Digital Inequity

Because of the growing amount of information on the internet and people’s increasing dependence on information, internet skills should be considered as a vital resource in contemporary society. This article focuses on the differential possession of internet skills among the Dutch population. In two studies, an in-depth range of internet skills are measured by charging subjects assignments to be accomplished on the internet. Subjects were recruited by applying a random stratified sampling method over gender, age, and education. While the level of operational and formal internet skills appeared quite high, the level of information and strategic internet skills is questionable. Whereas education appeared an important contributor to all skill levels, age only appeared a significant contributor to operational and formal skills. The results strengthen the findings that the original digital divide of physical internet access has evolved into a divide that includes differences in skills to use the internet.

This study explores the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and the computer-use profile of 1241 school students in Flanders, the northern region of Belgium. More specifically, the article examines whether varying patterns of computer access, attitudes, competencies and uses can be seen as constituting differences in cultural capital. Additionally, gender was included in the survey as an important background characteristic in digital divide research. Path analysis was used to model the complex relationships between the influencing factors upon the ICT-related variables. What emerged from the analyses was that SES affects the computer-use profile only moderately. No relationship between SES and computer ownership was found. Moreover, the acquisition of ICT competencies can no longer be attributed to computer ownership. Apart from a small effect on ICT use (a higher SES tends to be associated with more ICT use), SES does not seem to affect the computer-use profile of young people in Flanders.

The talk focuses on the implications of the digital inequality in emerging media use for developing and evaluating health intervention technologies. It also addresses a few considerations for incorporating emerging media into research and product design to offer better connection with theory and improved data quality in health evaluation and intervention research.

The paper presents a case study of the educational exploitation of group blogging for the implementation of a “learning by design” activity. More specifically, a group of students used a blog as a communication and information management tool in the University course of ICT-enhanced Geometry learning activities. The analysis of the designed learning activities, the blog content and log files, as well as the points of view of the students (via a questionnaire and a group interview) expressed upon completion of the activity gives significant findings supporting the researchers’ initial hypotheses about the potential of blogs’ educational applications. Blogs combined with a proper pedagogical approach such as ‘learning by design’ enable teachers to offer high quality learning experiences to their students.

In this article, we set out to explain different types of social uses of the Internet of Things (IoT) using forms of capital and Internet skills. We argue that the IoT platform entices different manners of social communication that are easily overlooked when focusing on the novelty of smart "things." How people use the IoT socially is crucial in trying to understand how people create, maintain, or absolve social relations in a networked society. We find inversed effects for social capital, income and education on private use, and on sharing IoT data with a partner. Sharing with acquaintances and strangers is predicted by cultural activities. Sharing IoT data with acquaintances can especially be attributed to social relations that escape the immediate household. We conclude that varying figurations of capital and Internet skills predict how the IoT is used socially.

This article examines the impact of globalization and technological achievement on the lives of vulnerable groups in society as well as the larger environment so that the marketing community may better understand the macrolevel implications of the digital divide. Using data collected by a variety of international organizations and in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme, this research explores the creation, diffusion, and use of technology within the context of economic inequities, gender discrimination, and carbon dioxide pollution across nations. The article opens with a brief introduction to the technology revolution and the digital divide along with a theoretical discussion of the research objectives. Data descriptions are presented in the next section, and the findings show comparisons across technology achievement categories. The article closes with suggestions for abridging the digital divide and research implications for macromarketing.

Blogs rest at the cross‐section of politics, media, and discourse. This relatively new medium has injected itself into the spectacle that is campaigns; competing narratives seek to define candidates, lure voters, and wage a war over the ownership of symbols and meaning‐making. Blogs influence the formation of narratives within the political spectacle of campaigns. This article seeks to describe local/regional blogs as social and discursive phenomena that participate in, and provide part of, the discourse of political spectacle. The article looks at this political subculture and attempts to express through an analysis of form, function, and meaning this new, palpable discursive force — a counter to the existing hegemony. The case studies utilized are the local/regional blogospheres that have developed in the states of Connecticut and Virginia. In Connecticut, we analyze the metonymic chains built in the Ned Lamont versus Joe Lieberman senatorial race and, in Virginia, Jim Webb against former lobbyist Harris Miller in the primary and Senator George Allen in the general election.

