Broadband infrastructure is the prerequisite that enables people to meaningfully participate in the data-driven economy, as well as to put to good use the “beauty” of datafication. Developing countries and LDCs need FDI to build their digital infrastructures. However, the economic benefit of the GATS Mode 3 market access commitments in the telecommunications sector has never been realized in many states. In this context, from Mexico – Telecom to Brazil – Taxation, the mere fact that the responding parties must have attempted to stretch the scope of the “universal services” or “public morals” to justify their digital inclusion policies within the WTO indicates that the interplay between international economic law and digital inequality invites further reflection. The pressing task for trade negotiators is to find the common ground necessary to balance digital trade liberalization and development needs, rather than creating another “Digital ‘Haves’ Trade Agreement.” One policy direction discussed in Chapter 1 is to impose obligations on big tech companies to contribute their fair share to universal service funds needed for infrastructure upgrades. Such a reform, of course, should be implemented in a transparent, nondiscriminatory, and competitively neutral manner, as required by the Telecom Reference Paper.

The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted the educational and social lives of millions of children across the globe. Many governments attempted to curb the spread of the virus by closing schools or allowing them to remain open only for certain students, necessitating a rapid adjustment to remote home learning for schools and families. In the UK, this led to huge variability in the provision of educational materials, in children’s engagement, and in parents’ capacity to support home learning. This chapter describes the impacts of the school closures on families’ and students’ educational and socioemotional development.

The slow development of telepsychiatry in the pre-Covid-19 world, mainly driven by the increases in mobile devices, intergenerational changes and the digital divide is described. The dramatic changes in psychiatric practice following the Covid-19 pandemic are documented, with case histories from five countries as well as extensive descriptions of changes in the United States. Finally, lessons learned from the move to telepsychiatry, including changes to psychiatric practice involving hybrid care, the use of virtual home visits and asynchronous consultations, are summarised as directions for future psychiatric practice.

1 Introduction

2 Defining an Evolving Divide

3 The Meaning of “Access” Evolves

4 Theorizing the Digital Divide

5 Historical Perspective

6 Government Initiatives

  6.1 Public and Private Initiatives

  6.2 K-12 Research in the United States

  6.3 Lack of Permission to Access Technology

  6.4 Differences between Home and School

  6.5 School Policies and Procedures Restrict Use

  6.6 The Power of Teachers on Student Outcomes

7 The Global K-12 Digital Divide

  7.1 The Divide between Developed and Developing Countries

  7.2 Within-Country Digital Divides

8 The Divide for South Africa’s Students

9 The Future of the Divide

In the space of a single generation, social media have transformed how billions of people make friends, build communities, and share knowledge. However, approaches that suggest harm occurs based solely on time spent using social media disguise this everyday reality. In response, this chapter points toward the importance of understanding who uses social media in daily life, why, and how. While we have more data than ever to help us explore the impacts of new technologies, including social media, everyday experiences require description alongside careful theorizing about the mechanisms that might cause benefits or harms. This collectively shifts research priorities towards applied applications that can mitigate problems, injustices, and inequalities that social media and other digital cultures can foster.

While a shift to virtual courts has been lauded by technological enthusiasts and reformers for decades, little research has examined how this technological change may affect vulnerable unrepresented persons and low-income people in the United States on the “have not” side of the digital divide. In this Chapter, we cast light on how virtual proceedings unfold for low-income unrepresented persons in the everyday. It is important to do so. To date, much of the conversation has lauded Zoom court proceedings as the future of civil justice, centering this praise on idealized forms of online proceedings and their conveniences, without interrogating the impact of the precarity that low-income people contend with or persistent digital divides. In marked departure, we examine how these new technologies affect the experiences of low-income unrepresented persons who encounter, and contend with, adversities within virtual court proceedings. We examine how these new technologies reconfigure the features, affordances, and barriers present within the civil justice system, and the impact of these new technologies on the psychology of judges, lawyers, and unrepresented persons, as well as the impact of these new technologies on the meaning of the judicial role and on a person’s unrepresented status.

