Massimo Ragnedda

Northumbria University · Department of Arts

This paper explores the intertwined nature of digital and environmental dimensions within Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to address contemporary global challenges. Controversial evidence exists regarding the environmental impact of digitalization, reflecting contrasting theoretical approaches at societal and individual levels. The paper examines how...

This study uses nationally representative survey data collected in Nigeria by the Pew Research Center in 2015, 2018, and 2019 to conduct a secondary analysis of three factors that can interact with concerns about climate change. The factors are: vulnerabilities to climate change, religious affiliation, and concerns regarding the U.S. withdrawal fro...

The previous chapter introduced the framework adopted by the DPA in which social structure and human agency are conceptualized as intertwined and metabolized by individuals (Greenhalgh & Stones, 2010; Stones, 2005). In this chapter, we start by introducing the core aspects of environmental poverty and its intrinsic connection with monetary poverty....

The previous chapter referred to circumstantial determinants as a meso level that can be defined as a social space structured in fields in which social actors operate. This chapter adopts a Bourdesian approach to conceptualize the circumstantial level as an intersectional space where both agency and structure can mutually influence each other, lead...

This chapter reflects on the salient aspects that emerged throughout the analysis of both digital and environmental policy frameworks, as well as existing practices, to provide some recommendations for interventions aimed at addressing digital-environmental poverty as dimensions of the same social challenge. In so doing, it contextualizes policies...

The previous chapter reviewed the debate concerning the link between economic and environmental poverty, highlighting contrasting findings on their causal relationship, especially due to the complexity of intersecting variables that can influence poverty conditions at multiple levels (from macro to micro levels). The identification of such interdep...

In the previous chapter, we started analyzing the evolution of poverty, introducing the implications of digital inequalities and their contribution to the nature of poverty in the digital age. In this book, the concept of digital poverty is intricately linked to the three levels of the digital divide (Ragnedda, 2017). Digital poverty extends beyond...

This chapter focuses on the interaction between the macro and individual determinants at a meso level by exploring how users absorb external inputs to develop their digital-environmental habitus. Reviewing the literature, this chapter shows that, beyond regulating the rising use of technology in daily life, which is also associated with a sharp ris...

Beginning with the deconstruction of the concept of poverty, this book explores themes at the intersection of resilience, environmental threats, prosperity, and innovation to demonstrate how digital poverty is connected not only to socioeconomic inequalities but also to environmental poverty. The rapid digital acceleration that has characterized co...

This chapter reviews the main debate and findings on the intersection between traditional forms of poverty and the rise of digital technologies. It starts by introducing the concept of poverty, albeit briefly (for a more comprehensive debate around poverty see Blocker et al., 2023; Lister, 2021; Spicker, 2007), acknowledging its multidimensional na...

This book suggested some theoretical foundations to understand digital-environmental poverty in the context of digital technological acceleration and increasing environmental urgency. In so doing it showed that poverty is an intricate and multifaced phenomenon, which is also context-dependent and, consequently, subject to different perspectives and...

This chapter considers some practices in which digital, social, and environmental aspects intersect to shape a particular habitus. These practices can have both positive and negative implications for addressing digital-environmental poverty at different levels (micro, meso, and macro). As we explore these topics, we initially focus on (digital) nud...

This chapter provides an overview of some major digital and environmental strategies designed by the UK government to tackle digital and environmental vulnerabilities, which also reflects how the country conceptualizes the interconnections between these issues. This enables us to comprehend how effective merging environmental and digital strategies...

Despite having high literacy rates and a robust digital infrastructure, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region still faces digital inequalities. This collection of articles explores the complexities of digital disparities within MENA, taking into account cultural, economic, and historical factors. Each article in this section examines the i...

This study employs the Bourdieusian concept of habitus to explore how users' mental dispositions are associated with both their eco-conscious use of digital technologies and online behaviours. The digital-environmental habitus, reflecting such a combination of digital technology use and environmental attitudes, is explored through an online survey...

