Online Versus Offline in the United States: Are the Media Shrinking?

We find that combined revenues for 10 major media in the United States have steadily declined as a proportion of overall economic activity or gross domestic product (GDP) from 1999 to at least 2009 (the latest year for which we have complete data). For individual media, we find a generally consistent pattern in which increasing revenues from Internet distribution are exceeded by declines in revenues from established distribution channels, with the exception of television and video games, whose revenues have so far kept pace with GDP. We also report a marked overall shift from advertiser to direct payment support for the media industries over this period. We consider four possible reasons for these revenue trends: shifts in consumer media usage, reduced appropriability due to more difficult copyright protection, inadequate advertising business models, and reduced costs due to more efficient Internet distribution. Our analysis suggests we may be entering an era of a declining size of media industries in terms of conventional measures, but not necessarily a falling supply of media products themselves.     

Eozoön: debunking the dawn animal

Discovered in the nineteenth century by the Canadian Geological Survey, the Eozo?n canadense fossil, or 'dawn animal of Canada', created a sensation in the geological community. Only a few initially challenged its status as a fossil organism, including two professors in the remote Irish town of Galway. These men claimed that Eozo?n was nothing more than a mineral formation and did not represent the discovery of the primordial organism. Supporters of Eozo?n closed ranks and a heated debate soon broke out in a range of periodicals. The story of Eozo?n lays bare the construction of scientific credibility, a process that was threatened in the second half of the nineteenth century by the proliferation of popular science.     

At the Intersection of the Digital Divide and the Knowledge Gap: Do Knowledge Domains and Measures Matter?

This study reports on knowledge gain, examined through three separate measures (free recall, comprehension and recognition) among high- and low-education groups who used two types of news media (newspaper vs. online) to consume two kinds of news (public affairs vs. entertainment). Results (n = 123) confirm the knowledge gap and validate concerns about the digital divide. Yet three different knowledge acquisition measures generated dissimilar findings: strong education effects for free recall, strong media format effects for recognition, and strong interaction effects between education and media format for comprehension. The implications of these inconsistencies are considered for measuring knowledge gaps in future research.     

ICT Research,the New Economy,and the Evolving Discipline of Economics: Back to the Future?

Economics-related ICT research has moved from the fringes of the discipline to penetrate all of its branches. It is, therefore, not a separate economics subdiscipline. It is also unlikely to become part of an “ICT or Internet research” proto-discipline. Instead, it should be seen as only one part of a bigger agenda toward a proper “information and knowledge economics” and possibly a future proto-discipline of a “unified theory of information and knowledge” or a meta-discipline of information sciences.     

Hacking the brain: brain–computer interfacing technology and the ethics of neurosecurity

Brain–computer interfacing technologies are used as assistive technologies for patients as well as healthy subjects to control devices solely by brain activity. Yet the risks associated with the misuse of these technologies remain largely unexplored. Recent findings have shown that BCIs are potentially vulnerable to cybercriminality. This opens the prospect of “neurocrime”: extending the range of computer-crime to neural devices. This paper explores a type of neurocrime that we call brain-hacking as it aims at the illicit access to and manipulation of neural information and computation. As neural computation underlies cognition, behavior and our self-determination as persons, a careful analysis of the emerging risks of malicious brain-hacking is paramount, and ethical safeguards against these risks should be considered early in design and regulation. This contribution is aimed at raising awareness of the emerging risk of malicious brain-hacking and takes a first step in developing an ethical and legal reflection on those risks.     

Twiplomacy in the age of Donald Trump: Is the diplomatic code changing?

This study employs digital methods in conjunction with traditional content and discourse analyses to explore how the US President Donald Trump conducts diplomacy on Twitter and how, if at all, diplomatic entities around the world engage in diplomatic exchanges with him. The results confirm speculations that Trump’s diplomatic communication on Twitter disrupts traditional codes of diplomatic language but show little evidence that new codes of diplomatic interactions on social media are being constructed, given that other diplomatic entities around the world mostly remain within the confines of traditional notions of diplomacy in (not) communicating with Trump on Twitter.     

Perspective: Flicking with flow: Can microfluidics revolutionize the cancer research?

According to the World Health Organization, cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Cancer research, in its all facets, is truly interdisciplinary in nature, cutting across the fields of fundamental and applied sciences, as well as biomedical engineering. In recent years, microfluidics has been applied successfully in cancer research. There remain, however, many elusive features of this disease, where microfluidic systems could throw new lights. In addition, some inherent features of microfluidic systems remain unexploited in cancer research. In this article, we first briefly review the advancement of microfluidics in cancer biology. We then describe the biophysical aspects of cancer and outline how microfluidic system could be useful in developing a deeper understanding on the underlying mechanisms. We next illustrate the effects of the confined environment of microchannel on cellular dynamics and argue that the tissue microconfinement could be a crucial facet in tumor development. Lastly, we attempt to highlight some of the most important problems in cancer biology, to inspire next level of microfluidic applications in cancer research.     

“We power democracy”: Exploring the promises of the political data analytics industry

Data-driven campaigning has been in the spotlight over several years. Yet, we still have a limited understanding of political data analytics companies: how they envision data analytics and voter targeting, their role in electoral processes and what promises they make to their clients. This article focuses on the way in which such issues are conceived of in the marketing rhetoric of the political data analytics industry. Drawing on a sample of 19 political data analytics companies it systematically explores the ways in which data analytics is envisioned and marketed as a powerful tool in electoral processes, exposing a fundamental disconnect between scholarly discourse on the one hand – often critical of the claims of these companies about the efficacy of their methods – and a highly functionary data imaginary on the other hand, actively fostered by the political data-analytics industry and the media.     