Social media, or web 2.0, allows citizens to produce content and information. However, not everybody has the same access to these benefits. This causes the emergence of a digital divide and the appearance of vulnerable sectors. We study the effect of education, financial income, and the frequency of technology use on the capacity of citizens to produce political content on social media in Spain. The methodology is based on a secondary analysis of data, whereby a statistical method was applied to a quantitative questionnaire (n=2,444). The results reveal that citizens’ creation of political content depends more on education level and frequency of digital network use, rather than on income levels. This data provides a significant and novel contribution to the awareness of factors that determine digital inequality.

In the latter half of 2008 a still-unidentified hoaxer created a fictional soccer player named Masal Bugduv. Initially the subject of blog forum posts made by the hoaxer, Bugduv climbed the feeding chain of European football media by going from an insertion in a Wikipedia page, to comments in forums, to blog posts, and then -after making the leap to more mainstream media -to a football magazine and finally to the 'Football's Top 50 Rising Stars' list of 2009 in The Times (London). This article analyzes the Bugduv hoax as a case study of sources of journalistic authority in blogs. A brief history of the hoax is presented followed by a rhetorical analysis of reasons why the hoax was successful. Although Bugduv eventually jumped journalistic platforms from internet to print, the communications that the hoaxer initiated with the audience were entirely on blogs. By considering the textual dynamics successfully used by the hoaxer in claiming sufficient journalistic authority to sustain the hoax, the sources of journalistic authority in blogs are examined and contrasted with those of traditional media.

The uptake of blogs proves that reports of the death of the author are greatly exaggerated. The Author is alive and well, and has a blog.

In the speculative era of cyberculture criticism in the early 1990s, many authors claimed electronic text would destabilise the institution of authorship (Poster 2001; Landow 1994; Bolter 2001). They argued changes of material form of writing would decrease the power of the author. They connected this claim with critics such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who had questioned conventional assumptions about authorship, and speculated on the possibilities of texts without authors. While the claims of these electronic writing advocates were contested theoretically (Grusin 1994), the popularity of blogs empirically demonstrates the persistence of authorship, and how progress often works backwards.

Authorship is so familiar it’s almost invisible, and so flexible it cannot be defined. Certain elements of a text attribute it to a source: an author’s name on the book cover, a newspaper by-line, or the author information in a blog. The Author emerged in the West alongside a range of economic, technological, social, political and legal changes associated with the rise of individualism, capitalism, rationalism, democracy and rule of law. Authorship functions as a boundary abstraction that connects each of these discourses. It gives authors the legal protection of copyright, economic connections with the printing and publishing industries and provides the key field to locate books on the shelves of booksellers and libraries. In silent reading, it provides a persona for the reader to imagines, completing a text’s meaning. Canons of authors provide symbolic figures whose names become shorthand for concepts and stories. The convention of reading a text with reference to its author is ingrained, even if this institution is only 500 years old. Blogs have succeeded because they are less innovative than other online forms.

Far from dissolving authorship, blogs perpetuate, coexist with, and transform it. Authorship re-emerges in proportion to the distance that a text moves from its context. Specific features of blogs allow them to invoke Foucault’s author-function more effectively than static personal home pages: the inverted narrative structure of the archive, the consistent voice, the time stamp that positions posts in a reference to a temporality shared with readers. However, the practices associated with blogs also do transform authorship. The reader’s capacity to give feedback through comments compensates for the conversational mode of writing. Many blogs’s authority comes from positions outside institutions.

Blogs gravitated towards two discourses that reflect the conventional split between public and private domains: the political polemic blog, and the confessional diary. Media events that brought certain blogs into the public sphere in 2003 and 2004 followed standard scripts for each side of this split. The role of political blogs in discrediting Dan Rather’s report on Bush’s war record was generally celebrated as evidence that blogs were legitimate players in the public domain. On the other hand, the most high profile personal diaries were those that presented narratives of transgressive sexuality: Muzimei in China, the London Callgirl in the UK, and Washingtonienne in the US. By contrast with the political bloggers, these authors who brought the private sphere to the public were subject to a moralistic collective tribunal.