The rapid pace of technological advancements of the last decades, accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, has increased the importance of digital skills for individuals, businesses, and society. However, despite efforts to increase digital ownership and educational initiatives, the digital divide remains a persistent issue and a barrier to social...

This opening chapter deconstructs the notion of living digitally, and sets the context for the interventions that follow in some 26 chapters on a wide range of digital society issues in the volume. It discusses digital life as engaging with post-analogue technologies and AI applications that have become much more organic to people’s daily activitie...

Web 3.0 is not a new concept but one that is constantly evolving. There is no universally accepted definition as its meaning can differ from scholar to scholar, and it is still unclear how it will affect how users interact with the Web. Tim Berners‐Lee envisaged the Web, known as Semantic Web, as an immense source of data governed by intelligent ap...

Introduction This paper aims to theoretically and empirically investigate the concept of digital capital in the Italian context. Digital Capital can be conceived as independent individual capital whose lack within a population can be a cause of digital inequality. Our paper draws from recent works that have measured the Digital Capital as a combina...

This issue of American Behavioral Scientist marshals case studies of online media platforms such as Zoom, YouTube, and Twitter and digital hardware systems such as virtual reality technology to assess the often unexpected interactions between the pandemic and digital technologies. The issue leads with a case study of Zoom to examine the largely suc...

This conceptual paper reviews four dimensions of the climate change (CC) debate concerning perception, framing, and political and economic dimensions of CC. It attempts to address the question posed by sociological research as to what can be done to reduce the social forces driving CC. In doing so, it attempts to uncover mechanisms that delay or pr...

This paper explores Digital Poverty (DP) in England by adopting the DP Alliance’s theoretical framework that includes both Individual Determinants (individual capability and motivation) and Circumstantial Determinants (conditions of action). Such a framework is interpreted as an expression of Strong Structuration Theory (SST), by situating the conn...

This article uses adopts a revised version of the concept of techno-environmental habitus to investigate and make sense of the differentiation among digital technology users’ attitudes towards the environment in England. Digital–environmental habitus refers to the combination of structural determinants (existing background) and the metabolised incr...

Based on an online survey conducted among a representative sample in the United Kingdom (n = 1013), this article investigates the role of traditional and new media in predicting climate change awareness. It suggests that individuals make choices under an ideological convincement that is organised within specific cultural and political-economic boun...

This article examines the GameStop episode by contextualising the discussion in the structure-agency interplay to understand the role of social news sites in informing, mobilizing, and giving voice to different social and political actors. First, the GameStop squeeze might be conceived as both an individual and collective agency-led form of resista...

This paper focuses on four e-initiatives that were precipitated by the coronavirus outbreak in Italy. These experiences played a relevant role in developing multilevel solidarity (from the local to the global level) both online and offline. They are represented by the hashtags “#iorestoacasa” (I stay at home) and “#andràtuttobene” (everything will...

Since an increasing number of daily activities are carried out online, an exclusion or limited access to the Internet prevent citizens from entering a world full of opportunities that cannot be accessed otherwise; in this sense, inclusion in the digital realm is strictly connected to social inclusion. Digital inclusion is not conceived as a mere di...

The COVID-19 pandemic erupted during the climate change (CC) crisis, forcing individuals to adapt abruptly to a new scenario, and triggering changes in everyone’s lifestyles. Based on a sample of the UK population ( N = 1013), this paper investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic invited/forced individuals to reflect upon a more sustainable way of life...

While Africa has largely been considered a digitally-disconnected country, recent studies have shown that connectivity figures are on a rise. In this paper, we theorize digital wellbeing in a context characterized by a fast-growing number of mobile data users despite a historically low Internet penetration. It is focused on an ongoing ethnographic...

This paper provides a summary of content in this special issue.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact upon all spheres of our life — social, economic, cultural, political, academic, and others. A shift to a new digital reality intensified already existing digital gaps and inequalities across societies and social groups within the countries and triggered a discussion about new forms of the digital divides in t...

