Forum: New Media & Society

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has been deployed in both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches, sometimes as technical platforms’, sometimes as platforms’ from which to speak, sometimes as platforms’ of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are carefully elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say. As these providers become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the terms by which they hope to be judged.

The proliferation of empirical inquiries into concepts such as interactivity’ and virtual reality’ has been at the expense of the theoretical (or metadiscursive) in new media studies. The greatest consequence of empiricism’s inductive hierarchies is an ontological negation of the body, the subject in corporeal space. Far from producing a new’ subjectivity, such a negation only reifies a subject’s disembodiment and wholly abstracts the space around them. Examining the writings of many critics and theorists, most significantly Mark Hansen and the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, this argument shows that the theoretical must first and foremost be held accountable to itself if the new’ is to be realized. The stakes in this piece are the subject’s embodiment and very ability to articulate itself as I’ in an information-saturated age that challenges the distinction between virtuality and corporeality, a challenge that conceptually bankrupts acts of distinction and differentiation.

Using network analysis, this study examines the current structure of international music trade flow and its determinants. International music trade data from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics database are employed to describe the international music flow network and how it changed between 2002 and 2006. Network analysis reveals the imbalance of international music trade between the core and the periphery. Specifically, the USA and European countries including Germany, the UK and the Netherlands are at the core, dominating international trade of music products. Over the five-year period, the international music trade network remained relatively stable. Regression analysis indicates that a country’s economic development, the language(s) its people speak and technological development are influential factors that determine the global structure of international music flows.

This article considers the problematic relationship between new media designers and users in current texts written about user-centered design (UCD) techniques. To better understand and solidify the importance of the user within the technological artifact, these designers often create personas’ — prototypical users with names, faces, interests and preferences. Personas serve as boundary objects used as conceptual stand-ins for users when team members make design decisions. This article traces the discursive construction of the user’ within web design texts and how these texts describe the persona technique. The analysis suggests that the use of personas is motivated as much by political realities within new media organizations, as it is by the desire to address user needs. In addition, it is argued that personas serve to reinscribe the conceptual separation between the user and designer despite technological developments (like Web 2.0) that blur this boundary.

Scholars have recently begun investigating teenagers’ perceptions of digital devices and awareness of the functions they serve in their lives (Campbell, 2007: Cheong, 2008; Heim et al., 2007; Ling, 2004). This article aligns with research on adolescents’ uses of digital media devices by conducting focus groups with 80 middle- and high-school teenagers. The chief objective of this research was to further our understanding of what young people think about digital devices (e.g. cell phones, video game systems, the internet) and the functions they serve in their lives. Four themes emerged from 11 focus group interviews: (1) an awareness of digital devices; (2) a sense of temporal displacement; (3) social functions; and (4) a palpable sense of risk associated with using them. These themes resonate with the current literature.

Drawing from a representative sample of adults in the USA, this study explored the links between mobile communication and select indicators of social capital, while also accounting for usage patterns regarding the proximity of mobile contact. Overall, the findings show that mobile phone use intersects with proximity in distinctive ways that are related to spending leisure time with others in a face-to-face context and being active in organized groups and clubs. For individuals with primarily local usage patterns, both voice calling and text messaging were positively associated with social leisure activity. For those who primarily used the mobile phone to contact others from a distance, text messaging was positively related to social leisure activity, and for those whose mobile contacts were balanced between local and distant, voice calling was positively associated with active membership in organizations. Interpretation of these findings and directions for future research are offered in the discussion.

Much has been written about how social networking sites (SNS) have provided new avenues for self-expression, connectivity and self-creation’ among young people, but few pay due attention to geographical and cultural variations. This article takes up the Japanese case by analysing how its youths engage with SNS, like MySpace and Mixi, within a framework of audience engagement’ that encompasses the multiple dimensions of audience activities. Drawing on an ethnography of Japanese youths living in the media-rich Tokyo Metropolitan Area, this article discusses the following four dimensions of audience engagement: information-seeking activity, connectivity, bricolage and participation. While it is neither all about me in MySpace nor all about us in Mixi, it is suggested that MySpace is about me and them and Mixi is about me with them. Japanese young people reflexively create and re-create themselves in everyday life with to-ing and fro-ing in the spectrum between two different cultural values, via SNS.

By means of a two-wave representative panel survey of adults in the Netherlands, this study examines changes in the profile of the online-news audience, how it uses and evaluates online news and how this eventually affects the use of traditional media. The analyses reveal interesting differences in the use of newspaper websites and other, non-paper, news sites. Displacement effects become visible: online newspapers gradually substitute for printed newspapers, other news sites for teletext and non-paper news sites for newspaper sites.

This article embraces the concept of technology identity as an innovative theoretical and methodological approach to study the digital divide. Reporting on qualitative data taken from a mixed-method study, the analytical approach goes beyond an access and skills perspective in measuring digital inequities. Narratives collected from students demonstrate how powerful sociocultural influences, such as family practices and access to a quality K-12 education, contribute to the development of a technology identity. The stories outlined in this article offer illustrative accounts of how holding a particular technology identity impacts the academic and social life of college students. Taken together, the narratives highlight the role of schools and universities as institutions which are perpetuating — rather than resisting — inequalities associated with the digital divide.