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The concept of e-health has come to assume a key place within a larger Canadian governmental discourse that lauds the benefits of supplying Internet-based services to as wide an audience as possible. In order to fulfil its vision of a connected public accessing services cheaply and easily through electronic media, the federal government has assumed that the potential exists for all Canadians to use the Internet and has done its best to achieve this result through programmes aimed at ameliorating accessibility issues. There is particular enthusiasm over the possibility of moving some health services online, thus reducing costs incurred through personal patient-practitioner meetings while ostensibly creating more informed, proactive and healthy Canadians. This paper discusses whether or not the enthusiasm of the government, and of individual users, regarding e-health practices is merited, focussing particularly on the consumption of online health information by patients. Numerous consequences and conflicts can accompany such practices, but this paper specifically addresses the negative aspects of promoting informed health choices through a medium inaccessible to all members of Canadian society, such as the aged, the poor, rural dwellers and some ethnic minorities. The paper also assesses the potential risks of acting upon incorrect information provided online and addresses the possibility that health professionals' workloads will increase rather than decrease. However, as this paper also notes, e-health does contain potential for improving the delivery of medical services in Canada if contained within clearly defined parameters, and if alternatives still exist for those who cannot or will not benefit from such technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a simple typology of different forms of engagement with the Internet by families with children with various forms of chronic illness. The analysis is informed by ongoing debates about the nature, distribution and efficacy of reflexivity in contemporary social life, especially as it relates to the changing nature of information and knowledge. Drawing upon qualitative interviews with sixty-nine parents and sixteen children, the paper offers a nuanced account of the manner in which laypeople are engaging with e- health. It is an account that argues that any reading of the 'digital divide' that is based upon a simple homology between socio-structural location, reflexivity and differential ability to gain material purchase from information in the 'information age' is misjudged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of the Internet on offline social movement mobilization from the perspective of identity building. It is based on a case study of a women's group in Hong Kong, the Queer Sisters, and the bulletin board it created on the World Wide Web. Content analysis, an online survey, interviews and observation conducted between September 1999 and December 2000 found that the bulletin board helped to foster a sense of belonging to the Queer Sisters among participants. Bulletin board participants also shared a culture of opposition to the dominant order. But a collective consciousness was absent, so the bulletin board fell short of building a collective identity among its participants. This paper, however, argues that the absence of a collective identity on the bulletin board is the result of the way the board was administered, constrained by the resources and the aims of the Queer Sisters. It suggests that the potential for the Internet to build collective identities for social movements differs for different types of social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a neo­Gramscian perspective can provide useful explanatory insights into the recent commercialization of the Internet. Governments, notably in the USA and Europe, have taken action to shape and smooth this transition in response to the desire of business to exploit a new commercial opportunity. A series of measures has been enacted in relatively new international fora whose general aim is to promote the development of international production and trade. There is evidence of concerted efforts aimed at designing an interconnected regulatory framework within which global electronic commerce might evolve. Governmental interests have attempted to promote the ethos of a new liberalized, self-regulatory system that prioritizes commercial and trademark interests of business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the analysis presented by authors such as Manuel Castells and James Slevin, this paper intends to contribute towards the debate on the use of Internet mediated communication (IMC). This paper argues that the relational structure being built through IMC is the network. A network of relations, of weaker or intimate ties occurring in environments more structured virtual communities — or less structured — conversational spaces in a permanent interaction between the online and offline spaces. The paper begins by outlining some contemporary debates about the use of IMC. It then presents data gathered through a national survey conducted in Portugal on Internet users in the ccTLD .pt. Next it argues that IMC seems to implement the creation of meeting places for socialization whose structure is the result of the social life dimensions more cherished by the users in a certain period of their lives — be it professional interests, entertainment or the search for relationships (friendship, conviviality, love) — and of their representations on the use of different kinds of IMC. In that way, forms of human association on the Internet are not jeopardizing those of the spaces not mediated by the Internet, since the communication does not confine itself to the Internet space, but it seems to be rather established beyond it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three prominent 'camps' have emerged within Internet democracy rhetoric and practice, each drawing upon different models of democracy: communitarian, liberal individualist and deliberative. Much interest has been shown in the former two camps by researchers and policy makers. This paper turns to an examination of the possible realization of the third camp's vision - that the public sphere of rational-critical discourse will be extended through cyberspace. This paper's method is to compare existing online discourse with a set of requirements of the public sphere developed from the work of Jürgen Habermas. Previous research of cyber-interactions reveals a number of factors limiting the expansion of the public sphere online. Toexplore how these limitations may be overcome, the paper examines an online democracy project that explicitly attempts to foster deliberation. It is shown how this initiative has been able to successfully surmount many of the impediments identified in less structured online deliberations, but that it has, along with similar projects, failed to gain a representative sample of the population and is increasingly marginalized by commercial sites, virtual communities of common interest, and liberal individualist political practices. The paper concludes that the expansion of the public sphere through the Internet requires not only developing deliberative spaces but also attracting participation from citizens who have been socialized within a commercialized and individualized culture hostile towards public deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the use and production of health information on the Internet. The paper will show that users of health services have also become significant providers of health information and advice. This analysis is based on two studies. The first involved a qualitative study of