This article investigates the interaction between digital capital and some offline components (economic, cultural, political, social and personal) that represent the background against which we access and use the Internet. Based on a stratified sample of the UK population (868), six indexes (one for each component) were generated through factor ana...

In this paper, we employ original data from a survey carried out in the summer of 2020 on an online sample of the UK population (1013 respondents) to investigate if, in the dramatic scenario caused by the recent pandemic, a new approach toward a more sustainable lifestyle has emerged in this Country. Our results indicate that, on average the indivi...

This article theorizes fresh connections between Bourdieusian social theory, and the digital divide in five key areas: political, economic, cultural, social, and personal digital advantage. In so doing it makes new arguments about how digital resources result in benefits that accrue from the combination of both access to and use of ICTs. In this wa...

This paper conceptualizes the techno-environmental habitus to explore differentiation among media users and their climate change awareness by adopting a dynamic concept that takes into consideration both pre-existing conditions and interactions with the technological field of action. The paper investigates the characteristics of multi-layered dispo...

This article investigates the entanglement between socioeconomic and technological factors in conditioning people's patterns of Internet use. We analysed the influence of sociodemographic and techno-social aspects in conditioning the distinctive digital practices developed by Internet users. By using a representative sample of UK users and differen...

This piece introduces the special issue of First Monday focused on the topic of Sustainability and Digital Transformation. This collection is a forum for that conversation to develop as a venue in which social scientists, STS scholars, and other digital scholars explore the concept of digital sustainability. This special issue emerges in the contex...

Forthcoming in American Behavioral Scientist (ABS) The COVID-19 pandemic erupted during the climate change (CC) crisis, forcing individuals to adapt abruptly to a new scenario, and triggering changes in everyone’s lifestyles. Based on a representative sample of the UK population (N= 1013) this paper investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic invited/fo...

Forthcoming in American Behavioral Scientist (ABS). This paper focuses on four e-initiatives that were triggered by the Coronavirus outbreak in Italy. These experiences played a relevant role in developing multilevel solidarity (from the local to the global level) both online and offline. They are represented by the hashtags “#iorestoacasa” (I stay...

This paper investigates the use of science in British newspapers’ narratives of climate change between 1988 and 2016. It is based on the analysis of eight newspapers and their Sunday and online versions (Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Daily Express, The Sun, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent). We used the keywords “climat...

This chapter identifies four main themes in the literature on media communication of climate change, which represent an interesting object of analysis for scholars who focus on moral panics' application. The combination of both the processual model and the attributional model to interpret the results of this literature review shows that during its...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to suggest that, to build a digital sustainable society, core terminal and instrumental values of sustainability and sustainable development should be followed across different worldviews, and in the formulation of policies or other initiatives form private and public stakeholders. These values are normative, th...

The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally,...

This collection sheds light on the cascading crises engendered by COVID-19 on many aspects of society from the economic to the digital. This issue of the American Behavioral Scientist brings together scholarship examining the various ways in which many vulnerable populations are bearing a disproportionate share of the costs of COVID-19. As the arti...

Twenty-three years have passed since the first issue of Information Communication and Society was published. Over the years, this journal has become one of the leading, top-ranked media and communication journals around. It is for this reason that we feel honored to have been selected to edit the journal’s first special issue exclusively dedicated...

This chapter focuses on digital equity by arguing that it is a new civic right that is increasingly vital in our hyper-connected societies which must be promoted and protected. Digital equity is necessary for political and cultural participation, employment, lifelong learning and access to essential services. However, we need to expand this notion...

This chapter aims to introduce the concept of social inequalities and how this phenomenon evolved over the years. This brief theoretical excursus introduces those basic ideas and concepts that are useful to reflect on how the advent of digital technologies might have exacerbated social inequalities. ICTs are cementing already existing social inequa...

