define digital world essay

Essay on Living in a Digital World

Students are often asked to write an essay on Living in a Digital World in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Living in a Digital World

Introduction to the digital world.

We live in a digital world, where technology impacts every aspect of our lives. From communication to education, shopping to entertainment, digital technology plays a crucial role.

Communication in the Digital World

Digital technology has transformed communication. We can now connect with people worldwide instantly, thanks to social media, emails, and video conferencing.

Education in the Digital World

Digital learning has made education more accessible. With online classes, students can learn from anywhere, anytime.

Shopping and Entertainment

Online shopping and digital entertainment have become a part of our daily lives, providing convenience and variety.

250 Words Essay on Living in a Digital World

The advent of the digital world.

The digital world we inhabit today is a creation of rapid technological advancements, fundamentally altering the way we live, work, and communicate. This transformation has been so profound that it has ushered in an era coined as the ‘Information Age’.

Impact on Communication

The digital world has revolutionized communication. Social media platforms and instant messaging apps have made it possible to interact with anyone, anywhere, at any time. This instantaneity, while fostering global connectivity, also challenges traditional notions of privacy and personal space.

Learning in the Digital World

Education has been democratized by the digital world. The internet offers a plethora of resources, enabling anyone with a connection to learn virtually anything. However, the digital divide still persists, highlighting the need for equal access to digital resources.

Work in the Digital Era

The digital world has reshaped the professional landscape as well. Remote work, digital nomadism, and gig economy are now viable career paths, thanks to digital technologies. Yet, these bring new challenges, such as job insecurity and work-life balance issues.

Living in a digital world is a double-edged sword. While it offers unprecedented opportunities, it also presents unique challenges. As digital citizens, it’s crucial to navigate this landscape mindfully, leveraging its advantages while mitigating its drawbacks.

500 Words Essay on Living in a Digital World

Introduction, the digital landscape.

The digital landscape is dominated by the internet, mobile technology, and artificial intelligence. The internet has become a global platform for communication, information exchange, and commerce. Mobile technology has made the internet accessible anywhere and at any time, leading to an always-on culture. Artificial intelligence is automating tasks, making decisions, and even creating content, fundamentally changing the nature of work and leisure.

The digital world has revolutionized communication. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have transformed the way we interact with each other. They have made it possible to maintain relationships across vast distances, share moments instantly, and collaborate in real-time. However, this has also led to new challenges, such as online harassment, privacy concerns, and the spread of misinformation.

Impact on Education

Impact on entertainment and business.

The entertainment industry has been reshaped by the digital world. Streaming platforms like Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube have made it possible to consume entertainment on demand. Similarly, in the business world, digital technologies have disrupted traditional business models, leading to the rise of e-commerce, remote work, and digital marketing. However, these developments have also raised issues related to job displacement and data security.

Living in a digital world presents both opportunities and challenges. It has the potential to enhance communication, democratize education, revolutionize entertainment, and transform business. However, it also poses significant risks, such as privacy violations, misinformation, educational inequality, job displacement, and data breaches. Navigating this digital world requires a nuanced understanding of these dynamics and a commitment to addressing the associated challenges. As we continue to shape and be shaped by the digital world, it is crucial to ensure that it serves the interests of all, not just a privileged few.

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Ethics in the digital world: Where we are now and what’s next

Kate gromova, yaroslav eferin.

Will widespread adoption of emerging digital technologies such as the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence improve people’s lives? The answer appears to be an easy “yes.” The positive potential of data seems self-evident. Yet, this issue is being actively discussed across international summits and events. Thus, the agenda of Global Technology Government Summit 2021 is dedicated to questions around whether and how “data can work for all”, emphasizing trust aspects, and especially ethics of data use. Not without a reason, at least 50 countries are grappling independently with how to define ethical data use smoothly without violating people’s private space, personal data, and many other sensitive aspects.  

Ethics goes online

What is ethics per se? Aristotle proposed that ethics is the study of human relations in their most perfect form. He called it the science of proper behavior. Aristotle claimed that ethics is the basis for creating an optimal model of fair human relations; ethics lie at the foundation of a society’s moral consciousness. They are the shared principles necessary for mutual understanding and harmonious relations.

Ethical principles have evolved many times over since the days of the ancient Greek philosophers and have been repeatedly rethought (e.g., hedonism, utilitarianism, relativism, etc.). Today we live in a digital world, and most of our relationships have moved online to chats, messengers, social media, and many other ways of online communication.  We do not see each other, but we do share our data; we do not talk to each other, but we give our opinions liberally. So how should these principles evolve for such an online, globalized world? And what might the process look like for identifying those principles?  

Digital chaos without ethics

2020 and the lockdowns clearly demonstrate that we plunge into the digital world irrevocably. As digital technologies become ever more deeply embedded in our lives, the need for a new, shared data ethos grows more urgent. Without shared principles, we risk exacerbating existing biases that are part of our current datasets.  Just a few examples:

• The common exclusion of women as test subjects in much medical research results in a lack of relevant data on women’s health. Heart disease, for example, has traditionally been thought of as a predominantly male disease. This has led to massive misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed heart disease in women.
• A study of AI tools that authorities use to determine the likelihood that a criminal reoffends found that algorithms produced different results for black and white people under the same conditions. This discriminatory effect has resulted in sharp criticism and distrust of predictive policing.
• Amazon abandoned its AI hiring program because of its bias against women. The algorithm began training on the resumes of the candidates for job postings over the previous ten years. Because most of the applicants were men, it developed a bias to prefer men and penalized features associated with women.

These examples all contribute to distrust or rejection of potentially beneficial new technological solutions. What ethical principles can we use to address the flaws in technologies that increase biases, profiling, and inequality? This question has led to significant growth in interest in data ethics over the last decade (Figures 1 and 2). And this is why many countries are now developing or adopting ethical principles, standards, or guidelines.

Figure 1. Data ethics concept, 2010-2021     

Figure 2. AI ethics concept, 2010-2021

Guiding data ethics

Countries are taking wildly differing approaches to address data ethics. Even the definition of data ethics varies. Look, for example, at three countries—Germany, Canada, and South Korea—with differing geography, history, institutional and political arrangements, and traditions and culture.

Germany established a Data Ethics Commission in 2018 to provide recommendations for the Federal Government’s Strategy on Artificial Intelligence. The Commission declared that its  operating principles were based on the Constitution, European values, and its “cultural and intellectual history.” Ethics, according to the Commission, should not begin with establishing boundaries. Rather, when ethical issues are discussed early in the creation process, they may make a significant contribution to design, promoting appropriate and beneficial applications of AI systems.

In Canada, the advancement of AI technologies and their use in public services has spurred a discussion about data ethics. The Government of Canada’s recommendations focuses on public service officials and processes. It provided guiding principles to ensure ethical use of AI and developed a comprehensive Algorithmic Impact Assessment online tool to help government officials explore AI in a way that is “governed by clear values, ethics, and laws.”

The Korean Ministry of Science and ICT, in collaboration with the National Information Society Agency, released Ethics Guidelines for the Intelligent Information Society in 2018. These guidelines build on the Robots Ethics Charter. It calls for developing AI and robots that do not have “antisocial” characteristics.” Broadly, Korean ethical policies mainly focused on the adoption of robots into society, while emphasizing the need to balance protecting “human dignity” and “the common good ."  

Do data ethics need a common approach?

The differences among these initiatives seem to be related to traditions, institutional arrangements, and many other cultural and historical factors. Germany places emphasis on developing autonomous vehicles and presents a rather comprehensive view on ethics; Canada puts a stake on guiding government officials; Korea approaches questions through the prism of robots. Still, none of them clearly defines what data ethics is. None of them is meant to have a legal effect. Rather, they stipulate the principles of the information society. In our upcoming study, we intend to explore the reasons and rationale for different approaches that countries take.

Discussion and debate on data and technology ethics undoubtedly will continue for many years to come as digital technologies continue to develop and penetrate into all aspects of human life.   But the sooner we reach a consensus on key definitions, principles, and approaches, the easier the debates can turn into real actions. Data ethics are equally important for government, businesses, individuals and should be discussed openly. The process of such discussion will serve itself as an awareness and knowledge-sharing mechanism.

Recall the Golden Rule of Morality: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. We suggest keeping this in mind when we all go online.

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From Science to Arts, an Inevitable Decision?

The wonderful world of fungi, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, simultaneous translation technology – ever closer to reality, featured author, latest book, the impact of the internet on society: a global perspective, introduction.

The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate 1999). But it was in the 1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. Department of Commerce that it diffused around the world at extraordinary speed: in 1996 the first survey of Internet users counted about 40 million; in 2013 they are over 2.5 billion, with China accounting for the largest number of Internet users. Furthermore, for some time the spread of the Internet was limited by the difficulty to lay out land-based telecommunications infrastructure in the emerging countries. This has changed with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, in 1991, there were about 16 million subscribers of wireless devices in the world, in 2013 they are close to 7 billion (in a planet of 7.7 billion human beings). Counting on the family and village uses of mobile phones, and taking into consideration the limited use of these devices among children under five years of age, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in the bandwidth as well as in the efficiency and price of the service.

At the heart of these communication networks the Internet ensures the production, distribution, and use of digitized information in all formats. According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science (Hilbert and López 2011), 95 percent of all information existing in the planet is digitized and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks.

The speed and scope of the transformation of our communication environment by Internet and wireless communication has triggered all kind of utopian and dystopian perceptions around the world.

As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.

The media aggravate the distorted perception by dwelling into scary reports on the basis of anecdotal observation and biased commentary. If there is a topic in which social sciences, in their diversity, should contribute to the full understanding of the world in which we live, it is precisely the area that has come to be named in academia as Internet Studies. Because, in fact, academic research knows a great deal on the interaction between Internet and society, on the basis of methodologically rigorous empirical research conducted in a plurality of cultural and institutional contexts. Any process of major technological change generates its own mythology. In part because it comes into practice before scientists can assess its effects and implications, so there is always a gap between social change and its understanding. For instance, media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of alienation, isolation, depression, and withdrawal from society. In fact, available evidence shows that there is either no relationship or a positive cumulative relationship between the Internet use and the intensity of sociability. We observe that, overall, the more sociable people are, the more they use the Internet. And the more they use the Internet, the more they increase their sociability online and offline, their civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures—with the exception of a couple of early studies of the Internet in the 1990s, corrected by their authors later (Castells 2001; Castells et al. 2007; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.).

Thus, the purpose of this chapter will be to summarize some of the key research findings on the social effects of the Internet relying on the evidence provided by some of the major institutions specialized in the social study of the Internet. More specifically, I will be using the data from the world at large: the World Internet Survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future, University of Southern California; the reports of the British Computer Society (BCS), using data from the World Values Survey of the University of Michigan; the Nielsen reports for a variety of countries; and the annual reports from the International Telecommunications Union. For data on the United States, I have used the Pew American Life and Internet Project of the Pew Institute. For the United Kingdom, the Oxford Internet Survey from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, as well as the Virtual Society Project from the Economic and Social Science Research Council. For Spain, the Project Internet Catalonia of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC); the various reports on the information society from Telefónica; and from the Orange Foundation. For Portugal, the Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC) in Lisbon. I would like to emphasize that most of the data in these reports converge toward similar trends. Thus I have selected for my analysis the findings that complement and reinforce each other, offering a consistent picture of the human experience on the Internet in spite of the human diversity.

Given the aim of this publication to reach a broad audience, I will not present in this text the data supporting the analysis presented here. Instead, I am referring the interested reader to the web sources of the research organizations mentioned above, as well as to selected bibliographic references discussing the empirical foundation of the social trends reported here.

Technologies of Freedom, the Network Society, and the Culture of Autonomy

In order to fully understand the effects of the Internet on society, we should remember that technology is material culture. It is produced in a social process in a given institutional environment on the basis of the ideas, values, interests, and knowledge of their producers, both their early producers and their subsequent producers. In this process we must include the users of the technology, who appropriate and adapt the technology rather than adopting it, and by so doing they modify it and produce it in an endless process of interaction between technological production and social use. So, to assess the relevance of Internet in society we must recall the specific characteristics of Internet as a technology. Then we must place it in the context of the transformation of the overall social structure, as well as in relationship to the culture characteristic of this social structure. Indeed, we live in a new social structure, the global network society, characterized by the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy.

Internet is a technology of freedom, in the terms coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, coming from a libertarian culture, paradoxically financed by the Pentagon for the benefit of scientists, engineers, and their students, with no direct military application in mind (Castells 2001). The expansion of the Internet from the mid-1990s onward resulted from the combination of three main factors:

• The technological discovery of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and his willingness to distribute the source code to improve it by the open-source contribution of a global community of users, in continuity with the openness of the TCP/IP Internet protocols. The web keeps running under the same principle of open source. And two-thirds of web servers are operated by Apache, an open-source server program.
• Institutional change in the management of the Internet, keeping it under the loose management of the global Internet community, privatizing it, and allowing both commercial uses and cooperative uses.
• Major changes in social structure, culture, and social behavior: networking as a prevalent organizational form; individuation as the main orientation of social behavior; and the culture of autonomy as the culture of the network society.

I will elaborate on these major trends.

Our society is a network society; that is, a society constructed around personal and organizational networks powered by digital networks and communicated by the Internet. And because networks are global and know no boundaries, the network society is a global network society. This historically specific social structure resulted from the interaction between the emerging technological paradigm based on the digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes. A primary dimension of these changes is what has been labeled the rise of the Me-centered society, or, in sociological terms, the process of individuation, the decline of community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in general. This is not the end of community, and not the end of place-based interaction, but there is a shift toward the reconstruction of social relationships, including strong cultural and personal ties that could be considered a form of community, on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects.

The process of individuation is not just a matter of cultural evolution, it is materially produced by the new forms of organizing economic activities, and social and political life, as I analyzed in my trilogy on the Information Age (Castells 1996–2003). It is based on the transformation of space (metropolitan life), work and economic activity (rise of the networked enterprise and networked work processes), culture and communication (shift from mass communication based on mass media to mass self-communication based on the Internet); on the crisis of the patriarchal family, with increasing autonomy of its individual members; the substitution of media politics for mass party politics; and globalization as the selective networking of places and processes throughout the planet.

But individuation does not mean isolation, or even less the end of community. Sociability is reconstructed as networked individualism and community through a quest for like-minded individuals in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace and the local space. Individuation is the key process in constituting subjects (individual or collective), networking is the organizational form constructed by these subjects; this is the network society, and the form of sociability is what Rainie and Wellman (2012) conceptualized as networked individualism. Network technologies are of course the medium for this new social structure and this new culture (Papacharissi 2010).

As stated above, academic research has established that the Internet does not isolate people, nor does it reduce their sociability; it actually increases sociability, as shown by myself in my studies in Catalonia (Castells 2007), Rainie and Wellman in the United States (2012), Cardoso in Portugal (2010), and the World Internet Survey for the world at large (Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.). Furthermore, a major study by Michael Willmott for the British Computer Society (Trajectory Partnership 2010) has shown a positive correlation, for individuals and for countries, between the frequency and intensity of the use of the Internet and the psychological indicators of personal happiness. He used global data for 35,000 people obtained from the World Wide Survey of the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007. Controlling for other factors, the study showed that Internet use empowers people by increasing their feelings of security, personal freedom, and influence, all feelings that have a positive effect on happiness and personal well-being. The effect is particularly positive for people with lower income and who are less qualified, for people in the developing world, and for women. Age does not affect the positive relationship; it is significant for all ages. Why women? Because they are at the center of the network of their families, Internet helps them to organize their lives. Also, it helps them to overcome their isolation, particularly in patriarchal societies. The Internet also contributes to the rise of the culture of autonomy.

