Forum: New Media & Society

This study focuses on three email lists — one used by a professional organization (Friends of the Earth) and two by grass roots, street-level participants (Direct Action Network and People’s Global Action) — in the Seattle World Trade Organization protests. Each list was examined in terms of how it contributed to the expression of collective identities online. Each group’s list employed at least one of three processes identified here as key to collective identity: the Friends of the Earth list emphasized cognitive framing of the event; Direct Action Network focused on emotional investments among list members; and People’s Global Action stressed setting boundaries among movement participants.Yet overall, none of the lists was entirely successful as a vehicle for expressing movement identities, suggesting that while the internet may facilitate certain organizational activities of social movements, it appears to have less impact on their symbolic ones.

What does the US public believe about the credibility of institutional actors when it comes to protecting information privacy online? Drawing on perspectives of environmental risk, this article addresses the question through a nationally representative telephone survey of 1200 adults who go online at home. A key result is that a substantial percentage of internet users believes that major corporate or government institutions will both help them to protect information privacy and take that privacy away by disclosing information to other parties without permission. This finding and others raise questions about the dynamics of risk-perception and institutional trust on the web.

Community technology centers (CTCs) are potentially a critical component in the communication environment of urban communities. They have been investigated extensively as instruments of technology-based public policy and social service capacity-building, yet they have not been subject to research that posits these centers as integral components of larger communication systems essential to civic participation and empowerment. This article describes how communication theory, communication infrastructure theory and community technology centers contribute to solving the inequalities addressed in previous studies of the `digital divide’. The article presents the communication infrastructure theory perspective as a way to reconcile alternative prescriptions for the way in which community technology interventions can lead to positive outcomes for local community-building and social mobility enhancement. This project re-situates the CTC as a communication-centric phenomenon, focusing on the linkages between the community-building capacity of CTCs and their role as an integral component of a community’s communication infrastructure.

Data from 574 participants were used to assess perceptions of message, site, and sponsor credibility across four genres of websites; to explore the extent and effects of verifying web-based information; and to measure the relative influence of sponsor familiarity and site attributes on perceived credibility.The results show that perceptions of credibility differed, such that news organization websites were rated highest and personal websites lowest, in terms of message, sponsor, and overall site credibility, with e-commerce and special interest sites rated between these, for the most part.The results also indicated that credibility assessments appear to be primarily due to website attributes (e.g. design features, depth of content, site complexity) rather than to familiarity with website sponsors. Finally, there was a negative relationship between self-reported and observed information verification behavior and a positive relationship between self-reported verification and internet/web experience.The findings are used to inform the theoretical development of perceived web credibility.

This article focuses on which variables predict instant messenger (IM) use. A model was tested with a sample of 329 undergraduate participants. Results indicated a strong link between internet self-efficacy and perceived usefulness of IM. Subsequently, one’s attitude toward using IM was impacted by the perceived usefulness of IM. Also, a peer groups’ subjective norm about IM accurately predicted their intention to use IM. However, intention did not predict IM use for users, and attitude toward using IM did not predict intention to use IM for either group. Finally, the data were judged to be inconsistent with the model.

Within democratic theory, the deliberative variant has assumed pre-eminence. It represents for many the ideal of democracy, and in pursuit of this ideal, online discussion forums have been proposed as solutions to the practical limits to mass deliberation. Critics have pointed to evidence which suggests that online discussion has tended to undermine deliberation. This article argues that this claim, which generates a stand-off between the two camps, misses a key issue: the role played by design in facilitating or thwarting deliberation. It argues that political choices are made both about the format and operation of the online discussion, and that this affects the possibility of deliberation. Evidence for the impact of design (and the choices behind it) is drawn from analysis of European Union and UK discussion forums. This evidence suggests that we should view deliberation as dependent on design and choice, rather than a predetermined product of the technology.

This study analyzed individual perceptions of various situations involving actions likely to be considered unethical by most people. It explored perceptions of the acceptability of parallel technology-based and non-technology-based vignettes, self-rated behavior regarding the survey scenarios and consistency between self-rated behavior and the level of acceptance of the vignettes.The responses from 453 participants were analyzed by age, gender, ethnicity and amount of weekly access to computers at home.The participants were more accepting of the technology-based survey items and were also more likely to engage in those behaviors than the non-technology items; however, the participant responses indicated a low level of acceptance for the scenarios and only a minimal likelihood that they would participate in them. Additional findings across the comparison groups are reported and discussed.

