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Forthcoming in American Behavioral Scientist (ABS) The COVID-19 pandemic erupted during the climate change (CC) crisis, forcing individuals to adapt abruptly to a new scenario, and triggering changes in everyone’s lifestyles. Based on a representative sample of the UK population (N= 1013) this paper investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic invited/forced individuals to reflect upon a new sustainable way of life and to (re)consider the anthropogenic impact on the environment. The results show that age and education are negatively associated with skepticism relating to the human impact on CC, while other control variables such as income, gender and employment status, have a limited impact on this attitude toward CC. Secondly, findings indicate a clear separation between those with a minimal standard of education, who support the natural origin of CC, while individuals with a higher level of education believe that CC is caused by human actions. Finally, on average, younger and more educated individuals tend to associate the COVID-19 pandemic with an opportunity to promote an eco-friendly world and to adopt an eco-sustainable approach.

This paper provides a summary of content in this special issue.

This article theorizes fresh connections between Bourdieusian social theory, and the digital divide in five key areas: political, economic, cultural, social, and personal digital advantage. In so doing it makes new arguments about how digital resources result in benefits that accrue from the combination of both access to and use of ICTs. In this way, the findings shed additional light on the third level of the digital divide by focusing on the role played by digital capital in influencing the uneven distribution of benefits that derive from the use of the Internet. Based on a structured sample of the UK population, the article adopts the model of digital capital developed by Ragnedda, Ruiu and Addeo (2019). Findings show that varied levels of digital capital are related to engagement in activities that have political, social, economic, cultural, and personal valence. Thus, the study offers compelling evidence of the increasing importance of digital capital in everyday life., Italian Sociological Review, V. 12 N. 1 (2022)

This chapter aims to introduce the concept of social inequalities and how this phenomenon evolved over the years. This brief theoretical excursus introduces those basic ideas and concepts that are useful to reflect on how the advent of digital technologies might have exacerbated social inequalities. ICTs are cementing already existing social inequalities, both on a macro level, given the raise to a new digital oligarchy, and on a micro level, reinforcing inequalities between individuals. After a brief theoretical and historical excursus, this chapter looks at how the advent of technologies may become a barrier of social mobility and how, by concentrating resources and wealth in few hands, the digital revolution is giving rise to digital oligarchy.

This piece introduces the special issue of First Monday focused on the topic of Sustainability and Digital Transformation. This collection is a forum for that conversation to develop as a venue in which social scientists, STS scholars, and other digital scholars explore the concept of digital sustainability. This special issue emerges in the context of two notable social trends. First, there is a push for global sustainable development, and second, all sectors of human endeavor are migrating into the digital sphere. These two trends combine into a single, nascent theme of digital sustainability, which is the topic of this collection of articles in First Monday. The focus is upon the role(s) of digital technologies in establishing a sustainable world. The collection includes seven papers, which make a modest contribution to the growing discourse about the sociological aspects of all things digital in sustainability practices. The aim is to establish a research agenda focusing on digital technologies' current and potential role (but also limitations). The articles pay special attention to the intricate interplay of technology, social dynamics of media, sustainability practices, and information change. The contributors have provided individual works that contribute to the digital sustainability scholarship, some conceptual and others analytical. The collection invites the reader to consider sustainability and the ever-expanding integration of digital technologies in various aspects of social life

The blockchain is built upon a peer-to-peer network, and anyone willing to join the network can do it without asking permission from anyone. Blockchain technology allows the secure transfer of information, assets and money without a third-party intermediary, such as banks or other financial institutions. A blockchain can be used also as a backbone infrastructure for running smart contracts, particular decentralized applications which can be seen as computer programs executed by participants in a blockchain. Blockchain technologies will be used for financial products and have opportunities in all those fields, which requires transparency, immutability, certainty and certification. Blockchain technology is able to fundamentally transform the boundaries of organizations, thus challenging traditional assumptions about organizations being an ideal entity to manage market transactions. Drawing on market data, industry cases, anecdotes and academic frameworks, the authors analyze the drivers of digital trust in the crypto industry from historic, institutional, market and sociological perspectives.

This article investigates the nature of the conversation around austerity on Twitter during the 2015 general election in the UK. Specifically, it explores the kinds of messages referring to austerity, as well as the kinds of accounts involved (whether they referred to a private or public role on Twitter and in society) and their affiliation to politically or non-politically oriented organizations/bodies. The search on Twitter concerning the austerity topic (for the 39-day time period from 3 March to 8 May 2015) resulted in 16,015 tweets, which generally referred to austerity, and 11,146 tweets, which contained at least one relevant hashtag.\ud \ud While austerity was rarely mentioned by mainstream media accounts in the Twittersphere, this topic was widely discussed during the election campaign by private users. This could be seen as a limitation of agenda setting, since there is no correlation between the agenda set by the media on Twitter and the public discussion about it. However, we found a relationship between the offline mainstream media agenda and the discussion led by private users on Twitter, thus confirming, to some extent, the validity of intra-agenda setting. In fact, offline media events (talk shows, news articles and question times) seemed to trigger peaks in tweet-based discussions or mentions about austerity, showing that the agenda set by the offline media influenced the discussion in the Twittersphere. Finally, we found that, while austerity has clear implications for citizens’ daily life, it seems to be more of an “elitist” topic, mainly addressed by those who are already politically oriented and well informed on the topic.