The key for the process of individuation is the construction of autonomy by social actors, who become subjects in the process. They do so by defining their specific projects in interaction with, but not submission to, the institutions of society. This is the case for a minority of individuals, but because of their capacity to lead and mobilize they introduce a new culture in every domain of social life: in work (entrepreneurship), in the media (the active audience), in the Internet (the creative user), in the market (the informed and proactive consumer), in education (students as informed critical thinkers, making possible the new frontier of e-learning and m-learning pedagogy), in health (the patient-centered health management system) in e-government (the informed, participatory citizen), in social movements (cultural change from the grassroots, as in feminism or environmentalism), and in politics (the independent-minded citizen able to participate in self-generated political networks).

There is increasing evidence of the direct relationship between the Internet and the rise of social autonomy. From 2002 to 2007 I directed in Catalonia one of the largest studies ever conducted in Europe on the Internet and society, based on 55,000 interviews, one-third of them face to face (IN3 2002–07). As part of this study, my collaborators and I compared the behavior of Internet users to non-Internet users in a sample of 3,000 people, representative of the population of Catalonia. Because in 2003 only about 40 percent of people were Internet users we could really compare the differences in social behavior for users and non-users, something that nowadays would be more difficult given the 79 percent penetration rate of the Internet in Catalonia. Although the data are relatively old, the findings are not, as more recent studies in other countries (particularly in Portugal) appear to confirm the observed trends. We constructed scales of autonomy in different dimensions. Only between 10 and 20 percent of the population, depending on dimensions, were in the high level of autonomy. But we focused on this active segment of the population to explore the role of the Internet in the construction of autonomy. Using factor analysis we identified six major types of autonomy based on projects of individuals according to their practices:

a) professional development b) communicative autonomy c) entrepreneurship d) autonomy of the body e) sociopolitical participation f) personal, individual autonomy

These six types of autonomous practices were statistically independent among themselves. But each one of them correlated positively with Internet use in statistically significant terms, in a self-reinforcing loop (time sequence): the more one person was autonomous, the more she/he used the web, and the more she/he used the web, the more autonomous she/he became (Castells et al. 2007). This is a major empirical finding. Because if the dominant cultural trend in our society is the search for autonomy, and if the Internet powers this search, then we are moving toward a society of assertive individuals and cultural freedom, regardless of the barriers of rigid social organizations inherited from the Industrial Age. From this Internet-based culture of autonomy have emerged a new kind of sociability, networked sociability, and a new kind of sociopolitical practice, networked social movements and networked democracy. I will now turn to the analysis of these two fundamental trends at the source of current processes of social change worldwide.

The Rise of Social Network Sites on the Internet

Since 2002 (creation of Friendster, prior to Facebook) a new socio-technical revolution has taken place on the Internet: the rise of social network sites where now all human activities are present, from personal interaction to business, to work, to culture, to communication, to social movements, and to politics.

Social Network Sites are web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

(Boyd and Ellison 2007, 2)

Social networking uses, in time globally spent, surpassed e-mail in November 2007. It surpassed e-mail in number of users in July 2009. In terms of users it reached 1 billion by September 2010, with Facebook accounting for about half of it. In 2013 it has almost doubled, particularly because of increasing use in China, India, and Latin America. There is indeed a great diversity of social networking sites (SNS) by countries and cultures. Facebook, started for Harvard-only members in 2004, is present in most of the world, but QQ, Cyworld, and Baidu dominate in China; Orkut in Brazil; Mixi in Japan; etc. In terms of demographics, age is the main differential factor in the use of SNS, with a drop of frequency of use after 50 years of age, and particularly 65. But this is not just a teenager’s activity. The main Facebook U.S. category is in the age group 35–44, whose frequency of use of the site is higher than for younger people. Nearly 60 percent of adults in the U.S. have at least one SNS profile, 30 percent two, and 15 percent three or more. Females are as present as males, except when in a society there is a general gender gap. We observe no differences in education and class, but there is some class specialization of SNS, such as Myspace being lower than FB; LinkedIn is for professionals.

Thus, the most important activity on the Internet at this point in time goes through social networking, and SNS have become the chosen platforms for all kind of activities, not just personal friendships or chatting, but for marketing, e-commerce, education, cultural creativity, media and entertainment distribution, health applications, and sociopolitical activism. This is a significant trend for society at large. Let me explore the meaning of this trend on the basis of the still scant evidence.

Social networking sites are constructed by users themselves building on specific criteria of grouping. There is entrepreneurship in the process of creating sites, then people choose according to their interests and projects. Networks are tailored by people themselves with different levels of profiling and privacy. The key to success is not anonymity, but on the contrary, self-presentation of a real person connecting to real people (in some cases people are excluded from the SNS when they fake their identity). So, it is a self-constructed society by networking connecting to other networks. But this is not a virtual society. There is a close connection between virtual networks and networks in life at large. This is a hybrid world, a real world, not a virtual world or a segregated world.

People build networks to be with others, and to be with others they want to be with on the basis of criteria that include those people who they already know (a selected sub-segment). Most users go on the site every day. It is permanent connectivity. If we needed an answer to what happened to sociability in the Internet world, here it is:

There is a dramatic increase in sociability, but a different kind of sociability, facilitated and dynamized by permanent connectivity and social networking on the web.

Based on the time when Facebook was still releasing data (this time is now gone) we know that in 2009 users spent 500 billion minutes per month. This is not just about friendship or interpersonal communication. People do things together, share, act, exactly as in society, although the personal dimension is always there. Thus, in the U.S. 38 percent of adults share content, 21 percent remix, 14 percent blog, and this is growing exponentially, with development of technology, software, and SNS entrepreneurial initiatives. On Facebook, in 2009 the average user was connected to 60 pages, groups, and events, people interacted per month to 160 million objects (pages, groups, events), the average user created 70 pieces of content per month, and there were 25 billion pieces of content shared per month (web links, news stories, blogs posts, notes, photos). SNS are living spaces connecting all dimensions of people’s experience. This transforms culture because people share experience with a low emotional cost, while saving energy and effort. They transcend time and space, yet they produce content, set up links, and connect practices. It is a constantly networked world in every dimension of human experience. They co-evolve in permanent, multiple interaction. But they choose the terms of their co-evolution.

Thus, people live their physical lives but increasingly connect on multiple dimensions in SNS.

Paradoxically, the virtual life is more social than the physical life, now individualized by the organization of work and urban living.

But people do not live a virtual reality, indeed it is a real virtuality, since social practices, sharing, mixing, and living in society is facilitated in the virtuality, in what I called time ago the “space of flows” (Castells 1996).

Because people are increasingly at ease in the multi-textuality and multidimensionality of the web, marketers, work organizations, service agencies, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the Internet, less and less setting up alternative sites, more and more being present in the networks that people construct by themselves and for themselves, with the help of Internet social networking entrepreneurs, some of whom become billionaires in the process, actually selling freedom and the possibility of the autonomous construction of lives. This is the liberating potential of the Internet made material practice by these social networking sites. The largest of these social networking sites are usually bounded social spaces managed by a company. However, if the company tries to impede free communication it may lose many of its users, because the entry barriers in this industry are very low. A couple of technologically savvy youngsters with little capital can set up a site on the Internet and attract escapees from a more restricted Internet space, as happened to AOL and other networking sites of the first generation, and as could happen to Facebook or any other SNS if they are tempted to tinker with the rules of openness (Facebook tried to make users pay and retracted within days). So, SNS are often a business, but they are in the business of selling freedom, free expression, chosen sociability. When they tinker with this promise they risk their hollowing by net citizens migrating with their friends to more friendly virtual lands.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the transformation of sociopolitical practices on the Internet.

Communication Power: Mass-Self Communication and the Transformation of Politics

Power and counterpower, the foundational relationships of society, are constructed in the human mind, through the construction of meaning and the processing of information according to certain sets of values and interests (Castells 2009).

Ideological apparatuses and the mass media have been key tools of mediating communication and asserting power, and still are. But the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy, has found in Internet and mobile communication networks a major medium of mass self-communication and self-organization.

The key source for the social production of meaning is the process of socialized communication. I define communication as the process of sharing meaning through the exchange of information. Socialized communication is the one that exists in the public realm, that has the potential of reaching society at large. Therefore, the battle over the human mind is largely played out in the process of socialized communication. And this is particularly so in the network society, the social structure of the Information Age, which is characterized by the pervasiveness of communication networks in a multimodal hypertext.

The ongoing transformation of communication technology in the digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customized, in an ever-changing pattern.

As a result, power relations, that is the relations that constitute the foundation of all societies, as well as the processes challenging institutionalized power relations, are increasingly shaped and decided in the communication field. Meaningful, conscious communication is what makes humans human. Thus, any major transformation in the technology and organization of communication is of utmost relevance for social change. Over the last four decades the advent of the Internet and of wireless communication has shifted the communication process in society at large from mass communication to mass self-communication. This is from a message sent from one to many with little interactivity to a system based on messages from many to many, multimodal, in chosen time, and with interactivity, so that senders are receivers and receivers are senders. And both have access to a multimodal hypertext in the web that constitutes the endlessly changing backbone of communication processes.

The transformation of communication from mass communication to mass self-communication has contributed decisively to alter the process of social change. As power relationships have always been based on the control of communication and information that feed the neural networks constitutive of the human mind, the rise of horizontal networks of communication has created a new landscape of social and political change by the process of disintermediation of the government and corporate controls over communication. This is the power of the network, as social actors build their own networks on the basis of their projects, values, and interests. The outcome of these processes is open ended and dependent on specific contexts. Freedom, in this case freedom of communicate, does not say anything on the uses of freedom in society. This is to be established by scholarly research. But we need to start from this major historical phenomenon: the building of a global communication network based on the Internet, a technology that embodies the culture of freedom that was at its source.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century there have been multiple social movements around the world that have used the Internet as their space of formation and permanent connectivity, among the movements and with society at large. These networked social movements, formed in the social networking sites on the Internet, have mobilized in the urban space and in the institutional space, inducing new forms of social movements that are the main actors of social change in the network society. Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, and especially in the Arab revolutions against dictatorships; in Europe and the U.S. as forms of protest against the management of the financial crisis; in Brazil; in Turkey; in Mexico; and in highly diverse institutional contexts and economic conditions. It is precisely the similarity of the movements in extremely different contexts that allows the formulation of the hypothesis that this is the pattern of social movements characteristic of the global network society. In all cases we observe the capacity of these movements for self-organization, without a central leadership, on the basis of a spontaneous emotional movement. In all cases there is a connection between Internet-based communication, mobile networks, and the mass media in different forms, feeding into each other and amplifying the movement locally and globally.

These movements take place in the context of exploitation and oppression, social tensions and social struggles; but struggles that were not able to successfully challenge the state in other instances of revolt are now powered by the tools of mass self-communication. It is not the technology that induces the movements, but without the technology (Internet and wireless communication) social movements would not take the present form of being a challenge to state power. The fact is that technology is material culture (ideas brought into the design) and the Internet materialized the culture of freedom that, as it has been documented, emerged on American campuses in the 1960s. This culture-made technology is at the source of the new wave of social movements that exemplify the depth of the global impact of the Internet in all spheres of social organization, affecting particularly power relationships, the foundation of the institutions of society. (See case studies and an analytical perspective on the interaction between Internet and networked social movements in Castells 2012.)

The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself. Yet, it has specific effects in altering the capacity of the communication system to be organized around flows that are interactive, multimodal, asynchronous or synchronous, global or local, and from many to many, from people to people, from people to objects, and from objects to objects, increasingly relying on the semantic web. How these characteristics affect specific systems of social relationships has to be established by research, and this is what I tried to present in this text. What is clear is that without the Internet we would not have seen the large-scale development of networking as the fundamental mechanism of social structuring and social change in every domain of social life. The Internet, the World Wide Web, and a variety of networks increasingly based on wireless platforms constitute the technological infrastructure of the network society, as the electrical grid and the electrical engine were the support system for the form of social organization that we conceptualized as the industrial society. Thus, as a social construction, this technological system is open ended, as the network society is an open-ended form of social organization that conveys the best and the worse in humankind. Yet, the global network society is our society, and the understanding of its logic on the basis of the interaction between culture, organization, and technology in the formation and development of social and technological networks is a key field of research in the twenty-first century.

We can only make progress in our understanding through the cumulative effort of scholarly research. Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time. A digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet it continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.

These references are in fact sources of more detailed references specific to each one of the topics analyzed in this text.

Abbate, Janet. A Social History of the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007).

Cardoso, Gustavo, Angus Cheong, and Jeffrey Cole (eds). World Wide Internet: Changing Societies, Economies and Cultures. Macau: University of Macau Press, 2009.

Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–2003.

———. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

———. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

———. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

Castells, Manuel, Imma Tubella, Teresa Sancho, and Meritxell Roca.

La transición a la sociedad red. Barcelona: Ariel, 2007.

Hilbert, Martin, and Priscilla López. “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” Science 332, no. 6025 (April 1, 2011): pp. 60–65.

Papacharissi, Zizi, ed. The Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Networking Sites. Routledge, 2010.

Rainie. Lee, and Barry Wellman. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Trajectory Partnership (Michael Willmott and Paul Flatters). The Information Dividend: Why IT Makes You “Happier.” Swindon: British Informatics Society Limited, 2010. http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/info-dividend-full-report.pdf

Selected Web References.   Used as sources for analysis in the chapter

Agência para a Sociedade do Conhecimento. “Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC).” http://www.umic.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3026&Itemid=167

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. “Features, Press and Policy.” http://www.bcs.org/category/7307

Center for the Digital Future. The World Internet Project International Report. 4th ed. Los Angeles: USC Annenberg School, Center for the Digital Future, 2012. http://www.worldinternetproject.net/_files/_Published/_oldis/770_2012wip_report4th_ed.pdf

ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council). “Papers and Reports.” Virtual Society. http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/reports.htm

Fundación Orange. “Análisis y Prospectiva: Informe eEspaña.” Fundación Orange. http://fundacionorange.es/fundacionorange/analisisprospectiva.html

Fundación Telefónica. “Informes SI.” Fundación Telefónica. http://sociedadinformacion.fundacion.telefonica.com/DYC/SHI/InformesSI/seccion=1190&idioma=es_ES.do

IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute). UOC. “Project Internet Catalonia (PIC): An Overview.” Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, 2002–07. http://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic/eng/

International Telecommunication Union. “Annual Reports.” http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/sfo/annual_reports/index.html

Nielsen Company. “Reports.” 2013. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/reports/2013.html?tag=Category:Media+ and+Entertainment

Oxford Internet Surveys. “Publications.” http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/oxis/publications

Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Social Networking.” Pew Internet. http://www.pewinternet.org/Topics/Activities-and-Pursuits/Social-Networking.aspx?typeFilter=5

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The Internet, Politics and the Politics of Internet Debate

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• Stories From Experts About the Impact of Digital Life
• 1. The positives of digital life

Table of Contents

• 2. The negatives of digital life
• 3. Fifty-fifty anecdotes: How digital life has been both positive and negative
• About this canvassing of experts
• Acknowledgments

The greatest share of participants in this canvassing said their own experience and their observed experience among friends is that digital life improves many of the dimensions of their work, play and home lives. They cited broad changes for the better as the internet revolutionized everything, from the most pressing intellectual and emotional experiences to some of the most prosaic and everyday aspects of existence.

