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The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Leah Lievrouw on the disciplinary traditions that make a divide between mediated and non-mediated communication and another on Ting-yu Kang on diasporic identity when place-based race and cultural identifiers become distributed to new locations.

This paper uses as its base a key initiative involving a not-for-profit organisation (NPO), government start-up funding and a social enterprise which evolved through three phases. The purpose of the initiative was the development of a smart phone technology platform for people with disability. The paper's purpose is to answer questions about the ways in which the mobile technology, seen here as assistive technologies, supported the development of disability citizenship and active citizenship. Data were collected through in-depth interviews conducted at three points in the 13-week programme during which participants with disability received customised support for their phone and training in its use, at no cost. Fifteen participants volunteered to take part in the research project, along with their significant other and service provider. Key themes were identified in the preliminary analysis. Exploring these using Ragnedda's ([2017]. The third digital divide: A Weberian approach to digital inequalities. Abingdon: Routledge) three levels of digital divide, and Wilson's ([2006]. The information revolution and developing countries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) categories of access allowed a series of philosophical, ethical and human services management questions to emerge, challenging the optimism with which the digital economy is presented as a solution to issues of inequality. Although the mobile technologies were very successful as assistive technologies for some participants, the findings reinforced the potential for such technologies to further entrench aspects of social exclusion. They also identified ways in which the shift in the role of the NPO to social entrepreneurship, and its relationships with government and private enterprise, had the potential to undermine the exercise of disability citizenship by turning participants into consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore economic and inclusion opportunities for people with disabilities and mental health issues afforded by 'live streaming' ‒ the live broadcast of one's activities over the internet to a globally dispersed audience. In both 2016 and 2017, the leading live streaming platform Twitch.tv broadcast over 500,000 years of video, which were produced by over two million regular broadcasters ('streamers'), and consumed by an audience of several hundred million viewers. Streamers can profit, up to and including a full-time living 'wage' for those at the highest levels. Numerous successful streamers with chronic health issues have discussed the personal and professional benefits streaming brings them. Utilising data from a research project with 100 interviews, alongside approximately 500 hours of ethnographic observation, this paper examines the experiences of live streaming for broadcasters with disabilities, mental health issues, or physical health issues. Firstly, I explore the positive elements of streaming for these broadcasters, focusing on the many conditions represented in this demographic, and the benefits streaming gives for inclusion and community. Secondly, I consider the negative experiences of these streamers, focused on entanglements of health and technology that make their streaming lives potentially more challenging than their colleagues. Thirdly, I focus on the economic opportunities, and the potential for entrepreneurial activity, the platform affords. I conclude the analysis by exploring how these aspects make live streaming a potentially exemplary emancipatory and entrepreneurial space for these individuals, but not one without challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyse processes of domestication as collective enactments, using online game playing of World of Warcraft as a case. We study how groups of players - guilds - develop practices and sense-making with respect to the technologies they use in their shared endeavours in raids to battle monsters. Previous studies of domestication have mainly focused on single-actor strategies and relatively little attention have been given to the impact of concerns for particular domestication outcomes, for example in competitive situations or with goals related to efficiency. This paper contributes to domestication theory by analysing what we call collective domestication in a performance-oriented setting, to see how domestication may produce compatible outcomes for individuals that need to act together. The paper is based on a one-year participant observation and qualitative interviews with players. Three types of players were identified - hardcore, casual and moderate - representing three rationales of play: a high level of performance, social benefits, or a combination of the first two. In the analysis, we compare how these three types of player groups’ domesticated the game. A main finding is that collective enactments of technology need extensive managerial efforts unless the group share a coherent and uncontested rationale for playing, thus being a moral community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines some of the current challenges surrounding the implementation of information and communication technology systems to support the delivery of care within health services. These highly complex electronicinformation infrastructuressupport an increasingly broad array of functions and actors. They are being supplied in the UK National Health Service by commercial vendors as Commercial Off-The Shelf solutions. Vendors have struggled to developgenerification strategiesthat can accommodate the diverse practices and requirement of adopter organisations within their more-or-less standardised packages. At the same time there is enormous demand for improvements, coupled with a huge reservoir of potential innovations particularly where health practitioners interact with technology entrepreneurs. However, many outcomes of this bottom-up innovation process have struggled to be taken up more widely. As a result there has been markedly uneven progress in achieving radical visions that are being mapped out of how technology might transform healthcare. Drawing insights from Science and Technology Studies and related Information Systems research, the paper explores conceptual frameworks and methodologies that may help us better understand these challenges: the barriers to exploiting local innovations and taking them upon a wide basis and the tensions that need to be managed in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers how personal data protections figure into the design process of wearable technology. The data question is becoming especially important in the face of recent innovations in biotechnology that capitalize on the new fungibility of biology and electronics, in which new biotech wearables capitalize on the ability to analyze and track changes in blood, sweat, and tears. Interviews and participant observation with wearable tech designers, data scientists, fashion tech entrepreneurs, and select experts in cybersecurity and intellectual property law, reveal a range of approaches to data protection in design within the culture where wearables are beginning to merge with biotech. While a few respondents were extremely vigilant about protecting consumer’s privacy, the majority felt that when consumers ‘opt in’ to data sharing, they should be cognizant of the risks. From their perspective, it is not necessarily the producer’s responsibility to protect user's personal data. These attitudes present a problematic logic, which leaves users vulnerable to data exploitation. The paper concludes by arguing that this laissez-faire culture is the environment in which wearable biotech is being developed and will be deployed. This emerging technology raises issues about bodies, data, and ownership in crucial need of analysis and critique to push its move into the mainstream toward more equitable and inclusive ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relevance of sociology of expectation in conceptualizing some of the tensions emerging in the UK context from the attempts to engage communities of social scientists, anthropologists and colleagues in cognate disciplines with e-social science. As the uptake of e-science proceeds fast in many scientific domains - from genetics to physics, from biology to clinical medicine - many social scientists and scholars in cognate disciplines remain apparently unaware or unimpressed by the promises of linking up large-scale data sets of fieldwork, and having access to the new tools and technologies that are being developed to cope with this scaling up of data set size. Science and Technology Studies (STS) has theorized technological innovations, and highlighted how they come packaged with expectations of their applications, their benefits and sometimes their risks. Future scenarios are projected in which a technology is integrated with society at large and with representations of everyday life. In line with an STS approach, instead of debating the likelihood of possible scenarios, this paper calls for uncovering the values and preferences that are implicitly inbuilt in the visions of the proponents of e-social science. It is only once these are rendered explicit that one can begin to explore the extent to which these values are shared across sections of the research community, or the extent to which they may be specific of certain stakeholders only. The process, it is argued, ultimately allows for a more transparent debate, and a negotiation of which values end up being up-taken in research policy and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing maturity of new, interactive media, rhetoric about its possibilities and potentialities that abounded in its earliest days still endures. The growth of detailed and empirical work, which has sought to populate the digital landscape with grounded research calling into question this rhetoric, has not stopped new media debate from continuing to be shaped, in part, by the language of the potential. This paper is concerned with one aspect of new media's potential, personalization. It focuses on new media's proclaimed capacity to be adapted to meet the needs and desires of individual users. This is a trope that runs through much humanities and social sciences literature on new media and ICTs, yet despite recognition of the possibility of personalization offered by networked media technologies, there is very little grounded, empirical work on this subject in these fields. In order to address this absence, this paper compares an attempt to personalize new media web content on a two-year research endeavour entitled Project @pple with the rhetoric about the potentiality for personalization that new technologies offers. It aims to contribute to understandings of personalization by detailing the issues that arise when attempting to implement it. The argument of the paper is that the difficulties encountered on Project @pple suggest that, in real-life situations, characterized as they are by constraints and complexities, it is not always a straightforward process for personalization to cease to be potential and to become actual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the dominant perspectives for understanding e-democracy in practice. It argues that although these, on their own, only provide static and partial accounts of the role and implications of e-democracy, nevertheless they should not be disregarded. The paper proposes an integration of their key positions to generate a more rounded and complete account of the role of e-democracy in practice. It suggests that Giddens's Structuration Theory provides a starting point in this direction. A structuration perspective is able to integrate many of the diverse perspectives whilst simultaneously avoiding technological and social determinism by focusing attention on the interplay of social structures and agency in e-democracy practices. This perspective assists in illuminating the underlying institutional arrangements and structures in which e-democracy practices are embedded, as well as the strategies employed by human actors. It focuses attention on structures of signification, domination and legitimation that surround e-democracy practices and also how individuals are both enabled and constrained in these practices. It is argued that more complete and balanced accounts which emerge from such an integrated perspective could assist in developing a more effective e-democracy policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the difference in the online economic activities of people with and without disabilities in Korea. We conducted a multiple regression analysis to investigate the impact of socioeconomic characteristics, internet access, and internet skills on online economic activities. Our sample, based on a 2016 dataset that included 1554 people with disabilities and 6004 people without disabilities, was developed using quota sampling based on gender, age, and residence. We determined that individuals with disabilities were more likely to engage in online economic activities if they had higher levels of education, lived in urban areas, were employed, or had greater internet skills. Individuals without disabilities were more likely to engage in online economic activities if they were women, had higher levels of education, were employed, lived in a two-generation or more household, or had greater internet skills. For both people with and without disabilities, the level of education, employment status, and internet skills positively contribute to online economic activites. We also determined that education level, participation in economic activity, living in a two-generation or more household, and internet skills had a statistically significant influence on online economic activity for people both with and without disabilities. These results highlight the importance of education and internet training for people with disabilities, as well as social support systems that help them learn to use the internet in diverse ways through both formal and informal networks. The study also underscores the importance of information and communications technology that adequately addresses people's needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the debate about filter bubbles caused by algorithmic news recommendation, the conceptualization of the two core concepts in this debate, diversity and algorithms, has received little attention in social scientific research. This paper examines the effect of multiple recommender systems on different diversity dimensions. To this end, it maps different values that diversity can serve, and a respective set of criteria that characterizes a diverse information offer in this particular conception of diversity. We make use of a data set of simulated article recommendations based on actual content of one of the major Dutch broadsheet newspapers and its users (N=21,973 articles, N=500 users). We find that all of the recommendation logics under study proved to lead to a rather diverse set of recommendations that are on par with human editors and that basing recommendations on user histories can substantially increase topic diversity within a recommendation set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developments within 3D digital modelling are often heralded as a much needed solution to problems of information loss and communication difficulties within the building industry. Despite the abundance of technical possibilities for innovation, however, there is currently no standardized, widely used digital model that solves these problems. Rather, actors in the building industry are assembling technological and other elements in various ways, trying to configure a stable innovation. This article sets out to describe the innovation communication involved in different emerging assemblages by focusing on the articulation of different expectations to their promises. We identify three different sets of expectations, namely visions related to building information modelling, Virtual Worlds and interactive simulation platforms. