Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Disuguaglianza digitale »

- After a short description of the main sociological approaches to social inequalities, the article proposes a co-relational reading of social inequalities in access to health services. Even if Italian healthcare system ensures universalistic and public access to care, social and regional disparities persist. The application of digital technologies to healthcare, if embedded in social complexity, can help in tackling obstacles to access.Keywords: social inequalities; health divide; Italian healthcare system; access to care; digital divide; health literacy.

- This is a tribute and a lasting memory of Achille Ardigň as a scholar, an academic an administrator and a politician. On a personal note, the short paper touches upon the intermingling of his personalities and the latitude of his knowlodge, which he always generously shared.Keywords: tribute, e-health, digital divide, participation, responsibility, inequalities.Parole chiave: tributo, e-health, digital divide, partecipazione, responsabilitÀ, disuguaglianze.

L'accelerazione della digitalizzazione imposta dalla pandemia ha proiettato moltissime attività online. Le forme di internazionalizzazione virtuale per far fronte all'emergenza Covid-19 sono il punto di partenza del presente contributo per discutere le sfide per le Università medio-piccole di una potenziale spinta alla globalizzazione dell'istruzione superiore. Un uso più di-sinvolto delle tecnologie digitali, in un contesto di economia dell'informazione, pone infatti l'attenzione sui rischi di polarizzazione e di accrescimento delle disuguaglianze, individuali e territoriali. Al contempo, il richiamo alle motivazioni di inclusione alla genesi delle nuove forme di internazionalizzazione, unitamente ad una concezione più moderna della globalizza-zione, evidenzia come il radicamento territoriale delle Università medio-piccole possa rappre-sentare una opportunità da giocare nel nuovo palcoscenico globale, in uno scambio simbiotico con la comunità e l'economia locale.

Questo lavoro è un tentativo di precisare dimensioni e condizioni del digital divide, a partire dalla scelta di una specifica accezione del termine, che lo inserisce nella più ampia e articolata problematica della disuguaglianza sociale. Le Information and Communication Technologies sollevano il problema del significato attuale della cittadinanza e dell’inclusione sociale, che nei contesti socialmente ed economicamente più arretrati si traducono in lotta alla povertà, chiamando in causa la complessa relazione tra tecnologia e sviluppo umano. L’accesso significativo alle tecnologie corrisponde all’applicazione di capacità intellettuale e comprende alcuni elementi di fondamentale importanza, come la gestione e rielaborazione dell’informazione, la crescita di competenze utili a sfruttare i vantaggi della tecnologia. La penetrazione delle tecnologie nella società contemporanea pone alcune sfide al rinnovamento della scuola e rende indispensabile valutare che tipo di competenze sono necessarie, come poterle sviluppare e quali metodologie adottare nella didattica, affinché le nuove generazioni crescano con la capacità di partecipare attivamente al cambiamento della società. A tale scopo, il presente contributo propone una ricerca sul campo che mette a confronto l’implementazione del progetto One Laptop Per Child in due realtà agli antipodi dell’indice di sviluppo umano – l’Italia e l’Etiopia – con un’attenzione specifica al potenziale sviluppo di “competenze digitali” e all’evoluzione della metodologia di insegnamento, elementi che in linea teorica corrispondono ai primi ingredienti di una incentivazione dell’inclusione sociale. La ricerca è di tipo qualitativo, utilizza gli strumenti del focus group, dell’intervista, del questionario e dell’osservazione partecipante, prendendo in esame 13 classi e 18 insegnanti/coordinatori per ciascun campo. I risultati più importanti mostrano che una azione efficace in termini di inclusione digitale è condizionata da una organizzazione educativa programmatica, promozione di iniziative con un valore locale, interventi di formazione e di capacity building che non sconvolgano sistemi socio-culturali consolidati, ma che incidano sulla motivazione dei destinatari valorizzando il capitale umano e sociale. È questo che intendiamo con innovazione della scuola.
The term digital divide echoes a kind of technological determinism. It has often suggested that inequalities depend on physical access to Information and Communication Technologies and that simply achieving such access would solve problems of social exclusion. In this work the original literal sense of “access” will be replaced by a set of more concrete operational definitions. It extends the model of a gap between haves and have-nots to a concept of a broader digital inequality, depending on the so-called “digital skills”. It calls attention to information as a primary good in the contemporary society, to be considered as the main goal to achieve through a meaningful use of ICT. The emphasis is therefore placed on education, where the digital literacy can provide the ability to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create information. Social opportunities of digital technology are underlined both in developed and developing countries. We argue in fact that, whenever integrated in school subjects, ICT might become a great opportunity to innovate learning and teaching, to accomplish a renovated citizenship in the Nord of the world and help to achieve better standards of development in the South. A comparative analysis of two opposite contexts investigate understandings of the digital inclusion by exploring best practices for sustainable projects. The field research focuses on the One Laptop Per Child worldwide project, comparing the use of the same technological tool in primary schools of Italy and Ethiopia. The data presented are based on observations, focus group and interviews with a sample of 13 classes and 18 teachers/coordinators for each field, conducted during the school year 2008-2009. Results indicate that often children capabilities are complementary to teachers’ ones, that ICT provide the flexibility to meet diverse learners’ needs, that training is essential to motivate and empower teachers to use ICT and revise traditional didactics, that social capital has a central role in the school. The concept of capacity building emerges from these concepts and suggests pathways to improve skills access in the long run and adapt school curricula to collaborative environments. This is what the present study calls innovation.