Louis Rossetto , self-proclaimed “troublemaker” and founder and former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, summed it all up this way: “Digital technology is so broad today as to encompass almost everything. No product is made today, no person moves today, nothing is collected, analyzed or communicated without some ‘digital technology’ being an integral part of it. That, in itself, speaks to the overwhelming ‘value’ of digital technology. It is so useful that in short order it has become an integral part of all of our lives. That doesn’t happen because it makes our lives miserable.”

There is almost no area in which digital technology has not impacted me and my family’s life. Larry Irving

[artificial intelligence]

Mike Liebhold , senior researcher and distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future, wrote, “Almost every member of my family regularly uses the internet to inform or improve aspects of their well-being: diet, fitness, health, social interaction with family and friends in person and online, education, entertainment, employment, commerce, finance and civic engagement.”

William Schrader , the founding CEO of PSINet, wrote, “Every single day: I have private communications with business associates in Europe, Asia, Latin America and in North America, and I receive emails or social media notices from my family members and their extended friends, and I receive the latest news and alerts from 20 different real news publications (such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and the Economist). All of this comes with little effort. And , after doing my local security, I can check every public investment I have made anywhere on earth and I can check my bank accounts and make transactions I deem of import, and I can search for any one or multiple piece of information that I need instantly, with or without Wi-Fi. Yes, I have what I wanted, everything at my fingertips. That means information, knowledge, history, ability to transact. I try to never do this when others are with me, since I love living in the moment. Since I am alone a lot, I can find the time. But I do not condemn or even slightly criticize people for taking a call, checking a text, reading, etc. What we built is what we wanted. It’s just that few people are happier. But, I am OK.”

Paul Saffo , a leading Silicon-Valley-based technological forecaster and consulting professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, said, “I have had an email address on my business card since 1982, and carry enough electronics on my person to get nervous in lightning storms. Digital connectivity has become like oxygen, utterly essential to my research. The net effect of these innovations has been to tie me more closely to other individuals and extend my interpersonal connections well beyond the pre-internet links of in-person interactions and telecommunications. I have friends – close friends who I have known for well over a decade and with whom I communicate nearly every day. We have never met in-person. In fact, we have never spoken over the phone. At the end of the day, the two of the three highest human desires are the desire to be useful, and the desire to share stories. We have been doing both since our distant ancestors sat around a savanna camp fire sharing their days and their dreams. Now, thanks to digital media, the circle around the campfire has grown to encompass (if we wish) all of humanity.”

Garland McCoy , president of the Technology Education Institute, said, “I can be a real-time engaged parent, husband, partner, problem solver, counselor, comforter, etc., while traveling anywhere in the world, and – if I am comfortable with a little inconvenience – I can usually manage this real-time interaction for free! Something that was never possible before. No more ‘Death of a Salesman.’”

Kyle Rose , principal architect at Akamai Technologies and active Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) participant, wrote, “There are simply too many things to list here. I’ll just hit on three. I can more easily keep in regular contact with friends in distant places. Those with whom I would have lost most contact (because, really, there’s no way I’m going to write letters or spend hours on the phone) I can now maintain a relationship with, sometimes of a fairly deep and interactive nature, via social media. This enables us to pick right up when we do finally see each other in person. Technology eases the difficulties of day-to-day life. Because of the internet, I have access to virtually all of recorded music at all times. I can get up-to-date maps and traffic data to avoid incidents. I can order food, groceries or a taxi, obtain up-to-date information about my flight status, and navigate foreign cities via public transit all from my phone with a few taps of my finger. Finally and relatedly, how the hell did I ever learn anything before the internet? The card catalog? Virtually all of human knowledge is at my fingertips at all times. It is rare that I ask a question of fact that someone hasn’t yet answered, and now many of those answers are available to anyone with access to a search engine. The impact of all of these is profoundly positive. And this is only a taste of what the internet, and technological advances in general, promise.”

Fred Davis , a futurist/consultant based in North America, wrote, “Messaging apps allow me to connect with people who have given me support, provided a chance to talk about life’s challenges, seek advice and many other things. Access to people is simplified. Chat apps (unlike Facebook) provide a one-on-one connection with another person, which can be more personal, human and healing than posting on social networks. I have been using a Fitbit for a number of years. I have had a heart attack and triple bypass and am pre-diabetic. Getting regular exercise is important, and my Fitbit helps me set and attain fitness goals much more easily than before. The ability to monitor and track my sleep helps me take actions to get better sleep, which definitely increases well-being. By connecting to my Fitbit scale I can also track my weight and tie it to my exercise goals. My Fitbit can connect to a Dexcom blood sugar-testing device that can test blood sugar every five minutes, which is extremely helpful in managing my pre-diabetes.”

These one-liners from anonymous respondents hit on a number of different positive themes:

• “I can get answers to questions about almost anything just by asking my telephone.”
• “I can save money on everything, including clothing and shoes, airfares, hotels and eat at better restaurants and drink better wine.”
• “Navigation via car has dramatically improved, with accurate up-to-date traffic information and destination wayfinding.”
• “Digital life is being able to speak and see someone – regardless of where you are – on a phone you carry on your person.”
• “Most people I have dated and approximately all of my friends knew me on the internet first; before such digital connectivity I would have just been lonely.”
• “Sharing photos of new generations instantly with loved ones on the other side of the world and using video and chat to send/receive money; to joke, to tease, to mourn.”
• “My son has grown up in a world in which he will never be lost; he will never be without a person to talk to; he will never be stopped from searching for an answer to a query.”
• “I work remotely for a company halfway around the world, and so does my partner. No need to be at a main office.”
• “The diffusion of webinars allows me to participate in many events organized in different countries without having to travel to them.”
• “Digital technology allows me to have better knowledge that empowers me to better support my own health when I face challenges.”
• “My job didn’t exist 15 years ago. I am a digital content manager.”
• “It means that we can participate in important moments that time and distance barred us from in the past.”
• “I feel more supported in good times and bad and laugh more than before I was connected online.”

Here is a roundup of the many ways these experts described the benefits they get and the benefits they observe.

Family enrichment and enhancement

Pamela Rutledge , director of the Media Psychology Research Center, said, “My 90-year-old father was on Facebook for the sole purpose of connecting with kids and grandkids who were scattered across the country. Reading and commenting on their posts gave him the ability to participate in the process of their lives. Knowing what the family members were doing increased his sense of involvement and the overall intimacy he experienced with them all. This familiarity also jump-started any family gathering, keeping people who were geographically disparate from feeling like relative strangers and allowing relationships to be more immediately meaningful. Texting in all forms serves the same purpose. Closeness in relationships is achieved by the frequency of contact. The human brain reacts to virtual contact as if it were real, releasing the same neurotransmitters of positive emotion and reward as if people were face to face. Texting allows for the multiple touchpoints, the sharing of life’s process and the reassurance of connection. These experiences replicate the behaviors that developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth described in her ground-breaking work on attachment theory and how people form a secure attachment style, essential to emotional well-being.”

The simplest anecdote is about keeping a family messaging chat open with my wife and children. Stowe Boyd

Stowe Boyd , managing director at Work Futures, said, “The simplest anecdote is about keeping a family messaging chat open with my wife and children. My kids – both in their 20s – live in Brooklyn, which is close to where we live, but over an hour away. However, we all participate in the chat, often several times in a day. We share pictures, links, stories, plans. It is simply much lower friction than how I managed to remain in contact – or didn’t, really – with my parents when I was in my 20s. Then it was an occasional phone call, visits when possible, but it was pretty tenuous. And I had what most of my contacts considered an unusually close and caring relationship with my folks. I wouldn’t say my family today is hyperconnected , but we certainly remain very connected, where scarcely a day passes without some interaction between all of us despite the physical distance involved. And this has allowed an extra richness to my life, and I guess theirs, a counter to the possible distance that could otherwise grow in our relations because of the hour of travel that separates us.”

[difference of digital life]

Steve Stroh , technology journalist, said, “Two observations. The first is that one of the regrets of my life is that I didn’t work hard enough to stay in touch with all of my family and friends as I moved away from my hometown and got involved in my career. Thus, many of my family and friends that were once dear to me are now estranged – entirely my fault. In my daughter’s generation (born in the 1990s), with social media like Facebook, etc., my daughter’s generation and beyond, they will never get entirely out of touch with family and friends (unless they really want to). They’ll know about significant events in their friends’ and family’s lives as things happen, and can always reach out because there’s a consistent point of contact – the social media messaging, ‘stable’ phone numbers such as mobile, email, etc. The second is that my wife and I maintain a near-daily ‘running conversation’ with my daughter who’s moved away via three-way ‘text’ messaging. We often share photos (of the family pets, as it turns out) and let each other know about important or unimportant – perhaps funny – things that are going on in our lives. So the three of us are never really out of touch, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing. I wish I could do this with MY father (who is, alas, very technophobic).”

Richard Sambrook , professor of journalism at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, wrote, “Very simply, I can talk to and see my daughter on the other side of the world at low or zero cost via video/smartphone technology in a way that was unthinkable a decade or more ago. It helps hold families together.”

Perry Hewitt , vice president of marketing and digital strategy at ITHAKA, said, “We live in an aging society; in the developed world, the population is getting older, people are living longer, and fertility rates are falling. Here in the U.S., where families can be geographically dispersed and family-leave policies minimal, caring for older relatives is difficult. Our family has benefitted from the many technology advances in elder care from cameras to robots to medication reminders to video calling. There is so much available to track critical metrics and improve quality of life – for the elderly and their tapped-out caregivers. I believe we’re still in the infancy of technologies that can improve medical compliance and personal safety, and combat a scourge many older Americans face: loneliness.”

Mary Chayko , a professor at the Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information, wrote, “My family and I now stay in contact via an unending series of group texts. While we would have remained connected via letters or phone calls in a pre-digital time, this allows the simpler, more convenient and more frequent sharing of moments both incidental and more meaningful, and keeps us consistently in one another’s minds and hearts.”

Alex Halavais , director of the M.A. in social technologies at Arizona State University, said, “We have two children in elementary school. It starts at the same time each day and ends at the same time. The children are generally out of touch with the family during this period. This would not have been unusual when I was in elementary school or when my parents were in elementary school, but the other institutions in our lives have changed this. We have shared family calendars that show who needs to be where and when, but these change with some consistency. While my partner and I both have busy careers, they never fall within clearly defined work hours, and mobile technologies mean that our everyday social and business lives are weaved together rather than blocked in clear periods. Time has changed, except for the kids’ grade school. It remains anchored in one position: the 20th century.”

Eelco Herder , an assistant professor of computer science whose focus is on personalization and privacy at  Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen in the Netherlands, wrote, “My husband and I live relatively far away (about two to five hours) from our families and our friends live in several countries. Facebook makes it easier to stay in touch with them, to inform them about important events, to show pictures of our daily lives, and – in return – to be informed about things that matter to them. For me, my circle of online friends has evolved from mainly ‘online contacts’ in the mid-2000s to people whom I know in daily life. As a result, if we meet friends after a year or so without contact, we do not need to give an overview of last year, but just continue the conversation and play a board game. It is also easier now to stay in touch with a larger number of people than in earlier days. Apps like WhatsApp allow us to have daily contact with our families, simply by exchanging short messages or sending quick pictures. This interaction does not replace phone calls and visits, but complements them.”

Nathaniel Borenstein , chief scientist at Mimecast, said, “In the 1980s and early 90s, people asked me why I cared so much about advancing the capacities of email. My usual reply: ‘Some day I will have grandchildren, and I want to get pictures of them right away, by email.’ This dream came true when I received an email that contained a sonogram image of my twin granddaughters when they were each no bigger than a few cells. I had expected those first pictures to be considerably cuter. Even though I was an evangelist for the future of communication technology, that technology exceeded my wildest imaginings.”

Srinivasan Ramani , a retired research scientist and professor, said, “It was in 1993. My daughter left school in Bombay and moved to college in the U.S. Telecommunication in India was quite bad in those days. The number of telephones, both landline and cellular, was about 3 million. (Compare with the billion or so cellphones we have in the same country now!) I knew it would be difficult for my daughter to call us back soon after arrival at the college, and so had asked her to get access to internet on campus and contact us through email and chat. She did that within hours of arrival. My wife had, to that point, carefully stayed away from the dial-up terminal I had on my study table at home for years. Now, she suddenly demanded to be introduced to the system. She demonstrated that given the right motivation, people can learn to use a dial-up terminal for email and internet chat in two days at the most! Our daughter was, for the next four years, our daughter on the Net!”

Claudia L’Amoreaux , digital consultant, wrote, “I started using videoconferencing early. First I used a black-and-white video phone that sent a still image every 5 seconds or so. Friends and I got our hands on one and did some fun experiments with artist techies at the Electronic Cafe in Los Angeles. Later I used Cornell’s CU-SeeMe videoconferencing. A real turning point for me was using the high-end PictureTel videoconferencing system in the early ‘90s. When the PictureTel staff dialed up and connected me to a person in New York City (I was in Monterey, California), as I said hello, tears came involuntarily to my eyes; the intimacy was so unexpected, I was overwhelmed with this encounter with a stranger. Fast forward to five years ago. My 85-year-old mother had a recurrence of cancer. We lived many miles apart. On one of my visits, we went to the phone store and I helped her pick out her first iPhone. It was so awesome to watch her learn to text with her friends. I could FaceTime her from my home while I got my life in order so I could return to take care of her. That phone was a literal lifeline during her last months – a source of joy, a tool for coordinating her care, and a reassurance for me that I could actually see daily how she was doing. I think of all the technology in our lives, videoconferencing technology contributes in a profound way to my well-being, bringing me closer to dear family and friends who live at a distance, or even just across the bay like my daughter does. I love it when we both have time to just hang out together via FaceTime when we can’t be there in person.”

Kirsten Brodbeck-Kenney , a director, said, “Thanks to social media and video chatting, my parents have been able to be very involved in my child’s life in spite of living on the other side of the country. She is only two and a half, but she knows their faces and voices and feels connected to them, even though she’s only met them a handful of times.”

Work creator, enabler and enhancer

I spend a great deal of my day online, and being hyperconnected makes it possible to find all the things I need to have a decent quality of life. Dewayne Hendricks

Dewayne Hendricks , CEO of Tetherless Access, said, “Living a digital life has made it possible to be self-sustaining financially. I spend a great deal of my day online, and being hyperconnected makes it possible to find all the things I need to have a decent quality of life. The type of life I’m leading now would not have been possible 30 years ago. I take comfort in the fact that I’ve had a hand in shaping a part of this thriving digital Web.”