Description This volume examines and explains the phenomenon of digital divides and digital inequalities from a theoretical perspective. Indeed, with there being a limited amount of theoretical research on the digital divide so far, Theorizing Digital Divides seeks to collect and analyse different perspectives and theoretical approaches in analysing digital inequalities, and thus propose a nuanced approach to study the digital divide.

How do social scientists study the impact of social networking sites on racial identity formation? How has the Internet impacted the accumulation of social and cultural capital? By synthesizing insights across a variety of disciplines, this book builds an original theoretical perspective through which these and other questions about core social processes can be addressed. Three case studies of how African Americans use information and communication technologies (ICTs) are used to illustrate this theoretical perspective. They show how groups can leverage ICTs to overcome historical inequalities. The book argues that the lenses through which scholars and society’s leaders think about new technology place too much emphasis on the technological and economic aspects of ICTs, and not enough on the impact of ICTs on social processes at the everyday level.

This chapter investigates the contribution of the digital divide towards the consumption of leisure among users. In analysing the entertainment and leisure dimensions of the Internet, the chapter draws on the literature exploring digital divide, but also on concepts such as network theory and liquidity. With the experience of leisure consumption in a postmodern society increasingly important as a distinctive form of identity, we question the extent to which digital inequalities, based on skills, income and education, influence leisure consumption online.

Este trabajo explora el estado que guarda el fenómeno de la desigualdad digital, medido en términos de conectividad, en el contexto del estado de Jalisco, una entidad de la Repú-blica Mexicana, cuyos niveles de desarrollo y bienestar social se ubican en el tercio superior dentro del país, pero en el que campean también importantes indicadores de pobreza y desigualdad. El análisis se elabora tomando en consideración las tendencias generales que imperan en el desarrollo de las tic a nivel global y nacional.
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This article deals with the question of digital inequality, measured in terms of connectivi-ty, within the context of the state of Jalisco, whose development indicators tend to place it as one of the most developed states in Mexico, but nonetheless accumulates significant evidence of poverty and social disparities. This analysis is carried out taking into account tiC's general tendencies of development at the national and international level.

Internet non-users as well as their reasons for being offline. The rich qualitative data are conceptualized and presented according to various reasons for non-use, positive and negative feelings regarding non-use, and the positive as well as negative influence of and dependence on social networks. The comparison shows both unique and common perceptions of the British and Swedish respondents, some of which can be attributed to social, economic, or socio-economic factors. However, it also displays vast differences between middle-aged nonusers in both countries. The analysis paints a complex picture of decisions for and against the use of the Internet and the need for more research to understand these highly complex phenomena, which cannot simply be attributed to socio-economic backgrounds as has been done in most previous research. The analysis shows that more complex reasons, such as lack of interest or discomfort with technologies, as well as the somewhat surprising finding that social networks can prevent non-users from learning how to use the Internet, as it is more convenient to stay a proxy-user, should be considered in future research and policies regarding digital inequalities.

Purpose
This study examines the implementation of a community-level Sustainable Broadband Adoption Program (SBA) under the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP), a national public policy program meant to expand broadband deployment and adoption under the American Recovery Act of 2009, and administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) at the U.S. Department of Commerce. The California Connects Program (CC) was administered by the Foundation for California Community Colleges (FCCC).

Methodology/approach
This chapter focuses on one part of CC’s efforts to expand broadband adoption among the most underserved Californians through collaboration with the Great Valley Center (GVC). CC-GVC provided basic computer and Internet classes to disconnected populations with low-literacy levels, and primarily in Spanish, through community-based organizations, public schools, public libraries, small businesses, and others in the Central Valley, an 18 county rural region with a high concentration of digital destitute populations. The program worked with under-resourced local community institutions with a range of poor technology resources and that operated under variable set of social, economic, political, and institutional conditions. Through inductive, process-oriented, and explanatory case study research, the structure, strategy, and training approach of CC was examined. Content and theme analysis of primary and secondary qualitative and quantitative data involving the program’s leadership, direct service providers, partners, participants, and nonparticipants was conducted. This involved a sample of 600 in-depth and short, structured and unstructured interviews and focus groups, archival and participant observation notes.