This article considers a neglected but crucial aspect of the new business of mobile interactivity: the premium rate data services industry. It provides an international anatomy of this industry model and the ways in which it has been used to capitalize upon the surprising success of short message service (SMS) to provide a basis for the development of consumer markets for mobile data services. It situates this analysis within a wider consideration of the role of premium rate culture in the social shaping of interactivity in convergent media. Specifically, it looks at how premium rate services are being constructed in relation to telecommunications, television and the internet. The article concludes that although premium rate culture has rejuvenated innovation in broadcast television, potentially it may constrain the interactive potential of the mobile internet.

Several surveys attest to growing public concerns regarding privacy, aggravated by the diffusion of information technologies. A policy of self-regulation that allows individual companies to implement self-designed privacy statements is prevalent in the United States. These statements rarely provide specific privacy guarantees that personal information will be kept confidential. This study provides a discourse analysis of such privacy statements to determine their overall efficacy as a policy measure. The in-depth analysis of privacy statements revealed that they offer little protection to the consumer, instead serving to authorize business practices which allow companies to profit from consumer data. Using public good theory as a foundation, policy implications are discussed.

This study examined the relationship among personal network characteristics, gratification-utilities and the frequency of use of three interactive communication technologies (landline telephone, email and instant messaging). A conceptual framework is presented, providing a rationale for three hypotheses predicting positive relationships between personal network characteristics (size, intimacy and physical proximity), gratification-utilities and frequency of use.The participants were 286 college students, whom research shows are primary users of interactive media. Hypotheses 1 and 2, proposing a link between network characteristics and gratification-utilities with frequency of use, were supported, while Hypothesis 3, predicting a link between the prior two variables, was only partially supported. Frequency of use was associated more strongly with network characteristics than with gratification-utilities across the three technologies. Of the network characteristics, network size was significantly associated with gratification-utilities. Directions for future research are discussed.

This exploratory study examines the use of online citations, focusing on five leading journals in journalism and communication. It analyzes 1126 URL reference addresses in citations of articles published between 2000 and 2003. The results show that only 61 percent of the online citations remain accessible in 2004 and 39 percent do not. The content analysis also shows that .org and .gov are the most stable domains. Error messages for `dead’ URL addresses are explored. The instability of online citations raises concerns for researchers, editors and associations.

Recently there has been some debate between deliberative democrats about whether the internet is leading to the fragmentation of communication into `like-minded’ groups.This article is concerned with what is held in common by both sides of the debate: a public sphere model that aims for all-inclusive, consensus seeking rational deliberation that eliminates inter-group `polarizing’ politics. It argues that this understanding of deliberative democracy fails to adequately consider the asymmetries of power through which deliberation and consensus are achieved, the inter-subjective basis of meaning, the centrality of respect for difference in democracy, and the democratic role of `like-minded’ deliberative groups.The deliberative public sphere must be rethought to account more fully for these four aspects. The article draws on post-Marxist discourse theory and reconceptualizes the public sphere as a space constituted through discursive contestation.Taking this radicalized norm, it considers what research is needed to understand the democratic implications of the formation of `like-minded’ groups online.

This study examines the relationship between relational quality and media use in relationships. In addition, the impacts of other potentially important variables such as the sex and relationship type of the participants and their partners are explored. College student participants focused on interaction experiences with an acquaintance, friend, romantic partner or family member. The results indicated that participant sex and partner sex did not affect reported media use, whereas relationship type had significant effects on the extent to which face-to-face and telephone communication were used. Relationships with acquaintances had the lowest relational quality and romantic relationships, while closer, were less satisfying than either family or friendship relationships. Same-sex relationships were perceived as more satisfying than cross-sex relationships. Finally, media use did not predict relational closeness or satisfaction.

This study examined the way in which television genres in the Netherlands make use of additional communication channels in terms of interactivity and genre modification and whether the availability of additional communication channels in genres corresponds to audience age. Expert interviews were held with representatives of Dutch broadcasting organizations and a secondary analysis of Audience Research data was conducted. It was found that compared to other genres, short message service (SMS) is added most frequently to reality programmes, email and websites to the information genre, teletext to sports programmes and merchandizing to children’s programmes. In addition, it was found that only SMS is added more often to programmes attracting a younger audience. The extent to which the additional communication channels represented real innovation varied from maintenance to the elaboration and modification of genres.

This study examines how individual differences in the consumption of computer games intersect with gender and how games and gender mutually constitute each other. The study focused on adult women with particular attention to differences in level of play, as well as genre preferences. Three levels of game consumption were identified. For power gamers, technology and gender are most highly integrated. These women enjoy multiple pleasures from the gaming experience, including mastery of game-based skills and competition. Moderate gamers play games in order to cope with their real lives. These women reported taking pleasure in controlling the gaming environment, or alternately that games provide a needed distraction from the pressures of their daily lives. Finally, the non-gamers who participated in the study expressed strong criticisms about game-playing and gaming culture. For these women, games are a waste of time, a limited commodity better spent on other activities.

