Digital Dilemmas Research Articles

Structural Functionalism in Rural Primary Education: An Inquiry into the Alleviation of Digital Dilemmas

This paper thoroughly examines the educational challenges faced by China's rural primary schools in the modern digital context and suggests solutions based on the structural functionalism theory. The allocation of educational resources in rural primary schools is blatantly unequal under the dual structures of urban and rural areas, and the use of digital teaching also creates the dual issues of system imbalance and incomplete function. This paper, which is based on the structural functionalism theory, explains the challenges that digital education in rural primary schools faces, including a lack of resources, a shortage of skilled teachers, and an imperfect top-level educational design. In light of these challenges, the paper proposes some solutions, including enhancing the creation of digital education resources, enhancing teachers' capacity for digital teaching, creating and refining the digital management system for rural primary education, and fostering shared values to support the social identity of rural primary education digitization. In order to improve rural primary education in China, close the educational resource gap between urban and rural areas, advance educational equity, and raise the standard of rural primary education, this paper offers a theoretical and practical perspective on the digital transformation of rural primary schools.

Digital dilemmas and existing recommendations for healthy screen time use for children and adolescents

As technology continues to play an integral role in our daily lives, concerns regarding the appropriate and healthy use of screen time have prompted health organizations and authorities worldwide to establish guidelines and recommendations. This paper comprehensively summarizes existing recommendations and guidelines for screen time use from various countries, highlighting key similarities, differences, and emerging trends. However, there is a dire need to expand the existing repertoire of guidelines and recommendations to different age groups and strategies depending on user engagement for healthy screen time use.

Digital Dilemmas and Exclusion of Marginals: A Trajectory from Paradox of Privacy to Poverty of Privacy

This article investigates the competing claims over privacy by the state and civil society as the digital dilemmas arise in the implementation of the Aadhaar Act, 2016 that poses a potential challenge to people’s right to privacy guaranteed under the Indian constitution. The objective is to examine how different sections, especially the marginals such as SC, ST, OBCs, minorities, and women perceive and practice privacy in enrolling for Aadhaar in India. This article has adopted a technique of ‘convenient sampling’ in conducting in-depth discussions with ‘open-ended questions’ during fieldwork in the Telangana state of India. The empirical evidence suggests that demographic factors such as class, caste, gender, and religion influence privacy in India. Further, the interpretation of the informants’ responses, on privacy and Aadhaar, indicates the prevailing ‘poverty of privacy’ rather than the ‘privacy paradox’ among the marginalized sections.

Ethical perspectives on public top leadership of digitalization

Digitalization of the public sector is here to stay, and it involves significant ethical dilemmas that the top management must actively address. This article offers an overview of ethical themes in digitalization and several concrete examples. The top management has the responsibility, power and opportunities, and it is therefore clear that there is no neutral position for the top management in relation to the use of digital technologies. The article argues that it is not enough for the top management to respect political priorities and involves public values among stakeholders. Based on communicative ethics, the top management must also seek insight into digitalization and formulate its own ethical stance in the digital dilemmas.

Managing sharing is caring

“Sharenting” is a usual habit for families in the digital age. While media outlets describe parents as inattentive and naïve about it, empirical data shows that many of them face digital dilemmas about this practice. Little is known, though, about the reflective practices parents engage in when trying to tackle these dilemmas. To fill this gap, this study explores how a parenting forum can work as an informal reflective and learning site where parents naturally discuss Social Media Dilemmas (SMDs) associated with sharenting. The contribution reports on findings from a thematic analysis of 1,626 posts from 47 discussion threads, where parents sought their peers’ advice and support to deal with these kinds of predicaments, lookingat how these naturally occurring conversations can help parents learn about and make sense of the new challenges posed by the evolving communication ecology in terms of governing their children’s digital footprints.

Beyond the Surface: Sharenting as a Source of Family Quandaries: Mapping Parents’ Social Media Dilemmas

Sharenting is a common habit for parents in the digital age. Despite common discourse describing parents as naïve about it, empirical data supports many of them grapple with digital dilemmas concerning these digital narrations. This paper presents a quantitative content analysis of the opening posts of 665 threads posted on a parenting forum where posters discuss how the evolving communication ecology poses new predicaments – here conceptualized as Social Media Dilemmas (SMDs) – when it comes to governing their families’ and children’s digital presence. Findings propose a mapping of SMDs associated with this practice, showing the complex and multi-layered enterprise of governing sharenting, with dilemmas starting well before the birth of a child and concerning, not only parents’, but also other people’s sharing behavior.

