Forum: New Media & Society

This article is about the interactivity of interactive television (ITV). It is both a theoretical elaboration of the concepts of interactivity and interactive television and a presentation of a survey among 74 American, Asian and European corporate experts of ITV. First, operational definitions of the concepts of interactivity and interactive television are presented as scholarly images of ITV. Then the main results of a questionnaire investigating corporate expert images of ITV are presented. These images are assessed by the investigators to be rather weak and imprecise. Still, the experts concerned are desperately seeking a suitable and concrete business model of ITV, as a kind of Holy Grail. Experts from the world of television production and internet production appear to have different images of interactivity, applications of ITV and the future of television. Finally, the authors present the main components of business models of ITV and the future prospects of this medium.

In the United States and Australia, men and women use the internet in nearly equal measure, whereas in Japan, India and China, men continue to dominate internet use. This article focuses on gender differences in the use of the internet at home as seen from women’s perspectives and draws particularly on open-ended interviews in 1999 with 30 middle-income Anglo-Celtic women with internet access in urban and rural areas of Australia. The study found that women generally use the internet as a tool for activities, rather than as play or a technology to be mastered. This partially explains why women farmers use the internet more extensively than their farmer husbands. When women become comfortable with technology – as with the telephone or the PC on a farm – women see it as a tool rather than a technology. Women’s continued discomfort with technology thus remains at the centre of the social construct of gender and technology.

After reviewing the emergence of online newspapers, we offer observations based on historical and design analyses of major US sites, supplemented top-down by innovators in the Americas and Europe and bottom-up by sites serving one locality in Massachusetts. Despite losing typical print elements, the late modern designs emphasize text, with minimal multimedia content, especially on local sites. Instead of giving outlet to news handicraft, corporate and promotional models abound. The web flattens hierarchies, exposes content sources, and deforms journalistic authority by disarticulating the audience. Historical parallels include 19th-century flows of design innovation from advertising into news and of informational tasks from reporting into photojournalism. Newspapers can coexist with the internet while surrendering some tasks, such as archiving factual background, becoming instead more analytical advocates.

Results from a random sample of 576 college students show that relaxation, entertainment and fashion are instrumental motives for ICQ (`I seek you’) use while inclusion, affection, sociability and escape are the intrinsic motives. Students who are heavy users of ICQ are motivated by affection and sociability whilst light users are motivated by fashion. Use of emails and ownership of cellular phones seem to be significant predictors of ICQ use. Students who spend longer time on ICQ sessions also play online games more often for entertainment, live in dormitories, have a lower household income, and do not subscribe to any ISP service at home. Female ICQ users tend to chat longer and more frequently for reasons of sociability while males spend less time on each session for entertainment and relaxation. The findings suggest that ICQ is a technology that facilitates social relations and is a major source of entertainment for college students.

Music plays an important, and sometimes overlooked part in the transformation of communication and distribution channels. With a global market volume exceeding US$40 billion, music is not only one of the primary entertainment goods in its own right. Since music is easily personalized and transmitted, it also permeates many other services across cultural borders, anticipating social and economic trends. This article presents one of the first detailed empirical studies on the impact of internet technologies on a specific industry. Drawing on more than 100 interviews conducted between 1996 and 2000 with multinational and independent music companies in 10 markets, strategies of the major players, current business models, future scenarios and regulatory responses to the online distribution of music files are identified and evaluated. The data suggest that changes in the music industry will indeed be far-reaching, but disintermediation is not the likely outcome.

In broad strokes this article adumbrates some issues in Filipino virtual communities and social interactions mediated by information technology (IT). Problems and prospects are explored with the optic of the barangay, a social unit that evolved from the pre-Spanish `boat community’ (barangay) to its present dominant geo-political form. While IT tends to be instrumental in Western hegemonic encroachment into the Filipino lifeworld, some of its libertarian potentials are gaining ground in emerging cyber-barangays which require new `focal things and practices’. The emerging Filipino communities mediated by IT are spheres of localization amid globalization and questions of nationhood. The article also proposes to `Filipinize’ IT – that is, to creatively and critically appropriate IT into practices congenial to Filipino culture.

