Forum: New Media & Society

The mainstream online news media face accusations of being slow to respond to so-called `grassroots’ or `citizen journalism’, which uses the world wide web, and in particular blogs and wikis, to publish and promote independent news-related content. This article argues that the adaptation of established news websites to the increasing demand from readers for space to express their views is driven as much by local organizational and technical conditions as it is by any attachment to traditional editorial practices. The article uses qualitative research interviews with the editors and managing editors of nine major British news websites to reveal the debates journalists are having about their changing roles, the challenges of meeting commercial expectations and legal obligations, and the innovations taking place in online newsrooms. It provides journalism and interactive media scholars with case studies on the changes taking place in journalism’s relationship with its consumers.

This study tests the effects of personalized and `stealth’ political discourse on weblogs (or blogs) and the repercussions on levels of political trust, information efficacy and political uses/gratifications. By surveying readers of three different blogs (N=1838), this study identified significant effects as a result of exposure to political statements on blogs. Indeed, there were differences in the levels of political cynicism depending on how political statements were communicated. Readers of non-political blogs were more confident in their level of political information and their ability to participate in politics. Finally, political uses/approaches and avoidances were examined, as were differences based on gender and age.

This article examines urban telecommunications access and use by poor households in the township of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. Analysis draws upon a broad range of quantitative and qualitative data and in doing so seeks to reveal the complexities of how this access and use underpins a wide range of social and economic processes critical to processes of social development. By way of example, the issue of informal urbanisation and housing tenure is addressed, as is the critical role that telecommunications play in facilitating and maintaining important social networks, both across Cape Town and beyond. Further, this article gives consideration to how telecommunications support and enhance livelihood opportunities, and the fact that they are embedded in existing modes of social communication and manifestations of social, cultural and symbolic capital.

This study seeks to describe the types of religious activities Muslim surfers in Singapore engage in on the internet, and uses the theory of planned behaviour as a theoretical framework to examine how internet perception, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control, internet self-efficacy, religiosity and other key demographic variables affect the use of the internet for religious purposes among Muslim surfers in Singapore. A total of 578 Muslim internet users aged 18 and above participated in a computer-assisted telephone interviewing survey in May 2004. We found that Muslim surfers tend to engage in online activities that were more related to personal religious concerns than those activities that were related to traditional institutional religion. Findings also indicate that perceived social pressure from the Muslim community, internet self-efficacy, and religiosity were positively related to engagement in online religious activities, while age was negatively related to engagement.

While international scholarly momentum continues to build around Ulrich Beck’s ideas on risk, politics and reflexivity, his commentary on transformative democracy is only beginning to attract scholarly interest. To better understand the theoretical and conceptual dynamics of transformative democracy in the age of second modernity, I use Mark Poster’s work on digital media and the culture of under-determination to focus analytical attention on the socio-technical domains from which the democratic-cosmopolitan imperative should be expected to garner strength. I argue that Beck’s largely structuralist cosmopolitanization thesis can be strengthened by a supplemental understanding of the material-communicative dimensions inherent to processes of individualization, reflexive modernization and sub-political mobilization. Introducing certain correctives to Beck’s `cosmopolitan manifesto’, I explore the complexities of second modern communicative agency and the constitution of the reflexive, socio-technical subject. My primary purpose is to develop theoretical and conceptual insights into the socio-technical aspects of transformative democracy in second modernity.

This article acknowledges the vital role that the Domestication Research-perspective has in media research, but criticizes it for being analytically ambiguous in its use of the central term `domestication’. By way of a contrastive set of data from an ongoing research project, we argue for a dislocation of `domestication’ from the domestic and the private. Instead, we wish to retain the meaning and use of the term to acts of domesticating, i.e. processes of `taming the wild’. By connecting our arguments to Wittgenstein’s concept of the `language-game’, we emphasize the practical aspect of language and meaning, and how ICTs become meaningful only as parts of practical-communicative contexts. We argue that this steering towards `domestication’ as contextualization highlights the universal and fundamental process of enculturation. Such a turn frees the perspective from historical and cultural specificities and thereby accentuates its analytical potential in a post-national, globalized world.

This analysis brings a range of theoretical perspectives on the politics of the communications policy-making process to bear on US Congressional efforts to protect children from internet pornography. The examination of the Congressional information gathering hearings during the formulation of the Communications Decency Act, Child Online Protection Act and Children’s internet Protection Act shows an excess reliance on anecdotal evidence and a lack of social scientific research in informing Congressional inquiries. The authors here argue that such incidental involvement of academic scholarship could be explained through the lenses of `symbolic politics’ and `class power’, which have important implications for communication scholars who wish to be more closely involved in the communication policy-making process during future debates.