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This article analyzes the construction in the UK media of the ‘stay-at-home mother’, a maternal figure who received increasing visibility during the recession and its aftermath. Based on a content analysis of UK national newspaper coverage of stay-at-home mothers (2008–2013), this article argues that the stay-at-home mother emerges from its press coverage as a neoliberal postfeminist subject. On the one hand, the coverage complicates claims about antifeminist backlash and women’s harking back to passive femininity. On the other hand, it fails significantly to undermine maternal femininity’s entanglement with neoliberalism, and reinforces the process described by McRobbie as ‘disarticulation’, by separating between middle-class mothers and working-class mothers.

Background: Telehealth is an emerging field of clinical practice but current UK health policy has not taken account of the perceptions of frontline healthcare professionals expected to implement it.\ud \ud Aim: To investigate telehealth care for people with long-term conditions from the perspective of the front-line health professional.\ud \ud Design and setting: A qualitative study in three sites within the UK (Kent, Cornwall, and the London Borough of Newham) and embedded in the Whole Systems Demonstrator evaluation, a large cluster randomised controlled trial of telehealth and telecare for patients with long-term and complex conditions.\ud \ud Method: Semi-structured qualitative interviews with 32 front-line health professionals (13 community matrons, 10 telehealth monitoring nurses and 9 GPs) involved in the delivery of telehealth. Data were analysed using a modified grounded theory approach.\ud \ud Results: Mixed views were expressed by front-line professionals, which seem to reflect their levels of engagement. It was broadly welcomed by nursing staff as long as it supplemented rather than substituted their role in traditional patient care. GPs held mixed views; some gave a cautious welcome but most saw telehealth as increasing their work burden and potentially undermining their professional autonomy.\ud \ud Conclusion: Health care professionals will need to develop a shared understanding of patient self-management through telehealth. This may require a renegotiation of their roles and responsibilities.

A methodology for the self-assessment of the socio-economic impact of Software-as-a-Service and Internet of Services research projects is presented in the context of EU-funded research. The SEQUOIA methodology was developed by assessing 30 existing projects in close collaboration with them. This process was documented to provide a basis for future research projects to apply the methodology on their own. The model and the empirical findings are discussed in detail, focussing on five projects that qualified as ‘best practices’. The main findings are that an ‘impact assessment culture’ needs to be cultivated, encouraged, and strengthened by the European Commission and all the stakeholders. The five projects that scored highest generated a fairly good financial return over the total projects’ output lifetime and showed a genuine attention for non-monetizable impacts such as knowledge creation and sharing, improvement in working routines, and social capital. Relative to the other projects, the five best practices demonstrated knowledge of the needs of their stakeholders and of their expectations, and engaged with them from the very beginning of their technology development activities. To integrate the assessment methodology within each project, its partners need to feel that they ‘own’ it, and that it has been optimized for its specific institutional, organizational, and epistemological requirements. We therefore recommend the inclusion in project consortia of socio-economic experts who are able to translate the ICT research language into measurable (potential) socio-economic impacts. SEQUOIA’s assumption that in the development of an effective socio-economic impact assessment methodology it is important to integrate the social and economic dimensions of potential impact was verified and validated through an ex post rationalization informed by economic anthropology, the usefulness of our quantitative model, and empirical evidence obtained through in-depth qualitative–quantitative data gathering techniques.

‘On Digital Crossings in Europe’ explores the entanglements of digital media and migration beyond the national and mono-ethnic focus. We argue how borders, identity and affectivity have been destabilized and reconfigured through medium-specific technological affordances, opting for a comparative and postcolonial framework that focuses on diversity in conjunction with cosmopolitan aspirations. Internet applications make it possible to sustain new forms of diaspora and networks, which operate within and beyond Europe, making issues of ethnicity, nationality, race and class not obsolete but transformed. It is therefore important and timely to analyse how these reconfigurations take place and affect everyday life. Using a critical approach to digital tools that avoids utopian notions of connectivity and borderlessness, this article highlights the dyssimmetries and tensions produced by the ubiquitousness of digital connectivity. It further introduces the different contributions to the special issue making connections and tracing relations among themes and methods as well as sketching main patterns for further research. It also offers a panorama of other related studies and projects in the field, which partake in a critical reassessment of the enabling power of digital media and their divisive implications for new forms of surveillance, online racism and ‘economic’ inequality, which we gather under the heading of postcolonial digital humanities.

What are the challenges to effective academic participation in telecommunications policymaking? In this article, the authors analyze their experiences with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and Industry Canada as examples. Their goal is to increase academic policy engagement despite negligible government support for public interest advocacy, as traditional public interest values are discarded by regulators because new technologies are framed as individual rather than collective. Industry Canada is deemed opaque with an “advocacy deficit,” though the CRTC is more transparent and inviting. To succeed in both venues, academics need to work with advocacy organizations as “circumstantial activists.” Such academic participation can offer new conceptual frameworks, add nuance to discourse, substantiate the use of scholarly research in policy debates, and add to policy theory building.