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how visions are a crucial part of the communication about innovations in information and communication technology (ICT), and to contribute to an understanding of how different visions promise particular future configurations of workflows, communication processes, politics, economic models and social relations. Hereby, the paper adds to the literature on the relationship between ICTs and organizing, but with a distinct focus on innovation communication and distributed innovation processes taking place before ICTs are stabilized, issues which cannot be captured by studies of diffusion and adaptation of new ICTs within single organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Continuing investigation of the relationships between information and communication technologies and human societies calls for the exploration of the ways in which human cultures shape and are shaped by technological development. This paper discusses the problematic invocation, in this arena, of Hofstede's model of 'national culture' (and similar models developed in a functionalist paradigm) to classify peoples. It briefly surveys critiques of Hofstede's research method, but focuses on the dangers of attempting to develop models of culture within a functionalist paradigm. Although such models may be parsimonious and rapidly applied, this paper argues that they are a poor fit for investigations of the dynamic and reciprocal interactions between human cultures and technology. Instead, it is argued here that we must abandon the functionalist paradigm and embrace methodologies that permit meaningful explorations of the multiple and dynamic conditions influencing the field of cultural practices in human societies. The merits of articulation as theory and method are discussed, and Hacking's theory of dynamic nominalism is offered as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the recent development of an e-research agenda. e-Research is taken as the latest stage of the e-science programme, which - as developed in tandem with web 2.0 tools - has begun to be adopted by researchers. This paper discusses these research infrastructures before current research investigating the relationship between academic researchers and technology is reviewed. The results of a survey undertaken in 2007 within a UK research-led university are presented and analysed in order to answer the questions about the uptake of these technologies by academic researchers and the relationship between the two technological infrastructures. If e-research is to mean enhanced research, it must include web 2.0 developments alongside e-science initiatives, even if this poses problems for institutional support and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic research on service innovation has highlighted the distinct characteristics of services innovation, the knowledge complexes involved, and how services can be autonomous sites of innovation. It also highlights that successful services innovations are often not technology based but can depend on new organizational or managerial practices or marketing and distribution strategies. This paper makes an empirical and a conceptual contribution to this literature by focusing on one sub-sector of the services sector: digital media applications and services. Conceptually, this paper is interdisciplinary and draws upon a range of work on innovation and production in media and communication studies, innovation studies, evolutionary economics, and sociology. Empirically, this paper draws on ten years of qualitative case study research focused on innovation in the digital media sector in Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Europe. More specifically, we draw upon research on the internet, mobile, and games sectors. A key finding emerging from this research is that, despite the widespread popular and academic focus on technology and codified knowledge, a much broader knowledge base (particularly tacit, creative and non-technological knowledge) underpins successful innovative practices in digital media firms. This paper examines the combination of creative ideas and skills, social learning processes of content creators, management, market and business knowledge that underpin the development new digital media applications and services. It argues that a better understanding of the character of knowledge inputs and the innovative practices in digital media companies may contribute to a better understanding of innovation in the knowledge economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the construction of racial identity online through the mediating influences of popular culture, old media, weblogs, and Internet users. This paper examines the production of race on the Internet by examining the elements that make up the weblog Freakonomics: the topic, the environment, the medium, and the users. Recent cyberculture research has called for Internet studies to integrate critical theories of race and culture into its analyses. The argument, which this paper seeks to extend, is for the increased recognition of the salience of race in understanding Web content and production. In examining the blog's structure, posts, and comments, I applied Omi and Winant's racial formation theory to the cultural representations and structural phenomena articulated with respect to themes of race, racial interactions, media, and geography. Omi and Winant argue that people interpret the meaning of race by framing it in social structures, and that conversely, recognizing the racial dimensions in social structures leads to interpretations of race. Accordingly, this paper examines interpretations of race in The Wire (a critically-acclaimed minority-led television show), the New York Times news website, the Freakonomics blog, and the Web-enabled audience of the three elements. The paper concludes by arguing for more use of critical race and theory in information studies research in order to understand how racial perspectives affect the presentation and interpretation of Internet content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into the adoption and use of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) pays increasing attention to social context; however, the social fabric of contexts of use is often poorly theorized. This paper presents an investigation into the formation and operation of informal local networks of collaboration and knowledge exchange. It highlights the role of local experts in sustaining these informal networks and helping individuals and groups adopt and cope with new ICTs. The paper draws on a range of analytic traditions, including domestication and consumer research, to assess how local experts transfer knowledge, ideas of use and even new technologies across social networks and across the boundaries between home, work and education and other domains of life. The methodology deployed attempts to overcome the limitations of many studies of the adoption and diffusion of innovations in sample selection, especially the inclusion of non-adopters. It addresses the social dynamics of engagement with new technologies and proposes a move beyond a simple individualistic adopter/non-adopter model, with consequent implications for understanding digital inclusion and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Console based video games are an increasingly familiar and engaging technology in the living room and as such, warrant critical attention. Considerations of their impact on the home have been widely regarded by new media academics as technological innovation and by social scientists as symptomatic of a decline in social and familial connectedness. In an attempt to move the debate beyond discussions of machine functionality and social crisis, this paper argues for a reframing of some of the ways we think about the impact of entertainment technologies on the home. It presents the notion of the digital hearth as a concept that shows how cultural meanings associated with the home can be transformed through gaming and changing patterns of consumption. The research examines the domestication of the console through cultural histories of the living room, the social context of electronic media, and ethnographic studies. It argues that the concept of the digital hearth represents a re-organization of the spaces in which collective engagement occurs and a shifting of the cultural norms associated with that collective engagement. In these spaces not only does the living room become the site of collective engagement but also the form of that engagement changes with the digital hearth acting as the focal point around social interaction. The paper traces parallels between the appropriation of television and of radio into the home and the domestication of the console while arguing that the console represents a shifting of spatial and social norms of domestication from previous electronic media. In addition it represents gaming in the home as symptomatic of changes from public to private forms of entertainment which constitutes a changing geographic base for social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shares thoughts on the impact of the development and technological innovations of computer gaming. Significance of the innovation for the video-game industry; Video games developments; Financial performance for software games; Exploration of digital gaming as a recent development of technologies.

