This title was first published in 2001. An investigation of new forms of interaction and communic... more This title was first published in 2001. An investigation of new forms of interaction and communication. The essays address theoretical contributions and insights which may assist us in the understanding of modern society inhabited by a wide range of new media. In order to answer questions on this subject, the text suggests a "structural hermeneutic" - a view on the public as agents embedded in their lifeworlds (rather than as consumers and receivers), who play a large part in reproducing structural and distanciated processes of meaning. The essays explore the implications of such daily practices as making a telephone call or sending an email, receiving money from a bank machine using a credit card, or retrieving information from a Web site. Each of these practices reproduce patterns of information and communication practices, which reshape communication processes in society. The essays examine the relationship between media change and social change, with particular emphasis on their contribution to social interaction in everyday life and in the reproduction of social systems.
This retrospective look at CPSR will focus on democracy as the core value most central to its mis... more This retrospective look at CPSR will focus on democracy as the core value most central to its mission throughout its 40-year history, a value it shared from the outset with the tradition of participatory design (PD) (and which, incidentally, was the subject of a plenary talk given by the author at CPSR's annual meeting in Seattle, WA in 1993). The implications of this value commitment for CPSR's own activist efforts globally, as well as PD practice locally/organizationally, are explored, drawing on one of CPSR's key activist projects from 1998, the One Planet, One Net initiative.
... 198724. Lievrouw, Leah A., Rogers, Everett M., Lowe, Charles U. and Nadel, Edward. 1987. Tria... more ... 198724. Lievrouw, Leah A., Rogers, Everett M., Lowe, Charles U. and Nadel, Edward. 1987. Triangulation as a research strategy for identifying invisible colleges among biomedical scientists. Social Networks , 9(Winter): 21748. ...
This panel brings together several presentations on the topic of information failure, particularl... more This panel brings together several presentations on the topic of information failure, particularly through tropes of noise, misinformation, error, and breakdown. The four speakers will follow a "Pecha-Kucha" style of presentation (thirty slides at twenty seconds a slide) followed by group discussion. Leah Lievrouw will consider noise by linking recent discussions of big data with information systems theorists Bertalanffy, Shannon, and von Foerster. Colin Doty will discuss misinformation within recent debates over vaccine safety. Patrick Keilty will provide a textual analysis of Desk Set (1957) to demonstrate the way that error is gendered female in representations of technology. Lastly, Lilly Nguyen will provide a semiotic analysis of technological breakdown, drawing from ethnographic fieldwork of software in Vietnam.
The objective of this portion of the conference is to present and debate works that combine outst... more The objective of this portion of the conference is to present and debate works that combine outstanding aesthetic vision with a commitment to the principles and philosophy of participatory design. Successful proposals will demonstrate both design/artistic merit and the collaborative involvement of designers, lIsers, audiences, and/or other relevant groups. Works may incorporate any forms or genres ofinformationlcommunication technologies or digital media (e.g., sound, still/moving images, touch, space, text, etc.), either alone or combined with other media and/or live performance. "
Since 2010, there has been a deluge of reporting and commentary in the traditional press and onli... more Since 2010, there has been a deluge of reporting and commentary in the traditional press and online about the consequences and implications of WikiLeaks and its activities for journalism, diplomacy, democracy, law, and trust. Reactions to its releases of huge caches of classified documents and diplomatic correspondence throughout 2010 ranged from outrage and borderline hysteria (U.S. politicians Sarah Palin and Senator Joseph Lieberman called for the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange) to bemused skepticism ("It would be an exaggeration to say that diplomacy will never be the same again"; "Unpluggable," 2010, p. 34). Somewhere in between, some officials and journalists took a more nuanced view, at least some of the time. While calling for aggressive criminal prosecution of Assange and WikiLeaks, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also praised the high level of professionalism, acute observation, and stylish writing on view in the leaked State Department cables. In a November 2010 Pentagon press briefing, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates observed, "Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest" (Bumiller, 2010, para. 7). In January 2011, Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, defended its publication of classified documents obtained from WikiLeaks: The idea that mere publication of such a wholesale collection of secrets will make other countries less willing to do business with our diplomats seems to me questionable.. .. David Sanger, our chief Washington correspondent, told me, "At least so far, the evidence that foreign leaders are no longer talking to American diplomats is scarce. I've heard about nervous jokes at the beginning of meetings. .. but the conversations are happening.. .. American diplomacy has hardly screeched to a halt." (Keller, 2011, p. 46) In September 2011, the WikiLeaks saga took another turn with the unexpurgated release of WikiLeaks' entire remaining inventory of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange and WikiLeaks claimed that the release was inadvertent, blaming it on the publication of the decryption key to the file containing the cables in a book by David Leigh, a journalist for The Guardian, and Luke Harding.