Pandemic in print: the spread of influenza in the Fin de Siècle

The rapid spread of the 1889-1890 influenza epidemic was widely reported in the periodical press. As Londoners read that another European capital had succumbed, they were struck that the illness was not only travelling as fast as the news, but was also moving along the same routes. Although medical science quickly resolved that a germ was the cause of the illness, its mild nature but widespread social impact lead many to suspect that it was actually caused by newspaper hype. This link between the press and the illness made the epidemic seem a curious symptom of the modern communications technologies that increasingly defined the age.     

Corporate dynamic transparency: the new ICT-driven ethics?

The term “corporate transparency” is frequently used in scholarly discussions of business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR); however, it remains a volatile and imprecise term, often defined incompletely as “information disclosure” accomplished through standardized reporting. Based on the results of empirical studies of organizational behaviors, this paper identifies a new set of managerial practices based on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and particularly Internet-based tools. These practices are resulting in what can be termed “dynamic transparency.” ICT allows for an informational environment characterized by two-way exchange between corporations and their stakeholders, which fosters a more collaborative marketplace. It is proposed that such dynamic information sharing, conducted by means of ICT, drives organizations to display greater openness and accountability, and more transparent operations, which benefit both the corporations and their constituents. One of the most important outcomes that will accrue to consumers and other individuals is the “right to know,” especially about corporate strategies and activities that might directly affect their quality of life. This paper demonstrates that dynamic transparency is more desirable and more effective than the more common “static transparency” where firms’ information disclosure is one-way, usually in response to government regulation. We present three ethical arguments to justify the implementation by business firms of dynamic transparency and demonstrate that their doing so is related to CSR and to augment and complement stakeholder engagement and dialogue. The paper concludes with a summary of the possible limits to and the problems involved in the implementation of dynamic transparency for corporations, and suggests some strategies to counter them.     

Biotechnology in the Netherlands: controversy or consensus?

This paper addresses the issue of public perception of modern biotechnology in the Netherlands. Contrary to expectations, data from the 1999 Eurobarometer on biotechnology indicate that the position of the Dutch public in general is rather ambiguous, which is in contrast to many of its neighboring countries. The issue is described in terms of differences between the Netherlands and other European countries on political-economic, social-cultural, or media coverage indicators. On many indicators, the Dutch population differs from that of other European countries, and the Dutch opinion-leading media present a rather balanced perspective on modern biotechnology.     

Report on the conference “information technology: Impact on the way of life”

Expanding computer network technologies have emerged as a popular communication channel for millions of people. Contemporary literature abounds with ideologically biased accounts of on-line interaction that hinder the emergence of a coherent analytical framework. Scholarly work on computer-mediated communicative play remains underdeveloped. Through an empirically grounded theoretical orientation, this study aims to identify and illustrate processes and elements central to the emergence of self in on-line chat environments. By use of an e-mail survey, participant observation, content analysis, and open-ended interviews, the social nature of on-line interaction is illustrated and identified as significantly more than the technological sum of the medium. Findings indicate that through on-line chat-interaction a ''cyberself'' emerges, rooted in a unique form of communication that is disembodied, dislocated, anonymous, multiple-simultaneous, and faceless. Each of these elements introduces new possibilities to the dramatic nature of on-line interaction, which represents a kind of communication ''self-game'' where participants enact a multiplicity of selves.     

Popular evolutionary psychology in the UK: an unusual case of science in the media?

This paper presents findings from quantitative analyses of UK press and print media coverage of evolutionary psychology during the 1990s. It argues that evolutionary psychology presents an interesting case for studies of science in the media in several different ways. First, press coverage of evolutionary psychology was found to be closely linked with the publications of popular books on the subject. Secondly, when compared to coverage of other subjects, a higher proportion of academics and authors wrote about evolutionary psychology in the press, contributing to the development of a scientific controversy in the public domain. Finally, it was found that evolutionary psychology coverage appeared in different areas of the daily press, and was rarely written about by specialist science journalists. The possible reason for these features are then explored, including the boom in popular science publishing during the 1990s, evolutionary psychology's status as a new subject of study and discussion, and the nature of the subject its as theoretically based and with a human, "everyday" subject matter.     

Value co-destruction: Exploring the role of actors’ opportunism in the B2B context

This exploratory study investigates value co-destruction in the Business-to-Business (B2B) context and examines the impact of actors’ opportunistic behaviour on value co-creation. The research undertakes an in-depth case study based approach. It uses data triangulation, where multiple sources of evidence (interviews, conference audio recordings and documents) are collected from the case organisation (a vendor) and its service ecosystem partners in the ICT sector. The partners included in the study are distributors, channel partners, competitors, and customers. B2B alliances are driven by the motivations to maximise strategic value and minimise transaction cost. Thus, using the ecosystem lens, we find that actors’ capabilities (resources and perceived value), vendor's approach to achieving strategic benefit and the channel governance mechanism enable value co-creation. However, using the transaction cost theory lens, we report that actors’ opportunistic behaviour, technological disruptions and new business model challenges lead to value co-destruction (in the form of termination of relationship, conflict and business liquidation). Alliance partners need to evaluate the strategic benefits of collaboration, knowledge sharing, learning, trust building, market expansion and technology sharing, considering partners’ self-serving behaviour driven by transaction cost economies. All ecosystem actors are seeking to develop capabilities, exhibit knowledge differentiators, demonstrate technology leadership, reduce uncertainty and respond to new business model challenges thus causing value co-destruction. Thus, this research is more encompassing because it explores factors that lead to both value co-creation and co-destruction.