Children as Digital Citizens: insights from classroom research with digital dilemmas

Children as Digital Citizens: insights from classroom research with digital dilemmas

Leaning Into Digital Dilemmas: How Educators’ Perspectives Can Inform New Civics Education

Background/Context: Digital life raises dilemmas that elude straightforward courses of action. These dilemmas are consequential to civic life, where participatory practices intersect with digital affordances to lend new power, stakes, and public consequences (Kahne et al., 2015). It is essential that students be able to recognize digital dilemmas and grapple with them in nuanced ways before acting (James, 2014). These realities engender calls for redesigning civic education for the digital age (Kahne et al., 2016). Engaging students with complex, authentic dilemmas builds on a rich tradition in moral education (Kohlberg, 1975). For educators on the front lines of this work, reflecting on polarizing digital civic dilemmas is an important precursor to effective classroom facilitation (Hess, 2005). Purpose and Research Questions: Doxing is the use of public social media to reveal personal information about an individual, often with the intent of inviting public shaming for their speech or other actions (Douglas, 2016). Doxing is a signature dilemma of today’s age that surfaces fundamental questions about freedom, privacy, and accountability. The current study examines educators’ varied responses to a doxing dilemma to illustrate how digital civic dilemmas can raise substantive themes for New Civics education. We ask: How do educators respond to a doxing dilemma? What considerations do they raise to justify different stances? Research Design: We draw on data from a larger survey about digital citizenship to examine views of educators (N = 769) who live and work with adolescents in varied contexts throughout the United States and in more than two dozen international contexts. We report on educators’ responses to the doxing dilemma based on an inductive analysis of their open-ended responses. Findings: The focal dilemma is indeed polarizing: 47% (n = 361) of educators surveyed agreed with the doxing case, while 53% (n = 408) disagreed. Respondents’ justifications reveal how the dilemma evokes reflection on the intersections of digital life with reasonable expectations of privacy, the bounds of constitutional rights and legal protections, salient moral principles, the importance of accountability and consequences for actions, and more. Conclusions/Recommendations: As educators are tasked with preparing youth for a New Civics era, we argue that digital civic dilemmas merit use in educator professional development settings and, ultimately, with students. Educators’ perspectives on the doxing dilemma surface diverse considerations, which we reframe as ten questions to guide and deepen engagement.

Digital dilemmas in the (post-)pandemic state: Surveillance and information rights in South Korea

Drawing on South Korea’s response to COVID-19, this article examines how the digital measures that were implemented by the nation state during the pandemic intensified the dilemma between public safety and information rights. South Korea’s highly praised handling of COVID-19 raises the question of how far digital technology can infiltrate everyday life for the sake of public safety and how citizens can negotiate the rapid digital transformation of a nation state. The South Korean government’s digital measures during the pandemic involved the extensive use of personal data; however, citizens were not allowed sufficient participation in the flow of information. By critically examining the South Korean case, this article reveals that the government coped with the pandemic through digital surveillance as a way to avoid physical lockdown, and in so doing, projected its desire for transition to a digitally advanced state while facilitating nationalism through a digital utopian discourse.

Dilemmi digitali e governance dell’identità digitale dei minori: l’interazione fra pari come opportunità informale di media education

The contribution investigates parents’ digital dilemmas associated with sharenting as an informal learning opportunity to rethink and orient their online sharing behavior. The paper reports on some results of an exploratory study based on the analysis of online conversations on a parenting forum focused on these dilemmas. Findings suggest that the interactional context where such exchange takes place can function as an informal learning environment, fostering informal peer-to-peer media education practices for parents in the digital age.

Digital investigators for solving digital dilemmas in the internet world.

Digital investigators for solving digital dilemmas in the internet world.

Diana C Parry, Corey W Johnson and Simone Fullagar (Eds.), Digital dilemmas: transforming gender identities and power relations in everyday life

Diana C Parry, Corey W Johnson and Simone Fullagar (Eds.), <i>Digital dilemmas: transforming gender identities and power relations in everyday life</i>

Digital dilemmas: the unintended consequences of election technology

ABSTRACTDigital technologies are increasingly used in elections around the world. Where the resources and capacity of the state are limited, some have argued that such technologies make it possible to rapidly “leapfrog” to cleaner and more credible elections. This article argues that the growing use of these technologies has been driven by the fetishization of technology rather than by rigorous assessment of their effectiveness; that they may create significant opportunities for corruption that (among other things) vitiate their potential impact; and that they carry significant opportunity costs. Indeed, precisely because new technology tends to deflect attention away from more “traditional” strategies, the failure of digital checks and balances often renders an electoral process even more vulnerable to rigging than it was before. These observations are not intended as a manifesto against the digitization of elections; apart from anything else, we argue that the drivers of the adoption of these new methods are too powerful to resist. But the analysis draws attention to the importance of more careful assessments of the problems, as well as the benefits, of such technologies – and to the need for more careful planning in their deployment.