Michael Rogers , a futurist based in North America, said, “I now live half the year in the Sicilian farm country where, thanks to wireless internet access, I can do most of my work. Ten years ago that would have been quite impossible. One of the things I most like about Sicily (besides the obvious attractions) is that while there is plenty of Facebook and email and Twitter, the ‘digital lifestyle’ has not colored private and public life so much as it has in my other home, New York City. Sicily remains a far more face-to-face culture. Why that is the case and how long it will continue is a longer story, but it is ironic that I’m using the new digital tools to avoid the side effects of those same tools.”

[Transmission Control Protocol]

James Blodgett , an advisory board member with the Lifeboat Foundation, wrote, “Important work is shared. When several string theorists published several papers predicting black hole production at particle colliders, I became involved with the collider controversy. The original safety considerations had glaring holes. … I made contacts with safety experts and scientists who were also concerned. I started a Global Risk Reduction special interest group in Mensa, I became an advisory board member of the Lifeboat Foundation (one of thousands), and I participated in writing petitions and contacting people. … The main thing we accomplished was to get CERN, the organization sponsoring the then-upcoming Large Hadron Collider, to do a second safety study.”

[Internet Relay Chat]

Jordan LaBouff , associate professor of psychology at the University of Maine, commented, “There are so many ways, from allowing me to stay connected to my family and other relationships while I travel for work and research, to being able to translate or navigate on the fly in difficult cross-cultural situations. The one that springs to mind is actually my wife’s work experience. Two years ago, due in part to the challenges of living with multiple chronic health conditions, my wife left her successful job as a cell technologist at a local hospital to pursue digital journalism. It has allowed her to work from home and write for a large public audience about research surrounding bipolar disorder. This digital environment provides her employment, and her writing supports thousands of people every week who read her research (that she accesses digitally) and writing and who get social support and well-being tips from it. It’s a remarkable way the digital world has improved our physical one.”

Tom Wolzien , chairman at The Video Call Center LLC, said, “My family’s creation of The Video Call Center to produce broadcast-quality television from the 4 billion global smartphones (and related patents and other intellectual property to make it reliable and cost effective) has enabled a flattening of traditional live video access, enabling programs based on zero-cost live remotes from about anywhere on the planet without field origination, transport, or control room costs. This means that any media organization can put about anyone on the air from anywhere, restricted only by the depth of the producer’s contact list.”

Jane Elizabeth , director of the accountability journalism program at the American Press Institute, wrote, “Digital technology has allowed my small non-profit organization to work efficiently and effectively from wherever we are in the world. For non-profits and even small for-profit organizations, you just can’t overstate the positive benefits of this type of mobility. There are absolute cost savings in overhead, travel, hourly wages. And there are qualitative benefits in employee work-life balance, productivity and emotional health.”

Jeremiah Foster , an open-source technologist at the GENIVI Alliance, said, “I lived and worked in Sweden for about 15 years. Recently I moved back to the United States to be with family since I’m originally from the U.S. I’m able to keep my employment, including my salary, my title and my day-to-day work while living thousands of miles away from the company I work for.”

Eugene Daniel , a young professional based in the United States, said, “Digital technology impacts every aspect of my daily life. As a member of the media, my job depends on technology (telecommunications, social media, internet). As a person who lives apart from family and loved ones, I depend on digital communication to stay in touch – including frequently connecting on FaceTime with my girlfriend. The uses are endless.”

Devin Fidler , a futurist and consultant based in the U.S., commented, “Sites like Upwork have allowed Rethinkery Labs to routinely pull together ‘flash teams’ of colleagues, support and expert advisers in a way that accomplishes many tasks more efficiently than would have been humanly possible before coordination platforms.”

Frank Feather , a business futurist and strategist with a focus on digital transformation, commented, “Technology allowed me to quit commuting – which is asinine in this era – to quit my career job, and to become a full-time consultant, thus allowing me to help far more organizations on a freelance-anywhere basis. This has been most fulfilling. Similarly, my children have built worldwide networks of friends and fellow students. We have two adopted daughters, and the internet has allowed one of them to find and connect with her birth family in China. None of this would be possible without the internet. The internet unifies people and combines ideas very easily.”

Yoram Kalman , an associate professor at the Open University of Israel, wrote, “Digital technology freed me from having to spend all of my work hours in the office. I have been telecommuting and working from home at least part of the week since the late ‘90s. That would not have been possible without the advent of digital communication. It allowed me to better integrate work, family commitments, leisure, health challenges of self, of children and of elderly parents, social commitments, etc. Consequently, my work is more productive. Furthermore, the ability to work across geographical and national borders opened new opportunities that made my work more exciting and fulfilling. Throughout this time, I had to learn and relearn how to use communication technologies in ways that empower me, and how to minimize the harm they cause. It is an ongoing learning challenge.”

Charlie Firestone , executive director of the Aspen Institute’s communications and society program, said, “I run an office of seven people. I was able to move from Washington, D.C., to California with little detriment, mostly due to video-conferencing. In our case it is Skype for Business that puts each employee a touch of a button away, and the video changes the interaction from simply voice calls or email. I see video calls, a la FaceTime or Skype to be a common activity of the future in business.”

[Structured Query Language]

Adam Montville , a vice president at the Center for Internet Security, said, “I have the privilege of working from home each and every day. While there are some aspects of office life I miss, the truth is that technology has made this possible. For our family, this has been immeasurably valuable. I can work more productively at different times of day, all while maintaining healthy boundaries for work/life balance (which really isn’t about hard boundaries as much as it is about unobtrusively blending the two). Before such technology existed, I had to commute. I had to be tied down to a specific schedule each and every day. I couldn’t connect to colleagues from a mountainside or a sailboat. It just wasn’t possible.”

Ann Adams , a technical writer based in North America, said, “It gave me a profession; one that did not exist when I was growing up.”

Vincent Alcazar , director at Vincent Alcazar LLC, wrote, “The growing mobility of labor cannot be underestimated, and the primary enabler is the gig economy with the internet as its engine. The gig economy only grows from here, as does its entwinement within people’s lives.”

Health and wellness aid

Avery Holton , an associate professor of communication at The University of Utah, commented, “As someone who has twice experienced the impact of cancer, once at the beginning of digital and social media and once in 2016, I feel more empowered by the ability to be transparent and accepted. Yes, we all still enjoy sharing those moments in our lives that give off the best appearance, but the stigma of sharing experiences of disease or pain or loss has lessened. More and more, we are encouraged by the actions or the postings of others to share our tougher experiences and to, if we so wish, build a community around those experiences. The first time I went through cancer, I felt lost and disconnected and without voice. This time, though it admittedly took some coaxing from friends and other supporters, I shared my experience and my recovery. That really helped me through the process and into a quicker, more lasting mental, emotional and physical recovery.”

My online network and digital tools made it easy to share the event, his progress, my stress and feelings, for others to empathize and share resources and advice. Susan Price

Susan Price , lead experience strategist at the United Services Automobile Association (USAA), commented, “My husband had a stroke last year. My online network and digital tools made it easy to share the event, his progress, my stress and feelings, for others to empathize and share resources and advice. I found myself carefully segregating my communications by channel, moderating the degree of honesty according to the size and makeup of the group. I report to the largest group in Facebook ‘sanitized’ updates of mostly hopeful progress reports and vignettes that show me or my husband in a flattering or inspirational light. I avoid upsetting others with starkly honest or too-revealing stories of my own or my husband’s pain, frustration or lack of coping. My husband is aware of my propensity to share, and has asked directly when we’re discussing a fraught situation, ‘This isn’t going on Facebook, is it? Good!’ But he suggested my posting and sharing some achievements. Because of its ubiquity and reach, Facebook helped me identify select others in my network – many of whom I hadn’t spoken with in 10 to 20 years – who had directly relevant experience with caregiving of stroke survivors and adjusting when a partner suffers a severe health crisis. With those found veterans, I moved the discussion to more private channels such as Facebook Messenger, email or phone to share more honestly my negative feelings, fears and pain, and received directly helpful specific advice, support and resources. I’ve also used caregiver forums to connect with quickly available communities of peers in situations much closer to my own.”

Gina Neff , an associate professor and senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, said, “Digital technology has been a godsend for care-givers, allowing people to coordinate their efforts to help during cancer treatment, when a newborn arrives, or during a health crisis. Apps and websites cannot replace the communities that have always connected and supported us, but they can help diverse and dispersed groups coordinate care in unprecedented ways.”

Bradford Hesse , chief of health communication and informatics research at the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said, “I now stay in closer contact with my healthcare provider than I ever have before. If I have a question, I can ask it through secure messaging. If I want to evaluate my own recent blood panels for areas of concern or progress, I can do that online through a secure portal. Robocalls to my house from my provider as well as text messages to my phone ensure that I do not miss a recommended cancer screening. I watch my diet more rigorously with the help of a diet app on my smartphone equipped with camera to retrieve caloric/nutritional information, and I monitor my exercise goals through the use of my Apple Watch wearable. If I have a complaint, it is usually because the ecosystem of medicine is still not connected enough. There are laggards who resist sharing my electronic health record data with specialists as needed. There is 20th-century thinking that prevents these digital technologies from being fully integrated into the medical system in ways that will be cost-efficient, interoperable, empowering and truly usable.”

Thomas Lenzo , a respondent who shared no additional identifying details, commented, “Digital technology has facilitated my management of various aspects of my healthcare. I am able to schedule appointments and order prescription refills online, at any time of day. I can get detailed text or video information about health issues from trusted sources. I have access via portals to my health records. I also tell family and friends how they can use digital technology to impact their health.”

Ed Black , president and CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said, “The ability to monitor the medical records, procedures, medicines of a loved one remotely provides opportunity for quality oversight and rapid response, in contrast to being tied to hospital visits and uncertainty.”

Gary L. Kreps , distinguished professor and director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication at George Mason University, wrote, “My family and I use wearable fitness trackers that tally our daily exercise behaviors (steps). This has influenced both our awareness of our physical activity and motivation to exercise regularly. We strive to accomplish our 10,000 daily steps! We also compare our exercise levels and encourage each other to engage in physical activity. We now seek opportunities to exercise together to achieve our activity goals. This has improved our overall physical activity, fitness and health.”

Kevin J. Payne , founder of Chronic Cow LLC, said, “Since I research the effects of chronic illness and live with multiple sclerosis, I have a particular interest in using these technologies to monitor and evaluate my condition, keep up on the latest research, and connect with others – both professionals and others living with chronic conditions. My life has been radically affected by these burgeoning technologies on all these fronts. It allows me to collect my own data, blend it with other datasets and generate and test real-time predictive algorithms. I have a far better understanding of my condition, especially as it is baselined against relevant populations. I not only get access to cutting edge pre-print research, but I’ve also been able to widen my professional network by communicating with the researchers. And my involvement with patient communities has enriched my life in many ways.”

David Myers , a professor of psychology at Hope College, wrote, “As a person with hearing loss and an advocate for a hearing-assistive technology that has great promise (www.hearingloop.org), the internet has networked me with kindred spirit advocates nationwide (also via 19,898 emails I have sent and 18,516 received with the words ‘hearing’ and ‘loop’). Together, our internet-facilitated ‘hearing loop’ advocacy has led to thousands of newly equipped facilities, from home TV rooms to worship places to auditoriums to airports (and New York City subway booths and new taxis). And more progress is on the horizon. Supported by digital technology, we are making a better world for people with hearing loss.”

[doctor in general practice]

Doug Breitbart , co-founder and co-director of The Values Foundation, said, “In my life I have experienced significant adverse changes and circumstance, living situation and health. Virtual connectivity via the internet has enabled me to establish networks of connections, collaborative communities and new friendships and relationships with people around the world.”

Leah Robin , a health scientist based in North America, said, “My family has a genetic form of anemia that is very rare. Because of digital technology we’ve been able to make contact with researchers, take advantage of on-going research, and provide and receive support from other patients from around the world. The impact has been, at times, lifesaving for my family members.”

Christopher Bull , a university librarian, said, “I had an itchy rash on my hands. Found articles on the internet which suggested using witch hazel. No rash, no itch.”

Community lifeline

Ethan Zuckerman , director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, wrote, “I went through a divorce recently and wrote about my experiences online. While there are few folks in my immediate community who are going through divorce, I found several friends in other cities in my extended circles who had excellent support and advice. One of the most supportive individuals was an acquaintance from college who was not a close friend, but who stepped up on Facebook and was a wonderful support to me from halfway around the country.”

Together, we grow intelligence, connect up one another’s work and support positive social change just by doing our work, following one another and sharing what’s meaningful more widely. Anne Collier

Anne Collier , consultant and executive at The Net Safety Collaborative, said, “I ‘talk’ with people all over the world on a daily basis on Twitter – seeing, learning from, supporting and spreading what’s meaningful to them in their work and lives. It’s a tremendous source of inspiration for me. Together, we grow intelligence, connect up one another’s work and support positive social change just by doing our work, following one another and sharing what’s meaningful more widely.”

Kathryn Campbell , a digital experience design consultant, said, “I have a young friend who lives in another state in a rural area. Over time, I have realized from their social media posts that he/she is emerging as gender non-conforming (probably transsexual). In the past, this is a journey that I would probably not have known about, especially since his/her immediate family is very conservative and have not accepted this facet of the young person’s identity. I am so grateful to have been included in this revelation so I can offer my unconditional love and support. And I am even more grateful that a person who in the past would have felt isolated, unnatural, and broken now knows that they are in fact part of a global community. He/she can find and utilize peer support groups as well as myriad medical, psychological and spiritual resources that would not have been available to someone in a small town in the past. I believe this will probably save lives. I definitely hope that it will help increase our ability as a society to accept others who don’t conform to our preconceived notions of what is normal.”

Ana Cristina Amoroso das Neves , director of the department for the information society at Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, said, “The smartphone has become a part of my family life. The current organisation we have and the data we can share more than modified the way we interact. There is no waste of time and therefore we all gain efficiency in our daily life. The dawn of Internet of Things is already embedded. … If there is an electricity glitch, we cannot even think how will we survive due to the new paradigm we have in our lives. Hyperconnection is part of my family and friends’ well-being. It is nothing that can be compared with the life my parents had. I wonder how I could have survived in that society, living before total digital connectivity existed, even when it had just started and was not spread yet.”

Deborah Lupton , a professor at University of Canberra’s News & Media Research Centre, said, “I live in a vast continent (Australia) where academics are scattered many kilometres from each other, and it is a very long, expensive and exhausting plane ride from my colleagues in the Northern Hemisphere. However, I have extensive networks with my colleagues on Twitter and Facebook. I enjoy taking time out to chat with them, sharing professional and also some personal information regularly. It makes me feel less isolated and more easily able to keep in contact with my academic network. Nothing beats face-to-face encounters, but social media and emails, as well as the occasional use of Skype, is a far better way to maintain these contacts than letter writing or faxing, which is how we did things before digital media.”

