Forum: New Media & Society

‘Interactivity’ was one of the major buzzwords of the 1990s. Although the academic discourse has produced a large number of different concepts of ‘interactivity’, in everyday life it still remains a label put on all kinds of aspects of online communication and digital media. Drawing on schema theory this article explores the concepts of ‘ordinary’ users (i.e. people who are not professional experts). The results indicate that users associate the foremost social and individual issues with the term ‘interactivity’, i.e. what they can accomplish by using media in terms of self-development, social influence and social relationships.

This article examines the ways in which individuals use MP3 players to shape their experiences of the London commute. To investigate MP3 listening practices, I conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with eight DJs and ‘listeners’ living in London. I argue that MP3 players enable individuals to use music to precisely shape their experiences of space, place, others and themselves while moving through the city. In doing so, individuals experience great control as they transform urban journeys into private and pleasurable spaces. While experienced effects of MP3 player listening were similar among respondents, pre-existing relationships to music appear to relate to motivations for use. This article draws on a variety of social theorists ranging from Simmel and Adorno to Lefebvre to interrogate the experience of control MP3 users describe, and to understand the implications for the autonomy of urban inhabitants.

This article reflects on the current state of digital communication studies in the context of mass communication research. The objectives of the article are: 1) to characterize the enunciators and the contents of scientific conversations about digital communication; and 2) to sketch a map of possible interlocutors who might enrich this new research field. After quickly exploring the paradigms of mass communication studies, the article deals with the main theoretical conversations about digital communication. The second part of the article describes the transformations that the appearance of digital technology has generated in communication processes. The article concludes with an agenda of the main issues and partners that theoretical conversations about digital communication should include. The article analyzes the constitution of a new scientific field and describes the process that may, in the future, lead to the creation of a theory of digital communication.

The uses and gratifications approach has been useful in explaining media use by individuals. However, it has been limited in that the use of a medium has always been considered independently from other media options available and from use trends occurring at the level of a population. The theory of the niche has been used to partially overcome these limitations by examining uses and gratification concepts in the context of media competition; but, up to this point, it has only been used to explain trends at the system level. Through the introduction of repertoire niches, the present article extends the theory of the niche by examining competition at the level of the individual within the resource space of his/her media repertoire. Results indicate that repertoire niche dimensions of breadth, overlap, and superiority have some predictive power over media use.

The movement toward what is often described as Web 2.0 is usually understood as a large-scale shift toward a participatory and collaborative version of the web, where users are able to get involved and create content. As things stand we have so far had little opportunity to explore how new forms of power play out in this context of apparent ‘empowerment’ and ‘democratization’. This article suggests that this is a pressing issue that requires urgent attention. To begin to open up this topic this article situates Web 2.0 in the context of the broader transformations that are occurring in new media by drawing on the work of a number of leading writers who, in various ways, consider the implications of software ‘sinking’ into and ‘sorting’ aspects of our everyday lives. The article begins with this broader literature before exploring in detail Scott Lash’s notion of ‘post-hegemonic power’ and more specifically his concept of ‘power through the algorithm’. The piece concludes by discussing how this relates to work on Web 2.0 and how this work might be developed in the future.

Despite the rapid growth of blogging in China, little is known about the communicative processes of blogs and their implications for China. This current study aims to bridge that gap by specifically looking at the political blogs posted on the NetEase, one of the largest portal websites in China, regarding the dismissal of Shanghai leader Chen Liangyu. Results from a content analysis indicate that bloggers, giving quick responses to the event, were actively engaged in discussions on politically sensitive topics, and expressed different opinions of the event and even criticism of the government.

This research considers the growing use of the internet by campaigns in the United States at the sub-presidential level and its relationship to the digital divide. The primary goal is to understand why candidates’ websites have different levels of quality and whether this is somehow connected to the digital divide. Examining the quality of campaign websites reflects scholarly research concerning information technology, the digital divide and political campaigns and elections. I observe the relative quality of House campaign websites from the 2002 mid-term election in relation to demographic features of a congressional district including race, family income and education. The objective is to predict the quality of these candidate websites using these variables; and, subsequently, to discover whether campaign website quality has a relationship to the digital divide.

Current theories of social interaction and normative influence in Computer-Mediated Communication were developed in the era of the internet predominated by text-based interaction. With the growth of visual-spatial worlds like Second Life, these theories need to be re-examined. The evolution of thinking about social norms online has moved from a mechanistic view to a systems view of humans and communication technology intertwined in a complex relationship that includes groups, identity, communication, and norms. Missing from that system is explicit attention to context and the important role of the environment that encases interaction. This article discusses theories of how architecture and embodiment shape offline life and how such theories increasingly apply in online interaction in visual social spaces. We argue that such spaces communicate normative information that influences behavior within a given context in both conscious and unconscious ways. This article then discusses implications of visual-spatial environments on existing theories of interaction online.

‘Collaborative culture’, ‘mass creativity’ and ‘co-creation’ appear to be contagious buzzwords that are rapidly infecting economic and cultural discourse on Web 2.0. Allegedly, peer production models will replace opaque, top-down business models, yielding to transparent, democratic structures where power is in the shared hands of responsible companies and skilled, qualified users. Manifestos such as Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006) and ‘We-Think’ (Leadbeater, 2007) argue collective culture to be the basis for digital commerce. This article analyzes the assumptions behind this Web 2.0 newspeak and unravels how business gurus try to argue the universal benefits of a democratized and collectivist digital space. They implicitly endorse a notion of public collectivism that functions entirely inside commodity culture. The logic of Wikinomics and ‘We-Think’ urgently begs for deconstruction, especially since it is increasingly steering mainstream cultural theory on digital culture.

