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This paper focuses on the blurring boundary between the "human self" and the smartphone, using interviews with 60 heavy smartphone users. The interview responses reveal three types of self-extension via the smartphone— functional extension, anthropomorphic extension, and ontological extension. Smartphone users assert that their phone has become an indispensable part of their self and thus influences their identity and sense of being in both positive and negative ways.

Social media allow users not only to read news, but also to evaluate, reconstruct, and share it. This study conceptualizes curatorial news use via social media as an important news use behavior, which involves evaluating the existing news, adding new values by reconstructing it, and then sharing it with other social media users. An analysis of survey data from 650 South Korean adults shows that curatorial news use on social media has a significantly positive association with political knowledge, internal political efficacy, and offline and online political participation. The interaction of social media news use and curatorial news use is also significantly associated with high levels of political knowledge and political participation.

The rise of social media, such as blogs, social network sites, Twitter, and YouTube, encourages hope for renewed confidence in the government and news media because these venues connect users directly to candidates and officeholders. This article indicates that blogs most heavily relied on the type of social media for political information. Moreover, reliance on blogs and YouTube leads to reduced confidence in the presidency, Congress, and the news media, but reliance on social network sites and Twitter leads to higher confidence in these institutions after controlling for strength of party ties, political ideology, political interest, reliance on traditional media, and demographic variables.

This study surveyed those who used blogs for information about the war in Iraq to investigate the degree to which judgements of credibility, reliance, demographics, and political characteristics of war blog users have changed between 2003 and 2007. In both 2003 and 2007, blog users judged blogs as more credible sources for war news than traditional media and their online counterparts. This study also found that different types of blogs were rated differently in terms of credibility in 2007 with military and war blogs rated the most credible and media blogs being judged the lowest in credibility. Additionally, parallels are drawn between the findings and possible roles for blogs in the escalating war in Afghanistan. Results are also discussed in terms of the changing roles of the military in Iraq as well as the changing role of blogs in the Iraq War.

This study relies on online surveys of politically interested web users during the 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential elections to examine the degree to which people judge online information as credible and to compare how credibility has shifted in the past decade. Whereas credibility scores jumped in 2000, they declined in 2004. Online issue sources were judged the most credible and online broadcast TV news sources the least credible. Whereas respondents perceived few differences between online and traditionally delivered sources in the 2000 campaign, greater differences emerged in the 2004 campaign.

This study examined the context of offensive language heard in prime-time programs aired on seven broadcast networks in 2001. Offensive words occurred more in the 9–10 p.m. hour. Situation comedies contained more instances of objectionable words than other program genres, but offensive language was more likely to be heard in a non-humorous setting. Most objectionable words were directed at another character, and lead characters were more likely to curse than secondary characters. Finally, vulgarities were typically met with either a neutral or positive reaction.

This study surveyed Weblog users online to investigate how credible they view blogs as compared to traditional media as well as other online sources. This study also explores the degree to which reliance on Weblogs as well as traditional and online media sources predicts credibility of Weblogs after controlling for demographic and political factors. Weblog users judged blogs as highly credible—more credible than traditional sources. They did, however, rate traditional sources as moderately credible. Weblog users rated blogs higher on depth of information than they did on fairness.

This study employed an online survey of 442 politically interested Web users during the 2000 presidential election to examine the extent to which relying on the Web for political information influences political interest, campaign interest, political involvement, likelihood of voting, and voting behavior after controlling for demographics, political attitudes and use of the traditional media. Results from this study are compared to a similar one conducted during the 1996 presidential campaign. The respondents were highly interested in politics in general, were very interested in the 2000 campaign, expressed a high likelihood to vote, and almost all did vote. The Internet appears to engage people politically as almost two-thirds claim that their involvement in politics has increased or greatly increased since they first became online users. Politically interested Internet users were more likely to report in 2000 than 1996 that they felt they had power to bring about political change, that they were very interested in the presidential campaign, and that they were more likely to vote. The Web appears to be at least partially responsible for this increase in civic engagement as reliance on the Web was the strongest predictor of political attitudes.