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 [...]

A first hand view on e-democracy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9RqHEAxN9g

Andrew Keen’s new book: The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture is now been published both in the US and the UK. To have a sample of his thought provoking thesis, which takes a critical approach to the Web 2.0 revolution, you can also check out a talk he has [...]

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just released a new report: “A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users” where they provide a profile of users of ICTs according to their technology assets, their actions, and their attitudes about ICTs. The report identifies three main typologies of users: ‘Elite Tech Users’ (31% of [...]

A forthcoming book ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy’ by Andrew Keen is questioning the euphoria which is surrounding Web 2.0 and user-generated content online from blogs to social networking sites to Wikipedia and citizen journalism. Keen questions current online contents and practices highlighting how [...]