Findings
It was found that CC-GVC was able to meet uncertainty and operated with low institutional resources and paucity of linguistically appropriate teaching resources for new entrants through a flexible leadership approach that adapted to the social situation and was open to innovation. Community technology trainers were also able to engage those without or little direct experience with computers and with low-literacy levels with a linguistically appropriate and culturally sensitive step-by-step teaching approach that empowered and met people where they are. The author expands non-adoption models to include structural barriers in the analysis of the disconnected. It is argued that non-adoption is a result of evolving inequality processes fueled by poverty and under-resourced community development institutions and that teaching and learning is a social and institutional process that takes trust and time.

Link to book chapter: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/S2050-206020150000010009

Practical Implications
CC shows that even the most disadvantaged can be empowered to learn-to-learn to use computers and can begin to function online and gain benefit under the most extreme institutional and economic conditions, but it takes more time and resources than providers expected and the Recovery Act provided.

Citation: Blanca Gordo , (2015), Roads and Roadblocks to Digital Inclusion: An Analysis of a Public Policy Program in California, in Laura Robinson , Shelia R. Cotten , Jeremy Schulz , Timothy M. Hale , Apryl Williams (ed.) Communication and Information Technologies Annual (Studies in Media and Communications, Volume 10) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.235 - 288

Gender and technology might seem unrelated on first sight because technology is often considered a neutral other that does not have anything to do with gender. Yet, taking a closer look at the language we use to talk about technology, at the images we rely on to represent technology, its uses and users, it becomes clear that gender stereotypes are more present than ever in the context of technology. Rather than subverting traditional gender roles, technology often reinforces and re-inscribes stereotypical behavior and ideas. Analyzing Apple iPad/iPhone advertisements, this paper will uncover some of the gender biases present in popular techno-narratives.

Carmen Martinez Conde and I analyse some reports which evidence the negative impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the digital and technological gap among students. This especially affects families with children with disabilities. We conclude that there is a need for institutions to provide compensatory support and resources in order to reduce this gap.

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Flint statt Bronze: Die Feuersteindolche des Spätneolithikums 32 in Norddeutschland und Südskandinavien Stefanie Tuppat Punzen für die Götter -40 Goldhüte und "unsichtbares Werkzeug" Cornelia Schmidt 48 "Unsichtbares Werkzeug" und Felsbildkunst Jennifer Valenta 54 Der "Bronzegießer" von Battaune Thomas Schönfelder Vom Beil zum Beutegut: 62 Die "Altmetallsammler" von Neupotz Sophia Hanelt 68 Danksagung und Liste der Leihgeber 70 Abbildungsverzeichnis 72 Impressum Inhalt Zur Einführung | 3 Als er von seiner Arbeit aufsieht, flimmert die Welt bläulich vor seinen Augen. Es ist der hundertunderste Kreisbuckel, den er in das feine Goldblech geschlagen hat, das Leuchten des Goldes beginnt in seinen Augen zu schmerzen und seine Hand wird steif. Der Goldschmied legt Hämmerchen und Punze kurz beiseite, massiert seinen Nacken und holt tief Luft. Noch 165 weitere Kreise muss er mit den Punzen ins Blech schlagen, Reihe für Reihe, und kein Schlag darf daneben gehen.