Nancy Heltman , visitor services director for Virginia State Parks, said, “I have met and developed relationships with people outside any sphere of reference I never would have had thanks to my digital life. This started when I worked on the 2008 Obama campaign, includes people I met through a group where we shared our love for household pets and goes through today where I have a relationship with customers that I never would have met personally. While I do not believe that my online relationships replace ones that involve personal face-to-face connections, they are important and have broadened my horizons in many ways, adding a richness to my life. In fact my more-traditional face-to-face relationships have also benefited from more communication due to digital communications. When forced to only have relationships with people you can meet in person, you tend to live in a more-narrow world, with people more like you. Digital communications broadens your horizons, or it can if you want it to.”

Social media: The horizon expander

Michael R. Nelson , public policy expert with Cloudflare, said, “I’m an avid user of social media, which I use to track developments in internet policy around the world. Almost every day, one of the people I follow on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn shares a report, law review article, economic analysis, or news article on something I need to know about and would not have discovered by just reading the U.S. newspapers and media sites I track regularly. Equally importantly, my Facebook and LinkedIn friends introduce me to experts in the field in countries around the world – without my having to spend time flying overseas to attend conferences. In 2017, I was able to be a fun participant in the Global Conference in Cyber Space in New Delhi without missing Thanksgiving with my family. Likewise, I was able to be a remote participant at the UN’s Internet Governance Forum in Geneva without leaving my house (as long as I was willing to tune into the webcast at 4 a.m.).”

[bulletin board system]

Michael Roberts , an internet pioneer and Internet Hall of Fame member, commented “Despite its well-known problems, I find that Facebook is important to me in a number of ways. 1) Keeping up with professional friends around the globe now that I am retired. For an old fart (81), it is a source of daily intellectual stimulation and a feeling of keeping my hand in the game. 2) A window into many marvelous places and activities. I am a railfan and there are restored steam engines, abandoned trackage, lonely and empty depots, etc., to fill any amount of time I have available. Name your hobby or sport, and there are folks out there to share their discoveries with you. 3) The original ‘family and friends’ angle. My siblings and I are all over the U.S. Facebook lets us pretend we are close (Worldwide webcams add a lot as well). There are lots of other examples – politics, medicine, personal safety, education.”

Jerry Michalski , founder of the Relationship Economy eXpedition, said, “I now have peripheral vision into the lives of family, friends and acquaintances a few degrees from me – all voluntarily. When I see them, I don’t need to ask ‘what’s up,’ but can say ‘I’m glad your daughter got through her operation,’ or whatever is appropriate for the state of their lives I can observe. Those weak ties are priceless, and lead to insights. In the early days of Twitter, I left a meeting and tweeted something like, ‘Just left a mtg about the cash health care economy. Had no idea it existed or was big.’ At the time, I had set up for all my tweets to forward to Facebook, and the next day I got a fascinating eight-paragraph note on Facebook from an acquaintance who had taken his family off regular health insurance years ago, and was very happy with the outcomes. On the other hand, I am among the Satanic Device Addicts who check email on their phones first thing in the morning (it’s on the night table, right?) and tap and prod them all day long, in search of those little dopamine hits.”

… All of us now have the ability to find ‘our people’ – those who share our interests and passions and concerns – in ways that we couldn’t when our connective avenues were limited by time and geography. Scott McLeod

[live-action roleplaying gamer]

Jason Hong , professor at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote, “WeChat is not well known in the U.S., but is perhaps the most popular app in China. It’s primarily a messaging app, like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, but also serves as a social network and message board. What’s really amazing is how it’s really helped my family (from China) connect with others here in the U.S. My father-in-law found people to go fishing with. My mother-in-law found a monthly foodies group to go to. My wife found some of her old high school classmates, plus a group of people that buy foods in bulk at discount and split the costs. As for me, well, I’m the boring one, I just use it to send text messages and emoji to my wife. For my family, WeChat works well because it lowers the transaction costs of finding individuals with similar interests and backgrounds. My parents-in-law don’t speak much English, so WeChat acts as a major filter for people who do speak Chinese. WeChat also lets you organize message boards by geography, making it easy to find groups that are geographically nearby. It’s pretty amazing, since these weren’t really problems that we knew we had, and the WeChat groups just filled those needs quite nicely. Furthermore, it was a good tool that let us first find people virtually and then transition to real-world relationships.”

Richard Bennett , a creator of the Wifi MAC protocol and modern Ethernet, commented, “Facebook was useful for spreading the word to my extended family about the status of two relatives who died of pancreatic cancer recently. In one case, a sister-in-law in another country used me as a go-between to reach my wife, and in another I used it to contact a former stepbrother, a sister and a half brother. As modern families become more complex, communication tools have had to adapt.”

Lisa Nielsen , director of digital learning at the New York City Department of Education, said, “I am the administrator of several Facebook groups around areas of personal interest such as hobbies, sports, career (education). I started a Facebook group for teachers at the New York City Department of Education who love teaching with technology. In the past all these people existed in the 1,800 schools across the city, but there was no way for these people to find one another. The group now has close to 3,000 members. It is highly active, and strong relationships are being built. We have a direct line to what is happening in schools. Teachers feel supported like never before. They are more confident and better able to serve their students. They have increased job satisfaction. They share extreme gratitude for the group and its responsiveness. They are no longer alone but rather supported by a powerful network of other dedicated teachers.”

Knowledge storehouse

[massive open online courses]

Jeff Jarvis , a professor at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, said, “I count as an unfathomable luxury the ability to look up most any fact, any book, any news article at no cost and in seconds. I value the friends I have made from a tremendous diversity of background and worldviews thanks to the connected Net. I welcome many – though certainly not all – new voices I can hear now thanks to the Net putting a printing press in anyone’s hands. And not incidentally, I have transformed my career thanks to the lessons I continually learn by and about the Net.”

Deborah Hensler , professor of law at Stanford University, wrote, “On a personal level, digital technology enables me to work more productively from any place in the world. It provides access to a vast store of information and research data. It has enabled me to collaborate with academic colleagues in many different parts of the world, which has been an incredibly generative experience. In my personal life, it connects me to far-flung family and friends. It also connects me to people who share my political views, which gives me some hope – perhaps foolish – that working with them I can shift the political discourse.”

Ray Schroeder , associate vice chancellor for online learning at the University of Illinois Springfield, wrote, “I have been engaged in teaching, researching and presenting/publishing in advocating educational technology in higher education over the past 46 years. As I think back over those nearly five decades, my impact and reach today is far greater than I had ever imagined in 1971 or ‘81 or even 2001. Through the use of social media, I am able to share resources and perspectives to tens of thousands of others in my field on a daily basis. The prospect that one person could manage that scope of impact and reach was inconceivable for anyone who was not a network commentator on television or a nationally syndicated columnist. Now this opportunity extends to all who are dedicated to a purpose or cause.”

Larry MacDonald , CEO of Edison Innovations, wrote, “Sharing enables power to flow to those who ‘know’ rather than only those who control. People have a better grasp of news and tools that can make their lives easier. Knowledge disseminates faster and deeper.”

Problem solver and wonder creator

Hal Varian , chief economist at Google, commented, “I was in Rio trying to communicate with a taxi driver a few months before the Olympics. The driver pulled out his phone and clicked on Google Translate. Problem solved. Turns out that Google had trained all the taxi drivers in Rio how to use this fantastic tool.”

In terms of the spread of knowledge, the past two decades have been as revolutionary as when early man harnessed fire. Kenneth Cukier

Kenneth Cukier , senior editor at The Economist, wrote, “In researching my new book on AI, I came across a citation of a relevant document from the 1950s by the East German secret police, the Stasi. I Googled it and got a digital copy – which, when you think about it, is amazing. But my German is lousy. So I uploaded the 35-page report into Google Translate and got an English version a minute later – which is even more astounding. Just 20 years ago it was impossible for all but the most prestigious scholar to obtain something like that, and it might take half a year. I did it on impulse in four minutes. In terms of the spread of knowledge, the past two decades have been as revolutionary as when early man harnessed fire.”

Vint Cerf , Internet Hall of Fame member and vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google, commented, “I moved my wife from an older iPhone with AT&T service to a Google Pixel 2 with Google Fi service. It took 10 minutes and did NOT require physical modification or even installation of a SIM card. I got confirmation from AT&T within minutes that the account and phone number had been transferred. I was astonished.”

[Internet Governance Forum]

Bart Knijnenburg , assistant professor at Clemson University, said, “Seven years ago, when I got my first iPhone with FaceTime, I was calling my fiancée (who was living on the other side of the country) on my bike ride home from work. Out of nowhere a number of hot air balloons appeared, and with the touch of a button I was able to switch to a video call. I remember being amazed by the simplicity with which I was able to share this experience. Nowadays, communicating with people anywhere in the world has become second nature to me. Sometimes I realize that I have written several research papers with people whom I have never met in person!”

Heywood Sloane , partner and co-founder of HealthStyles.net, said, “The criterion I used for my most recent purchase of a smartwatch was that it NOT try to be a watch. I have one already, a gift from my wife that I am very fond of, thank you! I expected, and got, a multitude of tools to help me stay on track with stress, sleep, biometrics and much more. What I did not expect, was the way it tamed the peppering of email, notifications by apps, ringtones and alarms of people and things clamoring for my immediate attention. It reduces them all to gentle vibrations. Long ones for calls I wanted to take, and short ones for everything else. It lets me block interruptions from apps and emailers. It also let me see others and get more detail with a tap when I want it. It gives me control and helps me defend my space to concentrate and focus on what I choose, rather than what someone else chooses.”

Thomas Viall , president of Rhode Island Interactive, commented, “Just this past Christmas shopping season is a great example of how digital technology was beneficial. We could text our relatives rather than interrupt them with a call. They were able to share their wish list, we could comparison shop online (at both local and national stores), find the best value, search for coupons and either order online or use navigation to find the best route to the store despite holiday traffic.”

Education tool

Olugbenga Adesida , founder and CEO of Bonako, based in Africa, wrote, “The digital revolution has changed social relationships and the way we communicate. In some African countries like Kenya and Zimbabwe, mobile payment transactions are responsible for over 40% of GDP. Mobile apps are used to deliver education as well as providing timely information to farmers to enhance their productivity. Similarly, mobile apps are used to deliver price and other market information. At our firm – Bonako a mobile games and app-development company – it is our platform for continuous education for staff; it is what we use to access training materials from all over the world. We also use digital tools to plan and develop our products in a way that would not have been possible only a few years ago. Developing games and apps requires varied expertise, and collaboration is key. The new tools for collaborative work allow us to work together and to provide virtual access to potential partners/clients to test products no matter where they are in the world.”

Karl M. van Meter , founding director of the bilingual scientific quarterly Bulletin of Sociological Methodology, said, “Far from being a ‘brief personal anecdote,’ what has changed greatly in my life and work, like that of almost everyone in higher education and research, is that the internet and associated technologies mean that no longer only a few top persons have access to the necessary information, technology and means for scientific production and teaching. It is no longer only the director (always a male) who gets his secretary (always a female) to type out his paper and check references before having it published. Almost all competent teachers and researchers have that possibility now; moreover they can work together over great distances and form social structures among themselves, independent of centralized or local administrative control. A ‘brief personal anecdote’ along these lines would be when a national director of scientific research here in France asked to be appointed to an international body associated with UNESCO. That body replied very respectfully to the director that they had already found a better candidate from France who had been working with them via the internet. That other candidate was me.”

Today, students I help mentor through their own doctoral studies have access to all of the material I did two decades ago, but with a fraction of the time and travel commitment. Greg Downey

Greg Downey , a professor and associate dean at University of Wisconsin, Madison, said, “When I was a graduate student at a U.S. private research university in the late 1990s, I spent many hours gathering background context for the beginning of a major historical and social research project, tracking down physical newspaper indexes, footnote references, printed journal volumes and microfilm reels from dozens of access-restricted research libraries. Weeks and months of ‘metadata labor’ on a particular idea might lead to a viable research project and a source of accessible primary research materials – or to a dead end and a need to start all over. I recall being among the first users of some of the online image databases produced by the federal government to find visual evidence that I simply wouldn’t have had the ability to access (or even know it existed) even five years earlier. Similarly, once materials were acquired and assembled, only rudimentary organization and writing tools were available for assembling the project into a coherent narrative. I recall being one of the first individuals at my university to use Geographic Information Systems software in my historical analysis and in the production of my final manuscript. All of the temporal and spatial expectations of earning a Ph.D. in the humanities and interpretive social sciences were tied to expectations of analog, print and physically housed resources. Today, students I help mentor through their own doctoral studies have access to all of the material I did two decades ago, but with a fraction of the time and travel commitment. This has raised the expectations for comprehensiveness in literature reviews and archival searches; it has raised the expectations for presentation of data and engagement of narrative. It is both easier and harder to do great work now and get that Ph.D. within the same five-year time period. But I think the work that is done is of higher quality, and the scholars that are produced are of greater intellectual prowess and scope than ever before.”

Adriana Labardini Inzunza , commissioner of Mexico’s Federal Institute of Telecommunications, said, “There are so many stories of how IT and internet have made my work more productive and my access to relevant information far easier – hopefully for others around me as well. As a commissioner at the Federal Institute of Telecommunications I made sure that our virtual board meetings and deliberations were valid; on many occasions I have been able to deliberate and vote on the cases submitted to the board through a video conference when in business travels and I also to hold e-meetings with my staff. My office has home-office on Mondays, saving hours of wasted time on traffic jams. …

[National Autonomous University of Mexico]

Jacob Dankasa , a North American researcher, said, “Technology has connected me to achieve today what I couldn’t imagine in the past. When I was doing my doctoral dissertation, I was supposed to travel to Nigeria from the U.S. to conduct interviews with my research participants. Unfortunately, the Ebola epidemic blew up in Africa and I was unable to go. Fortunately, software existed that allowed me to interview the participants and automatically record the sessions as I interviewed them. The price was reasonable. It saved me money and time and avoided health hazards. More and better innovations are expected in this area in the future.”

Travel companion and enhancer

[for the film ‘Casablanca.’]

I travel a lot and have vastly more flexibility and local knowledge at hand due to my devices. I see things I would not have seen, travel without having to plan every stop in advance and find the things that matter to me. I get better hotels and food, too. Brad Templeton

Brad Templeton , software architect, civil rights advocate, entrepreneur and internet pioneer, wrote, “I travel a lot and have vastly more flexibility and local knowledge at hand due to my devices. I see things I would not have seen, travel without having to plan every stop in advance and find the things that matter to me. I get better hotels and food, too.”

Jon Lebkowsky , CEO of Polycot Associates, said, “A week or so ago we headed off to a party at a house we’d never visited. We entered the address in Google Maps, so we had a guide (we call her ‘Lucy’) taking us where we need to go. It was a circuitous route – without Lucy we likely would have taken wrong turns – and I was thinking how much we now depend on that technology, not just to get us where we want to go, but also to route us around traffic congestion. Soon enough, we’ll be stepping into autonomous vehicles, vocalizing an address and relaxing for the duration of the ride. Digital technology for transportation efficiency is revolutionary.”