The research explores how teenagers from different social classes use and give meaning to the internet in their everyday life. The most common representations of youth’s relationship with information and communication technologies focus on the generational distinctiveness (for instance the expression “digital native”) and hide the relevance of social stratification. On the contrary socio-economic and cultural conditions contribute to differentiate teenagers’ relationship with internet and digital media. For such a reason the present work investigates how social background shapes teenagers’ internet use, attitudes and meaning-making practices. It also explores in which circumstances it is possible to identify digital inequalities. The first chapter presents a review of the literature on digital inequalities among teenagers. A particular emphasis is placed on research using qualitative approaches and investigating how dispositions and meanings are constructed within particular socio-cultural contexts. The second chapter illustrates the theoretical perspective. Given that parents’ key role is mostly overlooked in digital inequalities research, this chapter discusses the relevance of the theory of socialization and parental mediation. The third chapter describes the main references used for developing the methodology of the thesis. It presents a brief overview of the methodological underpinnings of audiences studies, domestication theory and science and technology studies in order to outline the notion of “appropriation”: the latter concept proved to be a helpful tool in order to overcome a solely descriptive analysis and to produce a contextualized account of digital inequalities. The fourth chapter gives an account of the research design, methods, samples and procedure of the analysis. The chapters that go from fifth to nine discuss the outcomes of the analysis. The fifth chapter illustrates the analysis of a survey administrated in spring 2012 to a representative sample of Lombardy second year secondary students (n. 2327) designed and implemented with other colleagues at the Department of Sociology and Social Research with the support of Lombardy Region and the Lombardy Office of Education. Chapters six to nine are dedicated to the qualitative results. They give an account of the four patterns of internet appropriation obtained through the analysis of 53 semi-structures interviews conducted with teenagers of different social classes (organized by parents’ professional occupation in: upper middle class, lower middle class, working class). Even if extremely diverse, the patterns present a coherent logic according to parents role as social agents. Teenagers from upper class families draw heavily from their parents discourses and examples to define their relationship with digital media. On the other side, adolescents with a working class background draw only but vastly on their peers. Overall the results show that socio-economic status and cultural background contribute to define teenagers’ internet appropriation through parental socialization. However, there is not a linear causality between social inequalities and internet use. Processes of reproduction, based on the possession of cultural capital coexist with tendencies of “disalignment” in the expected relationship between social status and media use. The relevance of these findings for the debate on digital inequalities among youth is discussed in the final chapter.

This contribution develops a broader understanding of well-being in premodern towns and by using digital methods to map social and economic inequalities, thereby drawing on insights from research on socio-spatial equity from urban studies. The key questions are how socio-economic inequality was reflected in the urban social topography and to what extent these spatial patterns reproduced inequality. Taking sixteenth-century Leiden as a case study, the spatial patterns of economic inequality and social segregation in this town are first examined. Next, the level of location-based inequality is explored by mapping and calculating urban spatial patterns of service accessibility.