As Miriam Simun from our Digital Natives team is off this morning to present our research findings on digital natives and their attitudes towards privacy at the Harvard CRCS Privacy and Security seminar series, news comes from Italy that the Agenzia delle Entrate – the department of revenue - has made available online for all [...]

With the primaries in full swing and the upcoming elections, one cannot but ponder what role new technologies such as the Internet are playing in facilitating citizens’ engagement in the political process. Is the Internet actually making a difference?
The Internet has certainly lowered the barriers of participation – if one wants to get involved, there [...]

In the last few weeks, a couple of initiatives in the UK have caught the eye of privacy advocates: first, the government proposal of making Internet Service Providers responsible for taking legal action against users who download music illegally over their accounts, thus making them actively responsible for monitoring the content which is passed through [...]

(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 [...]

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 [...]