This article examines the campaign websites of the 2003 Finnish parliamentary candidates. By examining candidate-level online competition in the candidate-centred Finnish context, individual-level variables are brought to attention in explaining website uptake and how campaign sites are used by candidates in terms of functions and sophistication. The findings show that the distribution of the candidates’ web presence was skewed towards an over-representation of major party candidates. Moreover, in predicting candidate website functions and sophistication, belonging to a major party was a strong predictor. Candidate competitiveness and incumbency were also found to be significant predictors. Nevertheless, the findings in the article indicate that the relevance of these political factors may be less significant than other factors, for example genre effects, in explaining candidate website content and presentation.

A large-scale content analysis of characters in video games was employed to answer questions about their representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population. The sample included 150 games from a year across nine platforms, with the results weighted according to game sales. This innovation enabled the results to be analyzed in proportion to the games that were actually played by the public, and thus allowed the first statements able to be generalized about the content of popular video games. The results show a systematic over-representation of males, white and adults and a systematic under-representation of females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly. Overall, the results are similar to those found in television research. The implications for identity, cognitive models, cultivation and game research are discussed.

Using the anniversary coverage of Hurricane Katrina, this textual analysis explores how reporters and citizen journalists considered themselves and each other in their different versions of a specific news narrative. This research indicates that online citizen writers undermined the mainstream news story by offering an often contrary version of Hurricane Katrina. Their collective memory focused on personal experience, asserting their right to tell this societal story. By inserting themselves into the news production process of collective memory formation, these citizens renegotiated their relationships with journalists and with journalism. In some cases, this resulted in complete role reversals. The findings suggest that new patterns for information flow are being created, renovating the existing institutional power structure involving the press and society. The conclusion of this article suggests that theorists evaluate citizen journalism alongside mainstream journalists’ work, for they are now part of the same news production process.

This article investigates the circulation of Wikipedia entries on the web in an effort to determine the integration of its collaborative model into existing proprietary web formats. In particular it details the use of Wikipedia content as ‘tags’ or information that is used to increase traffic to webpages through search engine results. Consequently, the article discusses the need to develop theoretical models that provide for an understanding of both content and form on the web, particularly as formatted by open-source legal frameworks.

While communication scholars suggest that the internet can serve as an important resource for social movement communication, few studies examine whether and how social movements actually use the internet. This article examines US-based social movement organization (SMO) internet use at one of its most visible points of access, the world wide web. Drawing on alternative media studies, the article develops a typology of communication functions central to social movements and surveys a random sample of SMO websites in order to determine whether and to what degree they exhibit features or attributes related to these types. The survey results suggest that the majority of US-based SMOs are not utilizing the web to its full potential, and posits a number of reasons why this might be the case, including organizational objectives, organizational resources and resource sharing.

This article provides an alternative to the masculine construction of the blogosphere by analyzing ‘mommy bloggers’ through the lenses of feminism and autobiography. It uses the event of the 2005 BlogHer conference as a starting point for a discussion about the mommy blogger phenomenon, wherein a constellation of ensuing conversations challenge the use of the title ‘mommy blogger’ and the activities that are encompassed by it. In qualitatively examining the form and content of mommy blogs, this article ultimately argues for their potential to build communities and to challenge dominant representations of motherhood within our society.

This article investigates how differences in social ties lead to differences in the social use of information and communication technology (ICT) and vice versa. The article draws on a qualitative study in the field of disability studies. Through this study of a marginalized subgroup of youth, the article advances insight into the permeability of the real and the virtual and extends the notion of established concepts of social ties and digital differentiation. The youth in the current study are 23 disabled Norwegians aged 15—20 years. The analysis is based on the principles of grounded theory and is characterized by a constant content comparative process. The outcome of this analysis shows how social ties of a marginalized subgroup of young people hold different characteristics than established notions anticipate, how these characteristics are vital in youths’ interaction in offline and online life and how this interaction implies a mixed reality.

This article proposes an empirical test of whether aggregate economic behavior maps from the real to the virtual. Transaction data from a large commercial virtual world — the first such data set provided to outside researchers — is used to calculate metrics for production, consumption and money supply based on real-world definitions. Movements in these metrics over time were examined for consistency with common theories of macroeconomic change. The results indicated that virtual economic behavior follows real-world patterns. Moreover, a natural experiment occurred, in that a new version of the virtual world with the same rules came online during the study. The new world’s macroeconomic aggregates quickly grew to be nearly exact replicas of those of the existing worlds, suggesting that `Code is Law’: macroeconomic outcomes in a virtual world may be explained largely by design structure.

This article analyzes cloaked websites, which are sites published by individuals or groups who conceal authorship in order to disguise deliberately a hidden political agenda. Drawing on the insights of critical theory and the Frankfurt School, this article examines the way in which cloaked websites conceal a variety of political agendas from a range of perspectives. Of particular interest here are cloaked white supremacist sites that disguise cyber-racism. The use of cloaked websites to further political ends raises important questions about knowledge production and epistemology in the digital era. These cloaked sites emerge within a social and political context in which it is increasingly difficult to parse fact from propaganda, and this is a particularly pernicious feature when it comes to the cyber-racism of cloaked white supremacist sites. The article concludes by calling for the importance of critical, situated political thinking in the evaluation of cloaked websites.