Fuelled by the Arab Spring, the question of how the rise of internet-mediated communication affects authoritarian regimes has received unprecedented attention within the discipline of communications. However, in this debate, scholars have not yet turned to the concept of literacy and addressed the role of citizens’ knowledge about political media in any greater depth. This is surprising since the concept of literacy as ‘emancipatory knowledge’, in Sonia Livingstone’s words, has a ‘long and proud history’ of being linked with processes of enlightenment, political empowerment and democratization. The present study contributes to filling this gap by suggesting four highly consequential facets of critical news literacy in contemporary Russia, a high-profile hybrid regime. The conceptual development is grounded in western literature and 20 in-depth interviews with young, urban and educated Russians.

This article proposes to redefine celebrity as a kind of capital, thereby extending Bourdieu’s field theory. This redefinition is necessary, it is argued, because one of the main limitations shared by current definitions of celebrity is their lack of explanatory power of the convertibility of celebrity into other resources, such as economic or political capital. Celebrity capital, or broadly recognizability, is conceptualized as accumulated media visibility that results from recurrent media representations. In that sense, it is a substantial kind of capital and not a subset or special category of social or symbolic capital, the latter being defined as legitimate recognition by other agents in a social field. Rather than adding another definition of celebrity next to many others, the notion of celebrity capital proposed here should be seen as an attempt to integrate the existing approaches of celebrity into a single comprehensive conceptualization that can enable us to grasp this societal and cultural phenomenon better.

This study examines whether the impact of offline identities on computer-mediated communication is stable across different social contexts or whether it depends on which identity aspect is salient. Field experiments with 206 teenagers tested the influence of gendered, ethnic, youth and personalized identities on teenagers' chat behaviour and cognitions. The findings show that offline identity varies in its relation to Internet self-efficacy but not chat partner selection. Self-efficacy differed significantly between boys and girls when youth and gender identities were emphasized but not when stressing personal identity. Across conditions, teenagers were most likely to choose chat partners from similar ethnic and opposite sex backgrounds. This partly supports the Social Identification and Deindividuation framework and argues that offline identities impact online behaviour and self-perception but that this effect depends on which identity aspect is activated.

PurposeAlthough cloud computing has been heralded as driving the innovation agenda, there is growing evidence that cloud computing is actually a “slow train coming”. The purpose of this paper is to seek to understand the factors that drive and inhibit the adoption of cloud computing, particularly in relation to its use for innovative practices.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on a composite research base including two detailed surveys and interviews with 56 participants in the cloud supply chain undertaken between 2010 and 2013. The insights from this data are presented in relation to set of antecedents to innovation and a cloud sourcing model of collaborative innovation.FindingsThe paper finds that while some features of cloud computing will hasten the adoption of cloud, and its use for innovative purposes by the enterprise, there are also clear challenges that need to be addressed before cloud can be adopted successfully. Interestingly, the analysis highlights that many of these challenges arise from the technological nature of cloud computing itself.Research limitations/implicationsThe research highlights a series of factors that need to be better understood for the maximum benefit from cloud computing to be achieved. Further research is needed to assess the best responses to these challenges.Practical implicationsThe research suggests that enterprises need to undertake a number of steps for the full benefits of cloud computing to be achieved. It suggests that collaborative innovation is not necessarily an immediate consequence of adopting cloud computing.Originality/valueThe paper draws on an extensive research base to provide empirically informed analysis of the complexities of adopting cloud computing for innovation.

When do international treaties cause domestic policy adjustments? While previous research emphasizes the consequences of treaty ratification, we argue that the need to secure entry into force can induce states to change their policies already before ratification. If a state expects benefits from a treaty, it can increase the probability of foreign ratification by implementing policies that benefit pivotal domestic players within its partner country. Accordingly, studies that focus on policy change after ratification underestimate the importance of treaties and partly misconstrue the causal connection between treaties and policies. We test the theory against data on the relationship between North-South preferential trading agreements (PTAs) and automobile emission standards, finding that developing countries adopt automobile emission standards between the signature and ratification of North-South PTAs.

This article details the benefits and challenges of Insight Journalism, a community engagement and research methodology developed by the interdisciplinary Bespoke project. Based in two under-resourced urban neighbourhoods in North West England, Bespoke combined community media with participatory digital design by supporting local residents to create a series of 'old' and 'new' media outputs that were exhibited locally and used within an innovative design process. The digital designs inspired by the journalism were then built by the Bespoke team and deployed within the local area, where Insight Journalists evaluated their reception. Based on our experiences, in this article, we argue that Insight Journalism can provide a vital space for exploring salient civic and social issues, but must be understood as a process of building relationships and competencies, as well as a set of products including the mediated stories and digital designs that resulted from ongoing engagement. © 2013 Intellect Ltd Article.