This chapter focuses on the rise of new digital inequalities by looking at the costs and consequences of algorithmic decision-making on citizens’ everyday lives and how they are affecting social inequalities. More specifically, the chapter looks at the inequalities in (a) knowledge (inequalities intended as the different levels of understanding of...

Digital society integrates ICTs in the productive structure, in the educational system and more broadly in our daily life. It has brought about changes in scale and pace like never before. However, digital technologies are penalizing socially disadvantaged people, giving rise to the digital underclass. This chapter pays particular attention to (tra...

Marking the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide,” we continue our metaphor of the digital inequality stack by mapping out the rapidly evolving nature of digital inequality using a broad lens. We tackle complex, and often unseen, inequalities spawned by the platform economy, automation, big data, algorithms, cybercrime, cybersafety, gaming, emot...

2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide.” Although a quarter century has passed, legacy digital inequalities continue, and emergent digital inequalities are proliferating. Many of the initial schisms identified in 1995 are still relevant today. Twenty-five years later, foundational access inequalities continue to separate the digital...

This chapter draws attention to the multilayer nature of the term ‘inequalities’, which embraces many different types of inequalities—social, cultural, economic and so on. We argue that digital inequalities, which are the key point of this book, are closely intertwined with other existing types of inequalities. We illustrate this idea by focusing o...

In this article, we argue that new kinds of risk are emerging with the COVID-19 virus, and that these risks are unequally distributed. As we expose to view, digital inequalities and social inequalities are rendering certain subgroups significantly more vulnerable to exposure to COVID-19. Vulnerable populations bearing disproportionate risks include...

This paper explores inequalities in using the Internet by investigating several digital activities that require different levels of digital capital. Data collected in the U.K. through an online survey of a national representative sample (868 respondents) shows that levels of digital capital and type and quality of online activities are intertwined....

Purpose This paper contributes to the literature by proposing an analysis of digital inequalities in Russia that focuses on two aspects hitherto under explored: the interregionality (by comparing and contrasting eight federal districts) and the multidimensionality of digital inequalities (by taking into account the three levels of digital divide)....

The paper draws linkages between ethnic diversity of the eight federal districts of Russia and their technological development (access and use of ICTs, digital literacy, etc.). We show that although there is no universal correlation between ethnic composition of the regions and the level of their technological advancement, regions where Russians co...

Starting from the assumption that digital capital is a capital in its own right, and can be quantified and measured as such, the authors of this book examine how digital capital can be defined, measured and impact policy. Using the Bourdieusian lens, this book makes a critical contribution to the field by examining in depth the notion of digital...

This book discusses how digital inequalities today may lead to other types of inequalities in the Global South. Contributions to this collection move past discussing an access problem – a binary division between ‘haves and have-nots’ – to analyse complex inequalities in the internet use, benefits, and opportunities of people in the Global South reg...

This book highlights how, in principle, digital technologies present an opportunity to reduce social disparities, tackle social exclusion, enhance social and civil rights, and promote equity. However, to achieve these goals, it is necessary to promote digital equity and connect the digital underclass. The book focuses on how the advent of technolog...

Claims have been made that the advent of social media and its assumed ability to fuel social strife and organize anti-government protests has empowered people around the world to successfully challenge repressive authorities. However, in an era in which several issues ranging from digital colonialism to digital exclusion among other challenges, hav...

This article develops a Digital Capital Index by adopting the definition provided by Ragnedda, who defines Digital Capital as the accumulation of digital competencies and digital technologies, and the model for measuring it developed by Ragnedda and Ruiu. It aims to develop a measure that can be replicated for comparison in different contexts. This...

Introducing blockchain Blockchain is no longer just about bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general, but it can be seen as a disruptive and revolutionary technology which will have a major impact on multiple aspects of our lives. The revolutionary power of such technology can be compared with the revolution sparked by the World Wide Web and the Intern...

The digital divide has a significant impact on the ways in which information across Africa is developed, shared, and perceived. This opening chapter seeks to analyse the problems and opportunities associated with the ubiquitous digital revolution, providing a cross-disciplinary examination of digital disparities inhibiting social, political, and ec...

