Forum: New Media & Society

Applying Fidler’s (1997) principles of mediamorphosis and Rogers’s (2003) diffusion of innovations, this study examines a 17-year timeframe to assess publication patterns in and outlets for new media research that examines the internet and related digital technologies within the communication discipline. The five primary findings reveal that: 1) publication of new media research continues to diffuse, with the subfield likely to have reached a critical mass and passed through an adoption ‘take off’ phase; 2) authors favor a concentrated set of title keyword terms to describe their research; 3) media-oriented journals publish approximately half of all new media articles; 4) a core set of 14 communication-related journals currently publishes new media research; and 5) the principles of mediamorphosis and diffusion of innovations help to explain the emergence of the new media concentration within the communication discipline. We conclude that new media research focusing on the internet and related digital technologies is currently a formalized and self-sustaining area of study within the discipline.

Many studies conclude that a significant gender divide in access to the telephone exists, particularly in developing countries. Furthermore, women are also said to use telephones in a different manner from men — making and receiving more calls, spending more time on calls and using telephones primarily for ‘relationship maintenance’ purposes. Much of this research is based on small-sample studies in affluent developed countries. This article shows that a significant gender divide in access to telephones exists in Pakistan and India, to a lesser extent in Sri Lanka, but is absent in the Philippines and Thailand. It also challenges the findings which claim that women’s and men’s use is fundamentally different, at least at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ in developing countries.

The current deployment of large screens in city centre public spaces requires a substantial rethinking of our understanding of the relationship of media to urban space. Drawing on a case study of the Public Space Broadcasting project launched in the UK in 2003, this article argues that large screens have the potential to play a significant role in promoting public interaction. However, the realization of this potential requires a far-reaching investigation of the role of media in the construction of complex public spaces and diverse public cultures.

Although the body of research on social network sites (SNSs) continues to increase, scholarship in this relatively new field has largely neglected the gendered dimensions of networked interaction on SNSs. Through an empirical analysis of users’ comment exchanges, this study demonstrates how a group of interconnected ‘friends’ on MySpace engage in gendered and sexualized interactions through the use of various semiotic resources (i.e. text, images, video). In this particular network, articulations of affection are indiscriminatingly distributed among the friends, creating a flow of polymorphous desire in which the heteronormative gender binary is repeatedly transgressed. From a theoretical perspective, it is argued that Judith Butler’s notion of performativity is useful as an analytical lens when investigating these networked interactions. The examples illustrate how the friends make use of ironic and/or parodic citations in order to be recognized as a member of the group, performatively delineating and shaping their friends network.

Social network services exhibit dual processes that enable both the creation of new public spaces and the controlling and monitoring of these spaces through mechanisms facilitated by the architecture of the network itself. This article explores how network science informs the design of for-profit networking services by providing templates for organizing the social. As the case of social networking websites illustrates, networks have gone from scientific frameworks or even mere descriptive metaphors to actualized models that normalize a particular kind of privatized sociality. In an attempt to theorize forms of resistance to these templates of social organization, I suggest two concepts crucial to the articulation of a critical theory of networks: nodocentrism and paranodality. The goal of such a critique is not a complete rejection of networks as models for organizing sociality but rather a shift in our ways of knowing the world through the epistemological exclusivity of the node.

This article examines black churches located in economically challenged neighborhoods in a northeastern US city. Employing the concepts of the organizational divide and Heek’s design—actuality model, we conducted interviews with clergy at seven black churches to understand their level of information and communication technology (ICT) use and capacity to secure funding from the White House Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives (FBCI). Through the use of e-government services, the FBCI is expanding public—private partnerships with faith-based organizations to implement social programs that address community challenges. Our findings suggest that black churches are rich storehouses of local information and have a long history of providing social support and spiritual strength. This may make them logical beneficiaries of the FBCI. Paradoxically, the black churches that provide social programs to economically challenged citizens are often underresourced and lack the organizational capacity to secure FBCI resources.

This study analyzes cross-sectional data obtained from respondents in neo-Nazi online discussion forums and textual data from postings to these forums. It assesses the impact of participation in radical and homogeneous online groups on opinion extremism and probes whether this impact depends on political dissimilarity of strong and weak offline ties. Specifically, does dissimilarity attenuate (as deliberative theorists hope) or rather exacerbate (as research on biased processing predicts) extreme opinions? As expected, extremism increases with increased online participation, likely due to the informational and normative influences operating within online groups. Supporting the deliberative and biased processing models, both like-minded and dissimilar social ties offline exacerbate extremism. Consistent with the biased processing model, dissimilar offline ties exacerbate the effects of online groups. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The USA—Australia Free Trade Agreement was one of several bilateral free trade agreements signed in the early to mid-2000s that explicitly incorporated free trade in digital content. This article argues that Australian policymakers failed to recognize the consequences of the agreement for national culture industries such as film, television and popular music. The agreement introduced a complex range of policy considerations. These included the circumvention of multilateral cultural policymaking and the US assertion of Intellectual Property Rights which reduced Australia’s ability to develop and enhance its culture industries in the face of the dominating power of US media, communications and entertainment industries.The result is digital determinism.The Free Trade Agreement negatively impacts national culture industries in the global networked context, reducing employment and creative opportunities for artists and producers, thereby challenging the human rights of workers in these sectors.