(by Corinna di Gennaro and Miriam Simun - cross-posted from Digital Natives blog and Berkman blog)
PBS recently aired “Growing Up Online” (and posted the entire episode on their website) - an inquisitive look into the lives of so-called Digital Natives. The program presented a world of young people spending much of their lives [...]

On 28 January 2008, the second annual Data Protection Day will take place, organized by the Council of Europe, with different events planned in the different member states. The aim of this initiative is to raise awareness amongst citizens about how personal data is collected about them, why, and what is done with these data. [...]

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press has just released a new survey on the role of the Internet in the 2008 US campaign. The report shows that almost half (42%) of 18 to 29 year olds learns regularly about the campaign from the Internet, double the number in the 2004 campaign (20%). [...]

Yesterday the New York Times published an article on Italy and its current political malaise and a very good video on the Beppe Grillo phenomenon - Beppe Grillo, comic, now blogger (after being banned from television for his political satire) has managed to rally together a new political movement of people who are disaffected [...]

Last week I attended The Eric Mindich Conference on Computational Social Science at Harvard, organized by David Lazer (Harvard) and Sandy Pentland (MIT), and co-sponsored at Harvard by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance, and at MIT by the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship and the MIT Living [...]

Our new paper: “Reconfiguring Friendships: Social Relationships and the Internet”, co-authored with Professor Bill Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford, is now available in the new special issue of Information, Communication and Society (Vol. 10, Issue 5) on e-Relationships.
In this paper we investigate whether and how social relationships are [...]

The Italian Government has recently proposed a draft law aimed at reorganising the legislation of the publishing sector, which requires every citizen engaging in publishing and editorial activities to register them with a central registry. This law covers different media, including the Internet, in practice requiring every Internet user who posts information online (thus carrying [...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXaT1Ty6JTY

As discussions about the digital divide have been slowly fading into the background (in spite of the persistent inequalities in Internet adoption both between and within countries), the new focus has been shifting on the inequalities in the way the Internet is used by drawing attention to the media skills (or media literacy) which are [...]

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford has just released its 2007 Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS) report - covering findings and trends comparing the 2003, 2005 and 2007 surveys.
You can download the report here and you can read the BBC press coverage the report has received here. The OxIS surveys are [...]

Itching for statistics, insights and data on the use of second life for political and educational purposes - who are the people who tune in? probably the usual suspects - but what do they think about the whole process? is the technology living up to their expectations? are these online forums a valuable form of [...]