University of California, Los Angeles eBooks, 1998
This study examines two models of information seeking between individuals and formalized informat... more This study examines two models of information seeking between individuals and formalized information systems. The individuals are competent social beings who seek meaningful, contextualized information. The "information system" is an efficiency-oriented, regularized set of behaviors providing information services in the form of computerized retrieval applications or human representatives of a professionalized information-providing group. These professional work functions may exercise authority over the information-seeking individual, in what is called here the traditional model, or follow an alternative model to work cooperatively to achieve mutually-acceptable goals. The proposed new model defines three constructs: relational status, language use, and discursive interaction. These constructs are operationalized as content variables reflecting semantic and pragmatic language, belief, clarification, shared knowledge, and private knowledge and three contextual variables based on the behavior of the speakers: addressing the seeker's goal, neutral utterances, or speaking from an authority role. A content analysis of sixteen encounters between systems and seekers provided the raw data for an empirical study. A discriminant analysis of these data found two clearly defined groups of cases that correspond to high and low quality interactions. The high group is based on the alternative model. It favors interpretive interaction, has qualities of pragmatic language use, internal discursive coherency, and demonstrated clarification of unfamiliar terms, all in the context of the seeker's goal-directed information seeking. The low quality group, founded on the traditional model, reflected language behaviors that separate belief statements from semantic ones and relies predominantly on speakers' private knowledge. This group's discourse was not internally coherent. At times the system representative spoke from the authority of his role (e.g., technician, teacher, police) and blocked attempts to disambiguate language and equalize relationships. The communication in these situations failed entirely or direction of the interaction was taken over by the system participant.
The authors identify three elements which will influence California's future. First, demographic ... more The authors identify three elements which will influence California's future. First, demographic shifts in the state's population have altered California's ethnic and cultural foundations. Second, the state educational system does not seem prepared to train larger numbers for information work, especially members of its growing ethnic population. Third, almost half the state's workforce is now employed in information-oriented work, whether in the industrial, service, or agricultural sectors. Theauthors demonstrate that the interaction of these elements has profound implications for California's development.
In this paper, we introduce and discuss an econometric measure that has not been widely applied i... more In this paper, we introduce and discuss an econometric measure that has not been widely applied in media research beyond broadcasting, but which may offer insights into the ways that people perceive and value other services and channels that comprise today’s multimedia environment. Willingness to pay (WTP) methodology is a technique for assessing individuals’ qualitative evaluation of goods, services, or other activities, particularly public goods. We apply and explore the use of WTP techniques to study the reception value of books and reading, particularly vis a vis electronic media. We hypothesize that readers’ reception value for books and reading is relatively strong compared with other media that compete for their attention and budgets. We present a case study that demonstrates the application of WTP to a medium, printed books, that traditionally has been considered to have the characteristics of both a market good and a public good. The results generally support the main hypothesis, and the study suggests that WTP is indeed a useful measure of reception value.
The main premise of this article is that in information societies generally, and in virtual socia... more The main premise of this article is that in information societies generally, and in virtual social contexts particularly, a distinctive style of interaction to facilitate the communication of difference, heterotopic communication, has emerged. It rests on two cultural foundations: an ideological belief in the positive, socially integrating power of communication, and a prevailing ethic of instrumental rationality,subjective individualism, and strategicallypracticed self-interest. The former is demonstrated by the use of simulation and spectacle as sources of information; exhibitionism/voyeurism as a communicative style; and the awareness of surveillance. The latter is seen in the competitive use of knowledge as a commodity; a surface globalism masking deep parochialism; lateral as well as vertical information inequity; and the use of public versus private as strategies for engagement rather than as spaces. Those who engage in heterotopic communication resort to their ª own devicesº both in the sense of personal agendas, strategies, interests, and interpretations, and in the form of the telecommunication tools that help realize them. These personal and technological devices allow individuals with the right educational and technical resources to avoid exposure to disagreement, difference, or other information that does not serve their direct purposes or re¯ect their particular views of the world; yet they also help convey the appearance of openness, availability, and cooperation. This style of interaction is used strategically in combination with information and communication technologies to gain social or economic advantages, but
In the past 20 years, ‘new media’ has emerged as one of the most dynamic research fronts in media... more In the past 20 years, ‘new media’ has emerged as one of the most dynamic research fronts in media and communication, addressing the diversity and proliferation of new information and communication technologies and their social contexts. This growing field is both international and transdisciplinary. The editors have mined a rich collection of published material covering the historical, economic, social and behavioral issues at stake to trace the development and implications of new media
In this paper, three features of the Internet/new media that have developed over the last decade ... more 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
This title was first published in 2001. An investigation of new forms of interaction and communic... more This title was first published in 2001. An investigation of new forms of interaction and communication. The essays address theoretical contributions and insights which may assist us in the understanding of modern society inhabited by a wide range of new media. In order to answer questions on this subject, the text suggests a "structural hermeneutic" - a view on the public as agents embedded in their lifeworlds (rather than as consumers and receivers), who play a large part in reproducing structural and distanciated processes of meaning. The essays explore the implications of such daily practices as making a telephone call or sending an email, receiving money from a bank machine using a credit card, or retrieving information from a Web site. Each of these practices reproduce patterns of information and communication practices, which reshape communication processes in society. The essays examine the relationship between media change and social change, with particular emphasis on their contribution to social interaction in everyday life and in the reproduction of social systems.