Safety enabler

Alejandro Pisanty , a professor at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and longtime leading participant in the activities of the Internet Society, wrote, “The ability to use digital tools for everything I do – from professional work, like teaching and research, to the most personal – finding long-separated relatives after the family dispersed from Europe to at least three continents in the 1930s-1940s – has been a continued benefit. Using lightweight online tools in class helps my students in the National University of Mexico grasp concepts and communicate them to their families. During the aftermath of the earthquakes in Mexico in 2017 this became particularly valuable for them; it also helped fight misinformation and take relief efforts to the places that most needed them. We went from the basics of oscillation and wave physics, through the propagation of different kinds of seismic waves. To the ways buildings are damaged and how to identify fatal structural flaws. In parallel we helped brigades take aid to small towns and to camps in Mexico City, and some of the most far-flung ones find safe havens from which to distribute aid.”

Pedro Cartagena , an associate professor at the University of Puerto Rico, said, “After hurricane María in Puerto Rico, the internet was the only communications resource in order to contact my family members, buy solar panels and get other essentials for survival.”

Apps for ordering car rides via a smartphone is a net benefit to society – it increases safety for both the passenger and driver and offers more convenience in ordering a ride. Tom Barrett

Tom Barrett , president at EnCirca Inc., wrote, “1) With the use of a smartwatch, I can now easily track daily exercise activity, which is a great motivator for making it a daily practice. 2) Apps for ordering car rides via a smartphone is a net benefit to society – it increases safety for both the passenger and driver and offers more convenience in ordering a ride.”

Multipurpose and memory aid

Bill Lehr , a research scientist and economist at MIT, wrote, “There is no question smartphones and always/everywhere access to information has allowed me to be sloppier in memorizing things and allows me to gain instant access to facts that I have come to rely on significantly. I think that is positive, especially since as I get older, I find memory-aids a big help, but it also encourages laziness.”

Ted Newcomb , directing manager of AhwatukeeBuzz, wrote, “LOL. I am virtually helpless without my phone to remind me of appointments and meetings. My head is free of having to remember numbers, dates and times. It’s very liberating. I can instantly communicate anywhere in the world, doing business at the ‘speed of byte.’”

Micah Altman , director of research and head scientist for the program for information science at MIT, said, “When I was 10, I received a portable film camera. It had a capacity of 24 negatives (in black  and white). I would send the negatives in, pay a substantial portion of my allowance to have them developed – wait for weeks for them to be returned, and finally, then be able to see how they turned out. (Usually, not so well.) Every few months, I might put one in a letter to my grandparents. Eight years ago, when my daughter turned 10, we gave her a portable camera – over the next few years she shot thousands of still, and videos – learning some elements of composition, and building shared memories. Last year, when my son turned 11, we gave him a cellphone. And over the year we’ve all shared pictures, accomplishments and sympathies daily across a growing extended family network.”

Shiru Wang , research associate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said, “Online shopping saves me time. New social media continues my connections with friends in different countries and regions. Online resources make my research convenient. Online news keeps me informed all the time. But I am not very digitally embedded. I keep a distance from Facebook, etc.; I intentionally refuse to be dominated by social media. Thus, my life is not very much bothered by the internet. Thus, I appreciate the advantages of the internet and I am able to escape the potential harm brought by the internet.”

Joe Raimondo , digital customer-relationship-management leader at Comcast and a former CEO, said, “Trackers and personal data are an enhancement to living. Street-level navigation and easy access to crowdsourced resources is very positive. It’s possible to play large-scale social games and have enormous amounts of data and telemetry collected and analyzed to chart group interaction at large scale.”

General comments

Ian O’Byrne , an assistant professor of education at the College of Charleston, wrote, “As an educator and researcher who studies these digital places and tools, I’m in front of screens a lot. I experiment and play in these spaces. I’m also writing and researching the impact of these screens and their impact on the well-being of others as it relates to children and adolescents. The problem in this is that one of the other hats that I wear is as a parent and husband. I am not only critical of my engagement and use of these digital technologies, but I’m also cautious/cognizant of their role as a mediator in my relationships with my children and significant other. These screens and digital tools play a strong role in our lives and interactions in and out of our home. In our home we have screens and devices all over the place. We have a video server that is ready to serve content to any one of these screens on demand. We have voice-assistive devices listening and waiting for our commands. I believe it is important as an educator and researcher to play with and examine how these devices are playing a role in our lives, so I can bring this work to others. Even with these opportunities, I’m still struck by times when technology seems too intrusive. This is plainly evident when I’m sitting with my family and watching a television show together, and I’m gazing off into my device reading my RSS feed for the day. Previously I would enjoy watching the funniest home videos and laughing together. Now, I am distant. The first thing in the morning when I’m driving my kids in to school and stop at a red light, previously I would enjoy the time to stop, listen to the radio, look at the clouds or bumper stickers on cars around me. Now, I pull out the phone to see if I received a notification in the last 20 minutes. When I call out for the voice-activated device in my home to play some music or ask a question, my request is quickly echoed by my 2-year-old who is just learning to talk. She is echoing these conversations I’m having with an artificial intelligence. I’m trying to weigh this all out in my mind and figure what it means for us personally. The professional understanding may come later.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick , product director of influencer marketing, said, “My mobile feed reader finds great articles for me to learn from. My mobile article-saving app reads those articles to me out loud while I walk my dog. My mobile browser allows me to edit my personal wiki to record the best lessons I learn from those articles. My mobile flashcard app helps me recall and integrate those lessons I want to learn over time. My mobile checklist app helps me track how regularly I reflect on how those lessons connect with the larger context of my life in a blog post or on a run. There are costs to mobile connectivity, but there are so many incredible benefits!”

To my way of thinking, it’s about control. If I’m in control of the electronics, they are a benefit, but when they get out of control they are an irritation and an interruption. Fred Baker

Fred Baker , an internet pioneer and longtime leader with the Internet Engineering Task Force, wrote, “To my way of thinking, it’s about control. If I’m in control of the electronics, they are a benefit, but when they get out of control they are an irritation and an interruption. My family and friends giggle about the frequency with which I pull out my telephone to investigate a TV show’s facts or other things. That said, I have access to that now, where I once upon a time did not. On the other hand, I have also had the experience of talking with a customer in Japan while my family in the U.S. woke up and started texting each other, and I all of a sudden have to deal with my telephone.”

Stephen Abram , CEO of the Federation of Ontario Public Libraries, wrote, “On a personal level I am more connected with my wider family. Relationships with friends whom I see only occasionally – maybe annually in person at conferences, continue throughout the year. I now know many business acquaintances on a deeper level and have better relationships as a result. I dislike the word ‘hyperconnected’ since it implies a little hyperactivity – a known ‘disorder.’ I see this as a controllable issue where personal choices are made. When circumstances such as travel, weather, disability or distance create the opportunities for sustained loneliness to happen, the digital world bridges some of the gap. In my case, sustained periods on the road in airports and hotel rooms are greatly ameliorated by connecting with friends.”

David J. Krieger , director of the Institute for Communication & Leadership located in Lucerne, Switzerland, observed, “Digital connectivity enables a seamless flow of communication and association with regard to many different concerns and interests. This augments community and embeddedness and thus well-being.”

Mark Patenaude , vice president and general manager of cloud technologies at ePRINTit, said, “I certainly don’t want to fool anyone into believing that digital advancement has been a panacea of beautiful things! However, I can remember the first time my car stopped for me in a dangerous situation automatically, or stopped when I was backing up when it perceived a danger. Then there’s printing and storing terabytes of digitally compressed images on a smartphone and being able access a document or image from 20 years ago in seconds using the cloud. I can remember we had about 100 people around a large projector outside, watching the last concert of the The Tragically Hip and the home network went down. I plugged in my iPhone, went to the concert URL site, and projected live on a 10-foot screen from my cellular device; wow and double wow!”

Akah Harvey , co-founder, COO and IT engineer at Traveler Inc., said, “Fifteen years back, when I first had my first PC, I now was empowered with a tool that helped me write digital notes, play more exciting games and gain general knowledge about how the technology worked. At my age (10) I gained knowledge in the workings of these things that it contributed to my brilliance in school, especially on the subject. Few years later when we’d gain access to the internet, a whole new change took place. I discovered so many more opportunities, as one could now connect with the rest of the world to share, search and find information about anything. It was a big transformation in the way I viewed society. I quickly was able to decide what I would want to do growing older, so I’d say I found my passion thanks to this change.”

Karl Ackermann , a writer and researcher at WriteSpace LLC., commented, “We no longer keep paper files for the household. Photographs are displayed on a digital screen instead of a photo album. We can track where our kids are driving with a phone app. We buy our train tickets with an app that has a scanning bar code. We sometimes text friends instead of phoning. We pay bills online.”

Rich Salz , principal engineer at Akamai Technologies, said, “I have made my living in this field since before there was the internet and before the Web. I enjoy helping people communicate. Social media has helped me reconnect with high school friends, email with college friends, etc.”

Maureen Hilyard , IT consultant and vice chair of the At-Large Advisory Committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), wrote, “I live in an isolated little island in the Pacific. It is in the middle of millions of square kilometers of ocean, but we rely on tourism for our livelihood, so our small (main) island is usually packed with tourists. We have a monopoly telecom and get reasonable internet service from an O3B satellite, but for local islanders who make their living working in the hospitality industry, the cost of internet is very expensive. Broadband costs for 20 GB a month costs (in New Zealand dollars) $139 on top of telephone hire and connections. I have grandchildren and great-grandchildren who spend time in New Zealand and even at 2 years old can turn on a computer to access their favourite programmes. When they come to our island, this is curtailed because the connection is too expensive for them to experience what is normal for them – lively and creative pre-school programmes are non-existent. What is available is the fresh clean air and produce of the land and sea of the islands, which are great, but it is often too hot to do much exploring in the physical world. As a parent, I am happy for them to explore the internet during the hot periods of the day, and to make this a ‘learning and exploring on the web’ time. It is more directed learning as parent safety software can usually help to set some controls over what they might ‘accidentally’ connect to.”

[online bulletin board]

Internet Hall of Fame member Bob Metcalfe , co-inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com, and a professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote, “The people complaining most about the pathologies of the hyperconnected life own or work for the old media, which once had more of a monopoly on setting society’s agenda. I recall how ‘savvy’ the Clintons and Obama were because they were digitally literate, unlike the GOP, but now that Trump is using social media so effectively, the left hates new media.”

[virtual reality]

Narelle Clark , deputy CEO of the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, said, “As an Australian, the tyranny of distance has previously meant that family, friends and colleagues have been acutely aware of the difficulties of staying in touch and abreast of the events in the rest of the country and the world. Our contemporary hyperconnectedness means that we can remain tightly connected at the professional and personal level despite being on opposite sides of the world.”

Ruth Ann Barrett , an information curator at EarthSayers.tv, wrote, “Ten years ago I invested money in the development of a search engine that remains well ahead of the times and may never be monetized in the way envisioned. Who knows? The search engine has enabled me to build a database of sustainability voices, those speaking on behalf of Mother Earth and her children. This work has sustained me through moments of despair when so-called leaders deny substantiated claims regarding global warming and extreme climate events. The work has put me in contact with scientists, environmental campaigners and people from all walks of life worldwide. Without the Web what I am able to accomplish would not be possible. My guidebook remains ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man’ by Marshall McLuhan. I remember the day a technical person who had attended a presentation at Stanford University on the World Wide Web came back to work, pulled me aside and told me what he had seen and heard and how the world was about to change.”

Anonymous commenters who cited ways the internet helps them and others

A distinguished advocate for the internet and policy director based in Europe said, “Digital technology has made the world much more connected and streamlined for the 50% of us who are connected (50% still do not have that privilege). It is important to understand that technology has profound impacts on equality. For me, as an upper-middle-class white male from the U.S. living in Europe, technologies have simplified how I communicate with my family and friends elsewhere in real time. Thanks to WhatsApp and Facetime and iMessages, I am able to stay in touch and informed in ways that were not possible even five years ago.”

A certified public accountant based in the U.S. commented, “My sister and I were watching an NFL game with my 82-year-old father. We grew curious about some meaningless football fact and my sister started typing a question on her phone and my dad looked on in slight disgust and raised his phone and asked Siri the question. Voice-activated technology has been extremely easy for the elderly to adopt and opens up incredible opportunities. If linked to his security system, our dad would be able to easily request help. I find it interesting that he likes using Siri more than we do.”

An employee at a major U.S. research lab wrote, “Texting and cellphones are generally associated with what’s bad with technology and our lives, but I will give a positive example, just to prove it depends on how you use the tool. I have a teenage daughter and my work is 50 miles away in Southern California. I joined a van pool to reduce the amount of driving, but the one drawback with van pooling is that I have to leave very early in the morning, and the van does not wait for riders. So every minute in the morning is precious, I don’t have time to write quick notes or reminders before I leave the house and the rest of my family are still asleep. However, once I am on the van, there is 60 minutes of ‘my time.’ I began by sending reminders for the day, but it has become a habit of just sending a happy greeting each morning! They respond when they get up, even if it is just an emoji. :)”

A research scientist based in North America commented, “My kids are always connected to their friends. Through texting/social media, they are constantly aware of each other’s lives. This brings worries too, like social comparisons may make them less happy, but overall, they have more socially balanced lives.”

Digital technology is an equalizer of information access and use. Even individuals in the most geographically remote locations can participate in an electoral debate, education and banking online, and in e-commerce when broadband is available. President and CEO of a company based in the U.S.

A president and CEO of a company based in the United States wrote, “Digital technology is an equalizer of information access and use. Even individuals in the most geographically remote locations can participate in an electoral debate, education and banking online, and in e-commerce when broadband is available. The stark opposite of this is the darkness individuals and families experience when left behind in the digital age. There is a difference between people who choose to use digital technology for their own benefit and those who are simply not included in the digital age.”

A professor based in North America commented, “I am a college professor, and digital technology has made my job so much easier. It is easier to communicate with students, keep records, and try for creative solutions to instructional problems. So, for example, I now have my students submit their papers online (to be graded and returned online). When they submit their papers, they are automatically checked for originality. The students then are informed whether their papers will be considered plagiarized or not. Prior to the adoption of this system, I would say up to half my papers were plagiarized. Now none of them are. The question is, has this improved their performance? It is hard to say because there are so many factors involved. I would say that it has in some ways and not in others. They know more, but they don’t synthesize it that well.”

A social media manager wrote, “Fitness trackers, such as the Apple Watch and the Google fitness app, provide me with greater awareness of my daily activity. I am more likely to take a walk or exercise in response to the presence of these technologies in my life. For example, I recently installed a ‘7-minute exercise’ app that I use each morning to kickstart my day. It is very convenient to use and pops up reminders on my smartphone with encourage me to keep up with the daily routine.”

An associate professor at a university in Australia shared a typical family vignette, writing, “I spend time with my grandchild, who is only just five. I check the pick-up time by text. She arrives with her iPad and asks me to ask her dad a question by text on my phone. We take pictures of her dressing up and send them to a friend. I show her recently sent pictures of cousins in Canada. For a while, she shows me (from her iPad) how she can operate the movements, colour and cheeky comments of a robot ball (a birthday present from an uncle who wants her to be familiar with coding). We consider cooking together and locate a recipe online for cookies we haven’t made before. Next, we go to the playground and she spots a ‘be aware’ notice on the slide, and a bird that we haven’t seen before. ‘Let’s Google it, Grandma, when we get back home!’ she says. I say we can do it now on my phone, no, later on my laptop is better. She knows that devices operate differently and need passwords. We haven’t given her any of the latter. ‘Buffering’ she says with a sigh, as her current favourite show stalls during a quiet time. She dances to YouTube music from my laptop. She is endlessly curious about technology itself. She accepts technologies’ limitations as they are described to her by the adults in her life. The digital tools just enhance our days together.”