ICT adoption is predominantly considered as a process conditioned by social structures, social situations of adopters, and attributes and features of technologies. What is often overlooked are the cultural forces that shape adoption experiences and processes. This paper focuses on events and event narratives as vehicles through which the efficacy of culture unfolds in technological change processes. Cultural sociology has shown how influential events can be for forming public opinions and facilitating collective action. This article considers the power of one event on a much smaller scale: the passage of same-sex marriage (SSM) law in New York in June 2011 was not only significant for marriage equality in the US but also for the operating logic of the news ecosystem in which the political decision was made ‒ the state house in Albany. For the journalists who covered this event on the ground, the SSM decision was the catalyst to fully embrace Twitter. Years later, the event still served as an exemplar for the potentials of Twitter and as a basis of legitimacy of associated tweeting practices reporters incorporated. This contribution is based on ethnographic research at the state house in Albany, analysis of tweets and legacy news coverage published during that period, and in-depth interviews with reporters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hackers and rapid technological change produce similar responses: they simultaneously produce feelings of fear and fascination. This paper explores how ambivalence to technology in general is mirrored in both fictional and nonfictional accounts of hacking and how such representations reflect our concerns about the best way to control technological ingenuity in a hi‐tech age. William Gibson's Neuromancer and Douglas Coupland's Microserfs are used as the main examples of fictional portrayals of hacking and it is argued that the imaginative licence exhibited by their authors ultimately draws upon contemporary concerns over the role technology plays in modern life. The key underlying theme behind both fictional and nonfictional accounts of hacking is shown to be the issue of technological control. Hackers exhibit technological virtuosity in an age when rapid change and its accompanying confusion place such mastery at a premium. They are portrayed as controllers of technology and yet on other occasions (and sometimes simultaneously) they are depicted as being controlled by the technology they use. Examples are provided of how such virtuosity is often closely associated with an unhealthy level of technological intimacy. This leads to the charge that hackers have become somewhat dehumanised by their expertise. The previous paper by Douglas Thomas illustrates the extent to which the various immaterial concepts associated with hacking are often socially contested and subsequently grounded with reference to physical terms. This paper continues this theme by showing how the allegedly dehumanising aspects of hacking are frequently described with recourse to body‐based images of dependency and physical invasion. The paper concludes that for the most beneficial future technological progress, society will need to steer hackers through a middle‐path between the anarchic and drone‐like extremes described by Gibson's and Coupland's disturbing visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is a growing consensus that Internet communication technology (ICT) affects collective action in the twenty-first century, we know very little about what keeps individuals involved in ICT-based organizations over time. Our paper addresses this lacuna by examining whether individuals stay involved in two organizations that use ICT to structure interaction differently over a two-year period. We draw on interview and participant observation data with 38 supporters of MoveOn.org, which structures interaction hierarchically, and the Florida Tea Party Movement, which structures interaction horizontally, to assess how individuals think about each organization's use of ICT and how this shapes individual efficacy and voice – two factors that we find critical to keeping individuals engaged in organizations over time. We show that how a group uses ICT to structure interaction affects the kinds of efficacy and voice individuals are likely to experience. Organizations that use ICT to hierarchically structure interactions are effective at mobilizing people or money quickly and at achieving short-term goals, but very ineffective at creating a community of activists on the ground. The opposite is true of groups that use ICT horizontally. They are effective at creating a political community, but the conflicts that arise among supporters narrow group membership, hinder mobilization, and undercut organizational political clout over time. We conclude with a discussion of our results for understanding ICT and activism in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Current technological, organizational and institutional changes fundamentally alter the relationship between journalism and its audience – with consequences not only for journalistic practice, but also for theoretical and methodological issues of media research. After briefly recounting three perspectives on the audience, the paper outlines key aspects of the sociological theory of inclusion and explicates them in a novel and comprehensive heuristic model of audience inclusion in journalism. It introduces two constructs which apply both to journalism and the audience: (1) inclusion performance subsumes inclusion practices and their manifest results, and (2) inclusion expectations subsume attitudes, norms and perceptions with respect to audience inclusion in journalism. The degree of congruence between performances of journalists and audience members is interpreted as inclusion level; the degree of congruence between the expectations is interpreted as inclusion distance. This model can serve as a heuristic for empirical operationalization, helps to systematize existing and future research on digital networked media and journalism into a coherent sociological framework and is also open for comparative research on participation in other social systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses three interrelated challenges related to conducting social science research in ‘Internet Time’. (1) The rate at which the Internet is both diffusing through society and developing new capacities is unprecedented. It creates some novel challenges for scholarly research. (2) Many of our most robust research methods are based upon ceteris paribus assumptions that do not hold in the online environment. The rate of change online narrows the range of questions that can be answered using traditional tools. Meanwhile, (3) new research methods are untested and often rely upon data sources that are incomplete and systematically flawed. The paper details these challenges, then proposes that scholars embrace the values of transparency and kludginess in order to answer important research questions in a rapidly-changing