This article analyzes representations of feminism and sexuality on Suicide Girls (www.suicidegirls.com), a commercial site which features the online journals, profiles and nude photographs of young, heavily tattooed, punk women. It highlights the ways in which this site attempts to subvert the male gaze by changing contemporary photographic practices. It also interrogates the way in which the feminist potential of this site remains constrained by its inclusion of only a limited number of women of colour and only as a marketing `strategy’ of diversity. It argues that rather than a critical race feminist commitment to inclusivity and structural change, this strategy of `diversity’ is reflective of the internet tenet which holds that `content diversity is good business’. Thus, it concludes that rather than a feminist site which operates in the hope of broadening understandings of female sexuality, this site prioritizes profit to the detriment of feminist content.

Little academic and policy attention has addressed the `digital divide’ among children and young people. This article analyses findings from a national survey of UK 9—19-year-olds that reveal inequalities by age, gender and socioeconomic status in relation to their quality of access to and use of the internet. Since both the extent of use and the reasons for low- and non-use of the internet vary by age, a different explanation for the digital divide is required for children compared with adults. Looking beyond the idea of a binary divide, we propose instead a continuum of digital inclusion. Gradations in frequency of internet use (from non and low users through to weekly and daily users) are found to map onto a progression in the take-up of online opportunities among young people (from basic through moderate to broad and then all-round users), thus beginning to explain why differences in internet use matter, contributing to inclusion and exclusion. Demographic, use and expertise variables are all shown to play a role in accounting for variations in the breadth and depth of internet use.

This article explores the use of mediated communication among Norwegian children aged between 10 and 12 years. The analysis is based on a survey and 88 qualitative interviews with 130 children about their use of different types of communication technologies. This allowed a sketch of connections between the nature of the childrens’ social relationships, mediated content and various means of communication employed. Six main content categories of mediated communication were identified. The study points out that new media technologies offer the children new ways of communicating content and meaning which were not easily communicated by children before; both aggressive and emotionally positive content are exchanged more easily through digital technologies than face-to-face. Above all, the children use communication technologies to build and strengthen relationships for the benefit of their schoolmates and friends. Whether the use of new communication technologies, Short Message Service (SMS) in particular, is accelerating the ongoing process of individualization of the family, is discussed.

Suggestions that the internet has facilitated existing trends towards the increasing disconnection of individuals from substantive communities have been balanced by a variety of empirical case studies demonstrating significant communal features on some online discussion forums. While recognizing the role of discussion forums in facilitating community, this article seeks to shift the focus of debate towards the rapidly increasing use of online journal style web logs (`blogs’) as a form of social interaction. Ostensibly centred upon the individual rather than the group, yet increasingly interactive and socially oriented, interactive online journals appear particularly consistent with the notion of individualistic rather than group-centred patterns of sociability. The article explores this possibility in relation to case study research focused on the recent take-up of online journals by a group of individuals who previously participated in discussion forums associated with a music and fashion subculture known as the `goth’ scene.

The proportion of North American gamblers who choose to gamble on the internet is increasing at a dramatic rate. Unfortunately, however, relatively little is known about the characteristics of these individuals or their propensity for problem gambling. Past studies predict that internet gamblers are especially at risk for developing gambling problems and that a substantial proportion of them already can be properly classified as problem gamblers. This article investigates this issue using data collected from an internet-based survey administered to 1920 American, Canadian and international internet gamblers. Confirming predictions of a relationship between internet gambling and problem gambling, it finds that 42.7 percent of the internet gamblers in the sample can be classified as problem gamblers. In light of the findings, and bearing in mind the recommendations made by other gambling researchers, it concludes with a discussion of issues and cautions for governments to heed when crafting internet gambling policies.

The nation-state of Sierra Leone crumbled during the 1990s. A decade-long civil war destroyed the state and brutalized the national imaginings. Despite the lack of institutional structure, some members of its society chose to keep the nation alive through discourse on a listserv, an email forum called Leonenet. Using a multi-methodological approach that incorporated content analysis, interviews with cultural informants, ethnography and participant observation, the findings of the study reported in this article indicate that list members had created a virtual nation, defined as any community that communicates in cyberspace, whose collective discourse and/or actions are aimed towards the building, binding, maintenance, rebuilding or rebinding of a nation. Leonenet was a diasporic communicative space where Sierra Leone’s state-related symbols were generated and then held in conceptual escrow, waiting for the institutional structure to return.