In recent debates about the ever-growing prominence of celebrity in society and culture, a number of scholars have started to use the often intermingled terms ‘celebrification’ and ‘celebritization’. This article contributes to these debates first by distinguishing and clearly defining both terms, and especially by presenting a multidimensional conceptual model of celebritization to remedy the current one-sided approaches that obscure its theoretical and empirical complexity. Here ‘celebrification’ captures the transformation of ordinary people and public figures into celebrities, whereas ‘celebritization’ is conceptualized as a meta-process that grasps the changing nature, as well as the societal and cultural embedding of celebrity, which can be observed through its democratization, diversification and migration. It is argued that these manifestations of celebritization are driven by three separate but interacting moulding forces: mediatization, personalization and commodification.

Telecommunications policy issues rarely make news, much less mobilize thousands of people. Yet this has been occurring in the United States around efforts to introduce "Net neutrality" regulation. A similar grassroots mobilization has not developed in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in Europe. We develop a comparative analysis of U.S. and UK Net neutrality debates with an eye toward identifying the arguments for and against regulation, how those arguments differ between the countries, and what the implications of those differences are for the Internet. Drawing on mass media, advocacy, and regulatory discourses, we find that local regulatory precedents as well as cultural factors contribute to both agenda setting and framing of Net neutrality. The differences between national discourses provide a way to understand both the structural differences between regulatory cultures and the substantive differences between policy interpretations, both of which must be reconciled for the Internet to continue to thrive as a global medium.

Recent anxieties over the digital divide have centered on the observation that uptake of the Internet is shaped by a number of identifiable, place-based factors. Yet is the Internet any more a product of material geography than previous communication technologies? Our contribution in this article seeks to address this question by deploying quantitative techniques to examine whether the country-level adoption of past communication networks—mail, telegrams, and telephone—was shaped by similar socioeconomic factors. Our results reveal striking similarities in the domestic attributes—income, education, and trade openness—influencing rates of uptake across all four technologies during their major periods of diffusion. © 2011 by Association of American Geographers.

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.

Most existing assessments of local Wi-Fi projects have concentrated on either top-down, government-driven endeavors, or bottom-up projects developed by volunteers or community organizations. In both Canada and the United States, existing local Wi-Fi projects—both top down and bottom up—have failed to fulfill expectations that they could increase digital inclusion. Current policy frameworks may play some role in these failures. This article argues for a policy approach that favors hybrid public broadband that is neither completely bottom up nor top down, and for the development of policy frameworks that support hybrid public broadband.

The electronic voting system of Brazil is understood to be widely trusted by the citizens of the country and international observers. More precisely, it is seen as a trustworthy mechanism of producing election results that accurately represent the choices of the electorate. In this article, we discuss briefly the concepts of trust and trustworthiness, and focus to examine the formation of beliefs regarding the latter. We argue that the belief of trustworthiness is only partly attributable to the perception of the merits of the technical system and its enactment procedures. In our case study we found that the institutional actors responsible for the elections—the Superior and the Regional Electoral Courts—have played a key role in the formation of the belief that the electronic elections are trustworthy. We therefore conclude that, unlike common assumptions about the potential of e-government in developing countries to restore trust in government institutions that are considered untrustworthy, the production of trust in government services mediated by information and communication technology relies on citizens' perceptions of their trustworthiness.

The explosion in social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Friendster is widely regarded as an exciting opportunity, especially for youth.Yet the public response tends to be one of puzzled dismay regarding a generation that, supposedly, has many friends but little sense of privacy and a narcissistic fascination with self-display. This article explores teenagers' practices of social networking in order to uncover the subtle connections between online opportunity and risk. While younger teenagers relish the opportunities to recreate continuously a highly-decorated, stylistically-elaborate identity, older teenagers favour a plain aesthetic that foregrounds their links to others, thus expressing a notion of identity lived through authentic relationships. The article further contrasts teenagers' graded conception of `friends' with the binary classification of social networking sites, this being one of several means by which online privacy is shaped and undermined by the affordances of these sites.

Every system of cruelty requires its own theater. 1 By “system” I mean an organization of objects, people and opportunities that is both regular and open to public view. There are of course many fo...

Computerisation facilitates instantaneous and direct links between all of us in our work and social lives. At the same time, and counter-intuitively so, securities are increasingly held indirectly through chains of custodians that operate between issuers and investors. This disconnects investors from issuers and can significantly reduce the value of assets. The regulatory framework does not prevent this effect. UK-regulated holders of client securities should be required to hold these directly in the name of the investor. At an international level, it is worth asking whether the technology underlying bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can be used to create an un-intermediated securities ledger connecting investors and issuers directly.

This article examines the emergence of new, inter-local spaces of news production and consumption, drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with community reporters trained by a community reporter organisation based in the north of England. Practices of news production and content generation are focused on people's own communities and they are underpinned by an ethos of production, which is grounded in a critical consumption of news and collective processes of skill acquisition. Through an analysis of motivations and practices, we account for the values that sustain community reporter communities and discuss how such practices, while emerging from the place of local community, also extend across wider communities of interest. It is suggested that an evolving practice of skill sharing and mutual recognition could potentially stimulate the regrowth of democratic values.

