Forum: New Media & Society

A concept of the cultural form is used to analyse the development of community telematics services. The article is based on empirical research of the development of telematics in the East End of London. It is argued that the use and development of a technology expresses a social vision, creates a powerful symbol and engages us in a form of life. In the case of telematics this involves addressing a rethinking of citizenship along the lines of consumerism, and understanding how that interacts with the development of telematics in local contexts such as the East End. This grounds an understanding of the innovation of telematics in the material, social and cultural aspects of a cultural form, which in so doing helps to assess telematics’ role and value in the contemporary public sphere.

In order to provide directions for future computer-mediated communication (CMC) scholarship, in this article, I analyze, critique and integrate contemporary CMC theory and research. Particularly, based upon an analysis of recent developments in multi-media software and the world wide web, I explore the theoretical implications of increased audio, video and three-dimensionality in cyberspace. In general, in this article, I argue that CMC theory and research has been limited by the `textual bias’ of previous scholars. CMC researchers and theorists must begin to reconstruct the communicative, rhetorical and epistemological features of multi-media CMC in order to describe and explain communication in cyberspace. Through an integrated, inter-disciplinary program of multi-methodological empirical research, scholars can build theory that better accounts for multi-media CMC.

The topic of information and communications technology (ICT) convergence is now of primary interest to policy makers in industry and government at the national and international level, as well as the academic community. In 1997, the European Commission published a Green Paper on the matter, and subsequently launched a consultation process which resulted in a series of re-regulatory proposals as part of the 1999 Communications Review. In recent years, there has been considerable evidence of Commission pro-activity and agenda setting in telecommunications and broadcasting. This article argues that ICT convergence policy is an interesting case of both policy entrepreneurship and intra-institutional rivalry within the Commission. Here, the ambitious initial proposals of interests in the Commission in favour of creating a uniform, light-touch regulatory ICT regime at EU level were significantly modified in the light of opposition from the Commission’s own quarters, other EU institutions, the national political level and the broadcasting sector. As a result, it appears that in the immediate future there will be only limited, though still very significant, development of a convergent approach to ICT regulation, in the form of measures dealing with infrastructure and associated services.

Since the dawn of human history, language differences have served as a barrier to full intercultural and international communication. The recent advent of synchronous, automatic translation systems (SATS), incorporated into the internet, are but the first sign of a communications revolution as profound as the invention of print. This article briefly surveys the following: (1) text/speech recognition and translation problems; (2) current developments in machine translation (MT) and artificial intelligence (AI) devoted to resolving these problems; and (3) potential future SATS technological developments and uses. The second half of the article is devoted to a wide-ranging analysis of several potentially profound future political, economic and cultural consequences of SATS. The main conclusion points to a paradox: although (perhaps because) SATS will lead to greater linguistic (and external-cultural) differentiation, the overall impact will be centripetal – greater integration among the world’s peoples, more international peace, and a general higher level of agreement regarding norms and values.

Current notions of social exclusion are to an extent anchored in older concerns with relative poverty, which had the merit of considering not just material deprivation but also the social and cultural dimensions of participation or exclusion. The focus of this article is on the role of ICTs in relation to people’s ability to participate in society. It draws upon detailed qualitative research on single parent and young elderly households to explore what counts as experiences of inclusion or exclusion and the processes behind them. Dealing mainly, but not exclusively, with the more traditional ICTs of telephony and broadcasting, the article considers processes of self-exclusion as people have mixed evaluations of these technologies derived both from current circumstances and past experiences. It then looks beyond the acquisition of ICTs to show how other modes of access to these resources are important before reflecting upon the quality of experience of ICTs, not just in terms of the functionality on offer but also taking into account that technologies are themselves symbolic goods. Finally, and drawing on more recent research, the article asks what lessons might be learnt from these traditional ICTs when considering newly emerging ones like the internet.

Despite the many arguments which imply a fallibility inherent in the information contained within a photograph there is a tendency for audiences to treat the photographic still as a witness and the reputation of the press image is dependent on this. There has been a widespread integration of computer technology into newspaper production over the last 10 years and this has led to the production of images through qualitatively different production techniques. This article will examine, through fieldwork, the practices of photographic journalism, the transformation of picture desks into electronic environments for image control and the perception of picture producers as to the feasibility of enhancing the aesthetic quality of a photograph without tampering with its other qualities.