This article attempts to illustrate how African learners orient themselves towards information in a pre-computerized learning environment. The critical objective of the article is to show that the disempowering elements in learning might again be replicated in computer-mediated learning or communication. The article illustrates that young African learners are situationally and not critically empowered by information as presented in its current form by institutions of learning. We assume that the African learner’s accommodation to the context and the forms of information transfer inhibits an authentic development of ways of learning and critical knowledge construction. The interaction with and orientation to the current contexts, which mediate and present information, might not be an empowering experience. The article hopes to contribute to the formulation of program design for computer-mediated communication. It conceptualizes a learning environment with a new culture, one based on the learning elements of social constructivist theory and the communal principles of Gemeinschaft [community] in a postmodern era. It is also intended to suggest to learning program designers how to facilitate conscientization and the empowerment of the African learners in their interaction with information.

This article describes an action-research pilot project to provide opportunities for the remote Kelabit community in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, to use information and communication technologies (ICTs) for sustainable human development. The project aims to establish a telecentre as a place for the community to use ICTs. Although many in the community have heard about computers, they have not seen or used them. In Phase 1 of this project, a team of University Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) researchers were involved in the collection of base-line data to provide a socio-economic profile of the community, to establish existing patterns of communication and computer awareness and finally to determine the current attitudes towards computers in Bario’s secondary school (SMK Bario). Findings indicate that due to Bario’s relative isolation, community members cited their relatives to be the main source of information and face-to-face communication as the major channel of communication, and that a majority of school teachers had a positive attitude towards using ICTs. Recommendations for future directions in promoting the utilization of ICTs to lead to the establishment of a telecentre are discussed.

This article reconsiders civic involvement and citizen empowerment in the light of interactive media and elaborates the concept of media participation. Departing from conventional notions of political activity which downplay the participatory opportunities inherent in communication media, the authors argue that since 1992 new media formats have made accessible to citizens a political system that had become highly orchestrated, professionalized and exclusionary. A typology of active, passive and inactive political involvement is presented to accurately distinguish civic involvement from political disengagement and to categorize the types of empowerment and rewards – both material and symbolic – that different modes of civic activity afford. Even if only symbolically empowering, civic engagement through new media serves as an important legitimizing mechanism of mass democracy.

The term `telemedicine’ refers to health care and health education transmitted over large distances via computer with interactive audio and video capabilities. Over the past decade, telemedicine has been widely hailed as a means of administering health care to rural areas where doctors are scarce. Most research on the subject emphasizes technological, regulatory, and utilitarian aspects of telemedicine. This study, however, develops a cultural studies perspective in order to examine how social relationships are negotiated with regard to telemedicine in a particular context. The contextual focus is South Dakota – a state where telemedicine has rapidly developed in response to an ongoing crisis in health care access. An overview of economic and health care conditions in South Dakota is followed by examinations of network structures through which telemedicine operates in the state and an analysis of how telemedicine is rhetorically constructed in the state’s leading newspaper. Concluding sections discuss the hegemonic nature of telemedicine in South Dakota and raise questions about telemedicine in other contexts.

Design and dispersion of new socio-technological configurations are studied by many varying sorts of scientific disciplines, ranging from communication studies to technology studies. In this article, the configuration and appropriation of new socio-technical constituencies are studied and subsequently interpreted in terms of a rather novel concept: social learning. On top of what is known about appropriation and configuration processes, social learning adds another point of view, elaborated from a perspective known as the social shaping of technology. It takes Beck and Giddens’ reflexive modernization as starting point, and uses this to elaborate social learning into two dominant modes: the mode of experimentation and the mode of control. The Digital City of Amsterdam is used as exemplar to demonstrate configuration and appropriation processes and how these can be interpreted as elements of the mode of experimentation.

This article explores the father-son-computer triangle in an attempt to shed light on the role of the machine in the articulation of male identity in particular, and family relationships in general. The article outlines a framework for the investigation of families and domestic communication technologies, arguing that the study of identity construction through the medium must be accompanied by a study of the relationships around the medium; and that men and boys need to be (re)incorporated into the work on the human-machine problematic. Drawing on an analysis of the discourse of three families that were observed and interviewed in the course of one year, the article proposes that the notion of computer expertise and the sense of dependence are key for the construction of fatherhood and masculinity vis a vis the home computer, and points to the metaphor of immigrants’ language acquisition, which was offered by one of the fathers, as capturing the complexity of contemporary paternal emasculation.

Despite the column inches and policy statements dedicated to arguing that young people need to use computers, very little is known about the reasons why young people themselves might value and acquire computer expertise. Drawing on a survey of 855 children and 16 detailed case studies of children’s use of computers at home this article explores the influence of software design, family discourses, peer group culture and gender identity on children’s perception of the potential uses and benefits of ICT expertise. The article goes on to argue that young people value and acquire computer expertise primarily in order to achieve practical objectives and in relation to the construction of (gendered) peer group identities. Given these findings the article questions the continued emphasis in educational policy on the acquisition of decontextualized information and communications technology (ICT) `skills’ within a rationale of future relevance to the workplace.

