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While Africa has largely been considered a digitally-disconnected country, recent studies have shown that connectivity figures are on a rise. In this paper, we theorize digital wellbeing in a context characterized by a fast-growing number of mobile data users despite a historically low Internet penetration. It is focused on an ongoing ethnographic research on mobile users and digital inequalities in Africa, zooming in on results from an explorative study featuring 10 in-depth interviews with young adult heavy users (more than 4–5 hours a day) and seeking to understand strategies they use in attaining digital wellbeing. The findings show how the sampled young adults (18–30 years old) struggle with the daily realities of digital participation including addiction and generational conflict in technology use. Results also reveal ways through which electronic connectivity is perceived both be a tool of freedom as well as a subtle form of potential digital enslavering.

This article investigates the entanglement between socio-economic and technological factors in conditioning people’s patterns of Internet use. We analysed the influence of sociodemographic and techno-social aspects in conditioning the distinctive digital practices developed by Internet users. By using a representative sample of UK users and different methods of analysis, such as factor analysis, K-means cluster analysis and logit analysis, this study shows how techno-social variables have a stronger effect than socio-economic variables in explaining the advanced use of the Internet., BritishAcademy, Depto. de Sociología: Metodología y Teoría, Fac. de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología, TRUE, pub

This article presents a study of 8 to 12 year-old Italian students (n=282) to test their knowledge about advertising and their interaction with TV. The thesis that gives a strong power of attraction, seduction, persuasion to advertising is supported by the results of this research. The main purpose of this article is to test the importance of the music in the seduction process of advertising. Music is often the first element that captures children's attention and, even if they do not pay much attention to the visual aspects of an advertisement, the music is able to penetrate the psyche. The research shows that music is the element of main attraction for the young students and that they often sing the jingle of an ad, becoming at the same time the unwitting mechanism for diffusion of the message and victims of the symbolic violence of advertising., Este artículo presenta una investigación, llevada a cabo sobre una muestra de 282 estudiantes italianos, de edades comprendidas entre los 8 y los 12 años, dirigida a comprobar el conocimiento real que los niños tienen del mudo publicitario y su relación con la televisión. La música en particular, en el centro de esta investigación, se muestra como un elemento de importancia fundamental para la publicidad televisiva, porque consigue que se instaure un proceso de fascinación y seducción que convierte el mundo publicitario en un lugar mágico y deseable. La música es el primer elemento que captura la atención de los más pequeños y se infiltra en los recovecos de la memoria. Los datos obtenidos demuestran que los estudiantes entienden que la música representa para ellos el elemento de mayor interés, confirman que cantan habitualmente los temas que acompañan a los spots, y sueñan con las atmósferas y los mundos propuestos por la publicidad.

Big Brother and Rhizome are both metaphors often used when talking about the Internet. On the web we are monitored and observed as personal data are catalogued and recorded as in a cyber-panopticon. This ever-present monitoring of Internet behaviours gives rise to the metaphor of Big Brother. As the aggregate of human communication, there is the need to impose social control on users on the web, specifically with the aim of creating uniformity of social behaviours. However, the Internet also has a rhizomatic structure, which does not conform to a rigid scheme of uniformity of behaviour. The Internet circumvents the centralization of power, just as it avoids the typical methods of vertical control and superstructure. Indeed, the Internet favours elf-regulation, preferring a central and horizontal relationship. This article explores how it is possible that these potentially contradictory Web schemes exist: the one favouring a system of surveillance as Big Brother, and with the democratic, rhizomatic.s characteristics of the web. Are these metaphors antithetical or coexistent in their integration? Or, perhaps there is a need for a new all-embracing metaphor that synthesizes these two aspects of behavioural regulation in the Internet., Gran hermano y rizoma son metáforas cada vez más utilizadas cuando se habla de Internet. En la red estamos continuamente monitorizados: se recogen y catalogan datos e información como si se tratase de un cyberpanopticón: de ahí la metáfora del gran hermano electrónico. La red siente la necesidad de imponer un control cuyo objetivo es uniformar el comportamiento de los usuarios. Pero Internet es, además, una estructura rizomática difícilmente encajable en modelos rígidos. Internet rechaza, por su propia naturaleza, la centralización del poder en beneficio de la autogestión. ¿Cómo pueden coexistir un sistema de vigilancia tipo gran hermano con las características rizomáticas de la red? Estas este artículo se analizan ambas metáforas y se busca una síntesis de ambos conceptos.

The consumerism has been accompanied to an increase of the spare time, that the mass media and the culture industry has tried, often successfully, to reduce to «time of consumption». The culture industry organizes the leisure, and feeds the desires, trying to delineate the amusement and its timetables, desires and its aspirations, trying to impose the rules of the «spare time» trying to impose and to interiorize the consumerism’s desires. The advent of that the English historian Hobsbawm called the «opulent society» in the lasts decades of century XX, has generated a consumerism guideline that revolutionizes the previous attitude towards the existence. The consumerism nourishes a various conception of the existence, much more docile and light, and from whose nucleus has been removed the hardness and the difficulty and, above all, where the assets is not estimated on their «value of exchange», but on their «value of consumption»., El consumismo ha llegado acompañado de un aumento del tiempo libre que los medios de comunicación de masas y la industria cultural han intentado, en muchas ocasiones con éxito, convertir en tiempo de consumo. La industria cultural organiza el tiempo libre y alimenta el deseo, intentando diseñar el entretenimiento y sus horarios, los deseos y sus aspiraciones, intentando imponer las reglas del «tiempo libre» y haciéndonos interiorizar los deseos y preceptos consumistas. La llegada de lo que el historiador inglés Hobsbawn llamó la «sociedad de la opulencia» del siglo XX ha generado una orientación consumista que ha revolucionado la postura de la época anterior frente a la existencia. El consumismo alimenta una concepción distinta de la existencia, mucho más dócil y ligera, y de cuyo núcleo se han eliminado la dureza y la dificultad, en la que los bienes no se evalúan en base a su «valor de cambio», sino a su «valor de consumo».