This retrospective look at CPSR will focus on democracy as the core value most central to its mis... more This retrospective look at CPSR will focus on democracy as the core value most central to its mission throughout its 40-year history, a value it shared from the outset with the tradition of participatory design (PD) (and which, incidentally, was the subject of a plenary talk given by the author at CPSR's annual meeting in Seattle, WA in 1993). The implications of this value commitment for CPSR's own activist efforts globally, as well as PD practice locally/organizationally, are explored, drawing on one of CPSR's key activist projects from 1998, the One Planet, One Net initiative.
... 198724. Lievrouw, Leah A., Rogers, Everett M., Lowe, Charles U. and Nadel, Edward. 1987. Tria... more ... 198724. Lievrouw, Leah A., Rogers, Everett M., Lowe, Charles U. and Nadel, Edward. 1987. Triangulation as a research strategy for identifying invisible colleges among biomedical scientists. Social Networks , 9(Winter): 21748. ...
This panel brings together several presentations on the topic of information failure, particularl... more This panel brings together several presentations on the topic of information failure, particularly through tropes of noise, misinformation, error, and breakdown. The four speakers will follow a "Pecha-Kucha" style of presentation (thirty slides at twenty seconds a slide) followed by group discussion. Leah Lievrouw will consider noise by linking recent discussions of big data with information systems theorists Bertalanffy, Shannon, and von Foerster. Colin Doty will discuss misinformation within recent debates over vaccine safety. Patrick Keilty will provide a textual analysis of Desk Set (1957) to demonstrate the way that error is gendered female in representations of technology. Lastly, Lilly Nguyen will provide a semiotic analysis of technological breakdown, drawing from ethnographic fieldwork of software in Vietnam.
The objective of this portion of the conference is to present and debate works that combine outst... more The objective of this portion of the conference is to present and debate works that combine outstanding aesthetic vision with a commitment to the principles and philosophy of participatory design. Successful proposals will demonstrate both design/artistic merit and the collaborative involvement of designers, lIsers, audiences, and/or other relevant groups. Works may incorporate any forms or genres ofinformationlcommunication technologies or digital media (e.g., sound, still/moving images, touch, space, text, etc.), either alone or combined with other media and/or live performance. "
Since 2010, there has been a deluge of reporting and commentary in the traditional press and onli... more Since 2010, there has been a deluge of reporting and commentary in the traditional press and online about the consequences and implications of WikiLeaks and its activities for journalism, diplomacy, democracy, law, and trust. Reactions to its releases of huge caches of classified documents and diplomatic correspondence throughout 2010 ranged from outrage and borderline hysteria (U.S. politicians Sarah Palin and Senator Joseph Lieberman called for the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange) to bemused skepticism ("It would be an exaggeration to say that diplomacy will never be the same again"; "Unpluggable," 2010, p. 34). Somewhere in between, some officials and journalists took a more nuanced view, at least some of the time. While calling for aggressive criminal prosecution of Assange and WikiLeaks, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also praised the high level of professionalism, acute observation, and stylish writing on view in the leaked State Department cables. In a November 2010 Pentagon press briefing, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates observed, "Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest" (Bumiller, 2010, para. 7). In January 2011, Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, defended its publication of classified documents obtained from WikiLeaks: The idea that mere publication of such a wholesale collection of secrets will make other countries less willing to do business with our diplomats seems to me questionable.. .. David Sanger, our chief Washington correspondent, told me, "At least so far, the evidence that foreign leaders are no longer talking to American diplomats is scarce. I've heard about nervous jokes at the beginning of meetings. .. but the conversations are happening.. .. American diplomacy has hardly screeched to a halt." (Keller, 2011, p. 46) In September 2011, the WikiLeaks saga took another turn with the unexpurgated release of WikiLeaks' entire remaining inventory of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange and WikiLeaks claimed that the release was inadvertent, blaming it on the publication of the decryption key to the file containing the cables in a book by David Leigh, a journalist for The Guardian, and Luke Harding.