This article argues that, instead of assuming that we know what ‘cultural citizenship’ involves, we should investigate more closely the uncertainties about what constitutes the ‘culture’ (or cultures) of citizenship. The article argues for the distinctive contribution of cultural studies to the problem of democratic engagement, as usually framed within political science. It then reports some preliminary findings from the recently completed ‘Media Consumption and the Future of Public Connection’ project, which focus on the importance of social opportunities for talk about public issues, the possibilities of withdrawal from news because it presents issues which people can do nothing about, and alternative forms of collective connection through media (such as celebrity culture) which exhibit no effective link to public issues.

Recognising and responding to behaviours and patterns of resistance is critical to the successful imple­mentation of technology-enhanced learning strategies at higher education institutions. At institutional, academic and student levels, resistance manifests itself in a variety of forms, at best supporting a critical culture and at worst creating inertia and active disquiet. Through the lens of an institution-wide strategic learning innovation vision at the University of Greenwich, designed to enhance connectivity and collaboration, this paper will explore the modes and pathways of resistance that occurred in the process of implementing and embedding an openness agenda at a learning and teaching level. Through supporting experimentation and play with social media creation and sharing as a mechanism of curricula transformation, we identified a number of patterns of resistance to sharing and openness. Using an approach informed by grounded theory we have attempted to represent these patterns in the form of a model of institutional resistance to technology-led change.\ud \ud Keywords: technology enhanced learning, openness, social media, institutional resistance.

This paper studies the effects of a country’s regulatory setting and competitive environment the performance of second-generation (2G) mobile on telecommunication. We consider three dimensions of sector performance: entry time, service prices and diffusion. We address the question of non-random selection arising from cross-country differences in the timing of the commercialization of new technologies. Our empirical exploration shows that this type of sample selection may indeed be a substantial problem in cross-country studies on technology diffusion and yield biased estimates of the policy variables of interest. Our estimation results suggest that standardization accelerates 2G entry and diffusion, although within-standards competition triggers less aggressive price competition than between-standards competition. We also find that an early monopolist will price more aggressively to build up an installed base. Furthermore, we find that liberalizing markets for incumbent technologies (i.e., fixed line telephony) has accelerated the commercialization of 2G.

This article suggests that it is timely to revitalise studies in the tradition of the political economy of media and communications in order to develop a critical and comprehensive analysis of the social and economic dynamics of the production and consumption of new media. Specifically, a coupling of research on mediated communication and on highly situated communities of practice with some strands of research in political economy could shed new light on the way changing power relationships are informing the development and application of new media products and services. There are precedents for this approach in studies of the older media and signs of a greater receptivity to such an approach in some studies of Internet developments and the open source software movement.

This paper illustrates the persistence of an exogenous model of development that underpins many interventions aimed at employing information and communication technologies (ICTs) to meet development goals. The analysis is based on a sample of texts from reports produced by United Nations agencies and the World Bank. The aim is to show how the discourse on ICT interventions invariably is reminiscent of a dominant exogenous model even when alternative models with respect to development are seen to influence policy and practice. It is argued that practice-based, emergence approaches offer an attractive, although insufficient, way forward.

This lecture reviews the history of how the status and authority of media institutions over the past century have been entangled with wider claims about social knowledge and the order of societies. It analyses those relations in terms of three successive and now overlapping myths: ‘the myth of the mediated centre’ which claims that media (traditional mass media institutions) are privileged access points to our centre of social values and social reality; the ‘myth of us’ which is now emerging around the supposedly natural collectivities that ‘we’ form on commercial social media platforms; and, from outside the media industries, the ‘myth of big data’ which proclaims big data techniques are generating an entirely new and better form of social knowledge. All these myths require deconstruction by a particular hermeneutic, but the case of the myth of big data is the most paradoxical, since its claims amount to an anti-hermeneutic, a refusal to interpret the social anymore as the resultant of processes of meaning-making. This third myth, it is argued, requires a hermeneutic of the anti-hermeneutic if it is to be deconstructed and previous conceptions of social knowledge (from Weber onwards), and the claims to possible justice and politics based upon them, are to be preserved.

The concept of celebrity culture remains remarkably undertheorized in the literature, and it is precisely this gap that this article aims to begin filling in. Starting with media culture definitions, celebrity culture is conceptualized as collections of sense-making practices whose main resources of meaning are celebrity. Consequently, celebrity cultures are necessarily plural. This approach enables us to focus on the spatial differentiation between (sub)national celebrity cultures, for which the Flemish case is taken as a central example. We gain a better understanding of this differentiation by adopting a translocal frame on culture and by focusing on the construction of celebrity cultures through the ‘us and them’ binary and communities. Finally, it is also suggested that what is termed cultural working memory improves our understanding of the remembering and forgetting of actual celebrities, as opposed to more historical figures captured by concepts such as cultural memory.

