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In this article we examine how teens in Norway navigate the many options for mediated communication when interacting with parents and grandparents. Drawing on workshop discussions with mid-adolescents, we suggest that there is a digital gap in this cross-generation communication despite high Information and Communication Technology (ICT) penetration in the market. The gap appears to be a manifestation of the social dynamic at play when reshaping the relationship between adolescents and their caregivers. This dynamic includes both centrifugal and centripetal forces. Applying the perspective of relational dialectics, we elaborate on how these forces unfold in the domestication of an increasingly complex set of communication tools referred to as polymedia. The empirical analysis suggests that teens assess the tools differently depending on if it is for interaction with parents or grandparents. This is also related to whether the mediated communication sessions are instrumentally or expressively skewed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses issues related to how to enable broadest possible innovative activities by infrastructural technology design. The authors focus on the development of high level services based on mobile telecommunication technologies. The focus of their analysis is how features of the technology enable or constrain innovations. They do so by looking at embryos of the Mobile Internet (primarily the Norwegian CPA platform, but also two pre-CPA platforms in Norway and Japan's i-mode) through the concepts of end-to-end architecture, programmability of terminals and generativity. This analysis illustrates that the change from closed infrastructures like MobilInfo and SMSinfo to more open ones like CPA and i-mode increased the speed and range of innovations substantially. At the same time the differences between CPA and i-mode regarding programmability of terminals, and the billing service provided by the CPA network enabling the billing of individual transactions, also contributed to basically the same speed and range of innovations around CPA as i-mode in spite of the huge differences in investments into the networks made by the owners. The analysis also points out important differences between the Internet and the existing Mobile Internet regarding technological constrains on innovations. It points out important ways in which powerful actors' strategies inhibit innovations and how they embed their strategies into the technology and creates technological barriers for innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mobile Internet (MI) has been hyped as the next big thing by telecom operators, handset manufacturers, and content providers. However, recent studies indicate that the usage of Internet via mobile phones has remained quite flat. The authors inquire into this discrepancy by focusing on actual usage of the MI and the motivating factors behind its use. Based on focus-group interviews in Norway and Hungary, they argue that MI usage is interrelated with and is an extension of the personal computer (PC)-based Internet. The key motivation behind MI use is to attain information in situations in which the PC is out of reach. In effect, MI has not led to the development of new usages. The expectation that the development of new killer applications will lead to an explosion of new usage is therefore misguided. MI usage is and will perhaps continue to be a mere extension of PC-based Internet usage-and such use activities are the very nature of MI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]