Forum: New Media & Society

This article describes and evaluates civic networks in Europe and the USA. These are seen as attempts to use new media technology, particularly the internet, to improve participation in local democratic processes. Various aspects of democratic communication are examined, including information access, preference measurement, deliberation and group mobilization. A wide variety of city-based experiments are described, which have all faced problems of low take-up and problems of inequality of access. It is argued that new media will have a significant and positive impact upon the processes of democratic communication within the appropriate regulatory and economic context, particularly regarding access to communications technologies.

This paper is based on an empirical study of users of an internet café in South east England. It picks out some of the key distinctions between internet use within domestic spaces and as a technology accessed in a public economy of consumption. The research findings are contextualized and tested against existing work on public internet access. The material derived from interviews with customers is used to explore the ways in which the internet is differently perceived, used and gendered in the public spaces of an internet café. The paper argues that public use of the internet is not just a transitional phenomenon which precedes home internet adoption. The research revealed that the internet café provided a distinct and dedicated use space which was intimately bound up in the domestic and work routines of its users.

This essay argues that the process of digitization has farreaching implications for the broadcasting field and claims that the most suitable theoretical framework to comprehend the full scope of these changes is provided by Ulrich Beck’s theories on risk society. Despite predictable developments, digitization increases the sources of uncertainties and the level of risks for the expanding number of players involved in broadcasting. Several sources of uncertainties are identified: market demand for digital services, intensified competition, regulations, the pace of technological progress and the phenomenon of convergence.The second section argues that the process of digitization is challenging public service broadcasters and may contribute to weaken their presence in the public sphere. Technological mastery increasingly tends to rest in the hands of commercial firms and digital broadcasting furthers the commercialism of television. In addition, fuelling the growth of conditional access, digitization threatens universal access, one of the key principles of public broadcasting.The last section argues that when digital broadcasting will be fully operational, watching television will cease to be a common experience, to become a shared activity that individuals experience separately.

One particular toy, the Tamagotchi, is analyzed as a cultural artifact which incorporates the latest in computer and video technology and virtually engages players in the most basic of nurturing relationships. Here one day, and gone the next, the Tamagotchi is seen as a symbol of its times in which even the most intense connections are disposable. The essay examines how this object relates to popular culture and to other children’s playthings in particular, and what it signifies in terms of relationships, gender identity, and existential predicaments. As a consequence, it raises a number of questions concerning the role that these and similar toys perform in the socialization of children and of society in general.

This article deals with access and diversity as central concepts of modern communications policy. Access may be sought at different layers of the communications system (Section 2), each presupposing a specific elaboration of communications policy questions (Table 1). Diversity, that is media diversity, refers to media content (Section 3). Media diversity has two faces: reflection of population preferences and openness, equal, uniform media access for divergent population preferences. These two faces have a dialectic relationship: usually for media systems it is not possible to produce full reflection and full openness at the same time. In Section 4 it is argued that, due to Hotelling’s Law, media markets are often better at reflection than at openness. In Section 5 the relationships between media competition and media diversity are further explored within the framework of media and democracy. Three hypotheses on these relationships are being developed. In Section 6 a plea is made for the main objective of modern communications policy to be free and equal access to a social communications system that diversely provides for the information and communication needs in society.

It is often argued that constraints on access to new information and communication environments will disappear as services decline in price and as customers and producers engage in new market relationships. Following this line of argument, the relative scarcity of communication and information access opportunities of the past should be dispelled. The aim of this article is to illustrate the faults in this vision as applied to Internet and new media services development. It is argued that the new electronic environment will not be immune to forces of monopolization nor will it give rise to an era of market competition that fully protects the interests of all consumers and citizens. In fact, empirical evidence suggests that electronic intermediary service providers are populating the new markets and deploying strategies that are no less informed by monopolization strategies than in the past, though they do take different forms. The evidence is consistent with the inescapable dynamics of tension between abundance and scarcity in the market place.

Grounded in the diffusion of innovations theoretical framework, this study focuses on examining who the mobile telephone have-nots are and what are the factors at work. Results of a telephone survey with a probability sample of 834 respondents show that the have-nots tended to be older females with lower household income and education attainment. They had pagers as an alternative and subscribed to no caller ID display service at home. This study also found a polarizing phenomenon in owning new telecommunications technologies. With the poor becoming poorer, the gap between haves and have-nots is widening. A hierarchy of relative influences on the intention to adopt a mobile phone suggests that the effects of age and social differences far outweigh that of the technological differences.

This article is concerned with key policy interventions in relation to the issue of violence in the Australian media. Media panics about violent events or violent media events, new media technologies and executive government inquiries are argued to be important elements in our analysis of policy formulation. We examine the recurring patterns in Australian regulatory policies governing media representations of violence from 1983-97. Media image regulation, at the close of the 20th century, is in part characterized by liberalizing and self-regulatory tendencies and that regulation inevitably has a strong commercial and market orientation. There exists a trajectory from state- to self-regulation, even though tensions still exist between these two regulatory impulses. Older media, television and video, have been subject to renewed attempts at state regulation, whereas emergent media policies display a clear industrial or market orientation.

This article describes several of the elements that have relevance in the integration of video-on-demand into the home. The specific case examined here involves a trial carried out in Oslo, Norway. Using qualitative methods, the study describes how a selection of users integrated the technology into the mental and physical contexts of their everyday lives. Video-on-demand is a technology that is outside our taken-for-granted experience and thus its integration presents a chance to observe the domestication of technology in everyday life.

The central argument of this article is that the social study of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has generated knowledge about at least four issues that have figured prominently in the development of online newspapers. Thus, CMC scholarship becomes relevant to analyzing the electronic version of a medium that has traditionally been the almost exclusive province of mass communication theorizing. Four issues are identified: (1) the social consequences of the increased anonymity of interlocutors; (2) the reconfiguration of territorially- and interest-based associations; (3) the processes that mediate between the introduction of new artifacts and their social outcomes; and (4) the mutual shaping of consumers and technologies. The role each has had in the construction of online newspapers is explicated and potential avenues for further research are suggested. Finally, Boczkowski maintains that the work outlined in this article fosters two dialogues crucial to the future of communication in increasingly networked societies: those between CMC and mass communication scholarship, and between media theory and practice.