Media Life Cycle and Consumer-Generated Innovation

This study examines the innovation in communication media, based on empirical survey results from five countries. First, the authors create a general framework of the media life cycle by exploring the replacement of communication media used in daily life. The shift from voice communications to mobile e-mailing is at the forefront of the media life cycle in the personal communication area. This framework also implies future media replacements in other countries. Second, by comparing two empirical surveys, done in 2002 and 2003, of communication means used among Japanese family relations, the authors discover that certain consumer clusters lead in the innovation of communication media. This framework and discovery can be useful to deal with the vacuum between conventional media studies and the latest information technology.

Creative London? Investigating New Modalities of Work in the Cultural Industries

This chapter considers the emergence of the discourse of creativity in contemporary economic, political, and social life, and the characteristics of emerging labour markets in the cultural industries. In particular it is concerned with analysing the working experiences of a number of individuals working in the cultural industries in London. Using a critical theoretical framework of understanding, it examines the importance of cultural capital, subjectivisation, governmentality, network sociality, and individualization as key concepts for understanding the experience of labour in the creative economy. This chapter considers how creative individuals negotiate the precarious, largely freelance, deregulated and de-unionised terrain of contemporary work. As the economic becomes increasingly inflected by the cultural in contemporary social life, the terrain of experience of individuals working in these expanding sectors has been neglected in cultural studies. This chapter seeks to critically intervene in this area, arguing that the “creative” turn in contemporary discourse can be seen to mask emergent inequalities and exploitative practices in the post-industrial employment landscape.

Foreseeing the Future Lifestyle with Digital Music

This chapter aims to explore the future trajectory of enjoying digital music entertainment among consumers comparing the characteristics of the usage patterns of digital music appliances in the U.S. and those in Japan. As the first step of this research, the author conducted two empirical surveys in the U.S. and Japan, and found some basic differences in the usage patterns of a variety of digital music appliances. Next, a series of ethnographical research based on focus-group interviews with Japanese young women was done and some interesting reasons of the differences were discovered. In Japan, sharing the experiences of listening to the latest hit songs with friends by playing them with mobile phones that have the high quality, ring tone functions can be a new way of enjoying music contents, while hard-disk music players like iPod have become a de facto standard of the digital music appliances in the world.

Working at Home

This chapter explores the work-family interface by investigating home as a potential work space that must still accommodate the social and leisure needs of household members. By examining spatial patterns of household Internet location, this chapter investigates the prevalence of paid work in Canadian homes, illustrates how household spaces are reorganized to accommodate the computer/Internet, and examines how the location of Internet access is situated within sociocultural contexts of the household and how this might affect potential work-from-home scenarios. Data collected from a triangulation of methods—surveys, interviews and in-home observation—also illustrate the relevance of household Internet location from an organizational perspective. The relationship between individuals and business organizations is interactive and integrative, and the home workplace is complex and blurred with other daily social realities, which influence effective work-at-home strategies and potentially shapes productivity and efficiency.

Organizing Across Distances

This chapter examines the use of computer chat technologies for virtual team meetings. The use of geographically dispersed (i.e., virtual) teams is a growing phenomenon in modern organizations. Although a variety of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been used to conduct virtual team meetings, one technology, synchronous computer chat, has not been exploited to its fullest potential. This chapter discusses some of research findings related to effective virtual teams and examines some structural features of chat as they relate to virtual meetings. Based on these characteristics, I offer tips for using chat as an effective tool for distant collaboration.

Screening in High Standard

This chapter introduces the innovation of television by looking at the development of high definition television (HDTV). It argues that the way that the interaction of technological, industrial, and political actors has been crucial in several stages of the development of this innovation. Central question is how industry, broadcasters, and consumers have debated and defined a medium and consequently redefine a medium through innovations. The complexity and the way actors have played a part within the changing media environment is analyzed by looking at the necessity for technological change of the television standard, by relating the media film and television in transition from analogue to digital and by studying case studies of political debates and policy in Europe and the United States.

Access to the Living Room

Whereas the advent of interactive TV has been discussed as one of the key added values of digitization and convergence of “old” and “new media” for years, current marketing strategies of the big players in the Dutch telecommunications market avoid the term interactivity. Providers promise users “more fun” and increased ease of media consumption when connected digitally to the media world by offering broadband Internet, cable television, and telephone services in one package. They aim at another added quality of interactive media consumption: gaining access to the living room means gaining access to consumption patterns that can be traced back to the individual consumer. This article discusses media convergence and the current development of interactive television in the context of the reconfiguration of the relation between producers and consumers in the new online economy.

Games and Advertisement

The use of digital games for the promotion of goods and services is becoming more popular with the maturing and penetration of the medium. This chapter analyzes the use of advertisement in games and seeks to answer in which way brands are integrated in interactive play. The branding of virtual worlds offers a completely new range of opportunities for advertisers to create a web of brands, and it is the usage of marketing through games that differs considerably. This chapter offers a categorization of advergames and will address the use of advergames from a developmental perspective, differing between commercial games with in-game advertisement and dedicated advergames. Where TV commercials, print ads, and the World Wide Web rely on representation for the conveying of their message, advergames are able to add the extra dimension of simulation as a mode of representation, resulting in various interesting game designs.

The Right of Interpretation

This chapter is an empirical research report describing the diffusion of mobile camera phones and picture mail services in Japan between the years 1997 and 2005, based on annual consumer surveys conducted by Ericsson Consumer & Enterprise Lab. A general framework based on sociocultural values and attitudes to telecom for describing the telecom market from a consumer perspective is presented. This framework is then used to put different consumer life stage segments in relation to each other in respect to product diffusion. The change over time of attitudes and behavior is described, and the conclusion is drawn that the product terminology spontaneously created by consumers themselves in order to relate to the product is an important step for mass market diffusion. Furthermore, the group of people who develop this terminology becomes a crucial catalyst for diffusion—and in the Japanese case presented here consists of female students.

Bringing on the Next Billion Online

This chapter classifies the types of partnerships employed to increase Internet demand in emerging markets. This classification system, or taxonomy, is based on more than 60 in-depth interviews, about 32 partnerships, designed to create Internet demand in Mexico. The taxonomy first classifies the partnerships into three broad categories based on the number of barriers to Internet usage the partnership was designed to overcome: one, two, or three. The partnerships are then classified into six subcategories based on the specific barrier or combination of barriers to Internet usage the partnership sought to overcome. The six subcategories of the taxonomy are: (1) lack of funds; (2) lack of awareness; (3) lack of uses; (4) lack of funds and lack of uses; (5) lack of funds and lack of infrastructure; and (6) lack of funds, lack of uses, and lack of infrastructure. This taxonomy gives empirical meaning and enables further analysis of this unique and increasingly popular type of partnership.