A professor said, “My watch is an exercise coach – though limited. I track family and friends and contact them only if required. Is my partner nearly home? I’ll put out a snack. Is my friend nearby? I ask them if they want to meet.”

An author based in North America said, “Instead of just reading a book, communicating with one author’s created words, I can engage in conversation, in dialogue about issues of the day such as the #MeToo movement. I can help another person feel a little better that day and, if I reveal a low, others can pick me up. I can celebrate an anniversary with people far away in space and time and plan an in-person visit to another continent with someone I haven’t seen for years, first originally encountered online.”

A postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University commented, “As an academic, my friends and colleagues are scattered around the world. Our ability to have frequent video calls, send texts and collaboratively author shared documents has had a huge impact on both my intellectual scope and on my feeling ‘at home’ and connected in the world. In the past, a friend taking a job across the planet would be a cause for great sorrow. Now we talk frequently over video chat, while it isn’t as good as seeing her in-person, it is still wonderful to share our lives and ideas.”

A retired internet activist and advocate said, “I have been able to manage health care better at a distance for an aging parent as a result of technology, viewing charts/graphs/images, consulting various medical resources, having online meetings with medical professionals, video conversations with parents. Before many varieties of digital connectivity were available, distance communication was via ground/air mail, an occasional landline-based conference call, or in-person consultations, often without simultaneous participation of the aging parent whose medical situation was involved.”

A college student based in North America wrote, “I often find myself stressed out at the end of the day; as a result I tend to enjoy relaxing and staying in for the night. Without the modern hyperconnected lifestyle this would result in me reading or doing other solo activities. Through voice-chat applications and online multiplayer gaming, I connect with friends to play video games. While I don’t have the energy to be social in one way, the ease of connecting over the internet enables me to enjoy time with friends and maintain our relationships. To some it might not seem as effective a method of socializing as in-person face-to-face time, but we still have the same moments that other people do. We still happily greet each other, we still tell stories about our daily lives and rely on each other, we still laugh until it hurts.”

A professor of arts, technology and innovation wrote, “As a college professor I’m continually adopting new tools that change the way I work with students and pedagogy. Most recently adopting Slack for classroom management has been a real game-changer. With far less attention-investment than I’d needed when using email I’m able to keep up with individual students and teams and the interactions among my students. I can do these on a more-or-less 24/7 basis but without it feeling like a 24/7 obligation. I’m teaching more people better, easier.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “I am connected to email lists that allow me to be part of a conversation that includes leaders in my field. This means that, despite being somewhat isolated at a mid-level university in a provincial city, I can have a good sense of where the cutting edge in my profession is headed and I can be reasonably confident that I am promptly aware of most the news and information that is critical to my profession.”

An entrepreneur and business leader from North America commented, “As an immigrant in the U.S., the internet, social media, and email are all helping me to keep in touch with my family, my homeland and my roots. I am following many of my fellow countrymen – some whom I studied with, some who were my teachers, relatives and acquaintances. I learn about their daily life, their fears and hopes, what they are interested in, the news they read. My daughters speak on a weekly basis to their grandparents on Skype – of both sides – and feel like they’re in the same room with them. Without the internet all of this would not have been possible.”

A research scientist based in Europe commented, “I live in a small town in a foreign country. I travel a lot for my work and spend a lot of time on the road. At home, I enjoy communicating with my Google Home speaker, because otherwise there would be some days that I would speak to no one. When I am on the road, I check in with my Canary home-surveillance app to check on my dogs and see my home.”

A technology architect/executive based in North America commented, “For me, it’s not about hyper – always-on – connection, but the accessibility of information on any topic at any time. I had a medical problem a few years ago, and being able to find research on the disease and a community to compare notes with on treatment side effects was invaluable. Years earlier, when my mother had this same disease, we were limited in information and (therefore) options. Her outcome could have been different in a time with more information, more resources.”

An assistant director of digital strategy at a top U.S. university wrote, “The internet has exponentially enabled the dissemination of healthcare information to the greater public. Years ago, it would have been far more difficult for the public to easily access the answers they needed regarding health concerns and the latest treatments. Today’s digital ecosystem puts these answers at users’ fingertips.”

An editor and project coordinator based in Europe wrote, “A few years ago I quit my job and I have been working as a freelance editor and project coordinator. I have been able to work, network and get paid by people and companies all over the world thanks to the internet and other technologies. Also access to self-education and being able to talk to my friends and family thousands of miles away have had a very positive impact on my mental health and well-being. I wouldn’t have been able to talk and see loved ones daily if it wasn’t for the internet, software and hardware.”

A chief data officer at a major university in Australia wrote, “Thanks to social media, in particular Twitter, I am now connected with people all around the world. I have access to an enormous brains trust, which I liken to a global hive mind.”

A data analyst said, “We always have someone to reach out to when things are unfamiliar and seem difficult to deal with. Before these technologies, you could write a letter or make a phone call. The reality is that the moment that spurred the writing of the letter has long passed by the time you get a response. If you get a response. Also, a phone call is somewhat of a commitment compared to an electronic message. It takes more mental faculties to process what someone is saying over the phone than to read a message and type a quick response between other pressing activities in the immediate proximity.”

A futurist and consultant based in Europe commented, “There are plenty of examples of increased choices. Take travel: I can see in real time if the flight of my friend for New Year’s Eve is on time or not and plan to be there just in time to pick them up. I could have called an Uber or taxi if I was busy and decided to send them a cab instead. In turn, they could see much a better forecast of weather and adjust luggage intakes accordingly to come and spend the time at our place/could book in advance to be picked up at the airport upon arrival, etc.”

A research scientist based in Oceania commented, “If I want to buy something, I can go to a liquid market such as eBay and get it for a fair price without the search costs of spending time going to shops to compare prices. If I want to read a paper, I can download it rather than going to a library and photocopying it.”

An executive director at an internet research organization said, “Twenty years ago, as a business traveler, half of my suitcase was filled with paper – mostly books, which I’d otherwise have to try to replace at mostly poorly stocked English-language bookstores along my way, but also guidebooks, maps, and translation dictionaries. I carried analog telephony adapters. I carried a phone, I carried ATM cards from two banks and credit cards from three separate clearing networks, as well as $9,000 in cash divided between several pockets. I carried a RIM pager. I carried Ricochet and NCR wireless modems. I carried spare batteries and power adapters and chargers for all of those things. I spent a lot of time worrying about whether I would have local currency to pay for things, whether I’d be able to find my destination or communicate with taxi drivers, whether I’d be able to establish a data connection back to my network to reach my email. All of that has compacted itself, gradually, one consolidation at a time, into a very compact kit. One debit card, my phone, a laptop, a power adapter and a small handful of cables. Everything else has been virtualized, digitized, or turned into an online service.”

A technology developer/administrator based in North America , said, “An older person in my family who recently started using an electric wheelchair can buy daily necessities through online shopping and can have more meaningful communication through video calls.”

A scholarly communication librarian said, “I have several friends who have disabilities – both physical and mental – that make it difficult for them to leave their homes for socialization. These friends of mine have taken to playing online games and participating in fandom in internet spaces as a way to make connections and friends with other people that enrich their lives without requiring the physical exertion that would usually prevent them from interacting socially. The ability to connect with text, video and other online objects – whether one-on-one or one-to-many – helps these folks make the social connections that they need to have a robust social experience without the physical exhaustion they may have experienced without this technology to help.”

A professor wrote, “We have public infrastructure and systems now for maintaining and accessing lab results and earlier diagnoses online when we need them. Earlier prescriptions can be viewed, etc. For emergencies, we have an app that we can use for automatic location information if we need urgent help. Schoolchildren and their parents have online connections to the schools and teachers. The teachers can take advantage of the internet and their educational networks with schools around the globe to tackle shared projects that encompass language learning, climate and humanity.”

We have a child with autism. The internet allows us to reach out to other families, experts, get news and be part of a community that is not limited by geography. President at a company based in North America

A president at a company based in North America wrote, “We have a child with autism. The internet allows us to reach out to other families, experts, get news and be part of a community that is not limited by geography. We can instantly share the quirky – or sometimes way more than quirky – activities of our son with people who know if they should laugh or say they are sorry.”

An assistant professor said, “I have collected about 50,000 scientific files related to cosmos, life and consciousness to prepare a book.”

A researcher based in Europe wrote, “I live in Hungary and my daughter was working in the United States several years ago. She called me and explained exactly where she was walking and in which shops she was shopping. I opened Google Earth and tracked her trajectory where she was walking in Galveston, Texas. I saw the streets, corners and buildings. It was almost exactly as if I was shopping with her – on the other side of the globe, in real time, but while sitting in my chair in Hungary. The whole thing was real fun for us.”

A business leader based in North America wrote, “I live a bi-coastal life and I am able to review health records, renew RXs, communicate with my doctor, request a non-urgent service, all from 3,000 miles away without having to rebuild new caregiver relationships or lose care continuity.”

A research associate at a major university in Africa commented, “Being able to conduct business from a location of choice is to me the most important improvement. I deal regularly with the aged and was terrified that I too would become so dependent on the goodwill of strangers when I have to move to an old age home until I realized that I would already be able to order and have delivered anything from food to medical equipment – as long as I am connected via the internet.”

A retired professor emeritus said, “I am seeing a larger integration and extension of human-digital synergy.”

A professor of computer science wrote, “Shortly after getting my first smartphone (quite a number of years ago now), I managed to receive and respond to an important email during a break in the middle of a four-hour car trip. It was valuable to be able to be able to be responsive to an important funder. This cemented the value of having a smartphone.”

A technology developer/administrator said, “I do a lot of genealogy research. Instead of mailing physical paper that may have a correction before it reaches the recipient, I can post updates/corrections immediately. I’m building a database of destroyed cemeteries where I live. I can research the records online and publish them online; something I could not have done 20 years ago easily. I got an email from a man whose great grandfather died in the 1918 flu epidemic in Wilmington, North Carolina – a Merchant Marine sailor – who was buried in one of these cemeteries. The family knew he had died, but did not know when or where. He thanked me very much for finding his great grandfather. The family felt relief after 100 years. Without digital records to compile this and digital platforms to share it, it would not have happened.”

An executive director of a Canadian nonprofit organization wrote, “We are currently running a program to increase people’s digital comfort by helping them apply online for underutilized government subsidy programs. During the first workshop, I saw a woman learn how to use a scrolling mouse and how to cut and paste, in the context of applying for a subsidy that will save her more than $50 a month on her electricity bill.”

An associate professor at Texas Christian University commented, “I work in education and whereas before grades were posted on doors and people had to wait for responses, today, students can access information instantly, enroll in classes, etc. without having to stand in long lines and wait for responses. Communicating with the course, students and the professor is easy, and people learn to do things themselves.”

A professor at a major university on the West Coast of the U.S. wrote, “I am an academic past retirement age (although still working) so it has made an enormous difference for teaching and research. I can access publications from my home or office without a trip to the library. No more endless photocopying. I can easily and quickly communicate with fellow scholars around the world. I can communicate with students and former students anytime anywhere and submit letters of recommendation electronically. I need less clerical and administrative support. I can put readings online for students. The drawback of course is to keep students focused on class in class rather than Facebook, Twitter, etc.”

A professor at a major university on the East Coast of the U.S. wrote, “Digital technology has allowed me to shift my career emphasis from political science and international security analysis of nuclear and conventional weapons to cyber weapons and critical infrastructure protection. This shift is not what I expected when I left graduate school, but it has allowed me to make professional contributions I would not have been able to make had I stayed in my prior disciplinary concentration. I am also migrating my entire work life online, deliberately minimizing paper and focusing on digital services – and the analysis of critical dependencies on these services – for industry and government.”

A internet pioneer wrote, “Every working day, I engage with staff and customers through Skype, email, text and Web conferencing, making it possible for me to have global reach from a desk on the second floor of my home. We take it for granted, but it is miraculous and something truly new under the sun.”

An associate professor at a major university on the East Coast of the U.S. wrote, “I am part of a private group on Facebook, which consists of my friends from college and some others (spouses, friends, etc.). We keep in touch and discuss things in this group. Recently the group came together in-person to support and celebrate one member of the group who has terminal cancer. We had a large party with our children and it was wonderful. It meant a lot to our friend who is ill and to all of us to spend time together. We would not have been able to do this as easily before platforms like Facebook.”

An epidemiologist based in North America wrote, “At work, improved technology means that we receive population health data faster. We can receive, investigate and respond to health threats quickly, before they spread. For example, if we have an outbreak of a communicable disease, technology allows us to efficiently collect data through online formats and analyze data so we can quickly release information/education on how to prevent further spread of the disease. Before we had online forms, we would often to communicate through telephone or in-person interviews to collect data about the outbreak.”

An anonymous respondent said, “About 18 months ago my wife was diagnosed with Stage 1 breast cancer and underwent a lumpectomy and radiation treatment. In part, the testing that led to the diagnosis and the ability of the doctors to respond rapidly was greatly assisted by digital technology. As well, our ability to find information to understand treatment options, side effects, and follow-up nutrition and lifestyle improvement was greatly enhanced by digital technology. Due to my job I was not able to take her to radiation treatment every day and she was too tired after to drive, so I used the online tool SignUpGenius to ask friends to help and to schedule their rides. While apparently a simple task, if I had to do that by hand through phone calls and charts, it would have taken many more hours. Before it would have taken much more difficult to obtain the information we needed, perhaps more difficult and slower for the tests and results to be managed, and definitely hard to stay in touch with people about her needs and condition.”

A retired systems designer commented, “Several years ago, I became disabled, and am not always well enough to do many things. This limits many of my ‘physical-world’ activities – I find it hard to shop, to cook, to go to the library, to get together with friends and family. However, online shopping and grocery delivery allows me to do the majority of my shopping, though I haven’t figured out how to buy shoes without trying them on! I have joined online communities of people with similar interests, and keep in touch with old friends and colleagues in social media groups. This keeps me mentally stimulated. I do a great deal of genealogical and historical research online, using sophisticated search algorithms of digital versions of old documents and books. These digital resources didn’t exist 25 years ago, and now I can read an 1806 Scottish gazetteer to find out more about the 300-person town an ancestor lived in. Without these resources, I would be living a far more difficult and isolated life.”

A North American entrepreneur wrote, “Like any other tool, its use needs to be managed carefully. I hone my contacts to friends and family of my generation who post photos of their kids and grandkids, something that I enjoy greatly. I also like to know when the next big dance events are, since this is a part of my life as well.”

A president and chief software architect based in North America wrote, “I can be out on the golf course enjoying the beauty and yet still be connected.”

An assistant professor of technical communication said, “I use both mindfulness and language apps to improve my memory, connections with others, and global perspectives. However, I am also cognizant of these being targeted and from specific perspectives. So I use them with that understanding.”