Issues pertaining to the production and consumption of corporate websites and online games remain relatively unexplored. This study examines the cultural production of a free, downloadable rugby game and parallel website for Adidas’s sponsorship of the New Zealand All Blacks entitled `Beat Rugby’. Produced by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellington to articulate the Adidas brand as globally cool, the promotional apparatus targeted a specific niche of Adidas’s company-wide target market known as the `jeeks’: male, sports-loving and computer literate 12—20-year-olds. More than 43,000 participants downloaded and played in the three-month tournament with the winners, the virtual 15 All Blacks, flown to New Zealand to meet their `real’ counterparts. The game and electronic community facilitated a range of consumption and communication experiences for a transnational audience of post-fans in a branded environment which was monitored by the cultural intermediaries at Saatchi & Saatchi on behalf of their client.

Research has dealt with the consequences of seeking casual partners online, but has been silent about its antecedents. To address this research gap, this study tested two hypotheses. The compensation hypothesis states that people high in dating anxiety and low in physical self-esteem seek casual dates online because the features of online communication (e.g. reduced cues, anonymity, controllability) allow them to compensate for the deficits experienced in offline dating. The recreation hypothesis proposes that sexually-permissive people and high sensation-seekers will look for casual partners online because they value the anonymity of the internet. Multivariate analyses of a survey of 729 Dutch adults supported the recreation hypothesis, but not the compensation hypothesis. Sexually-permissive people and high sensation-seekers looked for casual partners online more frequently than sexually-restrictive people and low sensation-seekers. Dating anxiety and physical self-esteem, in contrast, were unrelated to the seeking of casual partners online.

Media use has changed considerably during the past five years and earlier research has produced contradictory results on how media use links to children’s psychosocial factors. This study charts the access to and use of several media technologies among 825 Norwegian schoolchildren between 10 and 12 years of age. The questionnaire contained items concerning children’s self-concept, parental monitoring and social competence. It found that children engage with different kind of media activities and some of these are significantly related to psychosocial factors, however, these correlations were in general quite small. Entertainment usage was associated with low scholastic competence. Both utility usage and heavy advanced usage of new media were related to self-perceptions of athletic competence. Low social acceptance was linked to Gameboy usage and advanced usage of media. Finally, there was a relationship between experienced parental monitoring and utility usage of media technology. The possible implications for these empirical relations are discussed.

This research conceptualizes behaviors in online commercial transactions as communication acts intended to reduce uncertainty between interactants. Uncertainty reduction theory and predicted outcome value theory are used to contextualize individuals’ motivations and behaviors in the risky and uncertain environment of online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) auctions. Data from 6477 randomly-selected auctions conducted over eBay.com indicate that more commodity information leads to more, and higher, final bids; higher seller reputation results in fewer bids for less money; and greater system security features result in fewer bids. Additionally, holding item type constant, much more variance in final bid price and bid activity can be explained by these factors as item value increases, although important differences in the direction of relations emerge as well. Based on these findings, current theoretical perspectives on uncertainty reduction are extended to the environment of computer-mediated communication and interpretations are offered to explain individuals’ behaviors in initial encounters in online auctions.

Communication studies pay little attention to futures research, while there is a lack of communication knowledge in futures research.This article discusses the function of futures research and ways to embed domain knowledge in predictions. First, it looks at futures research in relation to the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in households in 2010. Second, it incorporates communication knowledge based on the vision of experts. It is interested in the ways in which the contextual factors of the adoption and use of ICT can be taken into account. Scenarios take social changes, political and regulatory trends into account and draw alternative, divergent pictures of a future context within which the adoption, domestication, use and effects of new technologies will take place.Through the use of scenarios different contexts can be described in which the impact of specific technologies can be analysed, making use of the know-how of communication scholars.

This article deals with ICT availability among ethnic minority groups in the Netherlands and Flanders. The rapid spread of ICT applications has affected various aspects of digital citizenship. The study results suggest that the world of ethnic minority youths in the Netherlands and Flanders, as with other western countries, is being digitized gradually. This is an irreversible evolution with tangible effects in new trends in communication and consumption. Ethnic minority youths orient themselves to the country where they live (bridging between cultures) as well as to their parents’ country of origin (bonding of social capital). This article examines whether differences in information and communication technology access and use can be explained by culture-specific characteristics such as ethnocultural position, religion and language proficiency, apart from the usual sociodemographic characteristics (age, sex and socio-economic status). Examining the online activities of ethnic minority

Drawing from the theoretical orientation of apparatgeist, this article explores the cultural similarities and differences in perceptions and uses of mobile telephony. A sample of college students from Hawaii, Japan, Sweden,Taiwan and the US mainland was surveyed to assess: (1) perceptions of the mobile phone as fashion;(2) attitudes about mobile phone use in public settings; (3) use of the mobile phone for safety/security; (4) use of the mobile phone for instrumental purposes; and (5) use of the mobile phone for expressive purposes.The results indicate some differences and several similarities among the cultural groupings and help to lay the groundwork for future research and theory-building.

