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[RRE]New Media & Society
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Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 15:10:57 +0000 From: jane.makoff@sagepub.co.uk Subject: New Media & Society
New Media & Society - Out next month
Volume 1 Issue 1 - Publication Date: 1 April 1999
Table of Contents:
Editorial
Themed Section What's New About New Media?
Introduction Roger Silverstone London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Underdetermination Mark Poster University of California, Irvine, USA
New media and knowledge Kevin Robins University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Artifacts and paradoxes in new media Ronald E. Rice Rutgers University, Newark, USA
The construction of new digital media Patrice Flichy Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) / Laboratoire Techniques Territoires et Soci`t`s (LATTS)
Human captital in information economies William H. Melody Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands
The language and nature of the Internet : the meaning of global Cheris Kramarae University of Oregon, Eugene, USA
New media and news : implications for the future of journalism John V. Pavlik Columbia University, New York, USA
New media, new audiences? Sonia Livingstone London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
The new media and democratic politics Stephen Coleman The Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government, London
The public at the table : from public access to public participation Lana F. Rakow North Dakota State University, USA
Articles (including abstracts)
Abstracts: The domestication of video-on-demand : folk understanding of a new technology
Rich Ling, Siri Nilsen and Stephan Granhaug Telnor R&D, Norway
This article describes several of the elements that have relevance in the integration of video-on-demand into the home. The specific case examined here involves a trial carried out in Oslo, Norway. Using qualitative methods, the study describes how a selection of users integrated the technology into the mental and physical contexts of their everyday lives. Video-on-demand is a technology that is outside our taken-for-granted experience and thus its integration presents a chance to observe the domestication of technology in everyday life.
Understanding the development of online newspapers : using computer-mediated communication theorizing to study Internet publishing
Pablo Boczkowski Cornell University, New York, USA
The central argument of this article is that the social study of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has generated knowledge about at least four issues that have figured prominently in the development of online newspapers. Thus, CMC scholarship becomes relevant to analyzing the electronic version of a medium that has traditionally been the almost exclusive province of mass communication theorizing. Four issues are identified: (1) the social consequences of the increased anonymity of interlocutors; (2) the reconfiguration of territorially- and interest-based associations; (3) the processes that mediate between the introduction of new artifacts and their social outcomes; and (4) the mutual shaping of consumers and technologies. The role each has had in the construction of online newspapers is explicated and potential avenues for further research are suggested. Finally, Boczkowski maintains that the work outlined in this article fosters two dialogues crucial to the future of communication in increasingly networked societies: those between CMC and mass communication scholarship, and between media theory and practice.
Review Essay
The one-dimensional network society of Manuel Castells Jan A.G.M. Van Dijk University of Utrecht, Netherlands
Book Reviews
Not nearly smart enough: Artificial Intelligence under feminist scrutiny Alison Adam, Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine
Little Brother Facing Up To Big Brother? Philip Agre and Marc Rotenberg (eds), Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape, reviewed by Paul Baker
Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption
Visit our website for further details: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/details/j0182.html
For further information about subscribing or contributing to the journal please contact:
Jane Makoff, jane.makoff@sagepub.co.uk Sage Publications
First Issue Editorial
In recent years we have borne witness to a remarkable growth in scholarship addressing the social implications of emerging communication and information technologies. This area, often described as 'new media' research, is both international in scope and interdisciplinary in approach. Within a number of inter-related fields, from communications to the social studies of technology, and across an increasingly wide range of divisions within the humanities and social sciences, research and teaching in new media are rapidly expanding. New graduate and undergraduate courses, and special sections in professional and scholarly associations are testament to its growing significance around the world.
These developments suggest that this is an opportune moment for the introduction of a journal devoted to new media, and New Media & Society has been designed to attend to that task. The field is mature enough to have established a firm intellectual base, but still young enough so that some developments are only now appearing. For example, until very recently, little work on new media issues was conducted by cultural studies or interpersonal communication scholars. Finally, the field is mature enough to support a journal and -- at the same time -- young enough to allow that journal to help determine its future trajectory.
New Media & Society seeks to contribute to the social, cultural and political understanding of new media and information technologies. We, as editors, plan to solicit contributions which focus on the implications of media and information technology change for communication, organization, and experience in societies -- within institutions and among individuals. The changes being brought on are both global and local, and have both a past and a future. They require attention to the role of governments and industry as well as to the activities of citizens and consumers. They require attention to structure and agency, as well as to the construction and shaping of meaning.
Contributions to New Media & Society will consider the entire spectrum of new media developments, but will do so with a primary focus on the processes of communication. Those developments -- digitalization, convergence, networking, regulation, consumption, interaction -- all require examination and critical attention, albeit at different levels and with different possible consequences.
The notion of newness -- in reference to 'new' media -- is a relative concept. It, too, demands critical attention, particularly in light of the complex and diverse histories of technological change -- change which affects both hardware and software, institutions and practices. Starting with a special series of reflective essays in this issue, New Media & Society will publish work which seeks to analyse 'newness' through comparison between the old and the new, in their social and cultural context, and to examine the implications and impacts of, as well as the determinants and obstacles to, media change. Roger Silverstone, one of the editors of New Media & Society, compiled the series of essays in this issue, and introduces that work in a separate editorial.
A theoretically pluralist position is taken in the pages of New Media & Society and we welcome contributions from the various disciplines examining the interaction between the technological and the social in new media research. We are soliciting contributions from communications, media and cultural studies as well as from sociology, geography, anthropology, economics and political and information sciences. Indeed, through inclusion of papers from such diverse perspectives, the journal seeks to enhance both debate and scholarship in the field.