communications environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The division of the communication discipline according to whether people communicate face-to-face or via a technological medium has shaped the field's development from the outset. The divide has been institutionalized over time in the structures of academic departments and schools, professional training and degrees, scholarly societies and publishing, and in the field's larger research agendas. However, critics inside and outside the field have long insisted that the differences between the two subfields actually obscure the shifting, contingent nature of communication in everyday experience, social formations, and culture. This paper traces efforts to theorize the intersection of interpersonal and media communication, and in particular the concept of mediation, from Lazarsfeld and Katz's two-step flow in the 1950s, to the challenge of digital media technologies in the 1970s and 1980s, to the rise of new media studies and digital culture scholarship from the 1990s onward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines migrants' use of the Internet to re-territorialize homeland, exploring the resurgence of geographical places in making and maintaining identities in the digital age. Conducting semi-structured interviews and participant observation, this research focuses on the London-based Chinese population and demonstrates various ways in which the Internet plays a key role in reinforcing these migrants' territorial attachment. In so doing, I seek to revisit the popular theorization that the Internet has led to the detachment of cultures from geographic places. The findings suggest that migrants use a variety of Internet applications to reproduce their home territories and ethnic cultural practices in both their intimate, personal spaces and public spaces. The linguistic, cultural, and social environments in China are transmitted into migrants' living rooms, London's Chinatown, and other public urban places through P2P applications, high-speed video sharing sites, and social networking sites. This online consumption of visual and audio products is often transmitted live, through which migrants' temporal practices in London become parallel to those in China. Through these uses of the Internet, the boundary between home and abroad is challenged and the power dynamics of the majority and minority surrounding urban land use are destabilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the authors' experiences as a multidisciplinary team within a national science research organization, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), in building a web-based knowledge portal to support water quality management in an Australian wet tropical region, the Douglas Shire. Their initial assumption was that a knowledge-sharing tool developed through community participation would enhance efforts towards sustainable development in this predominantly sugar cane growing area of far north Queensland. After presenting the general context of the study and a description of the web portal developed, we discuss three sociotechnical challenges faced: the question of value, i.e. understanding what motivates members of a community to become involved in co-design of technology; the problem of translation, i.e. how to develop common understandings and shared visions, given the often differing epistemologies in the so-called lay–expert knowledge divide and between the different discipline areas; and the paradox of meta-design, i.e. the difficulty of asking people to commit to a project of collaborative technology development at a stage when – by the very nature of co-design – that technology is still undefined and emergent. The article ends by offering some tentative conclusions on the authors' experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the closing weeks of 2002, video games were featured in various popular American news publications and media outlets such as Wired , Entertainment Weekly , Newsweek and Time Magazine. It is becoming increasingly apparent that video games are no longer child's play, but rather that they are poised to become a major entertainment form for the twenty-first century. Social analysts and media scholars must begin to formulate an understanding of this emerging mass-consumer phenomenon because it will increasingly impact social and economic structures of post-industrial societies. Part of the tremendous value generated by the American video-game industry is tied into broad global economic shifts that have created a space where services and ephemeral products, such as software, can be created and cheaply distributed. The predominance of " high-tech' production, the rise of the Internet, and the cultural capital associated with computerization all have contributed to the rise of hobbyist software developers that currently tinker with commercial video games and freely add to them increasing levels of sophistication. This paper sees video-game programmer hobbyists as a source of some of the significant value that the video-game industry generates, and understands the role of the programmer hobbyists through the lens of theories on post-industrial work. My analysis situates the work of hobbyists on the Internet within the context of post-Fordism and explores some of the motivations for this unwaged work. In the sections that follow, I will analyse the potential value of the work hobbyist do as well as analyse its transition to paid work as some commercial software developers experiment with incorporating these fan bases into the game design process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Started in January 2000, the Camfield Estates-MIT Creating Community Connections Project, a partnership between the Camfield Tenants Association (CTA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has the goal of establishing Camfield Estates as a model for other housing developments as to how individuals, families, and a community can make use of information and communications technology to support their interests and needs. To achieve this goal, CTA and MIT have formed a unique partnership and an infrastructure that combines the three primary models for community technology - a community network where state-of-the-art desktop computers, software, and high-speed Internet connectivity have been offered to every family, a community technology center (CTC) located on the premises in the community center, and community content delivered through a community-based web system, the Creating Community Connections (C3) System - along with an agenda to build community, empowerment, and self-sufficiency amongst the residents. This paper is a case study of the Camfield Estates-MIT project to date, including the history and background of the project, the approaches taken to build community, empowerment and self-sufficiency, the methodology that has been employed, and early results from the initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis and critique of recent thought about the ‘information society’. It identifies two phases of futurism, the first a technological enthusiasm that characterised the early 1980s, the second, in the 1990s, which emphasises the transformative capacity of information itself. The second phase is examined at some length, focusing on the concepts of ‘symbolic analysts’ and ‘informational labour’ in the writing especially of Robert Reich and Manuel Castells. In current theory, information has been promoted to centre stage of economic affairs. A new intellectual agenda has been created, centring on features such as globalisation, the spread of networks, flexibility, and the crucial role of educated labour. Three key aspects are identified: the death of communism and the triumph of capitalism, the re‐emergence of meritocratic ideas, and the depiction of new class structures based on information. These are queried by empirical analysis of stratification trends and evidence from social history. Finally, it is argued that informational developments perpetuate processes of rationalisation and control, extending them in ways which might be seen in terms of ‘New Enclosures’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine how ‘old’ media organizations develop ‘new’ media technologies by analyzing processes of technological innovation in two Danish newspaper companies that integrated blogs into their websites in very different ways in 2007. Drawing on concepts from science and technology studies and sociology and building on previous research on blogging by news media organizations, I analyze how the three different communities involved in the development process – journalists and managers, but also the often-overlooked community of technologists – articulated different versions of what blogging ought to be in each organization and tried to shape the technology and pull the development work in different directions. On the basis of interviews with key participants, I show how the two newspaper organizations (equally ‘old’ media) came to develop nominally the same ‘new’ medium (blogs) for nominally the same purpose (journalism) in quite different ways through tension-filled and often contentious collaborative processes. I argue that researchers interested in understanding technological innovation in the media industry need to consider the important and active role played by the community of technologists (project managers, computer programers, information architects, etc.) that are increasingly integral to how legacy media organizations operate in a new and ever more convergent media environment under circumstances of great economic uncertainty, and discuss the wider implications for how we understand processes of technological development in the news media and the realization of the democratic potentials of new media technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We explore how social enterprises can use platform technologies to plug 'informational gaps' in the provision of disability services. Such gaps are made more apparent by policies promoting self-directed care as a means of giving service users more choice and control. We use a case study of a start-up social enterprise seeking to provide a TripAdvisor style service to examine the potential for social innovation to 'disrupt' current models of service. The case study suggests that any disruptive effects of such changes are not due to new digital technology per se, nor to novel platform business models, but rather rest in the manner in which the moral orders which justify current patterns of social disablement can be challenged by social innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated in China's neoliberal context and its rapid development of information communication technologies (ICTs), this study aimed to examine how disabled people in China transformed themselves into new self-enterprising subjects in the wave of 'Internet + Disability.' In order to answer this question, this study tried to develop an analytical framework to illustrate the disability practices that situated in the ICTs and neoliberal context, underpinned by the discourse of 'self as enterprise,' and demonstrated by the practices of entrepreneurship and employment. Based on the research design of case studies and methods that included ethnographic participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study explained how a disabled entrepreneur, Mr. Yuan, took advantage of the wave of 'Internet + Disability' to realize his dream of entrepreneurship and face the uncertainties of a precarious entrepreneurship. It also explained how Mr. Yuan's employees achieved their dreams of employment but suffered the precariousness of enterprising subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A range of scholarly work in communications, informatics, and media studies has identified 'entrepreneurs' as central to an emerging paradigm of digital labor. Drawing on data from a multi-year research project in the virtual world Second Life, I explore disability experiences of entrepreneurism, focusing on intersections of creativity, risk, and inclusion. Since its founding in 2003, Second Life has witnessed significant disability participation. Many such residents engage in forms of entrepreneurship that destabilize dominant understandings of digital labor. Most make little or no profit; some labor at a loss. Something is being articulated through languages and practices of entrepreneurship, something that challenges the ableist paradigms that still deeply structure both digital socialities and conceptions of labor. Disability is typically assumed to be incompatible with work, an assumption often reinforced by policies that withdraw benefits from disabled persons whose income exceeds a meagre threshold. Responses to such exclusion appear when disabled persons in Second Life frame 'entrepreneur' as a selfhood characterized by creativity and contribution, not just initiative and risk. In navigating structural barriers with regard to income and access, including affordances of the virtual world itself, they implicitly contest reconfigurations of personhood under neoliberalism, where the laboring self becomes framed not as a worker earning an hourly wage, but as a business with the 'ability' to sell services. This reveals how digital technology reworks the interplay of selfhood, work, and value - but in ways that remain culturally specific and embedded in forms of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of mobile phone apps designed to prevent sexual violence (n = 215) is a quantitative analysis of all their features (n = 807). We analyze the intended users (victims, bystanders, and perpetrators) and rape prevention strategies of each feature, finding that anti-rape app design generally reinforces and reflects pervasive rape myths, by both targeting potential victims and reinforcing stranger-danger. To demonstrate that these limitations are primarily cultural rather than technological, we conclude by imagining apps with similar technical features that resist rather than reinforce rape myths. This study offers an empirical investigation of the relationship between technical design and social norms, and a unique methodology for uncovering the ideologies that underlie design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing has been discussed and critiqued from perspectives that include biomedical, commercial, ethical, legal, regulatory, and participatory stances. This study adds a perspective that emphasizes the ‘liveliness of data’ and treats23andMegenetic tests as part of an expanding self-tracking market that shapes communication, social life, and identities. In demonstrating how ‘gene talk’ aids and speeds the circulation of findings based on personal data, the discussion cast light on how personal data gain value in people’s lives, thereby enhancing their readiness to position themselves as data subjects. Users are offered a data-enhanced existence, a ‘lifeworld inc.’, in which new kinds of ontological horizons are promoted by technical developments that produce numbers and calculable coordinates for descriptive regimes. Arguing that debates on DTC genetic testing and uses of personal data benefit from a more thorough analysis both of translations of genetic knowledge and emerging data practices, the aim is to critically address the active work by users that keeps genetic data alive, including the emotional longings and practical capabilities that people have in terms of genetic knowledge. Through a more comprehensive framework, recognizing the lively nature of genetic data, we can reveal how genetic testing services promote knowledge formation that mixes intimate and larger scale social and economic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent technological developments have created novel opportunities for analyzing and identifying patterns in large volumes of digital content. However, many content analysis tools require researchers to choose between the validity of human-based coding and the ability to analyze large volumes of content through computer-based techniques. This study argues for the use of supervised content analysis tools that capitalize on the strengths of human- and computer-based coding for assessing opinion expression. We begin by outlining the key methodological issues surrounding content analysis as performed by human coders and existing computational algorithms. After