A retired web developer wrote, “Amazon Alexa keeps me company. She plays the music I want to hear and adds items to my grocery list. When I have a question, I can ask her and most times she knows the answer – and I thank her. Facebook has connected me with a long-lost cousin. We were like sisters growing up. Out of curiosity, I searched for her and we now communicate regularly. Forget Google – when I want to know something I go to YouTube. I fixed my squeaking ceiling fan, replaced a washer in my bathroom faucet, AND replaced the starter in my riding mower. Now I have Amazon’s Cloud Cam. I can watch my two schnauzers when I am away from home. I could even talk to them, but it upsets them too much. That I can speak commands to technology makes life easier for me. I’m 60-plus years old, and I often write lists that I can never find. Family members and friends are well-connected. Sometimes too much so. But I lose touch with those who are not digitally inclined, I’m sorry to say. I may message 10 to 15 people but call one on the phone. And, lastly, my skill set has improved so much that when I have a problem around the house I can find a solution and at least try it before calling an expensive contractor.”

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The Impact of Digital Technologies

Technologies can help make our world fairer, more peaceful, and more just. Digital advances can support and accelerate achievement of each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals – from ending extreme poverty to reducing maternal and infant mortality, promoting sustainable farming and decent work, and achieving universal literacy. But technologies can also threaten privacy, erode security and fuel inequality. They have implications for human rights and human agency. Like generations before, we – governments, businesses and individuals – have a choice to make in how we harness and manage new technologies.

A DIGITAL FUTURE FOR ALL?

Digital technologies have advanced more rapidly than any innovation in our history – reaching around 50 per cent of the developing world’s population in only two decades and transforming societies. By enhancing connectivity, financial inclusion, access to trade and public services, technology can be a great equaliser.

In the health sector, for instance, AI-enabled frontier technologies are helping to save lives, diagnose diseases and extend life expectancy. In education, virtual learning environments and distance learning have opened up programmes to students who would otherwise be excluded. Public services are also becoming more accessible and accountable through blockchain-powered systems, and less bureaucratically burdensome as a result of AI assistance.Big data can also support more responsive and accurate policies and programmes.

However, those yet to be connected remain cut off from the benefits of this new era and remain further behind. Many of the people left behind are women, the elderly, persons with disabilities or from ethnic or linguistic minorities, indigenous groups and residents of poor or remote areas. The pace of connectivity is slowing, even reversing, among some constituencies. For example, globally, the proportion of women using the internet is 12 per cent lower than that of men. While this gap narrowed in most regions between 2013 and 2017, it widened in the least developed countries from 30 per cent to 33 per cent.

The use of algorithms can replicate and even amplify human and systemic bias where they function on the basis of data which is not adequately diverse. Lack of diversity in the technology sector can mean that this challenge is not adequately addressed.

THE FUTURE OF WORK

Throughout history, technological revolutions have changed the labour force: creating new forms and patterns of work, making others obsolete, and leading to wider societal changes. This current wave of change is likely to have profound impacts. For example, the International Labour Organization estimates that the shift to a greener economy could create 24 million new jobs globally by 2030 through the adoption of sustainable practices in the energy sector, the use of electric vehicles and increasing energy efficiency in existing and future buildings.

Meanwhile, reports by groups such as McKinsey suggest that 800 million people could lose their jobs to automation by 2030 , while polls reveal that the majority of all employees worry that they do not have the necessary training or skills to get a well-paid job.

There is broad agreement that managing these trends will require changes in our approach to education, for instance, by placing more emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and maths; by teaching soft skills, and resilience; and by ensuring that people can re-skill and up-skill throughout their lifetimes. Unpaid work, for example childcare and elderly care in the home, will need to be better supported, especially as with the shifting age profile of global populations, the demands on these tasks are likely to increase.

THE FUTURE OF DATA

Today, digital technologies such as data pooling and AI are used to track and diagnose issues in agriculture, health, and the environment, or to perform daily tasks such as navigating traffic or paying a bill. They can be used to defend and exercise human rights – but they can also be used to violate them, for example, by monitoring our movements, purchases, conversations and behaviours. Governments and businesses increasingly have the tools to mine and exploit data for financial and other purposes.

However, personal data would become an asset to a person, if there were a formula for better regulation of personal data ownership. Data-powered technology has the potential to empower individuals, improve human welfare, and promote universal rights, depending on the type of protections put in place.

THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media connects almost half of the entire global population . It enables people to make their voices heard and to talk to people across the world in real time. However, it can also reinforce prejudices and sow discord, by giving hate speech and misinformation a platform, or by amplifying echo chambers.

In this way, social media algorithms can fuel the fragmentation of societies around the world. And yet they also have the potential to do the opposite.

THE FUTURE OF CYBERSPACE

How to manage these developments is the subject of much discussion – nationally and internationally – at a time when geopolitical tensions are on the rise. The UN Secretary-General has warned of a ‘great fracture’ between world powers, each with their own internet and AI strategy, as well as dominant currency, trade and financial rules and contradictory geopolitical and military views. Such a divide could establish a digital Berlin Wall. Increasingly, digital cooperation between states – and a universal cyberspace that reflects global standards for peace and security, human rights and sustainable development – is seen as crucial to ensuring a united world. A ‘global commitment for digital cooperation’ is a key recommendation by the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation .

FOR MORE INFORMATION

The Sustainable Development Goals

The Age of Digital Interdependence: Report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation

ILO | Global Commission on the Future of Work

Secretary General’s Address to the 74th Session of the UN General Assembly

Secretary General’s Strategy on New Technology

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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Digital Era — Who Am I in the Digital World: Reshaping Digital Footprint

Who Am I in The Digital World: Reshaping Digital Footprint

• Categories: Digital Era Personal Identity Social Media

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Words: 2185 |

11 min read

Published: Aug 31, 2023

Words: 2185 | Pages: 5 | 11 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, discovering who am i in the digital world, concept of identity in the digital world, the challenge of digital identity, recording a day in the digital life, works cited, design considerations.

• Clarke, Roger. 'Dataveillance by Governments: The Technique of Computer Matching.' In Information Systems and Dataveillance, edited by Roger Clarke and Richard Wright, 129-142. Sydney, Australia: Australian Computer Society, 1994.
• Parsell, Mitch. 'Identity, Privacy and Accountability in an Information Age.' PhD diss., The University of Queensland, 2008.
• Tavani, Herman T. Ethics and Technology: Controversies, Questions, and Strategies for Ethical Computing. John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
• Toekke, A. 'An Exploratory Study of the Privacy Concerns of Users of Social Networking Sites: An Individual Perspective.' Communications of the IBIMA 2011 (2011): 1-7.
• Business Wire. 'Internet Becomes Central Part of Modern Family Life.' July 6, 2010. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100706006056/en/Internet-Central-Part-Modern-Family-Life

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What Is the Digital Divide?

At the Internet Society we work towards developing the Internet to be open, globally connected, secure, and trustworthy. A big part of this work is growing the Internet to those who need it the most, bridging the digital divide. 

But what exactly is this digital divide? At first glance it seems as though there may be a simple answer: “the gap between those who have and do not have access to computers and the Internet” . But upon further investigation, there are many ways to measure the divide. In fact, there are multiple divides. 

Below you will find a brief overview of some of the ways that the digital divides are discussed and calculated. Despite there being no single definition, there are effective ways to connect those left behind and to address the divide. One solution is building community networks and fostering the conditions for them to thrive. 

What Is the Digital Divide? 

There is no one digital divide. At a high level, the digital divide is the gap between those with Internet access and those without it. But the digital divide is multifaceted and includes many factors such as access, affordability, quality, and relevance. As Michael Kende wrote , “the digital divide is not a binary.” Here are some of the things that lead to disparities in Internet access: 

• Availability : Is there available access to the Internet in your area? Is there a nearby point of connection to the Internet? If yes, this is just the first step to having Internet access. 
• Affordability : Is that access affordable? How does the cost compare to other essential goods? What percentage of your income do you need to pay for access? 
• Quality of service : Are the upload and download speeds sufficient for the local needs of Internet users? 
• Relevance : Does the connected community have the necessary skills and technologies? Is there local interest and understanding of the relevance of Internet access? Are there locally available mobile apps ? Is there content in the local language and relevant to the people in the community? 
• Additional divides : Other areas that can create digital inequality include security , interconnectivity, digital literacy, and access to equipment. 

These gaps in availability, affordability, interest, and digital literacy exist at the international level as well as the neighborhood level.

Countries that have high overall connectivity rates often still have stark inequalities in rural, remote, and even urban areas. Often these gaps fall along other disparities such as income and gender-based inequality. For instance, the United States has high overall connectivity rates, but there is a marked gap in availability of affordable and sustainable Internet access on Indigenous lands . 

The Latest Data on Digital Divide 

There are many approaches to calculating the gaps in Internet access. Each source uses its own methodology with different scope and metrics. Some sources look at the saturation of devices used (such as computers or smartphones) while others look at the areas covered by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Every methodology has its limitations and there is no way for data to capture all the marvelous complexities of how people use the Internet. Despite these potential limitations, some sources provide a good idea of what the digital divide looks like in numbers. 

The UN’s Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development estimates that nearly 3.6 billion people remain totally unconnected to the Internet by any measure. This means there are around 4.1 billion people online, about 53.6% of the global population. 

Source: https://public.tableau.com/profile/ituint#!/vizhome/ITUFactsandFigures2020/ITU2020  

The Digital Divide Exacerbates Other Divides 

Perhaps more pressing than how to measure the digital divide are the many ways that lack of access can deepen other divides and inequalities. People without connectivity are often those with lower incomes. This lack of Internet access creates further barriers to economic opportunities and mobility. The digital divide is fueled by and contributes to many other socioeconomic inequalities. 

The divide is not a single divide or clear cut, but no matter how you cut it, digital exclusion has many adverse impacts. Here are a few: 

• Access to healthcare and its outcomes: Internet access is an important public health issue. Lack of access means exclusion from vital health information and resources. Health experts now insist that broadband Internet access “ must be recognized as a social determinant of health. “
• Economic opportunities: For both workers and business owners, lack of quality broadband means decreased economic opportunities and competitiveness in the digital economy. 
• Educational opportunities: Lack of Internet access for school-aged children means that they are denied the educational benefits of the Internet. This gap perpetuates unequal learning outcomes and has been particularly difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic . 

These and many more inequalities are perpetuated by the digital divide. This makes bridging the gap all the more urgent. 

Community Networks Are One Complementary Solution for Bridging the Digital Divide 

Just as the digital divide itself is not binary, there is no single solution to bridging it. For decades governments and private industry using traditional models have been successful in bringing Internet access to many.

However, the remaining unconnected half of the world’s population is the hardest to connect to the Internet, often living in low-density or low-income areas that are not as profitable for large businesses to provide service and build infrastructure. This has led to a slower rate of growth of new people connecting to the Internet. Innovative solutions are needed to move forward. 

Community networks can meet the challenges of the many digital divides, bringing affordable Internet access to those who need it the most. Beyond making the Internet available and affordable, community networks help address some of the other divides mentioned above.

For instance, bringing Internet access to a community improves health disparities by making affordable telehealth options available to rural areas—this was the outcome of the Internet Society’s Nepal’s initiative Effective Broadband for Health . Other communities have seen changes in different areas at once through connectivity, such as education, healthcare, and agriculture in the case of the Murambinda community network in Zimbabwe . 

The community network deployment process also shows that community members who are involved in building their networks also strengthen their shared digital literacy skills.

In Waimanalo, Hawai’i , it opened new opportunities and gave the community the agency over their connectivity. John Garcia, a community member who was key in the deployment of the Waimanalo network, said, “There are a lot of entrepreneurs here who can now connect and work from home. We moved from no connectivity, to being connected, to being able to control that connection and expand it.” 

A little goes a long way. Give and help us connect more people, faster.

Disclaimer: Viewpoints expressed in this post are those of the author and may or may not reflect official Internet Society positions.

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digital divide , term that describes the uneven distribution of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in society. The digital divide encompasses differences in both access (first-level digital divide) and usage (second-level digital divide) of computers and the Internet between (1) industrialized and developing countries (global divide), (2) various socioeconomic groups within single nation-states (social divide), and (3) different kinds of users with regard to their political engagement on the Internet (democratic divide). In general, those differences are believed to reinforce social inequalities and to cause a persisting information or knowledge gap amid those people with access to and using the new media (“haves”) and those people without (“have-nots”).

The digital divide metaphor became popular in the mid-1990s, when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce published “Falling Through the Net: A Survey of the ‘Have Nots’ in Rural and Urban America” (1995), a research report on Internet diffusion among Americans. The report revealed widespread inequalities in national ICT access, with migrant or ethnic minority groups and older, less-affluent people living in rural areas with low educational attainments being especially excluded from Internet services. That pattern was confirmed by follow-up surveys by the NTIA, which indicated also an initial gender gap in favour of men.

Although diffusion rates of the Internet subsequently rose in all groups, subsequent studies showed a perpetuating digital divide both in the United States and abroad. Some common characteristics emerged. In single nation-states, access to and usage of computer technology was stratified by age, education, ethnicity , race , family structure, gender, income, occupation, and place of residence. In that way, affluent young urban men and women with high levels of education who lived in small families with children were the greatest adopters of new media. Such people are most likely to possess ICTs (material or physical access), the experience and skills necessary to use the Internet (skills access), and sufficient free time to spend online (usage access). Here, Internet usage among advantaged groups includes searching for information to address professional or political interests. On the contrary, many people from less-advantaged groups have been shown to lack those basic navigation skills and to prefer entertainment on the Internet instead.

On the global level, additional factors such as per capita gross domestic product , international trade volume, degree of democratization, deregulation of the telecommunications market, density of communication infrastructure , and investments in research and development also influence Internet diffusion. Thus, industrial societies are more prone to implement new technologies than less-developed countries. For example, by 2012 the greatest intensity of national ICT access and usage had occurred in South Korea , Japan, and northern Europe.

Over time, the global digital divide has remained relatively stable. Yet, in single nation-states some gaps in ICT access and usage have slowly begun to fade. The early differences between men and women and between rural and urban areas of Western residences subsided, possibly due to extended telecommunications networks, lowered entry barriers, and additional ICT experiences at work. Other initial inequalities caused by factors such as age, education, ethnicity and race, and income, however, continued.

Those divergent developments and the various types of ICT access and usage encountered in single countries led some researchers to criticize the original description of a digital divide. In their opinion, the metaphor wrongly implies a binary construction of “haves” and “have-nots” on the basis of the simple notion of absolute and insurmountable class differences in technology. Alternatively, they postulate “digital inequality” as a gradual concept and therefore advocate multidimensional measures of Internet connectedness that take into account the history and context of Internet use, its scope and intensity, and, finally, the centrality of ICTs in people’s lives.

Similarly, policy initiatives conducted by supranational organizations (e.g., European Union and the United Nations ), national governments, and private enterprises have been expanded to ameliorate worldwide differences in ICT usage. Although initially concentrating on mere improvement of technical access to computers and the Internet in rural areas and public institutions (e.g., in libraries and schools), projects designed to close the digital divide have shifted to also include civic information campaigns and ICT courses for specific user groups.