Billions of people around the world lack internet access. No one cared until the whole world had to go online. President Joe Biden has repeatedly said that the United States would close the digital divide under his leadership. However, the divide still affects people and communities across the country. The complex and persistent reality is that millions of residents live in digital deserts, and many more face disproportionate difficulties when it comes to getting and staying online, especially people of color, seniors, rural residents, and farmers in remote areas. Economic and health disparities are worsening in rural communities without available internet access. Students living in urban digital deserts with little technology exposure are ill prepared to compete for emerging occupations. Even seniors struggle to navigate the aging process without access to online information and remote care. In this book, Nicol Turner Lee, a leading expert on the American digital divide, uses personal stories from individuals around the country to show how the emerging digital underclass is navigating the spiraling online economy, while sharing their joys and hopes for an equitable and just future. Turner Lee argues that achieving digital equity is crucial for the future of America’s global competitiveness and requires radical responses to offset the unintended consequences of increasing digitization. In the end, Digitally Invisible proposes a pathway to more equitable access to existing and emerging technologies, while encouraging readers to weigh in on this shared goal.

Explores the real-life consequences of the digital divide and what can be done to close it. Based on fieldwork across the United States, this book explores the consequences of digital exclusion through the real-life narratives of individuals, communities, and businesses that lack sufficient online access.

Build a High-Impact, Low-Hassle Digital Sales Prospecting System That Works! Hate cold calling? Stop doing it! Build a supercharged, highly automated digital sales prospecting system that attracts more qualified leads, shortens sales cycles, and increases conversion rates—painlessly! In The Invisible Sale, Tom Martin reveals techniques he’s used to drive consistent double-digit growth through good times and bad, with no cold calling. Martin’s simple, repeatable process helps you laser-target all your marketing activities, sales messages, and sales calls based on what your prospects are actually telling you. Martin boils complex ideas down to simple, straightforward language...real-life case studies...easy-to-understand templates...and actionable solutions! • Discover the “invisible funnel,” where self-educated buyers are making decisions before you know they exist • Leverage Funnel Optimized website design to identify your prospects’ key challenges before you ever speak to them • Integrate social media, content, and email to optimize the entire prospecting process • Make every sales call count with behaviorally targeted email prospecting • Leverage Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to efficiently “prospect at scale” • Use the science of propinquity to choose “outposts,” strategize social networking, and drive offline campaigns • Save money by rightsizing production quality to each marketing requirement • Rapidly create keyword-rich text content, and use it widely to promote self-qualification • Create webinars and tutorials more easily and painlessly than you ever thought possible • Choose low-cost devices, apps, software, and accessories for quickly creating high-quality DIY media content • Learn how to apply Aikido Selling Techniques to close self-educated buyers

This book highlights how, in principle, digital technologies present an opportunity to reduce social disparities, tackle social exclusion, enhance social and civil rights, and promote equity. However, to achieve these goals, it is necessary to promote digital equity and connect the digital underclass. The book focuses on how the advent of technologies may become a barrier to social mobility and how, by concentrating resources and wealth in few hands, the digital revolution is giving rise to the digital oligarchy, further penalizing the digital underclass. Socially-disadvantaged people, living at the margins of digital society, are penalized both in terms of accessing-using-benefits (three levels of digital divide) but also in understanding-programming-treatment of new digital technologies (three levels of algorithms divide). The advent and implementation of tools that rely on algorithms to make decisions has further penalized specific social categories by normalizing inequalities in the name of efficiency and rationalization.

The revolution in digital communications has altered the relationship between citizens and political elites, with important implications for democracy. As new information ecosystems have evolved, as unforeseen examples of their positive and negative consequences have emerged, and as theorizing, data, and research methods have expanded and improved, the central question has shifted from if the digital information environment is good or bad for democratic politics to how and in what contexts particular attributes of this environment are having an influence. It is only through the careful analysis of specific cases that we can begin to build a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the role of digital media in democratic theory and practice. The essays in Digital Media and Democratic Futures focus on a variety of information and communication technologies, politically relevant actors, substantive issues, and digital political practices, doing so from distinct theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. Individually, each of these case studies provides deep insights into the complex and context-dependent relationship between media and democracy. Collectively, they show that there is no single outcome for democracy in the digital age, only a range of possible futures. Contributors: Rena Bivens, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Jennifer Earl, Thomas Elliott, Deen Freelon, Kelly Gates, Philip N. Howard, Daniel Kreiss, Ting Luo, Helen Nissenbaum, Beth Simone Noveck, Jennifer Pan, Lisa Poggiali, Daniela Stockmann.