households that used home computers to find health information on the Internet. The second piece of research involved the examination of home pages that contained accounts of ill health and an e-mailed questionnaire to home page authors. Drawing upon this research the consumption of health information is examined and related to how users make discussions about their health. This is followed by an analysis of the provision of health information on home pages. It is shown that these include web sites that provide simple accounts of an individual illness as well as sites that advocate a particular approach to health or offer services and products. The interweaving of personal experience with advice is considered and linked to debates about the quality of health information on the Internet and the reconfiguration of 'expertise'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the internet has tremendous impacts on homosexual communities in Taiwan. The internet has created a medium where homosexual people can form virtual communities to seek for emotional support without fearing the disclosure of their sexual preferences and causing unwanted negative consequences. The internet has become a medium where homosexual communities can share information with each other and voice their concerns to the public. Thus, the internet may become what Ithiel de Sola Pool (1984) called 'the technology of freedom' for homosexual communities. The purposes of this paper are set to discuss whether academic homosexual individuals perceive the internet to be more fair and impartial in terms of news reporting than traditional mass media and to investigate why they use the internet. This paper employs a questionnaire survey method to collect data for the questions. The quantitative analysis of survey data (N=701), from a self-completed questionnaire using modified snowball sampling of gays and lesbians from Taiwan. Principal component analysis with varimax rotation led to seven factors that account for 66.31% of the variance. These factors are social interaction and information, entertainment and relaxation, personal revelation, preference, privacy and escapism, pass time and, novelty-seeking. Correlation analyses also suggested that respondents' demographics, internet usage frequency and, time are associated with their use motivation. As an exploratory study of an academic homosexual population and their internet use behaviour in Taiwan, this study raised more questions than it intended to answer. The use of individual media by this group needs further study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has examined the impact of computing interventions to reduce digital inequity. However, few studies focus on factors such as inequalities to material access, Internet use patterns, and affective or emotional anxiety. This paper investigates the potential role of emotional costs and computer self-efficacy in the connection between computer use at home and students’ computer use patterns. Data for this research come from pretest and posttest surveys administered to fourth- and fifth-grade African-American students. The results reveal that students’ home computer use is a significant predictor of the change in their information and entertainment usage over the course of the intervention. Students’ emotional costs partially mediate the relationship between home computer use and information-oriented usage over the intervention period. The findings suggest that providing students access to digital devices is not enough to close the digital divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the transnational interconnected nature of the internet, cross-national comparisons in internet usage and their effects are still relatively scarce. Moreover, one of the core intrinsic properties that internet theorists have distinguished, the ability to increase democracy and ‘global understanding’ through its connectivity, has hardly been empirically studied. This paper examines how internet usage affects individuals’ openness to other cultures: cosmopolitanism. I analyze two manifestations of such openness: first, the cosmopolitan orientation toward other cultures in the broad sense; second, the interest in foreign cultural expressions. Using Eurobarometer data on 29 European countries, the results show that interactive internet practices are positively associated with openness to foreign culture. Buying culture online is positively related to interest in concrete expressions, but negatively to cosmopolitan orientation. Importantly, individual effects on cosmopolitan orientation are often moderated by the country people live in, whereas effects on interest in foreign expressions are more stable across Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article studies recoding practices on the Chinese internet that reframe controversial contents in a socialist discourse to circumvent censorship. Drawing on three cases of 'socialist recoding' for critical discourse analysis (CDA), this article finds different patterns of recoding strategies and power relations manifested in these practices, depicting the nuances of censorship-evading practices in different responses to censorship including but not limited to resistance, negotiation, and problematisation. This article argues that these recodings negotiate terms of censorship and mediate power relations through meaning-making, indicating a permanent instability of authority in internet governance in China. By showing the potentialities of nuanced and pluralised meaning-(re)making practices in contesting and negotiating internet governance and established norms and values more widely, this study advances existing understandings about nuances in China's contested internet and contributes to the broader debate about the decentring and destabilising of authority in contested cyberspace worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse of ‘rights defence’ (weiquan), referring to the grassroots’ struggle for legal redress after their lawful interests are encroached upon, has gained increasing popularity in China in the last two decades. Given the ubiquity of the Internet nowadays, rights defence activities also take place online; in a small number of cases, they develop into a form of online activism. But what determines or contributes to the online visibility of some rights defence cases and the invisibility of others? In this paper, we investigate this by examining three highly visible workers’ rights defence campaigns in comparison with three similar cases that received almost no attention. Analysing the variousactorsinvolved, we argue that online rights defence tends to become visible and develop into online activism when one key actor, thestate,which ought to be an impartial source of justice, is perceived to be collusive or to be playing an active role in the encroachment of people's rights and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the differential impact of Chinese citizens’ use of traditional media and Internet sources on their political views about the country’s territorial dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Chinese citizens can utilize a variety of conduits of information that allow varying degrees of government control over the way foreign affairs and other controversies are presented. Those who rely on mainstream, state-controlled television, radio, and printed media for information on the disputes, and those who turn to less-prescriptive sources on the Internet, can be expected to have distinctive political attitudes. We use original 2013 Chinese survey data to explore patterns of media consumption and citizens’ attention levels towards the Sino-Japanese island dispute, and views regarding the government’s performance in handling