This article claims that the expression of the ?lesbian intimate? is both a condition of possibility and the outcome of convergent lesbian media. The claim is grounded on the intersection of two major shifts in the publicity of feeling: the civic incorporation of lesbian desire (culminating in legislative equity for lesbian and gay subjects) intersecting with the shift of intimacy from private to public life (epitomised by the elevation of the intimate to a national concern). To understand how the lesbian intimate contributes to and is expressed in the formation of specific convergent media, the article draws on Deleuze?s writing on Spinoza (1988). A Spinozist conception of bodies and images is used to situate and think through The L World?s (Showtime 2004-9) lesbian media milieu as an environment of images that responds to—and is dependent upon its production of—capacities for feeling. In so doing, the article conceptualises lesbian as a mode of affection that modifies bodies as lesbian by modifying their feelings. Here lesbian intimacy is viewed as an effect of the contact between the affective capacity of images to modify viewers? feelings and the social and cultural legitimacy of lesbian intimacy that arises through the civic incorporation of lesbian desire and the shift toward the intimate in national cultures. This way of viewing intimacy is illustrated through a discussion of the circulation of images in A Photographic Journal by Jennifer Beals (Beals 2010); images that hide (while purporting to show) their material conditions of production by seeking to affect intimate contact between bodies.

The performance levels of fundamental (i.e., operational and formal) and advanced (i.e., information and strategic) Internet skills and their potential predictors were assessed among a sample of Dutch primary school children. The findings suggest that primary school children possess sufficient levels of fundamental but not advanced Internet skills and, hence, might not be able to make best use of important opportunities the Internet has to offer. Children employed very ineffective and inefficient search strategies and did not combine information to make beneficial decisions. Contrary to previous survey research findings, no performance differences among boys and girls were revealed when using actual performance tests. Training programs to support advanced Internet skills among primary school children should be considered. .

This article explores the possibilities for new forms of ‘digital citizenship’ currently emerging through digitally supported processes of narrative exchange. Using Dahlgren's (Dahlgren, P. 2003. “Reconfiguring Civic Culture in the New Media Milieu.” In Media and the Restyling of Politics, edited by J. Corner, and D. Pels, 151–170. London: Sage; Dahlgren, P. 2009. Media and Political Engagement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) circuit of ‘civic culture’ as a model for exploring the interlinking preconditions for new acts of citizenship, we discuss the contrasting outcomes of research at three fieldwork sites in the North of England – educational (a sixth form college), civil society (a community reporters' network) and social (a local club). Each site provided clear evidence of the elements of Dahlgren's circuit (some depending on the intensive use of digital infrastructure, others predating it), but there were also breaks in the circuit that constrained its effectiveness. A crucial factor in each case for building a lasting circuit of civic culture (and an effective base for new forms of digital citizenship) is the role that digital infrastructure can play in extending the scale of interactions beyond the purely local.

Despite the tremendous amount of attention that has been paid to the internet as a tool for civic engagement, we still have little idea how “active” is the average online activist or how social networks matter in facilitating electronic protest. In this paper, we use complete records on the donation and recruitment activity of 1.2 million members of the Save Darfur “Cause” on Facebook to provide a detailed first look at a massive online social movement. While both donation and recruitment behavior are socially patterned, the vast majority of Cause members recruited no one else into the Cause and contributed no money to it-suggesting that in the case of the Save Darfur campaign, Facebook conjured an illusion of activism rather than facilitating the real thing.

Despite growing research interest in sexting, not much is known about individual and country differences in engaging in sexting. Therefore, the aims of this study were to investigate (a) which individual and country characteristics explain sexting and (b) whether individual predictors vary across countries. On the individual level, we investigated age, gender, sensation seeking, and internet use. On the country level, we investigated traditionalism, gross domestic product, and broadband internet penetration. The sample consisted of 14,946 adolescents (49.7% boys) aged 11-16 from 20 European countries. Data were collected as part of the EU Kids Online project. Participants were interviewed at home. Using multilevel modeling, findings indicate that on the individual level, age, sensation seeking, and frequency of internet use predicted sexting across all countries. Gender differences in sexting varied across countries. Although country characteristics (GDP, broadband internet penetration, traditional values) had no direct effect on adolescent sexting, traditionalism significantly predicted gender differences in sexting. In more traditional countries, gender differences were more pronounced than in less traditional countries, with more boys than girls engaging in sexting. In less traditional countries, gender differences were smaller.

