Research

Title:
Digital Divide.
Political E-Participation in the Second Decade of the Internet Age

Supervisor:
Prof.Alexander Trechsel

My field of research centres on how people customize the use and design of digital technologies according to their local framework and political needs from a bottom-up perspective. The phenomenon commonly defined as the Digital Divide plays a key role in this regard. My analysis of the unequal access and use of digital technology leads me to identify the key elements of the Network Society. This allows me to explore the fragmentation of digital culture and the variations of Internet use for practicing politics.

In my PhD research, entitled “Digital Divide. Political E-Practices in the second decade of the Internet Age”, I focus on the Digital Divide within the framework of the political science. From this point of view, I explore the current dimension of the Digital Divide, particularly focusing on the impact of the Internet on democratic processes. I argue that if the Internet has been lauded an open space to which anyone who wants to can contribute, the following questions remain: are the Internet’s contents reflective of cultural dynamics worldwide? Who has the instruments to contribute to the Internet? Following these questions, I conceptualize the Digital Divide not just as a gap in accessing the Internet, rather I refer to the Digital Divide as the gap in contributing at the same level to designing the Internet, according to real local needs and cultural specificities. This last point is the guideline for my entire work.

Thesis outline:

In the first part of my dissertation I have set up a dataset including data of Internet Use, Internet Infrastructure, Internet Politics and national Social, Economy and Democratic factors in over 190 countries with a particular focus on Europe. Through cross-national analysis, I map the current status of the Digital Divide and how economic, political and social conditions affect its dimension. My recent findings confirm that although the population accessing the Internet is increasing worldwide, a serious gap still exists in how many people contribute to shaping the Internet.

In the second part of my work, I explore how this scenario affects the different usages of the Internet for the practice of politics. Here I explore not only how government institutions use the Internet for facilitating already existing forms of politics, but also how people use digital technologies for new forms of political practices. I pay particular attention to how people use collaborative network organization tools for designing their political practices from the bottom-up.