New Media & Society encourages theoretical as well as empirically grounded contributions. The journal welcomes interpretative and critical studies as well as those that employ established social science methodologies and designs. Contributions which confront conventional disciplinary boundaries, both within the social sciences and between the social sciences and the humanities, are encouraged. Articles which address issues of policy and practice are also welcome. We are particularly keen to encourage papers concerned with gender and new media as well as those that explore the relationship between, or aspects of, the global, the local, and the personal in new media use.
The four editors of New Media & Society come from different areas and approaches to the study of new media. Nicholas Jankowski is an empirically-oriented social scientist whose work spans qualitative methodology, use and assessment of new communication technologies, and the introductory processes of multimedia and Internet-based services. Steve Jones is widely known for his series of volumes on 'cybersociety', and his essays on the meaning of community and identity in virtual environments. Rohan Samarajiva is a political economist concerned with communication policy issues ranging from privacy to electronic commerce. Roger Silverstone has a long-time concern with the social shaping of communication technologies in everyday life situations and with 'communication as design'.
Each of us is involved in various projects related to new media, and the following excerpts from descriptions of recent projects illustrate some of our current work and concerns. According to Jankowski, much claim is made for the distinctive features of new media-increasing possibilities for audience interactions, transcendence of the constraints of time and space, reconstruction of individual identity, rekindling of the sense of community and possibility of collective action. Nevertheless, he feels that little systematic consideration has been given to how empirical social science research might attend to these alleged features, and particularly limited discussion on the methodological innovations possible in the arena of new media research. Some issues of importance include ways of measuring interactivity, determining use and assessment of websites, charting contributions to public debate and democratic action. Innovation related to these issues deserves placement within a broader methodological perspective so as to guide other studies of new media developments.
Jones believes John Perry Barlow's assertion that 'cyberspace is where you are when you are on the telephone' is a compelling description of the spatial experience of the Internet. However, the Barlow statement forces spatial considerations at the expense of social ones. What matters when one is on the telephone is less where one is and more with whom one is conversing. Though recent theoretical examinations of the 'space' of cyberspace are interesting and compelling, insufficient attention is paid to the self and its subjectivities online. Jones feels there is need for greater attention to issues of subjectivity and the consequences for a move from understanding cyberspace as spatial practice, grounded in offline notions of geography, toward an understanding of cyberspace as social practice, grounded in online notions of connectivity.
Samarajiva is seeking to understand the changing forms of integration
Silverstone is concerned with how we might understand, in an age of media and technology change, the ways in which the media are involved in enabling or disabling public participation in everyday life, and the nature of that participation. Such an enquiry, he feels, needs to be undertaken in order to provide routes towards a better understanding of the issues involved in thinking about the nature of the relationship between sociality and mediation. This item on the 'agenda' involves an attempt to bring media theory into line not only with the media's palpable ubiquity, but also with the changing character of media themselves, offering, as they are beginning to, new forms of participation and interaction within the spaces that they enable and create.
Caroline Bassett, Reviews Editor for New Media & Society, is interested in receiving assessments of recent publications in the subject areas delineated earlier. The 'carriers' for this work need not necessarily be limited to those employed by conventional book publishers, but may also include government policy documents; narrow-market academic monographs; university theses and dissertations; web-based reports; and cd-rom releases.
We are supported by a group of Contributing Editors with diverse areas of expertise. This group will work closely with us in shaping editorial policy, and in establishing and monitoring the quality of journal issues. In addition, New Media & Society has an International Advisory Board composed of scholars able to signal recent developments, work-in-progress, and research conducted by promising young scholars. With these 'support units' -- the Contributing Editors and members of the International Advisory Board -- we hope to make New Media & Society a journal providing both reflective and recent work, essential to the community of scholars concerned with the 'interface' of new media with society.
Our general editorial policy, as mentioned above, is to publish as wide a range of quality academic studies of new media as possible. Occasionally, as with the series of essays in this issue, articles will be compiled to form special themes. Generally, however, issues of New Media & Society will reflect the diversity evident in the field as a whole. We are considering several topics for future theme issues, but would welcome additional suggestions for topics and guest editors. In keeping with standard academic practice, submissions are subject to double-blind peer review. Generally, we will consider publishing articles in the range of 7000 words, but welcome longer manuscripts when the additional length is justified by the significance of the contribution.
This first issue of New Media & Society considers head-on the problematic of 'newness' in the new media through a series of essays composed by prominent new media scholars. In addition, this issue contains three articles diverse in topics and approaches. Pablo Boczkowski generates a series of research concerns and questions for the study of online newspapers from the perspective of computer- mediated communication. Tim Dwyer and Sally Stockbridge assess Australian government interventions and policy related to media violence found on the Internet, computer games and videos. This issue also contains a major examination of Manuel Castells' trilogy on the information society and shorter reviews of three recent books: Alison Adams' examination of gender and artificial intelligence; Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau's account of wiretapping and encryption; and an edited collection on technology and privacy compiled by Philip Agre and Marc Rotenberg.
Launching a scholarly journal is a major undertaking for all involved in the process -- for reviewers requested to assess drafts of the project proposal, for colleagues invited to serve on the editorial board, for the publisher who must ultimately consider the financial and intellectual viability of such an undertaking and provide the infrastructure for ensuring quality production, promotion and distribution. During the entire process, several staff members of Sage Publications have played an instrumental role in guiding this project from raw idea to creation of a new forum for scholarly debate. We are deeply appreciative for the support provided by Jane Makoff, Jane Price and particularly Julia Hall throughout this process.
We welcome reactions from readers to this and forthcoming issues of New Media & Society. We particularly encourage your contributions to making New Media & Society a central forum for lively academic debate on the place of new media in society.
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