This article reports new findings on the incidence of risk and the associated experience of harm reported by children and adolescents aged 11–16, regarding receipt of sexual messages on the internet (known popularly as sexting). Findings showed that the main predictors of the risk of seeing or receiving sexual messages online are age (older), psychological difficulties (higher), sensation seeking (higher) and risky online and offline behavior (higher). By contrast, the main predictors of harm resulting from receiving such messages were age (younger), gender (girls), psychological difficulties (higher) and sensation seeking (lower), with no effect for risky online or offline behavior. The findings suggest that accounts of internet-related risks should distinguish between predictors of risk and harm. Since some exposure to risk is necessary to build resilience, rather than aiming to reduce risk through policy and practical interventions, the findings can be used to more precisely target those who experience harm in order to reduce harm overall from internet use.

Reades J. and Smith D. A. Mapping the ‘space of flows’: the geography of global business telecommunications and employment specialization in the London mega-city-region, Regional Studies. Telecommunications has radically reshaped the way that firms organize industrial activity. And yet, because much of this technology – and the interactions that it enables – is invisible, the corporate ‘space of flows’ remains poorly mapped. This article combines detailed employment and telecoms usage data for the South-east of England to build a sector-by-sector profile of globalization at the mega-city-region scale. The intersection of these two datasets allows a new empirical perspective on industrial geography and regional structure to be developed.

The consumption landscape is saturated by media messages and media values, as many pessimistic diagnoses of contemporary culture have emphasized. We lack, however, the tools for understanding the details and the structural forces at work within that landscape, a gap which this article aims to fill by developing a concept of media and the boundaries and hierarchies that help produce the media's legitimacy. ‘Media power’ means here the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions, particularly those of television, radio and the press (the common-sense definition of ‘the media’), although the long-term impact of new media on media power is considered in the article's conclusion. The central parts of the article discuss, first, the theoretical framework that underlies this approach, which draws by analogy on Durkheim's account of the social generation of the sacred/profane distinction, but also on the work of Bourdieu and others; and second, material is presented from the author's empirical research on situations where non-media people come into close contact with the media process (both at leisure sites, such as Granada Studios Tour, the home of the set of the UK's longest running prime-time soap, Coronation Street, and at protest sites featured in the media). The conclusion looks more broadly at the implications of this approach for grasping the tensions and conflicts inherent in today's mediated landscape of consumption.

Digital policy literacy is a critical element of digital literacy that emphasizes an understanding of communication policy processes, the political economy of media, and technological infrastructures. This paper introduces an analytical framework of digital policy literacy and illustrates it with examples of young people’s everyday negotiations of mobile privacy, in order to argue for increased policy literacy around privacy and mobile phone communication. The framework is applied to the Canadian context, where a small pilot study engaged 14 undergraduate university students in focus groups about their uses of mobiles and knowledge of mobile privacy issues. Preliminary findings show that while our participants were aware of a variety of privacy threats in mobile communication, they were not likely to participate in policy processes that might protect their privacy rights. The paper concludes with a discussion of why young people may not be motivated to intervene in policy processes and how their digital policy literacy around mobile privacy is mitigated by the construction of youth as a lucrative target consumer market for mobile devices and services.

The tobacco industry’s archives suggest that the global campaign for the plain packaging of tobacco products originated in 1986, when the Canadian Medical Association passed a resolution calling for cigarettes to be sold in packages bearing only a brand name and the health message ‘this product is injurious to your health’. In most jurisdictions, regulations requiring the apposition of health warnings to cigarette packs have been in force for decades. Proposals for plain packaging aim to go further, and eliminate the visual and tactile features that turn cigarette packs into ‘badge’ wrappers, and which express the subliminal messages that diminish or subvert the effect of even the most uncompromising health messages. Given that effective plain packaging regulations would severely restrict the tobacco companies’ ability to exploit their trademarks or rights in trade dress, the question of the domestic or international ‘constitutionality’ of such restrictions has become an essential ground for the industry’s contestation of plain packaging measures. When it passed the Tobacco Plain Packaging Act of 2011, which came into force on December 1 2012, Australia became the first nation in the world to impose a mandatory scheme of plain packaging, and, in the process, the first jurisdiction to adjudicate on the constitutionality of plain packaging. Plain packaging legislation raises a number of engaging theoretical and practical questions: about the legal qualities of the intellectual property rights that articulate branding strategies, about the relationship between the regimes of international trade law and world health policy, and about the history of regulatory initiatives to address the public health implications of smoking. Here, I am interested questions about the communicative agency of the mass media: what does the example of Australia’s plain packaging laws tell us about the role played by the surfaces of material wrappers and packages in branding practices?; how do brands articulate with the other strands of the mass media?

This article conceptualizes media provocation, a common but understudied practice of mediatized protest and resistance, marketing or (self-)promotion and awareness raising. It is defined as a mediated act that questions or contravenes norms, values, laws, rules and symbolic power, thereby intentionally running counter to the normal horizon of expectations in a certain situation or context. As such, media provocation can have a major impact on public debate, politics and the course of events. In this article, the key elements of media provocation are initially examined and subsequently illustrated by drawing on a case study on Stijn Meuris, a Belgian rock artist and television personality. In 2010, he announced his refusal to vote in the next elections, although it is mandatory in Belgium for all adults to vote. The findings of this case study demonstrate the contingency of the component ‘intentionality’ in the definition of media provocation.