RESUMEN

Pretendemos, por medio de esta investigación, unificar diversos ejes relacionados con un conjunto de tematizaciones de interés antropológico. Nuestra investigación intenta ahondar en la esfera de lo religioso en tanto eje de construcción identitaria, a través de la indagación de las mitologías, memorias y narrativas posibles en el marco de la memoria colectiva y social de un grupo específico: la comunidad rural denominada San Javier (Departamento de Río Negro, Uruguay). La matriz religiosa de esta Colonia se afinca en su propio proceso fundacional: San Javier fue fundado en el año 1913, en el Uruguay, por un grupo de inmigrantes rusos pertenecientes a la “Comunidad Nueva Israel” (Novo Israilskaia Obchina), corriente religiosa escindida de la Iglesia Ortodoxa Rusa a mediados del siglo XVIII. A través de esta investigación tratamos de profundizar en las narrativas de los habitantes de San Javier, estudiando las diferentes temporalidades que atraviesan a las mismas y las fragmentaciones espacio-temporales sobre las cuales estas narrativas se construyen. En el espacio de la temporalidad que relaciona religión y memoria – y que señalan el declino de Nueva Israel, religión fundadora de San Javier- , ingresan un conjunto de fragmentaciones que construyen varios Otros en un proceso de alteridad interna a la propia Colonia . Sumado a esto, las relaciones de la Colonia San Javier con la sociedad nacional uruguaya y con la Unión Soviética, y particularmente, las temporalidades del Terror vividas por los habitantes de San Javier bajo la influencia del estalinismo en la URSS y la dictadura militar en el Uruguay, hacen que esa producción del Otro adquiera diversas modalidades, y que el espacio pluralizado y fragmentado donde conviven religión y memoria, se encuentre poblado por narrativas conflictivas, estableciéndose una tradición de la temporalidad sanjavierina basada en y para el conflicto.

Abstract

This research study is intended as a unifying link for a variety of topics that relate to a number of anthropological subject-matters. The research is aimed at an indepth analysis of the religious aspect as the central theme in building an identity. The study investigates mythologies, memories and narratives that can possibly be part of the collective and social memory of a specific group: a rural community known as San Javier (in the Department of Rio Negro, Republic of Uruguay). The religious mold of this colony is a result of its very own founding process. San Javier was founded in 1913 by a group of Russian immigrants who were part of the “New Israel Community” (Novo Israilskaia Obchina), a religious current that broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid 18th century. In order to attentively study the narratives of the people of San Javier, our work considers, in ample detail, their various temporalities, and the spatial and temporal fragmentations upon which such narratives have been created. A number of fragmentations that constitute several Others as part of an internal alterity process of the colony, are included in the space of the temporality that relates religion and memory – pointing at the decline of New Israel, the religion responsible for the founding of San Javier. Also, such production of the Other assumes a variety of forms, by virtue of the relations of the San Javier colony with Uruguayan society and with the Soviet Union; and in particular, due to the temporalities of Terror experienced by the inhabitants of San Javier during Stalin’s influence in the USSR and during the military dictatorship in Uruguay. In addition to this, the pluralized and fragmented space where religion and memory coexist becomes filled with controversial narratives, determining a tradition of the San Javier temporality, based on and toward conflict.

L’obiettivo di questo lavoro è la ricostruzione di un oggetto mediale di cui ormai in Rete si sono perse le tracce: il webcinema, il cinema creato, realizzato e distribuito attraverso la Rete. Esso nasce e si sviluppa in una fase pionieristica del web tra la seconda metà degli anni novanta e i primi anni del XXI secolo, in un periodo segnato dalla sviluppo della tecnologia
dello streaming che consentirà la trasmissione di contenuti sonori e audiovisivi attraverso la Rete, ridefinendo il concetto del web stesso da collezione di testi a flusso di informazioni audiovisive, l’euforia della net economy e lo scoppio della bolla delle dot-com. Per analizzare questo fenomeno ibrido, di cui la teorizzazione coeva è scarsa e di cui la Rete sembra essersi dimenticata, adottiamo l’approccio metodologico della Actor-
network Theory che ci permetterà di investigare i veloci cambiamenti, l’instabilità e l’eterogeneità propria dei media digitali. Nello specifico, il webcinema sarà studiato evidenziando i network di attori eterogenei, umani e non umani, che lo compongono: la rete della produzione e del consumo, quella della distribuzione e della esibizione e la relazione che tutte queste componenti hanno con l’estetica. Con l’analisi del case history verrà evidenziata la complessa relazione esistente tra dimensione tecnologica e dimensione sociale che nel caso dei media digitali è improntata a momenti di apertura nei confronti della innovazione e di stabilizzazione e definizione di determinati modelli d’uso.