Blockchain and Web 3.0 fills the gap in our understanding of blockchain technologies by hosting a discussion of the new technologies in a variety of disciplinary settings.

Purpose This paper aims to look at shifts in internet-related content and services economies, from audience labour economies to Web 2.0 user-generated content, and the emerging model of user computing power utilisation, powered by blockchain technologies. The authors look at and test three models of user computing power utilisation based on distrib...

Despite issues associated with the digital divide, mobile telephony is growing on the continent and the rise of smartphones has given citizens easy access to social networking sites. But the digital divide, which mostly reflects on one's race, gender, socioeconomic status or geographical location, stands in the way of digital progress. What opportu...

Despite issues associated with the digital divide, mobile telephony is growing on the continent and the rise of smartphones has given citizens easy access to social networking sites. But the digital divide, which mostly reflects on one's race, gender, socioeconomic status or geographical location, stands in the way of digital progress. What opportu...

This article brings to light significant insights into the three levels of digital divide in the particular setting of East EU. It discusses and analyses indicators related to the spread and use of the Internet (first level of digital divide), the level of digital skills (second level of digital divide), and digital services used by citizens in Eas...

This article makes a theoretical contribution by looking at the rise of digital capital and its relation to the already existent social, economic, personal, political and cultural capitals (the five capitals, 5Cs from now on). • It refers to the ways through which the interaction between the digital capital and the 5Cs generates inequalities in on...

The Problem Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have granted many privileges to their users. At the same time, they have given rise to new and complex forms of exclusion affecting those already marginalized and disempowered. The development of the information society has highlighted the existence of obstacles preventing certain social...

Presentation at GIG-ARTS 2018 in Cardiff, UK, on meaningful access and tangible outcomes of Internet use, showcasing data from our research focusing on Bahrain as a case study.

New media technologies are playing a progressively important role in the everyday lives of citizens. To fully participate in a digitally enabled society, where citizens’ lives are increasingly mediated by information and communication technologies, access to and use of ICTs has become vital. More and more services, resources, opportunities, knowled...

In this chapter we examine changes in digital inequalities in Russia and European Post-Soviet states, in the nearly 30 years since two significant events transpired: the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the advent of the World Wide Web. The goal is to establish a framework of comparison for a deeper analysis covering all European Post-Soviet sta...

Although discussion of the digital divide is a relatively new phenomenon, social inequality is a deeply entrenched part of our current social world and is now reproduced in the digital sphere. Such inequalities have been described in multiple traditions of social thought and theoretical approaches. To move forward to a greater understanding of the...

This article is based on semistructured interviews with library staff members in order to explore both how they perceive the role of libraries in most deprived areas in Newcastle upon Tyne and how they relate with their patrons. We show that public libraries play a primary role in activating a virtuous cycle, in which infrastructures, skills, and i...

This article investigates the nature of the conversation around austerity on Twitter during the 2015 general election in the UK. Specifically, it explores the kinds of messages referring to austerity, as well as the kinds of accounts involved (whether they referred to a private or public role on Twitter and in society) and their affiliation to poli...

Social media platforms are being considered new podiums for political transformation as political dictatorships supposedly convert to overnight democracies, and many more people are not only able to gain access to information, but also gather and disseminate news from their own perspective. When looking at the situation in several sub-Saharan Afric...

Drawing on the thought of Max Weber, in particular his theory of stratification, this book engages with the question of whether the digital divide simply extends traditional forms of inequality, or whether it also includes new forms of social exclusion, or perhaps manifests counter-trends that alleviate traditional inequalities whilst constituting...

his chapter investigates the contribution of the digital divide towards the consumption of leisure among users. In analysing the entertainment and leisure dimensions of the Internet, the chapter draws on the literature exploring digital divide, but also on concepts such as network theory and liquidity. With the experience of leisure consumption in...