University of California, Los Angeles eBooks, 1998
This study examines two models of information seeking between individuals and formalized informat... more This study examines two models of information seeking between individuals and formalized information systems. The individuals are competent social beings who seek meaningful, contextualized information. The "information system" is an efficiency-oriented, regularized set of behaviors providing information services in the form of computerized retrieval applications or human representatives of a professionalized information-providing group. These professional work functions may exercise authority over the information-seeking individual, in what is called here the traditional model, or follow an alternative model to work cooperatively to achieve mutually-acceptable goals. The proposed new model defines three constructs: relational status, language use, and discursive interaction. These constructs are operationalized as content variables reflecting semantic and pragmatic language, belief, clarification, shared knowledge, and private knowledge and three contextual variables based on the behavior of the speakers: addressing the seeker's goal, neutral utterances, or speaking from an authority role. A content analysis of sixteen encounters between systems and seekers provided the raw data for an empirical study. A discriminant analysis of these data found two clearly defined groups of cases that correspond to high and low quality interactions. The high group is based on the alternative model. It favors interpretive interaction, has qualities of pragmatic language use, internal discursive coherency, and demonstrated clarification of unfamiliar terms, all in the context of the seeker's goal-directed information seeking. The low quality group, founded on the traditional model, reflected language behaviors that separate belief statements from semantic ones and relies predominantly on speakers' private knowledge. This group's discourse was not internally coherent. At times the system representative spoke from the authority of his role (e.g., technician, teacher, police) and blocked attempts to disambiguate language and equalize relationships. The communication in these situations failed entirely or direction of the interaction was taken over by the system participant.
The authors identify three elements which will influence California's future. First, demographic ... more The authors identify three elements which will influence California's future. First, demographic shifts in the state's population have altered California's ethnic and cultural foundations. Second, the state educational system does not seem prepared to train larger numbers for information work, especially members of its growing ethnic population. Third, almost half the state's workforce is now employed in information-oriented work, whether in the industrial, service, or agricultural sectors. Theauthors demonstrate that the interaction of these elements has profound implications for California's development.
In this paper, we introduce and discuss an econometric measure that has not been widely applied i... more In this paper, we introduce and discuss an econometric measure that has not been widely applied in media research beyond broadcasting, but which may offer insights into the ways that people perceive and value other services and channels that comprise today’s multimedia environment. Willingness to pay (WTP) methodology is a technique for assessing individuals’ qualitative evaluation of goods, services, or other activities, particularly public goods. We apply and explore the use of WTP techniques to study the reception value of books and reading, particularly vis a vis electronic media. We hypothesize that readers’ reception value for books and reading is relatively strong compared with other media that compete for their attention and budgets. We present a case study that demonstrates the application of WTP to a medium, printed books, that traditionally has been considered to have the characteristics of both a market good and a public good. The results generally support the main hypothesis, and the study suggests that WTP is indeed a useful measure of reception value.
The main premise of this article is that in information societies generally, and in virtual socia... more The main premise of this article is that in information societies generally, and in virtual social contexts particularly, a distinctive style of interaction to facilitate the communication of difference, heterotopic communication, has emerged. It rests on two cultural foundations: an ideological belief in the positive, socially integrating power of communication, and a prevailing ethic of instrumental rationality,subjective individualism, and strategicallypracticed self-interest. The former is demonstrated by the use of simulation and spectacle as sources of information; exhibitionism/voyeurism as a communicative style; and the awareness of surveillance. The latter is seen in the competitive use of knowledge as a commodity; a surface globalism masking deep parochialism; lateral as well as vertical information inequity; and the use of public versus private as strategies for engagement rather than as spaces. Those who engage in heterotopic communication resort to their ª own devicesº both in the sense of personal agendas, strategies, interests, and interpretations, and in the form of the telecommunication tools that help realize them. These personal and technological devices allow individuals with the right educational and technical resources to avoid exposure to disagreement, difference, or other information that does not serve their direct purposes or re¯ect their particular views of the world; yet they also help convey the appearance of openness, availability, and cooperation. This style of interaction is used strategically in combination with information and communication technologies to gain social or economic advantages, but
In the past 20 years, ‘new media’ has emerged as one of the most dynamic research fronts in media... more In the past 20 years, ‘new media’ has emerged as one of the most dynamic research fronts in media and communication, addressing the diversity and proliferation of new information and communication technologies and their social contexts. This growing field is both international and transdisciplinary. The editors have mined a rich collection of published material covering the historical, economic, social and behavioral issues at stake to trace the development and implications of new media
In this paper, three features of the Internet/new media that have developed over the last decade ... more 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
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