Emerging Digital Citizenship Regimes

Emerging Digital Citizenship Regimes: Postpandemic Technopolitical Democracies explores how increasing digitalisation in post-COVID-19 urban environments is rescaling nation-states in Europe resulting in new emerging digital citizenship regimes, trends, aftermaths, emancipations, and future research avenues.

This book critically examines the interplay between digitalization and sustainability. Amid escalating environmental crises, some of which are now irreversible, there is a noticeable commitment within both international and domestic policy agendas to employ digital technologies in pursuit of sustainability goals. This collection gathers a multitude of voices interrogating the premise that increased digitalization automatically contributes to greater sustainability. By exploring the planetary links underpinning the global digital economy, the book exposes the extractive logics ingrained within digital capitalism and introduces alternatives like digital degrowth and the circular economy as viable, sustainable paths for the digital era. Through a combination of theoretical reflections and detailed contextual analyses from Italy, New Zealand, and the UK—including initiatives in participatory planning and technology co-design—it articulates the dual role of digital technology: its potential to support socio-economic and environmental sustainability, while also generating conflicts and impasses that undermine these very objectives. Offering fresh insights into power disparities, exclusionary tactics, and systemic injustices that digital solutionism fails to address, this volume also serves as a reminder that sustainability extends beyond climate-related issues, underscoring the inseparability of environmental discourse from wider social justice considerations. Aimed at a diverse readership, this volume will prove valuable for students, researchers, and practitioners across various fields, including Geography, Urban Studies, Sustainability Studies, Environmental Media Studies, Critical AI Studies, Innovation Studies, and the Digital Humanities.

Smart City Citizenship provides rigorous analysis for academics and policymakers on the experimental, data-driven, and participatory processes of smart cities to help integrate ICT-related social innovation into urban life. Unlike other smart city books that are often edited collections, this book focuses on the business domain, grassroots social innovation, and AI-driven algorithmic and techno-political disruptions, also examining the role of citizens and the democratic governance issues raised from an interdisciplinary perspective. As smart city research is a fast-growing topic of scientific inquiry and evolving rapidly, this book is an ideal reference for a much-needed discussion. The book drives the reader to a better conceptual and applied comprehension of smart city citizenship for democratised hyper-connected-virialised post-COVID-19 societies. In addition, it provides a whole practical roadmap to build smart city citizenship inclusive and multistakeholder interventions through intertwined chapters of the book. Users will find a book that fills the knowledge gap between the purely critical studies on smart cities and those further constructive and highly promising socially innovative interventions using case study fieldwork action research empirical evidence drawn from several cities that are advancing and innovating smart city practices from the citizenship perspective. Utilises ongoing, action research fieldwork, comparative case studies for examining current governance issues, and the role of citizens in smart cities Provides definitions of new key citizenship concepts, along with a techno-political framework and toolkit drawn from a community-oriented perspective Shows how to design smart city governance initiatives, projects and policies based on applied research from the social innovation perspective Highlights citizen’s perspective and social empowerment in the AI-driven and algorithmic disruptive post-COVID-19 context in both transitional and experimental frameworks

This book has a multidisciplinary approach to Metaverse studies and the relevance of Metaverse with the current and popular topics that concern society and how it will change them in the future. In addition, academic texts are included since not much scientific content is available in this field. In short, there are sections in the book that everyone will find useful. Most importantly, the topics are grouped under four main parts. The first is the Introduction, where the main issues are explained. In the second section—Technical Topics, the technological infrastructure of the subject is explained, followed by section three where the social and human dimensions of Metaverse are explained. The fourth and final section is on Industrial Applications.

Supporting children and young people to participate safely, effectively, critically and responsibly in a world filled with social media and digital technologies is a priority for educators the world over. Most young people in Europe today were born and have grown up in the digital era. Education authorities have the duty to ensure that these digital citizens are fully aware of the norms of appropriate behaviour when using constantly evolving technology and participating in digital life. Despite worldwide efforts to address such issues, there is a clear need for education authorities to take the lead on digital citizenship education and integrate it into school curricula. In 2016, the Education Department of the Council of Europe began work to develop new policy orientations and strategies to help educators face these new challenges and to empower young people by helping them to acquire the competences they need to participate actively and responsibly in digital society. This volume, the first in a Digital Citizenship Education series, reviews the existing academic and policy literature on digital citizenship education, highlighting definitions, actors and stakeholders, competence frameworks, practices, emerging trends and challenges. The inclusion of a wide selection of sources is intended to ensure sufficient coverage of what is an emergent topic that has yet to gain a strong foothold in either education or academic literature, but has received wider policy attention.

Digitization has transformed the way we interact with our social, political and economic environments. While it has enhanced the potential for citizen agency, it has also enabled the collection and analysis of unprecedented amounts of personal data. This requires us to fundamentally rethink our understanding of digital citizenship, based on an awareness of the ways in which citizens are increasingly monitored, categorized, sorted and profiled. Drawing on extensive empirical research, Digital Citizenship in a Datafied Society offers a new understanding of citizenship in an age defined by data collection and processing. The book traces the social forces that shape digital citizenship by investigating regulatory frameworks, mediated public debate, citizens' knowledge and understanding, and possibilities for dissent and resistance.

From the rise of cyberbullying and hactivism to the issues surrounding digital privacy rights and freedom of speech, the Internet is changing the ways in which we govern and are governed as citizens. This book examines how citizens encounter and perform new sorts of rights, duties, opportunities and challenges through the Internet. By disrupting prevailing understandings of citizenship and cyberspace, the authors highlight the dynamic relationship between these two concepts. Rather than assuming that these are static or established “facts” of politics and society, the book shows how the challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet inevitably impact upon the action and understanding of political agency. In doing so, it investigates how we conduct ourselves in cyberspace through digital acts. This book provides a new theoretical understanding of what it means to be a citizen today for students and scholars across the social sciences. This new and updated edition includes two new chapters. A Preface consists of reflections on developments in digital politics since the book was published in 2015. It considers how recent major political struggles over digital technologies and data can be understood in relation to the conceptualization of digital citizens that the book offers. While the Preface positions dominant responses to these struggles such as government regulations as ‘closings’, a new final chapter, Digital citizens-yet-to-come offers examples of ‘openings’ – digital acts such as new forms of data activism that are less recognised but which point to the emergence of paradoxical digital acts that are producing new digital political subjectivities.