O desenvolvimento da sociedade da informação reforçou a existência de obstáculos que dificultam o acesso e o uso apropriado das tecnologias por certos grupos, levando a novas formas de exclusão no mercado de trabalho, nas instituições governamentais, no lazer, e nas atividades educativas. Contudo, reduzir o hiato entre aqueles que estão conectados e aqueles que não estão tendo acesso físico mais barato e mais rápido à internet não resulta automaticamente numa eliminação da distância colocada pelas desigualdades digitais. É um erro assumir um posicionamento tecnologicamente determinista, que vê o acesso à tecnologia como solução para os problemas sociais, incluindo problemas de desigualdade social, democracia, liberdade, interação social e um senso de comunidade. Na verdade, muitas dimensões e padrões existentes podem gerar e reforçar desigualdades, aumentando ainda mais as distâncias entre cidadãos/usuários. O termo “hiato digital”, muitas vezes usado como expressão binária, pode não ser adequado porque sugere um hiato unidimensional, baseado principalmente no fator econômico – possuir tecnologia –, ao passo em que há hiatos em perspectivas múltiplas, que vão além do simples acesso ou da obtenção dos recursos. Essas dimensões criam desigualdades digitais que, se não forem retratadas, produzem e reforçam as desigualdades sociais. Os conceitos de estratificação social e digital estão intimamente interligados.\ud \ud \ud The development of the information society has highlighted the existence of obstacles preventing certain social groups from accessing and properly using technologies, leading to new forms of exclusion from the job market, governmental institutions, leisure and academic activities. However, reducing the gap between those who connect and those who do not by offering cheaper and faster physical access does not automatically translate into closing the gap in terms of digital inequalities. The technological determinist position, which sees access to technology as being able to solve social problems, including problems of social inequality, democracy, freedom, social relationships and sense of community, is misleading. In fact, several dimensions and patterns can generate and reinforce inequalities, further increasing the distances between citizens/users. The term “digital divide”, often used as a binary expression, is confusing, because it suggests a one-dimensional gap, mainly based on the economic factor – possession of technologies –, while there are gaps in multiple dimensions that go beyond the simple access to or possession of resources. These dimensions create digital inequalities that, if not mirrored, can produce and reinforce social inequalities. The concepts of social and digital stratification are intimately intertwined.

Seminal sociologist Max Weber rarely wrote about media dynamics; however, the Weberian perspective offers rich potential for the analysis of various media issues, including the study of digital divides. In particular, the contribution of a Weberian school of thought to the field seems to be the addition of noneconomic and nontechnical concerns to the study of digital inequalities, most notably the importance of status and legitimacy and group affiliations and political relations as areas of focus. This piece introduces the Special Section on Max Weber and digital divide studies and clarifies the inspiration behind it. It briefly presents the article contributions, while summarizing their arguments, and offers a broad discussion of Weber’s relevance to digital divide studies as a way of understanding the individual articles as a shared intellectual effort.

The new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) introduced a highly automated and much cheaper systematic observation of personal data. ICTs advance the intensification and the extension of surveillance, such that an expanding quantity of data can now be collected, tabulated and cross-referenced more rapidly and more accurately than old paper files. This process contributes to the building a "new electronic cage" constraining the individual, on the basis of his e-profile and data-matching. Especially two agents of surveillance are interested in collecting and using such data: government authorities and private corporations. Massive stores of personal data held on ordinary people are now vital to both public services and private business purposes. The new electronic cage is more all-encompassing and complete, being able to produce a complete profile of citizens and consumers in real time. Both public and private information agencies rely on one another for creating and modelling the profiles of good citizens/consumers who, by definition, are well integrated into social life, exhibiting predictable behaviour that conforms to the general needs of contemporary consumer/ oriented social relations. The underlying assumption under girding the public/private exchange of personal data, the idea is that a good consumer is also a good citizen, and vice versa.

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.

Monahan Torin and Rodolfo D. Torres' (eds.) Schools under surveillance: cultures of control in public education. New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers University Press. 264 pp. $24.95 (US), Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-8135-4680-3.

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».

La propaganda costituisce un ampio e affascinante oggetto di studio. Non poche sono le ricerche che hanno indagato l'argomento: dai più scientifici studi di Ellul (1967, 1973) a quelli più critici di Chomsky (1988, 1997) e Rampton e Stauber (2003), da quelli più accademici di Qualter (1985) e Doob (1950) sino alle più recenti ricerche di Pratkanis e Aronson (2001). Il comune denominatore è rinvenibile nella difficoltà riscontrata in tutte queste ricerche nel definirne il concetto e portare avanti una trattazione obiettiva non influenzata da pregiudizi. Le difficoltà sono imputabili alla connotazione negativa che il concetto di propaganda ha assunto con il passare del tempo. Infatti nonostante la sua iniziale neutralità, è andata assumendo i caratteri dispregiativi di un'opera di manipolazione ed è oggi spesso usata come sinonimo di un discorso falso e parziale. Inoltre essa viene spesso associata alle dittature, poiché è stata essenzialmente nei regimi totalitari che ha avuto modo di svilupparsi ed è proprio nelle dittature che è stata usata come tecnica e strumento fondamentale per il mantenimento dello status quo. Per questo motivo ci sembra necessaria una seppure sintetica definizione del fenomeno di propaganda ed un inquadramento storico, analizzandone poi il ruolo che essa riveste all'interno delle libere democrazie anche in termine di funzionalità per la loro evoluzione e sostentamento (Ellul 1967: 232). Si tratterà inoltre di come sia più complicato accertarne la presenza all'interno della libertà di stampa e trovi la sua forza, a differenza di quanto accade nei totalitarismi, nella sua onnipresenza e invisibilità.