This article discusses how interactive media threaten informational privacy, especially in a legal environment that fails to protect individuals’ right to receive and use content without being scrutinized by private and government institutions.The article observes that as information about media consumption habits make up an increasingly large share of the stock of data that institutions can use in order to make inferences about individuals, it becomes increasingly more difficult for individuals to determine which types of behaviors would cause them to be assigned to a high-risk category. In the light of this observation, the article concludes by proposing that in order to address the uncertainty that individuals face in trying to figure out how institutions use personal information to categorize them into different risk groups, a privacy protection scheme that increases the accountability of these automated and manual interpretation processes is needed.

This study compares the roles of progressive online news services with those of mainstream newspapers in developing reactions to the deaths of two schoolgirls by a US military vehicle into massive anti-US protests during 2002 in South Korea. Clear differences were found between the online news services and the mainstream conservative newspapers’ coverage in terms of the number of articles, the composition of news sources, and the frames used to make sense of the issues. It reveals that the progressive media played an important role in escalating reactions to the deaths of the two schoolgirls into a broader anti-US sentiment. The results of the study suggest the limitations to the inter-media agenda-setting model in explicating the dynamics of issue development. Additionally, the potential of alternative online news media in agenda-building and the relationship between the news media and issue development are discussed.

Juxtaposing symbolic interactionist and postmodern interpretations of cyberself-ing, I bring data to bear on the tensions between these two theoretical stances. I argue that postmodernist accounts are no longer tenable; such studies were based on multi-user domains (MUDs), but generalized to cyberspace. I examine the evolving internet population, which has reached a critical mass of the American population, to demonstrate that MUD users no longer constitute the majority of users. After substantiating this shift in the user base, I elucidate evidence that corroborates the countervailing thesis of ‘socialized’ online selves. I argue that using a symbolic interactionist perspective to frame the cyberself-ing project allows us to understand the creation of the cyber ‘I,’‘me,’ and digital ‘generalized other,’ as well as the dynamics of interactional cuing online.

People who work, learn, or play in online social worlds must sometimes leave those social worlds. Such departures may happen for many reasons. Often they are anticipated departures because the social world was meant from the start to be temporary. Most people do not yet have much practice at leaving an online social world, nor do we have a good model of the process. Activities that people undertake while disengaging from transient online social worlds affect them personally, as well as their future personal and professional relationships with one another. For this research, 30 students near the time of graduating from an online learning master’s degree program participated in semi-structured interviews exploring their activities and emotions related to disengaging. The result is a model of the disengaging process encompassing 12 dimensions.

The study of cybercommunity is inevitably linked to the development of the internet amid other cultural phenomena, and cybercommunity as a cultural practice has clearly reached a point of critical mass. The concept of online community has become increasingly diluted as it evolves into a pastiche of elements that ostensibly ‘signify’ community. This study grapples with the concept of community in cyberspace and suggests alternative ways of characterizing online social relations that avoid the vagaries of ‘community’. Based on interviews and a theoretical consideration of online community, it finds that the metaphor of ‘community’ in cyberspace is one of convenient togetherness without real responsibility. This study suggests a symbolic interactionist approach to the examination of online social relationships that is free of the controversy and structural-functional baggage of the term ‘community’. It suggests that community is an evolving process, and that commitment is the truly desired social ideal in social interaction, whether online or offline.

‘New Digital Cartesianism’ investigates the socio-material power inequities embedded in text-based, computer-mediated communication (CMC). Is the body really transcended in text-based computer-mediated communication? This article summarizes software and hardware advertising ‘hypes’, cyber-enthusiast ‘hopes’, and the ‘actualities’ of CMC which contradict this virtual dream of pure minds communicating. Marketing hypes and cyberhopes mythologize disembodied CMC with promises of anonymity and fluid identities. However, the actualities of how users interpret and derive meaning from text-based communication often involve reductive bodily markers that re-invoke stereotypes of racialized, sexualized and gendered bodies. Ironically, despite claims that CMC achieves Descartes’ dream of ‘pure minds’ and the transcendence of body, users frequently rely on stereotyped images and descriptions of bodies in order to confer authenticity and signification to textual utterances. In digital Cartesianism, the body actually functions as a necessary arbiter of meaning and final signifier of what is accepted as ‘real’ and ‘true’.