European self-regulation to ensure children's safety on social networking sites requires that providers ensure children are old enough to use the sites, aware of safety messages, empowered by privacy settings, discouraged from disclosing personal information, and supported by easy to use reporting mechanisms. This article assesses the regulatory framework with findings from a survey of over 25000 9- to 16-year-olds from 25 European countries. These reveal many underage children users, and many who lack the digital skills to use social networking sites safely. Despite concerns that children defy parental mediation, many comply with parental rules regarding social networking. The implications of the findings are related to policy decisions on lower age limits and self-regulation of social networking sites.

This article studies the mediatization of criminal and deviant subcultures by analyzing the media-related practices of graffiti writers and skaters in Ghent, Belgium. The ethnographic analysis shows how these subcultures orient themselves toward media and how media become an essential part of and change their everyday practices. Three consequences of this mediatization are highlighted: First, by emphasizing their artistic and performative skills through the mediation of their practices, these subcultures start losing their rebellious and oppositional image. Second, as such, it can be observed that they increasingly become part of mainstream culture. Third, our analysis demonstrates how the mediatization of subcultural groups and their practices goes hand in hand with their commercialization and commodification, as they engage in recording and disseminating their work not only for artistic reasons but also as a means of acquiring sponsorship deals and job opportunities.

Communicative interchanges play a foundational role in establishing the social. This being said, communicative behaviour can also lead to stalemates and conflict in which demands of recognition outweigh the prospect of hearing or saying anything beyond what is thought to be known. This paper foregrounds a dimension of communication often neglected by approaches prioritizing mass communications and new media technologies, namely the psychical and inter-subjective aspects of communicative exchange. More directly, this paper introduces and develops a Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of two interlinked registers of communicative behaviour. The first of these is the imaginary: the domain of one-to-one inter-subjectivity and behaviour that serves the ego and functions to consolidate the images subjects use to substantiate themselves. The second - far more disturbing and unpredictable - is the symbolic. It links the subject to a trans-subjective order of truth, it provides them with a set of socio-symbolic co-ordinates, and it ties them into a variety of roles and social contracts. In an elaboration of these two registers, illustrated by brief reference to Nixon’s admission of guilt in his interviews with David Frost, I pay particular attention to both the potentially transformative symbolic aspect of communicative behaviours and the ever-present prospect that such relations will ossify into imaginary impasses of mis-knowing (meconnaissance) and aggressive rivalry.

As today's media simultaneously converge and diverge, fusing and hybridizing across digital services and platforms, some researchers argue that audiences are dead-long live the user! But for others, it is the complex interweaving of continuities and changes that demands attention, especially now that audiencing has become a vital mode of engaging with all dimensions of daily life. This article asks how we should research audiences in a digital networked age. I argue that, while many avenues are being actively pursued, many researchers are concentrating on the notion of participation, asking, on the one hand, what modes of participation are afforded to people by the particular media and communication infrastructures which mediate social, cultural or political spheres of life? And, on the other hand, how do people engage with, accede to, negotiate or contest this as they explore and invent new ways of connecting with each other through and around media? The features of this emerging participation paradigm of audience research are examined in this article.

Objective: To assess the effect of second generation, home based telehealth on health related quality of life, anxiety, and depressive symptoms over 12 months in patients with long term conditions.\ud \ud Design: A study of patient reported outcomes (the Whole Systems Demonstrator telehealth questionnaire study; baseline n=1573) was nested in a pragmatic, cluster randomised trial of telehealth (the Whole Systems Demonstrator telehealth trial, n=3230). General practice was the unit of randomisation, and telehealth was compared with usual care. Data were collected at baseline, four months (short term), and 12 months (long term). Primary intention to treat analyses tested treatment effectiveness; multilevel models controlled for clustering by general practice and a range of covariates. Analyses were conducted for 759 participants who completed questionnaire measures at all three time points (complete case cohort) and 1201 who completed the baseline assessment plus at least one other assessment (available case cohort). Secondary per protocol analyses tested treatment efficacy and included 633 and 1108 participants in the complete case and available case cohorts, respectively.\ud \ud Setting: Provision of primary and secondary care via general practices, specialist nurses, and hospital clinics in three diverse regions of England (Cornwall, Kent, and Newham), with established integrated health and social care systems.\ud \ud Participants: Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, or heart failure recruited between May 2008 and December 2009.\ud \ud Main outcome measures: Generic, health related quality of life (assessed by physical and mental health component scores of the SF-12, and the EQ-5D), anxiety (assessed by the six item Brief State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), and depressive symptoms (assessed by the 10 item Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale).\ud \ud Results: In the intention to treat analyses, differences between treatment groups were small and non-significant for all outcomes in the complete case (0.480≤P≤0.904) or available case (0.181≤P≤0.905) cohorts. The magnitude of differences between trial arms did not reach the trial defined, minimal clinically important difference (0.3 standardised mean difference) for any outcome in either cohort at four or 12 months. Per protocol analyses replicated the primary analyses; the main effect of trial arm (telehealth v usual care) was non-significant for any outcome (complete case cohort 0.273≤P≤0.761; available case cohort 0.145≤P≤0.696).\ud \ud Conclusions: Second generation, home based telehealth as implemented in the Whole Systems Demonstrator Evaluation was not effective or efficacious compared with usual care only. Telehealth did not improve quality of life or psychological outcomes for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, or heart failure over 12 months. The findings suggest that concerns about potentially deleterious effect of telehealth are unfounded for most patients.\ud \ud Trial Registration: ISRCTN43002091.

