Forum: New Media & Society

This article employs and extends the concept of technical code (Feenberg, 1992, 1995a, 1995b) to examine the current state of the internet. The notion of technical code — the cultural and social assumptions and values that become manifest in a technology’s physical and structural forms — is invoked to examine design characteristics of the internet that, in turn, reflect and provide opportunities for important social outcomes. Overall, the internet’s technical design supports interoperability and open access, while suggesting an enormous capacity for personalization and innovation. In turn, these technical features support the emergence of myriad collective social activities, resulting in a sense of individual empowerment achieved through enhanced agency. Significant countervailing forces, however, inhibit this potential. By examining the values, priorities, and assumptions that have become built into the internet, both technically and socially, the present analysis clarifies this tension and serves to frame the internet’s potential at this critical time in its evolution.

MySpace has received a significant amount of negative attention from the media and many concerned adults, who point to several isolated incidents where predators have contacted, become involved with and even assaulted adolescents whom they met through the popular social networking web site. Furthermore, concerned parents have expressed discontent with the amount and type of personal and private information youth seem to reveal on their profile pages. In 2006, the authors performed an extensive content analysis of approximately 2423 randomly sampled adolescent MySpace profiles, and found that the vast majority of youth were making responsible choices with the information they shared online. In this follow-up study, the authors revisited the profiles one year later to examine the extent to which the content had changed. Though exceptions occur, youth are increasingly exercising discretion in posting personal information on MySpace and more youth are limiting access to their profile. Moreover, a significant number of youth appear to be abandoning their profiles or MySpace altogether.

Despite the impact that influential American political bloggers have had on public policies and the mainstream media agenda in recent years, very little research is currently available on the most widely read political bloggers.Through a survey of 66 top American political bloggers, the present study examines this elite group by analyzing their initial and current motivations for blogging as well as their online and offline behaviors. The findings demonstrate that nearly all motivations for blogging have increased over time, with the most substantial increases occurring in extrinsic motivations. The results also reveal a significant association between extrinsic motivations and blogger online and offline political participation. This study demonstrates that future research on political blogs needs to look beyond blog readers and blog content and investigate the influential political bloggers themselves.

The Sims is the best selling PC game of all time. It has regularly been stated that its success is partly due to its attraction to a much wider audience than the proverbial male adolescent, yet academic research on its player base is lacking. This article reports on the first ever explorative survey (N = 760) conducted among players of The Sims2. Our study combined social role theory with gender and games theorizing to enable us to understand gender differences in play. We focused on gender differences in motivation for playing The Sims2, employing uses and gratifications as our guiding theory. Our results revealed that most of our participants were indeed female. The significantly higher score of male players on the challenge motive was anticipated by social role theory, but their higher score on social interaction was unexpected. Accordingly, we discuss the implications of our results for uses and gratifications theory as well as the necessity to investigate actual practices of play in more detail.

The phenomenon of consumer co-creation is often framed in terms of whether either economic market forces or socio-cultural non-market forces ultimately dominate. We propose an alternate model of consumer co-creation in terms of co-evolution between markets and non-markets. Our model is based on a recent ethnographic study of a massively multiplayer online game through its development, release and ultimate failure, and is cast in terms of two explanatory models: multiple games and social network markets.We conclude that consumer co-creation is indeed complex, but in ways that relate to both emergent market expectations and the evolution of markets, not to the transcendence of markets.

When new technologies are introduced to the public, their widespread adoption is dependent, in part, on news coverage (Rogers, 1995).Yet, as weblogs began to play major role in the public spheres of politics and journalism, journalists faced a paradox: how to cover a social phenomenon that was too large to ignore and posed a significant threat to their profession. This article examines how blogs were framed by US newspapers as the public became more aware of the blogging world. A content analysis of blog-related stories in major US newspapers from 1999 to 2005 was conducted. Findings suggest that newspaper coverage framed blogs as more beneficial to individuals and small cohorts than to larger social entities such as politics, business and journalism. Moreover, only in the realm of journalism were blogs framed as more of a threat than a benefit, and rarely were blogs considered an actual form of journalism.

This study examines public discourse surrounding the development and deployment of digital television in China from 1999 to 2004. It analyzes print media constructions of this new media technology against the backdrop of controlled commodification and formation of trans-media groups that define media reform, development and management.The study reveals how these structural changes play a key role in restraining the development of a flexible business environment in which print media can support critical technological development. Inhibiting the media’s ability to promote this technological development is a lack of market-oriented experience and knowledge and organizational integration under the current trans-media structure. Accordingly, considerable doubt is cast over the government’s broad strategy of media reform, development and management to successfully support the deployment of digital television as the pre-eminent technology in China’s drive towards modernization.

Many hopes exist regarding the opportunities that the internet can offer to young people as well as fears about the risks it may bring. Informed by research on media literacy, this article examines the role of selected measures of internet literacy in relation to teenagers’ online experiences. Data from a national survey of teenagers in the UK (N = 789) are analyzed to examine: first, the demographic factors that influence skills in using the internet; and, second (the main focus of the study), to ask whether these skills make a difference to online opportunities and online risks. Consistent with research on the digital divide, path analysis showed the direct influence of age and socioeconomic status on young people’s access, the direct influence of age and access on their use of online opportunities, and the direct influence of gender on online risks. The importance of online skills was evident insofar as online access, use and skills were found to mediate relations between demographic variables and young people’s experience of online opportunities and risks. Further, an unexpected positive relationship between online opportunities and risks was found, with implications for policy interventions aimed at reducing the risks of internet use.