Faith in technology as a way to narrow the civil justice gap has steadily grown alongside an expanding menu of websites offering legal guides, document assembly tools, and case management systems. Yet little is known about the supply and demand of legal help on the internet. This chapter mounts a first-of-its-kind effort to fill that gap by measuring website traffic across the mix of commercial, court-linked, and public interest websites that vie for eyeballs online. Commercial sites, it turns out, dominate over the more limited ecosystem of court-linked and public interest online resources, and yet commercial sites often engage in questionable practices, including the baiting of users with incomplete information and then charging for more. Search engine algorithms likely bolster that dominance. Policy implications abound for a new generation of A2J technologies focused on making people’s legal journeys less burdensome and more effective. What role should search engines play to promote access to quality legal information? Could they, or should they, privilege trustworthy sources? Might there be scope for public-private partnerships, or even a regulatory role, to ensure that online searches return trustworthy and actionable legal information?

Media and communication influence, shape, and change our societies. Therefore, this first chapter aims to explain the implications of digital communication for our societies and the relationship between media, technology, and society. The chapter introduces the concept of society from a sociological perspective and explains how societies change because of the effects technological developments have on them, and vice versa. It illustrates this interplay with the example of digital divides.

In order to explain the significance and changes of public communication in a digital society, the chapters zooms in on the media landscape and explicates the difference between new media and old (or traditional) media. It pays particular attention to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, as his work remains a cornerstone when studying the relationship between media, technology, and society. The chapter then outlines the discipline of media linguistics and explains how media linguistics can help to make digital media and digital communication more tangible. It focuses on three key terms crucial for understanding public digital communication: multimodality, media convergence, and mediatization.

This chapter explores the digitalisation of higher education in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), where technology is used to support teaching and learning. This conceptual chapter contends that technology uptake and use by institutions of higher learning has been inevitable in the recent past due to a number of factors, with the latest being the COVID-19 global pandemic. Central to the argument of the chapter is the fact that technology is pertinent for the transformation of teaching and learning. However, in some developing countries, especially those of Africa, digitalisation, noble as it is, has resulted in undesirable consequences. Many citizens of the developing countries have been affected by the dark side of technology uptake, which has brought with it social exclusion and digital divide. As much as they need technology for teaching and learning, findings are that factors such as lack of access to internet, shortage of equipment and lack of skills, among others, have proved to be barriers to effective online teaching and learning. The chapter is guided by van Dijk’s Resources and Appropriation Theory.

Digital government has enabled the automation of numerous public services and improved the efficiency and openness of the public administration. Nevertheless, for senior citizens, undeserved communities, individuals with low literacy and limited digital skills, the shift to governmental portals, online payments, and smartphone applications remain considerable obstacles to their daily interactions with public authorities. Drawing on a review of interdisciplinary literature, this chapter contributes to the legal literature with an account of the underlying causes of digital exclusion and a discussion of its most relevant legal implications through the lenses of fundamental rights (e.g., due process, equal treatment) and the principles of good administration.

Intrastate armed conflict has become the most frequent and deadly form of engagement in the world after the end of the Cold War. The massification of the use of Information and Communication Technologies and the digitization of political activities have turned intrastate conflicts into information-centric conflicts. In this context, cyberspace can be a battlefield as well as a space to conduct peacebuilding activities. Drawing upon literatures in conflict resolution and cybersecurity, this chapter proposes a definition of cyber peacebuilding as an active concept that captures those actions that delegitimize online violence, build capacity within society to peacefully manage online communication, and reduce vulnerability to triggers that may spark online violence. Cyber peacebuilding can also shed light on the relationship between intrastate conflicts and global cyber peace, contributing to raise awareness about cyberthreats in the Global South. The chapter uses the cases of Colombia and South Africa in order to illustrate the challenges and prospects of cyber peacebuilding organized around the four pillars of cyberspace outlined in this volume. Moreover, it argues that cyber peacebuilding in the Global South is an essential element of the emergence of cyber peace as a global public good.

This chapter elaborates on the impact of digitisation on international trade. It explains both the benefits of digitisation and the issues that the digital economy faces. Digitisation has allowed for unprecedented supply of goods and services across borders and has removed many practical barriers to the cross-border supply of services. However, the positive impact of digitisation on the global economy has not reached all countries to the same extent. The ‘digital divide’ entails that several developing countries at the moment do not sufficiently benefit from the changes brought about by digitisation. The chapter further elaborates on the impact of digitisation for services trade specifically. In order to set the scene for the rest of the book, the concept of digital services is contextualized and explained, providing the reader with a clear understanding of the subject of the legal analysis that will be conducted in the rest of the book.