the issue and appropriate policy responses. Those who derive their information from traditional media tend to view the government’s performance more positively, and are more likely both to favour compromise and to oppose the use of military force. By comparison, information from Internet sources, which is more user selfselective, sustains a wider range of attitudes about the Sino-Japanese island dispute and the appropriate policies for dealing with it, including both militaristic and moderate stances. All told, we find that Chinese citizens bring distinctive predispositions to their consumption of media information on this issue, but our results also clearly reflect an ongoing, pervasive influence for China’s state-run traditional media. These findings have important implications for considering the resilience of authoritarian systems in the Internet era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates whether or not the proposition that the second digital generation (or so-called digital natives) is more engaged in social use of the Internet than older generations is tenable. By analysing nationally representative questionnaire-based survey data collected from Finland in 2011 (N = 612), the study shows that rather than social use of the Internet in general, it is the synchronicity of online communication that distinguishes user generations. Results show that, in contrast to asynchronous modes of online communication (e.g. social networking sites, blogs and online discussion forums), synchronous modes (e.g. instant messaging and Internet calls) are clearly generationally differentiated practices. They are more frequently used by the second digital generation than the first digital generation and digital immigrants. Furthermore, the study shows that asynchronous uses of the Internet are clearly gendered in nature. Women are more typically users of social networking sites and blogs than men, whereas men are more often engaged with discussion forums than women. These results are discussed in light of two concepts: privacy and communicative efficacy. The studied forms of synchronous online communication provide more privacy as well as an instant and abundant channel for effective communication, which are all features especially appreciated by the youngest user generation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Arguably the world's most secretive government, North Korea remains largely isolated from the global information economy. However, despite stereotypes that the country lacks internet access entirely, it has recently shown signs of an emerging cyberstructure and population of netizens. This paper examines its internet in three stages. It opens with a contrast between the enormous differences between cyberspace in North and South Korea. Second, it explores the details of the internet structure and users in the North, including the growth of users of mobile phones, satellite contacts, government programs to facilitate the growth of information technology, an intranet, cybercafés, websites, and censorship. Third, it addresses the North's role in cyberattacks on South Korea and the United States, and conversely its position as a victim of similar assaults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines, with ethnographic lenses, the emergence of shared networks in the Tseltal and Zapoteco communities in Chiapas and Oaxaca (Mexico). 'Shared networks' are first-mile signal-sharing practices that articulate interconnection infrastructure and values of coexistence to, in the cases studied, extend the internet to areas where the services of existing larger internet service providers are unsatisfactory or unavailable. It argues that by infrastructuring their own local networks and interconnecting to the global internet, Tseltal and Zapoteco people are effectively internet codesigners, building Latin-Centric Indigenous networks and shaping internet governance from below. When comunalidad values, supported by unlicensed frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, towers, radio antennas, houses' rooftops, routers, and cables, intersect with the values of the internet service providers and their policies, hybrids emerge. Shared networks are a result of what these hybrids enact and constrain, as well as evidence of the vivid struggles for a more inclusive and pluriversal internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the use of websites and blogs during the 2010 UK anti-cuts protests, where students across the UK occupied more than 35 universities in a symbolic act of opposition to government plans to cut education funding and increase tuition fees. Although social media have largely monopolized the debate on online political activism in recent years, students did not limit their online e-tactics to the use of social media, but used websites and blogs extensively to describe and contextualize their views, demands, protest experiences and actions. This study assesses which of the website features that are usually found in social movement organization (SMO) websites are adopted by websites constructed by loosely organized groups, such as those of the occupying students, and how they differ from SMO websites. The findings show that informational, interactive and mobilizing features were not equally prominent in all occupation websites. Although all standard SMO website features could, to some extent, also be found on the occupying students' websites, the features were emphasized differently. Mobilizing (and some interactive) features played a more prominent role in the occupying students' websites, which tended to lack other customary SMO website functions such as establishing lateral links with other occupation websites. This study discusses the differences in website features and suggests avenues for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of the Internet for health-related purposes and whether this usage is part of larger pattern of health-promoting behaviors, or health lifestyle. Pierre Bourdieu's concept ofhabitusprovides the key theoretical concept that links health lifestyle and the digital inequality framework to explain how social conditions (i.e. social status and quality of Internet access) influence attitudes and behaviors. Path analysis is used to examine the relationship between key endogenous variables on attitudes, health behavior, health status, and online health-related activities, while controlling for demographics and other factors. Data comes from the National Cancer Institute's 2007 Health Information National Trends Survey. The results demonstrate that online health behaviors can be usefully conceptualized as elements of health lifestyle. The combination of health lifestyle and digital inequality provides a broader theoretical framework that highlights the importance of social conditions to influence people's Internet habitus and routine health-promoting behaviors. The combination of health lifestyle and digital inequality provides a useful theoretical framework for future research investigating persistent social disparities in health and the potential for the growing reliance on information and communication technologies to contribute to socially patterned health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, three features of the Internet/new media that have developed over the last decade are discussed: the relational Internet, the enclosed Internet, and the ‘mean world’ Internet. These features correspond to the three interrelated elements of new media infrastructure: the practices in which people engage to interact and share information and meaning; the tools, devices, or artifacts that people create and use in order to do so; and the social arrangements or institutional forms that develop out of and around