In the wake of labor market deregulation during the 2000s, online content sharing and social networking platforms were promoted in Japan as new sites of work that were accessible to anyone. Enticed by the chance to build personally fulfilling careers, many young women entered Japan's digital economy by performing unpaid labor as photographers, net idols, bloggers, online traders, and cell phone novelists. While some women leveraged digital technology to create successful careers, most did not. In Invisibility by Design Gabriella Lukács traces how these women's unpaid labor became the engine of Japan's digital economy. Drawing on interviews with young women who strove to sculpt careers in the digital economy, Lukács shows how platform owners tapped unpaid labor to create innovative profit-generating practices without employing workers, thereby rendering women's labor invisible. By drawing out the ways in which labor precarity generates a demand for feminized affective labor, Lukács underscores the fallacy of the digital economy as a more democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive mode of production.

»Digital Culture & Society« is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory and provides a publication environment for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation. This issue, edited by Anna Lisa Ramella, Asko Lehmuskallio, Tristan Thielmann and Pablo Abend, discusses the mobility of people, data and devices from the perspective of digital mobile practices. As the authors of various empirical case studies show, these need to be studied both situationally, and on the move. With contributions by Marion Schulze, Jamie Coates, Geoffrey Hobbis, Samuel Gerald Collins, among others, and an interview with Heather Horst, David Morley, and Noel B. Salazar.

Use this hands-on guide to understand the ever growing and complex world of digital security. Learn how to protect yourself from digital crime, secure your communications, and become anonymous online using sophisticated yet practical tools and techniques. This book teaches you how to secure your online identity and personal devices, encrypt your digital data and online communications, protect cloud data and Internet of Things (IoT), mitigate social engineering attacks, keep your purchases secret, and conceal your digital footprint. You will understand best practices to harden your operating system and delete digital traces using the most widely used operating system, Windows. Digital Privacy and Security Using Windows offers a comprehensive list of practical digital privacy tutorials in addition to being a complete repository of free online resources and tools assembled in one place. The book helps you build a robust defense from electronic crime and corporate surveillance. It covers general principles of digital privacy and how to configure and use various security applications to maintain your privacy, such as TOR, VPN, and BitLocker. You will learn to encrypt email communications using Gpg4win and Thunderbird. What You’ll Learn Know the various parties interested in having your private data Differentiate between government and corporate surveillance, and the motivations behind each one Understand how online tracking works technically Protect digital data, secure online communications, and become anonymous online Cover and destroy your digital traces using Windows OS Secure your data in transit and at rest Be aware of cyber security risks and countermeasures Who This Book Is For End users, information security professionals, management, infosec students

Provoking an ethical reconsideration of what we do, or do not do, with excess data, this is a call to action for researchers and scholars to rethink how they conduct their research as the consequences of datafication grow ever more central to both our academic endeavours and our lives.

In every part of the world information and technology are changing society and challenging the structures, roles, and management of traditional government institutions. At the same time, universal needs for human and social development, environmental protection, commercial and financial stability, and scientific and technological advancement demand governmental attention. In this complex and changing environment, governments are still expected to provide for the public good through legal and political processes, and public programs and services. Digital transformation, electronic government, government 2.0, and electronic governance are just some of the labels used to characterize the ideas and actions that underlie adaptation, transformation, and reform efforts. This book contributes to the ongoing dialog within the digital government research and practice community by addressing leadership and management challenges through the interplay of five interconnected themes: management, policy, technology, data, and context. These themes are evident in a wide range of topics including policy informatics, smart cities, cross-boundary information sharing, service delivery, and open government, among others. Accordingly, it includes chapters that explore these themes conceptually and empirically and that emphasize the importance of context, the need for cross‐boundary thinking and action, a public value approach to performance, and the multi‐dimensional capabilities necessary to succeed in a dynamic, multi‐stakeholder environment. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Public Management Review.