This article explores how the development of information technology, especially interactive computers, changes the privacy environment as experienced by individuals and the policy implications of these changes. External entities, such as governments and commercial industries, that ‘invade’ people’s rights to be left alone are of less concern now than individuals who voluntarily give up their privacy by willingly providing personal information for other benefits on the internet. Also, in the interactive environment, intended and unintended activities of more diversified and less easily identifiable entities have become more of a threat to individual privacy. In this new environment, rather than ‘providing’ privacy for passive individuals, a more user-oriented, active approach is needed to help users to protect themselves from more diversified and unknown forces and potential loss of control. This article suggests that focusing on the right not to be identified on the network by allowing affirmative acts of secrecy and deception regarding identity and identification might be the most effective-and sometimes only practically viable-way of ensuring privacy in the interactive environment.

This study examines the relationships between the lifestyles of urban Chinese consumers and the adoption and use of pagers and mobile phones. Based on a probability sample of 7094 respondents from China’s seven most prosperous cities, results show that the respondents identified as yuppies tended to integrate pagers and mobile phones into their conspicuous, westernized and socially active lifestyle. Adopting a pager and mobile phone is found to be a means to achieve social differentiation and identity among this lifestyle segment. The study demonstrates the utility of segmentation analysis in delineating complex relationships among demographics, lifestyles and adoption and use of new media.

Many have studied the interrelations between online spaces and offline contexts, highlighting that internet spaces are fundamentally embedded within specific social, cultural and material contexts. Drawing upon a study of breast cancer patients’ computer-mediated communication (CMC), this article aims to contribute to our understanding of the role of cultural elements in shaping the participation in and design of, CMC environments. It uses an analysis of patients’ interviews and breast cancer websites as an exploratory site for identifying cultural dimensions that should be considered in studying online spaces. It shows how both the breast cancer sites and their participants emphasize a sense of global similarity and commonality, while at the same time this CMC context is shaped by specific linguistic, national, temporal, spatial, religious, ideological and discursive North-American dimensions. It concludes with a broader discussion of the importance of examining the cultural aspects of online contexts and by extension, how cultural elements shape the methodologies that researchers employ.

Privacy seals were developed to address concerns about online privacy. However, seals are widely misinterpreted by consumers as privacy protection. This research assessed how well privacy policies matched the standards promised by the seal authorities and compared the privacy protection practices of participating and non-participating sites. Privacy policy statements were interpreted as a form of persuasive communication that attempts to minimize the risks of providing personal information while emphasizing the benefits of personal disclosure. There were few differences in the privacy practices between seal authorities: TRUSTe and BBBOnLine participants offered about the same degree of privacy protection assurances and they were equal with regard to the amount or depth of personal information they requested. Notably, unsealed sites offered nearly equal privacy assurances and made fewer personal information requests than the sealed sites. However, seal program participants did provide superior access to information and assurances of data security.

This article draws on empirical research into internet use by minority ethnic women to consider whether anonymity remains a useful focus for sociocultural studies of internet identities. The central argument of the article is that the time has come for internet identity research to reposition itself conceptually, to move away from a preoccupation with the generalized, enduring claim that internet identities are anonymous, multiple and fragmented-not only because, in some cases, online identities are continuous with offline selves, but also, more importantly, because common uses of the concept of anonymity are limited as starting points for carrying out analyses of internet experiences. In short, it argues that the terms of internet identity research are problematic, that contexts matter, and that studies of internet identities need to engage with and learn from ongoing debates within cultural studies which call into question the usefulness of the very concept of identity.

Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting webpages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index and losing older ones. Some search engines can be used to search for information on the internet for specific periods of time. However, these ‘date stamps’ are not determined by the first occurrence of the pages in the web, but by the last date at which a page was updated or a new page was added and the search engine’s crawler updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. This article examines the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of results and the structure of retrieved information erodes over time.

This article explores how online multiplayer digital games are used as a venue for the negotiation of intellectual property rights. Recent disputes between players and creators are contributing to both a shift in contemporary notions about the nature and limits of copyright and a growing relationship between virtual leisure and real-world economics. A brief overview of the debate as it has been portrayed in both academic literature and the popular press will provide the context for this analysis. The focus then shifts to the ways in which existing laws and understandings about intellectual property are transforming to accommodate the unique characteristics of online multiplayer games. The contentious issue of labor within online gaming is discussed through a consideration of shifting social conceptualizations of play and the confounding of leisure and labor. The underlying use value-exchange-value relationship is also explored within the theoretical framework of a political economic perspective.