those practices and tools. Together, the three features have had an important influence on the ways that new media are understood and used and have helped shift popular discourses and the study of new media from an emphasis on possibility, novelty, adaptability, and openness toward greater preoccupations with risk, conflict, vulnerability, routinization, stability, and control. Given these conditions, the author proposes that three problem areas – again corresponding to practices, tools, and social arrangements – may be important directions for new media studies over the ‘next decade in Internet time’. Network literacies and pedagogies that prepare individuals to be full and effective participants in society, politics, and culture must be developed and implemented. Dead media may pose increasing challenges to sustainable cultural heritage as well as to ever more intrusive regimes of total surveillance and capture of personal information, enabling a ‘right to be forgotten’. Commons knowledge projects may challenge and even reconfigure the foundations of institutional authority, expertise, legitimacy, and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 structure of people's social networks predicts democratic engagement. However, the relative contribution of different types of social ties to civic and civil behaviors is unclear. This paper explores the role of core networks - bonding social capital - to the role of overall network diversity - bridging social capital - for participation in formal civic institutions and informal civil behaviors. Emphasis is placed on the possible role of heterogeneity within core networks - political disagreement and the presence of nonkin ties - and on frequency of interaction, in-person and mediated: mobile phone and the Internet. This study finds that overall network diversity is a more consistent and substantive predictor of civic and civil behaviors than the size or heterogeneity of the small number of ties that make up the core network of most people. The two dominant new media used to interact with core network members - email and mobile phones - are unrelated to any of the behaviors measured. Some other media - contact in-person, postal mail, texting, instant messaging, and social network services - have an inconsistent and modest relationship to civic and civil behaviors. Findings lead to speculation that political disagreement within core networks, typically associated with lower levels of political participation, has a spillover effect that results in other forms of democratic engagement. There is evidence of glocalization; contact with core ties using new media supports local civil and civic behaviors. Internet use largely supports democratic engagement through interaction with bridging, but not bonding ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public/private distinction is one of the fundamental categories of modern social life. Historically, the two functioned as a dichotomous pair both theoretically and practically. During the height of the separation of public and private, 'private' was code for the home, personal, and non-professional contexts; 'public', on the other hand, stood for the professional world outside the home. This dichotomous treatment of public and private informed many aspects of social life ranging from gender relations and the division of household labor to the development of suburbs as purely residential (private) areas geographically separate from the public sphere of work. Recently, however, this dichotomous vision of the public/private divide has become outdated. It no longer accurately describes the ways in which public and private operate in contemporary social life; where the two spheres were once separate, there is now significant overlap and interaction. This breakdown in the public and private divide has occurred at many levels and has a strong relationship with the development and ubiquity of information and communications technologies such as mobile telephones and the Internet. This paper describes the ways in which public and private are changing and proposes a new way of theorizing the public/private distinction, as a continuum rather than as a dichotomy. This way of thinking about public and private reflects contemporary social life much more accurately than does the dichotomous conception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-use of the Internet has often been researched within the topic of digital divides. The focus of these studies lay mainly on differences in socio-economic backgrounds and resources. This paper goes one step further by attempting to describe various groups of non-users in two highly developed European countries: Great Britain and Sweden. Results from descriptive analyses, multivariate regressions, and principal components analysis with two waves of comparable data from 2007 and 2009 show a more heterogeneous non-user population in Great Britain and a slightly more homogeneous one in Sweden. Socio-economic factors play a bigger role in influencing who is going online in Britain than in Sweden. Education, occupational status, and household income are significant determinants in both countries. The most important determinants of Internet adoption are age and occupational status. The analysis of a 25-55-year-old sub-sample shows that non-users from this age group feature different socio-economic characteristics from older age groups. Middle-aged British non-users share two specific socio-economic characteristics: low income and unemployment; 25-55-year-old Swedish non-users tend to have low incomes, be unemployed, and be single. Non-users' self-assessment of reasons for non-use do not seem to be consistent with the 'raw data'. Non-users mainly state that they are not interested in the Internet. Many non-users share sceptical attitudes about the Internet, which influences interest in them. There needs to be more detailed research to know exactly which people are not using the Internet and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a first analysis of popular Internet humour about gender. The focus is on the extent to which such humour encodes sexist, feminist, and post-feminist ideologies. Utilizing a novel sampling protocol, a corpus of 150 highly popular verbal and visual comic texts was retrieved from eight English-based websites. The findings of a content analysis suggest that although men and women are mocked to an equal extent, traditional stereotypical gender representations still prevail, along with the emergence of new postfeminist portrayals. The postfeminist, essentialist thesis of gender differences is revealed to be central, while feminist humour about gender inequalities is marginal. The discussion contextualizes these findings and argues they express backlash interpretations of postfeminism. Finally, the results are discussed in relation to the high hopes held for the potential of the Internet to be involved in women's empowerment and the transformation of gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a disability studies perspective on the history of the development of web content accessibility policies in the United States. Using procedural documents, popular press accounts, and policy documents themselves, augmented by personal interviews with key participants, I sketch a critical history of accessible web development. First, I argue that the world wide web consortium accessibility guidelines (WCAG 1.0, 1999) and US government Section 508 standards (2001) emerged out of the confluence of three trends: the ongoing work on telecommunications accessibility, the increasing attention to the civil rights of people with disabilities under a social model of disability, and the development of and enthusiasm for the Internet and the Web. A