2012, Vol.19, No.2

Informatization Policy 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 4.08

pISSN : 1598-3498
https://journal.kci.go.kr/nia

This study examines the trend and issues of sociological studies of social network service(SNS). For this purpose, the studies were classified into three types. The first type of study concerns spatial characteristics of SNS. It deals with the impact of such SNS usage on individual attitudes and behaviors. The second type of the study focuses on the formation process of interrelationship among users. It is based on sociological concepts such as trust and social capital. The last type of study emphasizes the impact of SNS on society. The study includes the issues of social movement and political participation. In the future study of SNS, more diverse sociological subjects, such as social integration, exclusion, public welfare, and affective support need to be dealt with.

The proliferation of the Internet and the advent of e-commerce have amplified public concerns about privacy. Accordingly, much research effort has been made on the issue. While existing research on online information privacy has usually focused on the examination of antecedents of personal information disclosure, the literature has not paid attention to the potential changes of the antecedents’effects depending on the user’s experience of the service. The current study aims to investigate the moderating role of site usage experience in Internet users’decision on personal information disclosure. Specifically, this study considers two types of antecedents of personal information disclosure on a site—the attributes of personal information requested (sensitivity and relevance of information) and the value of the service provided by the site; and examines how the effects of the antecedents on the disclosure intention are affected by the users’experience of the site. Our analysis of the data gathered through a web-based experiment reveals that site usage experience moderates the relationship between the attributes of personal information and disclosure intention. While usage experience attenuates the negative effect of information sensitivity on disclosure intention, it intensifies the positive impact that relevance of information has on disclosure intention. Based on the analysis results, we provide implications for the mitigation of the Internet users’privacy concerns as well as theoretical implications.

The authors utilized two contested perspectives on the use and non-use of ICTs, especially the Internet, to verify three assumptions of urban ghettos as fundamentally excluded from the ICT structure, ghetto people as behaving in the same way, and deficiency as the sole explanatory variable of their non-use. The first assumption that the urban ghettos would be fundamentally excluded from the urban ICT structure can be nullified by our finding about the prevalence of ICTs in that area, albeit apparent lower level of access to ICTs compared to that of the urban core. The second assumption that the urban ghetto residents would display the same information behaviors would be challenged by our finding that the availability and usages of the Internet would be hardly consistent by gender, age, occupation, family size, and locational characteristics. The third assumption that deficiency would capture the Internet non-use by ghetto residents was found very tenable but could be rivaled by the choice perspective that use or non-use is simply a result of situated choice. Theoretical and practical implications were suggested.