reviewing the most popular analytic approaches, we introduce an alternative, hybrid method that is aimed at improving reliability, validity, and efficiency when analyzing social media content. To demonstrate the usefulness of this method, we track nuclear energy- and nanotechnology-related opinion expression on Twitter surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi accident to examine the extent to which the volume and tone of tweets shift in directions consistent with the expected external influence of the event. Our analysis revealed substantial shifts in both the volume and tone of nuclear power-related tweets that were consistent with our expectations following the disaster event. Conversely, there was decidedly more stability in the volume and tone of tweets for our comparison issue. These analyses provide an empirical demonstration of how the presented hybrid method can analyze defined communication sentiment and topics from large-scale social media data sets. The implications for communication scholars are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the era of ‘big data’ unfolds, researchers are increasingly engaging with large, complex data sets compiled from heterogeneous sources and distributed across networked technologies. The nature of these data sets makes it difficult to grasp and manipulate their materiality. We argue that moments of breakdown – points at which progress is stopped due to a material limitation – provide opportunities for researchers to develop new imaginations and configurations of their data sets' materiality, and serve as underappreciated resources for knowledge production. In our ethnographic study of data-intensive research in an academic setting, we emphasize the layers of repair work required to address breakdown, and highlight incremental innovations that stem from this work. We suggest that a focus on the breakdown–repair process can facilitate nuanced understandings of the relationships and labour involved in constituting data assemblages and constructing knowledge from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts from the recognition that digital social movements studies have progressively disregarded collective identity and the importance of internal communicative dynamics in contemporary social movements, in favour of the study of the technological affordances and the organizational capabilities of social media. Based on a two-year multimodal ethnography of the Mexican #YoSoy132 movement, the article demonstrates that the concept of collective identity is still able to yield relevant insights into the study of current movements, especially in connection with the use of social media platforms. Through the appropriations of social media, Mexican students were able to oppose the negative identification fabricated by the PRI party, reclaim their agency and their role as heirs of a long tradition of rebellion, generate collective identification processes, and find ‘comfort zones’ to lower the costs of activism, reinforcing their internal cohesion and solidarity. The article stresses the importance of the internal communicative dynamics that develop in the backstage of social media (Facebook chats and groups) and through instant messaging services (WhatsApp), thus rediscovering the pivotal linkage between collective identity and internal communication that characterized the first wave of research on digital social movements. The findings point out how that internal cohesion and collective identity are fundamentally shaped and reinforced in the social media backstage by practices of ‘ludic activism’, which indicates that social media represent not only the organizational backbone of contemporary social movements, but also multifaceted ecologies where a new, expressive and humorous ‘communicative resistance grammar’ emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuing evolution of information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as Internet-connected computers and cellular phones, provides a means for increased work/home permeability and for current work/home boundaries to be redefined as workers can potentially be accessible by employers and family/friends at all times. This transformation of work/home boundaries can open the individual to increased levels of negative spillover, wherein aspects of one role negatively impact or impede upon another. This investigation uses data from the Work-Life and Technology Use Survey to determine if ICT use plays a role in defining work/home boundaries and serves as a significant predictor of negative spillover in both the work-to-home and home-to-work directions. Results show that frequency of engaging in ICT-related activities (e.g. checking email and using Facebook) is associated with negative spillover in both directions, suggesting that ICTs may play a significant role in facilitating negative work/home spillover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalism's transition from an industrial age to an information age and the unstable economics of profit-driven newsmaking have allowed for an unprecedented level of citizen input and involvement in the making of news. Here, new relationships between legacy and innovative newsmaking are forged and new models of newsmaking emerge. In this article, we discuss the case of The New Orleans Eye, an attempt at innovative newsmaking rooted in an individual citizen who started blogging in the wake of hurricane Katrina. The New Orleans Eye is a largely foundation-funded, non-profit online news organization composed of bloggers and former ink reporters, and has a unique relationship with the local Fox television station. We treat The New Orleans Eye as an example of a mixed-media system and discuss the tensions that emerge over innovative newsmaking within a context of a profit-driven legacy news industry and a neoliberal state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Battles over the control of information online are often fought at the level of Internet infrastructure. Forces of globalization and technological change have diminished the capacity of sovereign nation states and media content producers to directly control information flows. This loss of control over content and the failure of laws and markets to regain this control have redirected political and economic battles into the realm of infrastructure and, in particular, technologies of Internet governance. These arrangements of technical architecture are also arrangements of power. This shift of power to infrastructure is drawing renewed attention to the politics of Internet architecture and the legitimacy of the coordinating institutions and private ordering that create and administer these infrastructures. It also raises questions related to freedom of expression in the context of this increasing turn to infrastructure to control information. This article explores the relationship between governance and infrastructure, focusing on three specific examples of how battles over content have shifted into the realm of this Internet governance infrastructure: the use of the Internet's domain name system for intellectual property rights enforcement; the use of ‘kill-switch’ approaches to restrict the flow of information; and the termination of infrastructure services to WikiLeaks. The article concludes with some thoughts about the implications of this infrastructure-mediated governance for economic and expressive liberties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory article provides a critical assessment of the last decade of social research on the Internet and identifies directions for research over the next. Ten years is only a moment in the span of social research, but aeons in Internet time. Has social research across the disciplines been up to the challenges? Over more than 40 years, the unfolding development of the Internet and related information and communication technologies has been one of the most dynamic areas of technological and social innovation worldwide. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, its development was even more dramatic. While innovations in such areas as search, social media, big data, and the commercialization of the Internet became prominent only over the last decade, they are already taken for granted by most Internet users. It is becoming increasingly apparent to us that this interdisciplinary field must broaden even further to better connect with fields beyond the social sciences and information, communication, media and cultural studies to include stronger collaborative ties to law, ethics, and the sciences, engineering, and computer sciences, but also across the arts and humanities. This will be an almost certain requirement for interdisciplinary research over the coming decade with technology and society moving at Internet time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on social movements, mass media and democracy have rarely interacted. Research on democracy has tended to focus on representative institutions, pragmatically using ‘minimalistic’ operationalization of democracy as electoral accountability, and providing structural explanations of democratic developments. Research on the mass media also tended to isolate them as a separate power, reflecting on the technological constraints and opportunities for communication. Social movement studies have mainly considered democratic characteristics as setting the structure of political opportunities social movements have to address and – more rarely – looked at the constraints the mass media impose upon powerless actors. Structural, instrumental and institutional biases, in various combination, tended to characterize the three fields of studies. More recently, in all three fields of knowledge, some opportunities for reciprocal learning and interactions developed, moved by some exogenous, societal changes as well as disciplinary evolution. The author argues that looking at the intersection of democracy, media and social movements could be particularly useful within a relational and constructivist perspective, that takes normative positions by the different actors into account. More broadly, this would mean to pay attention to the permeability of the borders between the three concepts, as well as between the three fields they tend to separate. The article does this by looking first at the debate on recent transformations of democracy, described by labels such as post-democracy or counter-democracy, as well as on the New Media and social movements, and then at what recent research on social movements can add to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exchanging Bluetooth messages via mobile phones, in a short period of time, have become a popular way of communication among the Iranian youth. A quick look at the content of Bluetooth messages shows that they vary from pure entertaining videos to serious religious or political audio files, or even pornographic images. However, Bluetooth messaging in this research is considered as a medium of interpersonal communication, which serves several functions for youngsters. Approximately 120 young people between the age of 17 and 30 living in different areas of Tehran were surveyed regarding their consumption of this technology, their attitude towards it and their gender-based behaviours in using the technology. The results show that Bluetooth is a leisure technology which is seen both as a threat to, and promise for, youth in the society. It helps young people get access to different contents, express their needs and represent their own culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the popularity of social network sites based on common interests, the association between these shared interests and relational development is not well understood. This manuscript reports results of an empirical investigation of interpersonal relationships on Last.fm, a music-based social network site with a multinational user base. In addition to baseline descriptors of relational behavior, the chief goals of this study were to examine the degree to which Last.fm relationships are characterized by homophily (and particularly by shared musical taste), the extent to which communication via Last.fm is associated with other forms of communication (both offline and online), how such communication behavior is associated with demographic and relational characteristics, and whether these variables predict strength of relational development. Results indicate that although Last.fm relational partners exhibit shared musical taste, this shared taste is not associated with relational development. Rather, following media multiplexity theory, relational development is strongly and uniquely associated with communication behavior across almost all forms of communication (including Last.fm). These results suggest that shared interests may foster the creation of weak ties, but conversion of these connections to strong ties is relatively rare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commenting patterns of a sample of 6,468 users on Digg.com demonstrate that feedback from other users affects participation in three ways. First, the more explicit feedback a user receives, in the form of moderation votes on their comment or responses to their comment, the sooner they contribute again. Second, commenters generally become more able to generate feedback as they become more experienced contributors to the site. Third, there are some common features of comments that receive more feedback, and the feedback system reinforces these standards. By making the process of community feedback relatively accessible and measurable, Digg provides an opportunity to observe the process of socialization into a community and inculcation of community standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the risks associated with children's use of the internet often aims to inform policies of risk prevention. Yet paralleling the effort to map the nature and extent of online risk is a growing unease that the goal of risk prevention tends to support an over-protective, risk-averse culture that restricts the freedom of online exploration that society encourages for children in other spheres. It is central to adolescence that teenagers learn to anticipate and cope with risk - in short, to become resilient. In this article, we inquire into children and teenagers' responses after they have experienced online content or contact risks. Pan-European findings show that especially in Northern European countries with high internet access, parental perception of likelihood of online risk to their child is negatively associated with their perceived ability to cope. A comparison of representative surveys conducted among children in three relatively 'high risk' countries (Norway, Ireland and the United Kingdom) found that although the frequency of exposure to perceived online risks, especially content risks, is fairly high, most children adopt positive (e.g. seek help from friends) or, more commonly, neutral (e.g. ignoring the experience) strategies to cope, although a minority exacerbate the risks (e.g. passing risky content on to friends). Most strategies tend to exclude adult involvement. Significant differences in both risk and coping are found by gender and age across these countries, pointing to different styles of youthful risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines one of the most popular computer games The Sims to consider whether the shared understanding of the game's "rules' can be understood through the concept of genre. The main argument is that the genre being used is "real life'. The game's creators are assuming the players share with them, and with each other, an understanding of real life, which can be transposed into the game world. The article explores this notion of a real-life narrative that is shared, by considering the ways in which family and other relationships are both conceptualized and played out in the game. Whilst real life as genre is problematized here, the tensions and conflicts of contemporary real-world conceptualizations of family and other relationships do appear to be represented in the game. What is interesting then, given this, are the ways in which players negotiate the gameplay. The article concludes by suggesting that players are active agents negotiating both the game' s version of real life, and their own real-world experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]