key tension can be traced through these historical processes, as both documents grappled with concepts of accessibility as it related to usability, universal design principles, and disability status. In my analysis of this tension, I use the recurrent theme of variation to develop a productive and progressive notion of 'access' that challenges understandings of accessibility as based on accommodating disability. By centering variation, accessibility can address a range of bodily differences, including (but not limited to) disability, and create a more inclusive cultural and political sphere online. Finally, I argue that variation has also proven productive for theoretical models of disability and for new media studies, and thus it may hold great promise for the future expansion of accessible web content across a variety of sites and Web2.0 services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on past studies of virtual community by illuminating the effect of offline gatherings ('meetups') on physically dispersed virtual communities. Although research to date has examined the way in which online interaction affects offline community, the question of how offline interaction affects online community has largely been ignored. On the one hand, these offline gatherings may provide individual benefits for members as the development of relationships strengthens social ties, leading to the creation of bonding social capital. However, these gatherings do not necessarily benefit the community at large as the resources found in weak ties may be sacrificed as attendees favour interaction with one another to the detriment of those that do not attend meetups. Non-obtrusive analysis of over eight years of user activity from a large, active online community suggests that the development of multiplex relationships - relationships maintained both online and offline - enhances attendees' engagement with the online community as a whole, strengthens ties to other attendees, and contributes to the creation of bonding social capital. However, weak ties with non-attendees dissolve and bridging social capital is sacrificed as those who meet offline favour interaction with other attendees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In much of the recent literature on contemporary social movements there is call for a re-conceptualization of the definition and understanding of political struggle given the impact of new emerging information communication technologies (ICTs), and the Internet in particular, on social movement organizing, contentious politics, and the electoral political process. This paper undertakes an analysis of MoveOn within a critical theory framework and argues that electronic social movement organizations, such as MoveOn, are in many ways broadening public opinion and the public sphere. It draws on the work of Habermas and theories of the Internet to illustrate how ICTs can revitalize communicative action in the public sphere and thus enhance participatory democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on newly completed research looking at the role of the internet as a means of promoting civic engagement and participation among young people aged 15-25. It focuses on one specific aspect of this phenomenon, namely the use of websites to promote 'ethical consumption' among young people. This paper begins by briefly examining several intersecting works discussing not-for-profit marketing, commercial marketing, youth cultures and subcultures, politics, and ethical consumerism. It then moves on to examine the rhetorical constructions of youth identity and ethical consumerism on a range of civic websites, exploring the identifications and disavowals implicit in the language, layout, and imagery, and the conceptualizations civic-orientated Web producers have of their audiences and of consumption per se. This is achieved by taking a case-study approach involving a qualitative textual analysis of web-pages taken from UK and US-based sites such as Adbusters, Oxfam's Generation Why, Ethics Girls, Adili and Amnesty International, which advertise or promote the buying of ethical goods by young people. It also involves an analysis of the aims of the site producers, as exemplified on the sites' mission statements and in in-depth interviews. By means of this analysis, the article seeks to identify and assess the actually or potentially 'civic' aspects of these sites and to question the notion of ethical consumption in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, 'configurable' technologies such as the Internet-connected PC, cheap and accessible media-editing software, and writeable media drives have enabled a profound shift in the agency of media consumers, opening up a vast grey area between traditional production and consumption. This shift has given rise to a host of new media practices and products, such as mash-ups, remixes, mods, and machinima. However, the cultural discourse about media practices are still mired in the 'black and white' ethics of the twentieth century media distribution, evidenced by 'piracy' and 'theft' debates. In this paper, we examine the self-reported attitudes of nearly 1,800 American adults and draw on the personal interviews with dozens of configurable music practitioners to discover what a new, and more appropriate, ethical discourse of configurability might look like. Data suggest that the new practices of cultural appropriation are both reaffirming and challenging the age-old evaluative criteria. [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]

Based on in-depth interviews and a political economy analysis, this paper offers an evaluation of a Computer Literacy Project in Slovenia that was created as a part of a larger technological development project in the region. The article is divided into three main parts. The first part offers some critical arguments on the notions of development and technology. The second part contains an analysis of why the Computer Literacy Project received much support from the educational authorities in Slovenia - and it is argued that this is because it falls in line with general political and economic principles promoted by the dominant neo-liberal vision in the Central-Eastern European region. In the third part, a case study of the Computer Literacy Project in Slovenia is assessed. We attempt to unveil the discourses of the Computer Literacy teachers that were geared towards creating a specific vision of a Slovene future: a vision that continues to promise economic progress, and democracy through technology and the rise of the Internet. This section explores how their discourses stem from mainstream perspectives of development and technology. We attempt to unravel the paradoxes within the disourses, while showing how this vision sidesteps a morecritical analysis of the Internet's potential. Entrenched in a technological-deterministic perspective, the study respondents recognize that education and the democratic public sphere can be guaranteed by virtue of a technology access alone. We suggest that education policy-makers everywhere should carefully review their computer literacy policies, and we argue for a course on Information Literacy that would provide an alternative educational experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the authors explore the problems inherent with sampling bloggers and their blogs, specifically several factors unique to these populations: spam blogs, abandoned blogs, access-restricted blogs, and non-traditional blogs. Reviewing 24 blogging studies, they focus on the four strategies that researchers have employed to sample bloggers and blogs on the Internet: self-selected and convenience samples, sampling through blog hosts, sampling with the assistance of blog aggregators