Forum: New Media & Society

Concurrent with the explosive pervasion of information and communication technologies in recent years, mediated communication has gained a strong position in the daily interaction between family members. Based on the results of qualitative interviews with families in Denmark, this article shows how the mobile phone is used by parents and children to mediate a feeling of closeness while they are physically separated. This practice of `connected presence’ is based on frequent calls and text messages between parents and children as well as between parents themselves. The article also analyses families’ use of the mobile phone in the context of modern family life, emphasizing the importance of the temporal and spatial dispersion of family members in explaining the form and content of intra-familial mediated communication. Finally, the dual role of media technologies (including the mobile phone) in both integrating and dispersing families is discussed.

Assuming that internet purchasing is related to the amount and quality of technological equipment in a household, the aim of this study was to find some predictors which would help to explain the use of e-commerce in Spain. However, instead of discovering people’s reasons for using internet shopping services, it discovered their reasons for not doing so. The use of e-commerce was low in digital households, as only 7.7 percent of those polled had used an internet shopping service on occasion, and only 6.8 percent had done so during the month prior to the poll. Users of e-commerce have a large amount of computer equipment at home and other equipment for leisure activities which is compatible with the former. The results of this study are based on a survey involving personal interviews with members of 560 households in five Spanish cities who subscribe to a TV digital package, by cable or satellite.

This study surveyed 1261 internet users from five cities (Bangalore, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney and New York) to examine multinational internet users’ perceptions and behavioural responses concerning online privacy. It identified a set of individual-level (demographics and internet-related experiences) and macro-level factors (nationality and national culture), and tested the extent to which they affected online privacy concerns and privacy protection behaviours. The results showed that individual differences (age, gender and internet experience), nationality and national culture significantly influenced internet users’ privacy concerns to the extent that older, female internet users from an individualistic culture were more concerned about online privacy than their counterparts. The study also identified three underlying dimensions of privacy protection behaviour — avoidance, opt-out and proactive protection — and found that they distinctly related to the individual and macro-level factors. Overall, the findings highlight the conditional and multicultural nature of online privacy.

The outcomes of interaction in online communities depend to a large extent on finding solutions to typical problems of interaction, such as free-riding and lack of trust. This article presents a theory which argues that a member’s online behaviour sends signals about how (s)he regards the relationship to other members and to the group. Under specific conditions, members take the signal sending into account when they decide whether to contribute to group discussions and to participate in trust-demanding online activities. Community administrators can use the insights to influence members’ behaviour by using social control. Three forms of social control are distinguished. Group conditions influence which form is more adequate for diminishing free-riding and lack of trust. A theory-guided typology of online groups and communities clarifies what type of community is more likely to suffer from problems of interaction and the effects of each kind of social control.

This article focuses on the role of reputation in consumer communities. Reputation systems can have a sanctioning function (incentive for good conduct) or a signalling function (e.g. signalling competence or trustworthiness). If the sanctioning function is dominant, striving for reputation should be the major motivation for contribution. However, contributions also can be motivated by altruism, the pleasure of interaction, earning money or generalized reciprocity. An online study of members of a German consumer community assessed the motivations for contribution and the evaluation of various features of the site. Overall, reputation turned out to be the least important motivation. Five types of users could be distinguished, but only the multiple motive consumers scored high on reputation. However, all community members perceived the quality ratings of the reviews as very important. The findings suggest that reputation has mainly a signalling function, but not so much of a sanctioning function in consumer communities.

This article addresses whether dead public intellectuals differ from living public intellectuals in terms of their social network properties in the mass and internet media. Explicated at the theoretical level is the macro-level asynchrony of the web, moving beyond micro-level conceptualizations. Networks for 662 actors which Posner defined as public intellectuals are analyzed based on data from Nexis for magazines, newspapers and broadcast media, and on the web through Google and Google Groups. The differences between the media profiles of dead and living public intellectuals are assessed. As hypothesized, there are no significant differences between living and dead public intellectuals in hits for webpages and for Google Groups threadedness. Also, mass media hits show a significantly higher frequency for the living. Findings show that dead public intellectuals have a social `afterlife’, a sociomorphic quality that continues in cyberspace and not in other media.

The ability of communication technologies to favor certain societal concerns, such as privacy, is widely recognized. This article argues that an institutional analysis is central to understanding how a technology affects a societal concern. This is demonstrated with a case study of cookie technology, which has been shaped in differing ways by universities, firms and consortia. A comparative institutional analysis finds that each of these institutions act according to their own norms and processes in influencing the recipe for cookies. It is these institutional tendencies that shape cookie technology. By understanding these tendencies, policymakers can better assess, predict and proactively influence the development of communication technologies to improve societal welfare.