on evolving and adapting themselves to the new context, usually by carving out a niche for themselves (Fidler, 1997).
Thus, it is crucial to understand the context where new ICT are spreading. Generally speaking, the emerging of digital technologies is driving the media market towards globalization thanks to the opportunities offered by digitization.
The present chapter aims at providing a conceptual framework for understanding the newest digital communication tools and the practices they encourage, stressing the communication opportunities these technologies offer and the limitations they impose. The first paragraph will outline the framework, presenting the main tools and devices that allow digital communication and the characteristics of the settings they rely on, and providing a four-layer taxonomy for the understanding of new digital communication tools. The second paragraph will present two examples of relevant social practices where ICT play a seminal role, namely journalism (news market) and Internet search engines. It will then explore how they are changing as a consequence of the diffusion of new ICT.
many-to-many ones; it is possible to publish written texts with images and audio and video as well; it is possible to communicate in real time or to send messages that will be read later; it is possible to send and share documents of all kinds; and so on. The features of the communications taking place over the Internet are strongly dependent on the tools employed: different tools impose different constraints and offer different options to interlocutors. (Cantoni & Tardini, 2006, p. 43)
The Internet offers indeed a variety of communication tools. The most common and most diffused one is e-mail. Through e-mail it is possible to send a text message to one or more addressees simultaneously. E-mail is a low-bandwidth, text-based technology, but since it is possible to attach all kinds of files to an e-mail message, it allows also the exchange of multimedia documents between interlocutors. E-mail is mostly used as an asynchronous tool, somehow like normal mail. Two other tools, based on the technology of e-mail, are to be mentioned here: mailing lists and newsgroups, which allow for an easy delivery of a text message to a group of addressees.
Over the Internet it is possible to have also interpersonal synchronous communica- tions, either spoken or written. Chat or messenger systems, for instance, allow for a synchronous exchange of written text messages, while desktop (audio/video) confer- ence systems and VoIP systems allow for spoken interactions over the Internet, where interlocutors can either hear each other (as in VoIP systems and in audioconferences) or even (partially) see each other, as in videoconferences. A more complex interac- tion environment is that of 3D multi-user virtual environments, where subscribed participants are represented in a 3D virtual world (also called metaverse) by an avatar, that is, a virtual character users can move in the virtual space in order to get closer to other participants, chat with them, perform actions allowed by the virtual world, and so on. One of the most known and diffused of such environments is Second Life (http://secondlife.com), a 3D online digital world imagined, created, and owned by its residents. In June 2007 Second Life had more than 7,500,000 residents; its virtual environment has been exploited by companies, businesses, universities, and other institutions to expand and support their commercial, educational, and institutional activities (see, for instance, Kemp & Livingstone, 2006).
Of course, the Internet-based communication tool that, together with e-mail, is the most known and used is the World Wide Web (WWW), a system of Internet serv- ers that support specially formatted documents. The documents are formatted in a markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) that supports links to other documents, as well as graphics, audio, and video files. This means you can jump from one document to another simply by clicking on hot spots. (http://www.
Webopedia.com/TERM/W/World_Wide_Web.html)
The most important “space” of the WWW are the well-known Web sites; however, we will focus here on the main tools and services of so-called Web 2.0, that is, the second generation of the World Wide Web that is focused on the ability for people
to collaborate and share information online. Web 2.0 basically refers to the transition from static HTML Web pages to a more dynamic Web. (http://www.Webopedia.
com/TERM/W/Web_2_point_0.html)
In other terms, rather than aiming at providing users with information, Web 2.0 tools “enable user participation on the Web and manage to recruit a large number of users as authors of new content,” thus obliterating “the clear distinction between information providers and consumers” (Kolbitsch & Maurer, 2006, p. 187). Thus, we can claim that Web 2.0 tools have the potential of moving further the process of socialization of Internet-based communication technologies, by socializing also the activity of publishing on the Web.
The main tools we are referring to here are blogs and wikis. Blogs (short for Web logs) are Web pages that serve as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual or a group, a sort of Web-based electronic diaries that reflect the person- alities of their authors. Blogs are very useful tools for micropublishing, since they
“enable the process of quickly and easily committing thoughts to the Web, offer limited discussion/talkbacks, and syndicate new items to make it easier to keep up without constant checking back” (Hall, 2002). Blogs “are not open to the public for authoring, and there is no well-defined publishing process as in newspapers”
(Kolbitsch & Maurer, 2006, p. 190). The rapid spread of blogs has given rise to the creation of a real network of more or less loosely interconnected Weblogs (so-called blogosphere), where the author of one blog can easily comment on the articles of other blogs.
Strictly connected to blogs is RSS (Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Syndication), an XML format developed to syndicate Web content, thus helping people receive new information items as soon as they are published. Users can subscribe to RSS content, and automatically receive new info, such as news feeds, updates, blog’s items, and the like. Similar in nature is podcasting, the possibility of automatic download of audio files onto an iPod (or other mp3 players) from Web services one has subscribed to.
Wikis (from the Hawaiian word “wiki wiki,” which means “quick”) are collaborative Web sites comprised of the perpetual collective work of many authors. Similar to a blog in structure and logic, a wiki allows anyone to edit, delete or modify content that has been placed on the Web site using a browser interface, including the work of previous authors. (http://www.Webopedia.com/TERM/w/wiki.html)
In a sense, wikis seem to have materialized the dreams of the pioneers of hypertext, such as Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Douglas Engelbart, and of the early hyper- text theorists, that of having a shared environment where anybody could produce, edit, and store any kind of information, thus blurring the distinction between authors and readers. The most famous wiki-based Web site is no doubt the Wikipedia, the
“free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page).
As observed by Kolbitsch and Maurer (2006), “the success of Wikipedia builds on
the tight involvement of the users, the sense of the community, and a dedication to developing a knowledge repository of unprecedented breadth and depth” (p. 195).
Started in 2001, in December 2007 the English version of Wikipedia had more than 2,100,000 articles, the German and French Wikipedias more than 500,000, and also the Polish, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, and Chinese versions had more than 150,000 articles; in December 2007, 250 different Wikipedias were online (the complete list can be found at: http://meta.wikimedia.
org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias).
Finally, the diffusion of community-based networking services has to be mentioned.
These are Web-based services that rely on the community of their users in order to let them store, organize, and share different kind of documents, such as photos (e.g., Flickr—www.flickr.com) and bookmarked Webpages (e.g., del.icio.us—http://del.
icio.us). Users of such services can add their documents to their online space in the service, tag them, comment on them, and share them with other users; the key ele- ment of the system is the tagging activity, since the tags added by a user to his/her documents are used for describing and categorizing the documents, thus making them available for other users’ searches. Such services can be seen as a Web-based evolution of file sharing systems (such as Napster and Kazaa), which allow users to share (sometimes illegally) their files by means of a peer-to-peer architecture.
Conceptually similar to community-based networking systems are some features of Web services like eBay, Amazon, and similar ones; in these services the behaviors and the opinions of users (in the form of a rating given to a seller, of a comment on a book, and so on) are used to create “social” (in a broad sense) networks, such as clusters of users with similar interests, which are in some way connected with each other, but cannot communicate. Community-based networking services are often used as an alternative to “traditional” search engines; however, as we will see in the next section, also Internet search engines are undergoing a pragmatic/social turn, in the sense that they are trying to take more and more into account the actual behaviors of their users (Cantoni, Faré, & Tardini, 2006).