or indexing websites, and sampling from ready-published lists of blogs. They look closely at the practicality of such methods and discuss their tradeoffs. They then examine several techniques that researchers utilize to sample elusive, networked and rare populations in an offline context, emphasizing how they can be applied to sampling bloggers and blogs. In conclusion, they propose that these suggestions be applied to sampling methodologies concerning other Internet-based communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the prevalence of creative activity and sharing in an age when the barriers to disseminating material have been considerably lowered compared with earlier times. The authors use unique data to explore the extent to which young adults create video, music, writing and artistic photography, as well as the prevalence of sharing such material online. Findings suggest that despite new opportunities to engage in such distribution of content, relatively few people are taking advantage of these recent developments. Moreover, neither creation nor sharing is randomly distributed among a diverse group of young adults. Consistent with existing literature, creative activity is related to a person's socioeconomic status as measured by parental schooling. The novel act of sharing online, however, is considerably different by gender with men much more likely to engage in it. However, once internet user skill is controlled for, men and women are equally likely to post their materials on the Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationships between Internet and social capital building within religious organizations, which are relatively understudied foci. Building upon theoretical insights provided by new institutionalism and recent research on the Internet, social capital and religion, this article explores the ways in which religious organizations have (re)structured their norms, values, and practices of religious community in light of the incorporation of the Internet into their congregational life. Drawing from interviews conducted with Christian and Buddhist religious leaders in Toronto, this article discusses three major relationships in which the effects of the Internet on social capital may be understood, that is, complementary, transformative, and perverse relationships. Religious organizations are traditionally associated with relatively high stocks of social capital, yet findings here suggest that their communicative norms, values, and practices are changing to a varying extent. The results also indicate that the relationship between the Internet and social capital building is largely complementary; however, the Internet is perceived by some to be a 'mixed blessing', facilitating the potential transformation of organizational practices that affect community norms while leading to the dispersion of religious ties that could undermine community solidarity. Thus, contrary to earlier studies that have documented no evidence of innovations involving the reconfiguration of organizational practices and the adjustment of mission or services, findings here illustrate how some religious organizations have expanded the scope of their calling and restructured their communicative practices to spur administrative and operational effectiveness. Like other organizations, religious organizations are not insulated from technological changes including those associated with the Internet. This study clarifies and identifies key ways in which the distinct spirituality, cultural values, and institutional practices and norms of religious organizations influence communication processes that constitute bridging and bonding forms of social capital in this dot.org era of faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether the Internet is increasingly a part of everyday neighborhood interactions, and in what specific contexts Internet use affords the formation of local social ties. Studies of Internet and community have found that information and communication technologies provide new opportunities for social interaction, but that they may also increase privatism by isolating people in their homes. This paper argues that while the Internet may encourage communication across great distances, it may also facilitate interactions near the home. Unlike traditional community networking studies, which focus on bridging the digital divide, this study focuses on bridging the divide between the electronic and parochial realms. Detailed, longitudinal social network surveys were completed with the residents of four contrasting neighborhoods over a period of three years. Three of the four neighborhoods were provided with a neighborhood email discussion list and a neighborhood website. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to model over time the number of strong and weak ties, emailed, met in-person, and talked to on the telephone. The neighborhood email lists were also analyzed for content. The results suggest that with experience using the Internet, the size of local social networks and email communication with local networks increases. The addition of a neighborhood email list further increases the number of weak neighborhood ties, but does not increase communication multiplexity. However, neighborhood effects reduce the influence of everyday Internet use, as well as the experimental intervention, in communities that lack the context to support local tie formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the convergence of communication and travel and the emergence of a mobile and network sociality, through investigating new communication practices based on the internet and mobile phone enacted by backpackers while on the move. These global nomads produce and maintain mobile spaces of sociality, founded on a complex intersection of face-to-face interaction and mediated communication, co-presence and virtual proximity, corporeal travel and virtual mobilities. Personal communities become a mobile phenomenon, relocalized in a plurality of online and offline social spaces. It is thus argued that network relationships are reshaped and mobilized through reconfigurations of co-presence, proximity and distance in relation to the use of new media. Exploring new media uses on the move can thus provide a useful insight into the emerging social model of the network and mobile society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emerging discipline of community informatics (CI) has begun to trace out a distinct agenda for change in the social uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Focusing upon the appropriation of ICTs by local communities who have been disenfranchised by technological development, this agenda foregrounds uses of the Internet in the pursuit of distinctly community-related objectives. However, the role that the local state ought to play within this agenda for change remains marked by a degree of controversy and ambiguity. Assertions of the need for community autonomy coexist uneasily with a recognition that the local state can help develop and sustain CI. Much current work therefore focuses upon exploring notions of 'partnership' between the local state and local groups in developing CI. Against this background, this paper draws on a case study of Birmingham City Council (BCC) in order to explore a series of significant organizational changes to local government, which have seen BCC adopt a fundamentally new 'community leadership' role. This shift to community leadership is being expedited by innovative uses of Internet technology. It is argued that, rather than straightforwardly re-creating BCC as a better partner to community groups in developing CI, such changes are deeply paradoxical. In the first instance shifts to community leadership have enabled BCC to develop valuable web resources that enhance their role as a partner facilitating citizen-led CI. Conversely, however, these changes are bound up in a broader attempt by BCC to reassert managerial control at a time when its legitimacy as a social institution is being questioned. Faced with a series of external challenges, BCC has replicated important CI activities in the pursuit of its own interests. Ultimately it is argued that this assimilation of CI could eventually undermine the broader CI agenda for change. [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]