Electronic democracy rhetoric has proliferated with the growth of the internet as a popular communications medium. This rhetoric is largely dominated by liberal individualist assumptions. Communitarianism has provided a resource for an alternative vision of electronic democracy. A third model, deliberative democracy, has recently been employed by electronic democrats who want to move beyond the individualism/communitarianism opposition. In this article, I outline each of these visions, describing the democratic assumptions and electronic democracy practices that each embraces. In particular, I explore the ways in which each vision sees the internet as aiding its cause. I conclude by pointing to the relative lack of research into the possibility of the deliberative position being realized through cyberspace. I suggest that a more regorous analysis of the intersection between the internet and deliberative democracy would not only be sociologically fruitful but may provide interesting possibilities for enhancing contemporary democratic forms.

Through the analysis of Walkman use I propose a reevaluation of the significance of the auditory in everyday experience. I argue that the role of sound has been largely ignored in the literature on media and everyday life resulting in systematic distortions of the meanings attached to much everyday behaviour. Sound as opposed to vision becomes the site of investigation of everyday life in this article. In focusing thus, I draw upon a range of neglected texts in order to provide a dialectical account of auditory and technologically mediated experience that avoids reductive and dichotomous categories of explanation. I propose a new evaluation of the relational nature of auditory experience whereby users manage their cognition, interpersonal behaviour and social space. The Walkman is perceived as a tool whereby users manage space, time and the boundaries around the self.

The diffusion of the internet in Germany was accompanied by strong attention from the traditional mass media who considered the new medium extensively in their coverage. Their media framing of the internet is analyzed following the four dimensions of framing identified in earlier research on media issues. Central to this process are the argumentation patterns used in this research which were defined with regard to a qualitative analysis of the multimedia discourse. Results of a quantitative content analysis of German news magazine coverage (1995-8) indicate that these media had a strong tendency towards a favorable assessment of the internet. The euphoric and economically optimistic argumentation patterns were most important, and outcomes of the development were evaluated as supporting the emancipation of the individual. However, this particular way of framing the internet issue is only partly reflected in the perceptions of users.

In post-Communist Russia, when talking about new communications technology, one has to ask what is `new’ and what is `old’. Already in the Communist era increasing availability of new communications technology (for example fax machines and email) amplified cheap `small’ technology as an alternative to `big’ and expensive technology controlled by the state. New communications technology, at the crossroads of mass and interpersonal communication, was harder for authorities to control and intensified the process whereby communication has escaped from political control. The introduction of new communications technology has been slow in post-Communist Russia in comparison to western countries because it is constrained by established state structures. The article concludes that although new communications technology provides new opportunities for individuals, old technology and structures set boundaries to the growth of the new.

This article examines the process of expressing oneself in cyberspace through the metaphor of `voice’, by drawing a similarity between the process of speaking and the presentation of the self in cyberspace. The metaphor of voice allows the examination of expressions in cyberspace in a dialogic manner and demonstrates a unique voice that can be produced with the technology of cyberspace. This is a voice that is heteroglossic and hyperconnected, and in the case of the marginalized, this voice has the potential of producing a call that the dominant has a moral obligation to acknowledge. Consequently, the metaphor of voice in cyberspace problematizes the relation between the marginal and the dominant by initiating a crisis of acknowledgment on the part of the dominant. Ultimately, this approach allows for the re-examination and re-invention of the notion of cyber communities and their role in the public sphere. These issues are developed by using Indian diasporic websites as evidence to support the arguments.

This article asks whether, and in what ways, new media technologies contribute to variations in information resources and communication relations from place to place that may encourage social integration or differentiation. Current perspectives on differentiation theory are briefly discussed, and a model is presented which suggests how the generation, circulation and use of information in society create different social milieux or information environments. Recent studies of new media use are used to illustrate how ICTs might contribute to social differentiation.

This article reports the findings of an ethnographic study of internet use conducted in Vancouver, Canada. Our goal was to examine how non-professional users interpret, `domesticate’ (Silverstone, 1994) and creatively appropriate (Feenberg, 1999) the internet in order to integrate it into the relevance structures and activities of their everyday lives. We identify new cultural practices emerging on this basis and reflect on what these practices mean for the social shaping of the internet as a communication medium. The methods of data collection included ethnographic interviews, and `tours’ of the home and computer space of 30 domestic users of the internet in different socio-biographical situations.