The internet presents challenges to traditional journalism by being a platform for alternative practices of news production and dissemination. In response, traditional journalists are expected to engage in ‘news repair’ in order to reconfirm the authority of existing news institutions and the legitimacy of traditional models of journalism. This interaction between new media and journalistic practices must be contextualized within a media system. Built upon these premises, this study analyzes data from probability sample surveys of journalists in two Chinese cities. It finds that journalists regard mainstream media organizations’ websites as more credible than those run by commercial portals. The perceived credibility of these two types of news websites varies with journalists’ beliefs about journalism. While party journalism remains a dominant lens through which Chinese journalists evaluate the two types of websites, the sites of commercial portals are viewed by some to be embodying an alternative model of journalism.

This article addresses how young people are represented in popular discourses of mobile phone technology and what this representation implies for the local positioning of youth. After reviewing the ways in which representations of youth and technology have been discussed in previous studies, the research reported in this article analyzes different discursive constructions of young mobile phone users in South Korea between 1997 and 2002. The study finds that the different streams of discourse in government documents, the mass media and consumer culture appear to reflect widespread anxieties in Korea about becoming involved in ‘global’ material culture and seek to counter this tendency through rearticulating hegemonic social relations.

This article explores key US and European Union policy documents to identify the similarities and differences in the way that the digital divide has been defined in both contexts in recent years. To that purpose, a computer-assisted text analysis was conducted, which identified not only the most frequent relevant terms in each document, but also patterns of semantic association among them. While significant differences related to the political specificities of each context were found, both sets of documents revealed a tendency over time to frame access in economic and market-based terms. The article argues that these results provide useful insights into the study of the globalization and homogenization of telecommunications policymaking.

The mp3 lies at the center of important debates around intellectual property and file-sharing, but it is also a cultural artifact in its own right. This article examines the design of the mp3 from both industrial and psychoacoustic perspectives to explain better why mp3s are so easy to exchange and the auditory dimensions of that process of exchange. As a container technology for recorded sound, the mp3 shows that the quality of ‘portability’ is central to the history of auditory representation. As a psychoacoustic technology that literally plays its listeners, the mp3 shows that digital audio culture works according to logics somewhat distinct from digital visual culture.

Singapore was one of the early adopters of e-government initiatives in keeping with its status as one of the few developed Asian countries and has continued to be at the forefront of developing e-government structures. While crediting the city-state for the speed of its development, observers have critiqued that the republic limits pluralism, which directly affects e-governance initiatives. This article draws on two recent government initiatives, the notions of corporatism and communitarianism and the concept of symmetry and asymmetry in communication to present the e-government and e-governance structures in Singapore. Four factors are presented as critical for the creation of a successful e-government infrastructure: an educated citizenry; adequate technical infrastructures; offering e-services that citizens need; and commitment from top government officials to support the necessary changes with financial resources and leadership. However, to have meaningful e-governance there has to be political pluralism, which occurs only when permitted by the state.

This article reports a survey of 4531 users of Itiraf.com (‘Confession.com’), a confessional website based in Istanbul, Turkey, where people make personal confessions, tell stories and establish online and offline relationships with other users. Adopting a uses and gratifications approach to the web-based survey, to determine why the contributors to this website return so regularly and what uses they make of the site, the study adds to the limited information available on Turkish internet users. The major finding of the study is that diversion drives most reading on the site, but social interaction provides the largest gratification to those who participate through writing confessions, commenting on others’ confessions and meeting people offline. Some differences in use patterns were found among Turkish respondents who lived in other countries. A rapidly changing social environment in the country provides a partial explanation of website activity.

This article investigates the levels of consumer awareness and knowledge of digital television (DTV) in the USA. It also explores the consumer perceptions of DTV characteristics, benefits and importance. Various consumer characteristics and DTV perceptions were examined to assess their influence in the adoption of DTV. It was found that the consumers had many misconceptions of DTV and their DTV knowledge level was most related to personality traits and internet usage or tenure. While the desire for bigger screen size, digital video recorder ownership, income and broadband access were the best predictors of intention to adopt DTV sets, desire for better video quality and knowledge of DTV environment were the best predictors of intention to adopt DTV converters.

This article is, in part, a response to articles for this Journal by Sally McMillan and Spiro Kiousis. The article examines the analytical problems caused by the fact that interactivity is both a property and an activity. It asserts that interactivity is a contextualizing facility that mediates between environments and content and users. The article analyses the modes of operation both for the production of the properties of interactivity and usage/production in the activity of interactivity. The concept of ‘positioning’ is offered as a means of moving the debate on from the application of communication models or the practical development of ‘features’. The article proposes ‘succession mapping’ as a methodology that acknowledges the building up of the interactive offer and also the generative capabilities of packages. The concept of the active user engaged in ‘user production’ i.e. generation is introduced as being of value to academics, practitioners and those who practice, teach and research.