Although research findings have been equivocal as to whether the use of social networking sites (SNSs) increases experiences of online risk among children, the affordances of SNS lend support to this possibility, attracting much policy and public concern. The present article examines whether the use of such services increases the risks that children and young people encounter by analyzing data from a random stratified sample of approximately 1000 internet-using children aged 9-16 years in each of 25 European countries. Four hypotheses were formulated and tested. The first hypothesis, namely that children who use social networking sites will encounter more risks online than those who do not, is supported by the data. The second hypothesis stated that SNS users with more digital competence will encounter more online risk than those with less competence; this was also supported, despite being counter to common assumptions. Thirdly, we hypothesized that SNS users with more risky SNS practices (e.g. a public profile, displaying identifying information, with a very large number of contacts) will encounter more online risk than those with fewer risky practices: this too was supported by the data; thus what matters for risk is how SNS are used, a useful point for awareness-raising initiatives. The fourth hypothesis stated that SNS users with more digital competence in using the internet will experience less harm associated with online risk. The data did not support this hypothesis, since digital competence did not reduce the probability of children saying that they have been bothered or upset by something on the internet. Finally, the study found that, although this had not been predicted, whether or not risks are experienced as harmful depends on the specific relation between risks and platforms (website, instant messaging, gaming or social networking). We call on future research to explore how particular affordances sustain particular communicative conditions and, in turn, are responded to differently by children. The research and policy implications of the findings are discussed.

Objective To examine the costs and cost effectiveness of telehealth in addition to standard support and treatment, compared with standard support and treatment. Design Economic evaluation nested in a pragmatic, cluster randomised controlled trial. Setting Community based telehealth intervention in three local authority areas in England. Participants 3230 people with a long term condition (heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or diabetes) were recruited into the Whole Systems Demonstrator telehealth trial between May 2008 and December 2009. Of participants taking part in the Whole Systems Demonstrator telehealth questionnaire study examining acceptability, effectiveness, and cost effectiveness, 845 were randomised to telehealth and 728 to usual care. Interventions Intervention participants received a package of telehealth equipment and monitoring services for 12 months, in addition to the standard health and social care services available in their area. Controls received usual health and social care. Main outcome measure Primary outcome for the cost effectiveness analysis was incremental cost per quality adjusted life year (QALY) gained. Results We undertook net benefit analyses of costs and outcomes for 965 patients (534 receiving telehealth; 431 usual care). The adjusted mean difference in QALY gain between groups at 12 months was 0.012. Total health and social care costs (including direct costs of the intervention) for the three months before 12 month interview were £1390 (€1610; $2150) and £1596 for the usual care and telehealth groups, respectively. Cost effectiveness acceptability curves were generated to examine decision uncertainty in the analysis surrounding the value of the cost effectiveness threshold. The incremental cost per QALY of telehealth when added to usual care was £92 000. With this amount, the probability of cost effectiveness was low (11% at willingness to pay threshold of £30 000; >50% only if the threshold exceeded about £90 000). In sensitivity analyses, telehealth costs remained slightly (non-significantly) higher than usual care costs, even after assuming that equipment prices fell by 80% or telehealth services operated at maximum capacity. However, the most optimistic scenario (combining reduced equipment prices with maximum operating capacity) eliminated this group difference (cost effectiveness ratio £12 000 per QALY). Conclusions The QALY gain by patients using telehealth in addition to usual care was similar to that by patients receiving usual care only, and total costs associated with the telehealth intervention were higher. Telehealth does not seem to be a cost effective addition to standard support and treatment. Trial registration ISRCTN43002091.

This article proposes an interactive approach to the analysis of compositional elements of still visuals. This approach stems from the argument that the rhetorical efficiency of images is related less to their content per se than to how this content is displayed and organised. As such, we start from the premise that images are "active," performing the visual equivalent of speech-acts (i.e., "image-acts") through which they construct the world and its impact upon their viewers. In their turn, the audiences of an image participate in interpreting its meaning and responding to its particular "action." This leads us to formulate a method based on the active engagement of researchers with the image at hand. We suggest a classification of compositional elements and identify ways in which such elements can be analyzed and interpreted, thus casting light on the range of rhetorical and ideological effects that images so often achieve.