The Internet is increasingly used to communicate health knowledge and there is growing belief that it can help transform both personal and public health. There is no lack of information on healthy lifestyles, but the manner of communication of risk and the level of support for lifestyle change need improvement, especially among deprived populations. Assisting vulnerable persons to increase their health knowledge could help them to be more responsible for maintaining their health. The Internet offers potential for interactivity by providing a dynamic medium for influencing learning and behaviour change, especially in so far as it enables inter-subjective communication among peers. This paper examines how the Internet might help tackle health inequalities by improving communication of risk and providing support for those who are most susceptible to changing their behaviour. The authors provide a descriptive account of whether facilitated access to the Internet may improve the capacity of older men to manage their heart conditions. Nine men aged 50 to 74 living in multiply deprived areas of Salford were given computers, Internet access and training for six months. Interviews and qualitative data were collected to assess the influence the Internet had on the management of their heart conditions before they were given the computers, after six months and three years after they were introduced to the Internet. The study was exploratory but its results suggest that interactive learning is worthwhile because it can help strengthen social support and influence behaviour change. Home access to the Internet via their own personal computer had a beneficial influence in building confidence and facilitating healthy behaviour change. Although less than half of the participants had ever used the Internet before the study, the majority of them reported using the Internet and email regularly after their involvement in the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing spread of the Internet holds much potential for enhancing opportunities for people with disabilities. However, scarce evidence exists to suggest that people with disabilities are, in fact, participating in these new developments. Will the spread of information technologies (IT) increase equality by offering opportunities for people with disabilities? Or will a growing reliance on IT lead to more inequality by leaving behind certain portions of the population including people with disabilities? In this paper, the authors draw on nationally representative data regarding Americans' Internet uses to (1) identify the extent to which people with disabilities are embracing use of the Internet; (2) how their use of the Internet compares with the Internet uses of the rest of the population; (3) how having a disability relates to and interacts with other social statuses (e.g. socioeconomic status, age, gender) with regard to Internet use; and (4) what explains these trends. They draw on representative data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census of the United States to answer these questions. It is found that people with disabilities are less likely to live in households with computers, are less likely to use computers and are less likely to be online. However, once socioeconomic background is controlled for, it is found that people with hearing disabilities and those who have limited walking ability are not less likely to be Internet users. This research enables a deeper understanding of both the use of the Internet by people with disabilities and the spread of new IT more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores popular attitudes toward the Internet (and computer-mediated communication more generally) by mapping some of the more threatening, transgressive and ‘monstrous’ images associated with cyberspace. An account of risk consciousness is developed in three parts: (1) comparisons with earlier information technologies reveals similarities and differences with regard to public attitudes toward cyberspace and its risks; (2) the development of a model of contemporary teratological space derived from images of boundary-dissolving threats, intrusive alterities and existential ambivalences created by the erosion of binary distinctions and hierarchies; and (3) possible historical and sociological explanations of cyberpanic drawing on recent theorizations of globalization (capitalism/information society theory, risk society theory, reflexive modernization theory, and alterity theory). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the core elements of the vision of ‘electronic democracy’ is the hope that the Internet permits free and equal access to political debates. However, experiences with online discourse challenge this view. The digital divide being one obstacle to participation, even more interesting is the fact that online communication is constrained in ways similar to the offline world. This paper attempts to reassess the question of whether the Internet makes political debate more open to voices that are normally not heard in the political field. Based on empirical evidence from a large-scale online deliberation, it analyses who participates in political debates on the Internet and whose views are represented. The results challenge both the optimistic and the sceptical view on electronic democracy. A theoretical model is developed that is able to explain the results. It extends current research by including the cultural practices of technology use and the specific effects of large-scale communication in the analysis. Though preliminary this model can help to inform the designers of online deliberations to make the most of their democratic potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a unique British three-wave longitudinal dataset to examine the rates of transitions into and out of ‘ICT poverty’ defined as having Internet access in the household and/or having a mobile phone. This serves three purposes: it shows that many are still ‘passing by’ ICT ownership, that ‘gaining ICT’ access is not a one-way street – many just pass through; and that the rates of dropping out differ for different ICTs and for different groups of people. This has implications for both commercial and public policy strategy. It also shows the value of longitudinal approaches to data collection without which this kind of analysis would be impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines some of the issues involved in the development of human relationships in cyberspace. Set within the wider context of the Internet and society it investigates how geographically distant individuals are coming together on the Internet to inhabit new kinds of social spaces or virtual communities. People ‘live in’ and ‘construct’ these new spaces in such a way as to suggest that the Internet is not a placeless cyberspace that is distinct and separate from the real world. Building on the work of other cyberethnographers, the author combines original ethnographic research in Cybercity, a Virtual Community, with face-to-face meetings to illustrate how, for many people, cyberspace is just another place to meet. Second, she suggests that people in