In 1989, years after the majority of Israeli city dwellers, the members of Kibbutz Y celebrated the installation of telephones in their apartments. We trace the cultural biography of the telephone in Kibbutz Y, with special emphasis upon the practical and symbolic transition from public to private telephones, in order to discuss the role of deliberation in the adoption of new technologies. The biographical approach permits us to discuss parallel developments in the technology, the kibbutz ideology, the society and the interrelationships between them. The article argues that even within a community where ideology is transparent, such as a kibbutz, contradictions and dilemmas inform users’ discourse.

The web is important for academic communication and publishing on an international scale, but it is difficult to assess the extent to which globalization actually has occurred. This article examines the connectivity structure of links between university websites in 25 Asian and European countries as a case study of an inter-regional and intra-regional web phenomenon. The five most linked-to universities in each nation-state were selected and network analysis techniques were used. The results suggested that the UK (and to a lesser extent some other European countries) has a high impact on the formation of link-xmediated academic networks in Asia and Europe. Universities’ websites in Asia are more heavily connected to European universities than linked to each other. The overall findings were indicative of globalization rather than regionalism, but a better characterization might be globalization with regional imbalances and individual high performing countries.

With 71 percent of its households owning computers and having internet access, Sweden is one of the world’s leading information and communication technology (ICT) nations. The prevalence of ICT has inspired the Swedish government to ascribe it as a civic tool, capable of cultivating more active citizenship and a stronger democracy. However, despite its lofty intentions, Sweden’s ICT policy has a significant shortcoming: it is uninformed about the everyday lives of citizens. This article aims to shed light on ICT policy through an analysis of the appropriation of the computer and the internet in Swedish working-class households. Specifically, by drawing on semi-structured interviews, observations and media diaries with household respondents, the article critically discusses civic visions in Swedish ICT policy. It concludes with a recontextualizion of the discussion within an international arena.

Recently, the major US music and movie companies have pursued a dramatic renovation in their approach to copyright enforcement. This shift, from the ‘code’ of law to the ‘code’ of software, looks to technologies themselves to regulate or make unavailable those uses of content traditionally handled through law. Critics worry about the ‘compliance’ rules built into such systems: design mandates for manufacturers indicating what users can and cannot do under particular conditions. But these are accompanied by a second set of limitations: ‘robustness’ rules. Robustness rules obligate manufacturers to build devices such that they prevent tinkering – not only must the technology regulate its users, it must be inscrutable to them. This article examines this aspect of technical copyright regulation, looking particularly at the Content Scramble System (CSS) encryption system for DVDs and the recent ‘broadcast flag’ proposed for digital television. In the name of preventing piracy, these arrangements threaten to undermine users’ sense of agency with their own technologies.

This study1 examines the factors that affect the intention to adopt the internet among non-users against the backdrop of an emerging internet plateau. Using data from a telephone survey with a representative national sample of non-users in Singapore, this study attempts to understand better what may facilitate or impede non-users to adopt the internet in light of the theory of planned behavior. Findings indicate that, in addition to demographic factors, attitudes toward the internet and perceived control of several internal and external factors are predictive of individuals’ intentions to get online in the future. Implications of the findings and future research directions are discussed.

This study examines the discourse of the British National Party’s (BNP) website. It explores the site as a form of alternative media, focusing on how it involves members and supporters in its discursive construction of racism. It finds that the discourses and identities produced are played out through a radical reformation of the concepts of power, culture and oppression. Drawing on the post-colonial notion of the Other, the BNP seeks to present itself, its activities and its members as responses to racism and oppression that, it argues, are practised by the Other. While this discourse is constructed through the everyday experiences and attitudes of its members, the hierarchically-determined nature of the site prevents those members from sustained, active involvement in the construction of their own identities. For this reason, the study concludes, the BNP’s site is far from the more open, non-hierarchical practices of ‘progressive’ alternative media.

This article builds on a case study of the worldwide online dating site Match.com to develop a theoretical understanding of the place of communication and affect in the information economy. Drawing on theoretical debates, secondary sources, a qualitative survey of dating profiles and an analysis of the features and affordances of the Match.com site, the article argues that internet dating seeks to guide the technologically enhanced communicative and affective capacities of internet users to work in ways so that this produces economically valuable content. This is primarily achieved through branding, which as a technique of governance that seeks to work ‘from below’ and ‘empower’ users to deploy their freedom in certain particular, pre-programmed ways. The argument is that online dating provides a good illustration of how the information economy actively subsumes communicative action as a form of immaterial labour.