In the last few years, new multimedia products have been designed in order to attract female users. Some of these products even reflect some kind of feminist programme to make girls and young women more interested and better qualified to exploit new information and communication technologies. The article analyses two Norwegian examples of such initiatives, a CD-ROM called JenteROM and a webservice called HjemmeNett, based on interviews with the most prominent actors of the respective design constituencies. The analysis focuses on the ways gender is constructed in multimedia form and content, in order to explicate gender as a process of social learning. What is observed is a set of ongoing transformations of gender as well as computers, related to controversies about proper definitions of gender and femininity as well as about how new media content and form should be designed in order to cater to women’s interests.

This article takes a social learning perspective to examine the development of a community information service in terms of the changing computer interfaces used and their relations to a variety of more or less competing discourses around the related concepts of community, access and service. We show how both the enthusiasm of internet proponents and the pessimism of writers such as Castells does not take account of the complex interplay of local and global concepts of what the information society can be. Taking a sceptical middle course between, we show how some of the debates around the `information society’ elide some crucial distinctions in the development of community information services. Through an ethnographic analysis we show how these discourses have been worked out in struggles around the development of appropriate interfaces for a community information service.

It is often suggested that new media may provide a new means to preserve the diversity of cultural identities in an increasingly global media environment. In order to address this suggestion, this article first analyses different conceptions of new media/multimedia and how the dominant discourses at a national and European level tend to focus on the economic and technological potential of multimedia rather than its wider social or cultural role. The article continues by analysing how these wider discourses and trends interact with more local factors to shape the form and content of multimedia artefacts produced in four organizations based in Ireland. These organizations were attempting to produce multimedia artefacts specifically designed for Irish, French and German users. The article explicates the processes by which global technologies are actively shaped within local production and consumption contexts and highlights a number of important political, economic and social factors which actively shape attempts by organizations to develop diverse forms of multimedia content.

A number of different theories have been proposed to explain the relationship between technological development and social change, including: technological determinism, symptomatic development and social constructionism. A popular and influential theory describing this relationship is technological determinism. An examination of the history of the computer’s graphical user interface reveals that the original inventors of this technology were influenced by theorists associated with the determinist perspective. However, when creating their actual interfaces, early designers Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay utilized methods that support a social constructionist view of technology development. Moreover, as new social interfaces emerge that incorporate software agents into the process of computer interaction, these new designs continue to support a constructionist approach. This article will describe the relationship between theories of technological determinism and the development of graphical user interfaces to argue that a social constructionist approach bridges the gap between theory and invention.

The study explores a concept defined as `internet anxiety’, and uses mass communication theories to help explain it. Findings suggest we believe `other people’ are responding to media messages about the internet, perpetuating beliefs that internet use is higher than it actually is, and that we are further behind other people than we actually are.Evidence of third-person perception and overestimation of internet use were found. An understanding of internet anxiety can help structure messages for mass audiences, and lead to more efficient and appropriate use of the internet by business.

Personal relationships are noted for intimacy, frequent interaction, the maintenance of multiple relations, face-to-face contact and a desire for proximity. What happens to such relationships when face-to-face contact is unavailable or severely limited? How do pairs maintain personal relationships at a distance and via computer-mediated communication, and what do their personal networks look like under these conditions? Social network data from four computer-supported distance learning classes are used to build a picture of the size and composition of students’ personal online networks. Individuals reported on their communications regarding instrumental and social relations with others in their class, and on which media they used to maintain these relations. In keeping with social network studies, those who communicate more frequently maintain more relations and more socially supportive relations, and report more positively about their desire for future work and social interaction. Individuals benefit from closer ties by feeling a stronger belonging to the class and perceiving greater social interaction among class mates. Unique to the online multi-media environment, strongly tied pairs use more media to communicate and appropriate both the technology and occasions for interaction to maintain their ties. Interview data from members of the same program reveal that pairs with closer ties used computer media to create virtual proximity, whispering to each other via Internet Relay Chat during synchronous classes, and seeking out others via email late at night.