Cybercity are investing as much effort in maintaining relationships in cyberspace as in other social spaces. Her preliminary analysis suggests that by extending traditional human relationships into Cybercity, they are widening their webs of relationships, not weakening them. Human relationships in cyberspace are formed and maintained in similar ways to those in wider society. Rather than being exotic and removed from real life, they are actually being assimilated into everyday life. Furthermore, they are often moved into other social settings, just as they are in offline life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authors have noted that young people like to use the Internet and mobile phones for communication purposes. This paper reports results concerning use of the Internet and mobile phones for communication from a survey of 1340 English secondary schoolchildren conducted in 2002 and examines whether the use of either of these forms of communication technologies occurs at the expense of the other amongst this group. In agreement with background literature, it was found that communication via the Internet and mobile phones was popular amongst young people and small but significant positive correlations amongst the sample for measures of the use of the Internet and mobile phones for communication purposes were also discovered. This latter finding implies that these communication media are complementary rather than substitutable amongst young people. This article discusses a number of possible reasons for the popularity of the Internet and mobile phones for communication amongst young people and states that the positive correlations imply that children are ‘rational actors’ where communication via modern technology is concerned. That is, young people use the Internet and mobile phones strategically to meet different communication needs. It is concluded that as both of these forms of communication technology can be employed to achieve different purposes, the result is that neither negates the use of the other amongst this group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the potential uses of the Internet and other forms of information and communication technology (ICT) as a tool for delivering information services for unemployed people, comparing the experiences and attitudes of jobseekers in peri-urban and remote rural labour markets. The analysis is based upon research carried out in two areas: the first combining a remote rural town with a much larger, more sparsely populated, rural 'travel-to-work area'; the second, a centrally located peri-urban labour market. Survey research undertaken in the study areas gathered responses from 490 unemployed jobseekers. Emerging issues were then followed up during twelve focus groups. The study found that the use of ICT for job seeking remained a marginal activity for most unemployed people, hut was much more important in remote rural communities. In these areas, jobseekers were more likely to use the Internet as a search tool and were particularly dependent on telephone helplines provided by the public employment service (PES). However, the study also found that a 'digital divide' was evident within the unemployed client group. Those with low educational attainment, the long-term unemployed, young people and those perceiving their ICT skills to be 'poor' were less likely to use the Internet. Although respondents in rural areas were more likely to use ICT to look for work, they also pointed to the overriding importance of informal, social networks as a means of sharing job information in remote communities. We conclude that ICT may have a future role in the delivery of services for jobseekers, especially in rural areas. However, policies are required to ensure that information provided through ICT-based services is locally relevant, and disadvantaged groups have access to the facilities and training they require. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the Internet as a new mode of meeting people and forming relationships. It is argued that the rapidly growing number of Internet 'dating resources' constitute a domain where people are entering into particular forms of interactions that are characterized by interactional 'rules' that facilitate the building of 'trust' between users. Authenticity and 'emotional communication' is, as Giddens (The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992) has suggested, central to the `pure relationships' of our late modern era. It is therefore appropriate that information and communication technologies are supplementing or replacing traditional routes to potentially romantic encounters that have in the past been mediated by the marriage broker, shadkhan or others taking similar roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A good deal of discourse relating to the `democratic potential' of the Internet has tended to simplify the question of technology. Whilst it is true that the structure of the Internet may well-facilitate certain 'democratic' forms of use, this is not a necessary fact. This paper argues that the Internet is not passive, but is shaped by the ways in which it is used. Such an account emphasizes the fact that certain forms of use may well conflict, leading to a struggle to define the technology, people's relation to it, and thus the ways in which it is used. The discussion concludes with the suggestion that, unless users strive to develop the Internet as a democratic tool, or one that enhanced non-commercial civil society, the potential often referred to will be lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One popular framework for analysing web pages has been to think of them as identity performances on the part of the author. This framework opens up possibilities for analysis of the ways in which identity performances are composed. The personal web pages to which this perspective is most immediately applicable, are, however, now only a small proportion of the overall amount of information available on the World Wide Web. It would be possible, by extension, to analyse institutional web pages as performances of the institutional identity. It is the contention of this paper that to do so is to miss out on some important aspects of web page design: namely that the production of a web page involves understandings not only of the audience for the page but also of the capacities of the technology. In addition, web page production has to become a socially meaningful act for the individual web page developer and the institution concerned. It is, therefore, argued that the analysis of web pages can usefully learn from media studies and the sociology of technology in this respect. An interview-based study of the developers of web pages for the service departments of a UK university is described. The ideas of audience which the authors use are far from homogeneous: they include an institutional offline audience for the page, a pre-existing imagined audience, developers themselves as audience, and the technology of the browser as a stand-in audience. The audience and the capacities of the technology are developed in context through the practices of designers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifty years after his death, Harold Innis remains one of the most widely cited but least understood of communication theorists. This is particularly true in relation to his concept of 'bias'. This paper reconstructs this concept and places it in the context of Innis' uniquely non-Marxist dialectical materialist methodology. In so doing, the author emphasises ongoing debates concerning Innis' work and demonstrates its utility in relation to contemporary analyses of the Internet and related developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]