online news publishing, rarely evidenced in the literature, illustrates the nature and significance of transnational relationships in the diffusion and adoption of online publishing. It simultaneously reflects an alternative transnational practice through which African migrants engage with their home of origin.

Although most friendships use a variety of media to stay in touch, many studies have ignored the multimodality of social life. This study uses media niche theory to consider: changes in patterns of media use across time, which modalities tend to be used in association with other modalities; and the association between specific modalities and relational closeness. Data assessing modality usage and degree of friendship closeness were collected on best friendship pairs in 1987 and 2002. The results suggest that postal mail use has declined between 1987 and 2002, telephone contact has become a particularly potent predictor of relational closeness, and face-to-face contact is a less stable indicator of closeness. Intimacy and efficiency or convenience emerge as two potentially important constructs for understanding how modalities are used for maintaining relational closeness.

Diffusion of innovation theorizes on how human beings adopt new communication technology, but it fails to take into account the institutional factors involved in the process. In this study involving new communicational technology use in a small Greek rural village, it is determined that the village cafe, as the central socializing element in the community, plays a powerful role in dissemination of new communicational devices, or what this article conceptualizes as `mediating commons’. Such mediating commons social institutions as the village cafe play a significant role in encouraging the adoption of new communication products; without such a mediating commons in a community, adoption rates may reduce significantly and lead to a spreading digital divide.