In this article I identify specific historical trajectories that are directly contingent upon the deployment and use of new media, but that are actually hidden by a focus on the purely technological. They are: the increasingly abstract and alienated nature of economic value; the subsumption of all labour — material and intellectual — under systemic capital; and the convergence of formerly distinct spheres of analysis — the spheres of production, circulation and consumption. This article examines the implications of the knowledge economy from an historical materialist perspective. I synthesize the systemic views of Marx (1846 [1972], 1875 [1972], 1970, 1973, 1976, 1978, 1981), Adorno (1951 [1974], 1964 [1973], 1991), Horkheimer and Adorno (1947 [1998]), Jarvis (1998) and Bourdieu (1991, 1998) to argue for a language-focused approach to new media research and suggest aspects of Marxist thought which might be useful in researching emergent socio-technical domains. I also identify specific categories in the Marxist tradition which may no longer be analytically useful for researching the effects of new media.

Wired magazine is taken as a case-study of social engineering in action. The contributors all tried to elaborate a new consensus on the status of personal identity in relation to real and virtual communities of belonging. They did so through a conscious attempt at analysis of the means of production and reproduction in cyberspace. The position of the magazine, militantly activist and always optimistic, set the tone for the social acceptability of the so-called computer revolution. This optimism can be explained by the socio-economical origins of its founders and of the public that they sought. An analysis of their editorial agenda allows us to reconstruct the discourse held by these pioneers of digital interaction, and their attempts at legitimizing their utopia of a technological democracy into a reality yet-to-be-created.

The literature on interactivity includes many assumptions and some definitions but few tools for operationalizing the concept of interactivity in computer-mediated environments. This article takes an early step in filling that gap. In-depth interviews with 10 individuals who work and teach in the field of interactive communication led to a conceptual definition of interactivity based on six dimensions: direction of communication, time flexibility, sense of place, level of control, responsiveness, and perceived purpose of communication. Suggestions are made for applying these dimensions to multiple forms of computer-mediated communication. Future research should empirically test the existence and application of these dimensions.

Much of the rhetoric that surrounds the so-called `electronic frontier’ of the new communication technologies has emerged at a moment when discourses about borders, margins and exiles are also proliferating in the arts and in critical writing. What Mark Poster has called the `second media age’, which he sees as constituting a mode of information fundamentally different to broadcast media, can also be seen as defining a period in which electronic technologies service individuals and populations who are culturally and geographically displaced on a scale previously unknown in history.The article critically interrogates the writings of Mark Poster, Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen as theorists of the new media and draws from different articulations of exile by Edward Said, Theodor Adorno and Hamid Naficy to present an alternative theoretical response to contemporary electronic culture.

The internet is often seen as a significant contributor to the globalization of culture and the economy. It is also seen as an inherently international medium, unimpeded by national borders and removed from the jurisdiction of the nation-state. This paper argues that although geographic borders may be removed from cyberspace, the social structures found in the `real’ world are inscribed in online networks. By surveying 4000 web sites, it is determined that the organization of the world wide web conforms to some degree to traditional national borders. Web sites are, in most cases more likely to link to another site hosted in the same country than to cross national borders. When they do cross national borders, they are more likely to lead to pages hosted in the United States than to pages anywhere else in the world.

Digital audio technology, though only a decade old in broadcasting, is being so comprehensively integrated into control rooms and studios that the time for wake-up calls to critics and theorists is past. Based on eight years’ observation at BBC Radio and Danmarks Radio studios, this article speculates on how the new technology of radio is shaped by the old: how the process and texture of digital radio production influences the aesthetic decisions, and political economy, of radio producers.

The advent of caller identification (CID) services has brought additional complexity to the issue of telephone privacy. Federal hearings and other documents written between 1988 and 1996 are analyzed to create a typology of possible harms caused by CID, including the potential for CID to be used in the stalking of women by abusive men.Four examples of CID usage that led to a murder of a spouse or lover were located through NEXIS searches of electronic newspaper archives. Analysis of these cases suggest that: stalking has not been a common feature of murder cases involving CID; men have been equally likely to be victims as women; half of the cases have taken place in one of the two states with no restrictions on CID; in half the cases it was the misinterpretation of CID information, rather than the data itself, that led to the murders; and in half the cases the victim’s CID device was used against them.

This article focuses on two issues with regard to the policy debate on the regulation of access of communication systems. The first issue deals with the concepts that are commonly used in communication policy with regard to the regulation of `access’, i.e. universal service and public service. The article then goes on to challenge the validity and usefulness of these concepts in the new communications environments. The analysis points at many shortcomings in this respect. Attention is focused consequently on what communication policy in a networked society – or information society – should take into account. Here the main argument is that communication policy has to shift from media policy to social policy. What this means for regulating access, and its two main concepts, will be briefly outlined.