The academic book and its digital dilemmas

The future of the academic book has been under debate for many years now, with academic institutional dynamics boosting output, while actual demand has moved in the opposite direction, leading to a reduced market which has felt like it is in crisis for some time. While journals have experienced widespread migration to digital, scholarly monographs in print form have been resilient and digital alternatives have faced significant problems of acceptance, particularly in the arts and humanities. Focusing in particular on the arts and humanities, this article asks how, and under what conditions, the digitally mediated long-form academic publication might hold a viable future. It examines digital disruption and innovation within humanities publishing, contrasts different models and outlines some of the key challenges facing scholarly publishing in the humanities. This article examines how non-traditional entities, such as digital humanities research projects, have performed digital publishing roles and reviews possible implications for scholarly book publishing’s relationship to the wider research process. It concludes by looking at how digital or hybrid long-form publications might become more firmly established within the scholarly publishing landscape.

La revolución digital: mobile media use in contemporary Cuba

ABSTRACTRecent scholarship on mobile internet use in the Global South highlights access disparities, along with shifting social practices that accompany greater web connectivity. Cuba is part of the Global South, and ranks among the least internet connected countries in the world. Venegas’[2010. Digital dilemmas: The state, the individual, and digital media in Cuba. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press] thorough account of technology use in Cuba positions Cuban digital media as an assemblage of political, economic, historical, and global factors. Recently, however, mobile digital technologies in Cuba have undergone rapid transformation. Continuing tensions between the US and Cuba remain part of how the country's infrastructure and internet practices develop in location-specific ways. In this paper, we utilize ethnographically-informed data to provide a case study of the mobile internet adaptations in Havana, Cuba. Specifically, we draw upon Sutko and de Souza e Silva [2010. Location-aware mobile media and urban sociability. New Media & Society, 13(5), 807–823] framework for location-aware mobile media and urban sociability to examine the unique communication and coordination practices of Havana internet culture. Additionally, Massey [2005. For space. London: Sage] and Wiley and Packer [2010. Rethinking communication after the mobilities turn. The Communication Review, 13(4), 263–268] notions of space allow investigation of Cuban cultural technologies within a larger social field. These theoretical lenses enable interrogation of mobile device adaptations on mobility, sociability, and space to position Cuban media use as an assemblage of local and global forces.

‘Hustler lives’ and digital dilemmas in Kenya: Young men negotiating work opportunities, life aspirations and mobile phone use

Abstract This article explores the livelihoods and media uses of young men in rural, urban and peri-urban Kenya, enquiring into how these young men use digital technologies, mobile phones in particular, in the context of constantly and quite rapidly changing livelihoods. It is a media ethnographic case study offering a gendered perspective upon the lives of male youth in Kenya. Kenya is a country branded as being digitally innovative, disruptive, entrepreneurial and developing new opportunities for Kenyan economic development and for the citizens of Kenya (ICT Authority 2014). By unpacking the socio-economic organization of everyday life and the quotidian use of mobile phones amongst mainly low-income young men in Uasin Gishu County in Rift Valley, this study enquires into the strategies applied by these young men in pursuing their aspirations for a better life. How do they navigate in the context of a rapidly and profoundly changing society informed by policies and discourses of digital innovation? It is a context where mobile phones by government are considered spearheads of digital innovation, disruption and entrepreneurship, but where the everyday usage reveals deeper complexities and contradictions. From reviewing the experiences of 36 young men I have identified work-oriented profiles of three young men. Their profiles, albeit unique, resonate with many of the persistent features of all 36, in how they negotiate work opportunities and media uses in their aspirations for a good life. The three profiles I have identified are (1) the digital entrepreneur; (2) the urban casual worker; and (3) the university student and opinion leader.

Ethical Dilemmas in Qualitative Research with Youth On/Offline

Research on the digital and online environment poses several ethical questions that are new or, at least, newly pressing, especially in relation to youth. Established ethical practices require that research has integrity, quality, transparency and impartiality. They also stipulate that risks to the researcher, institution, data and participants should be anticipated and addressed. But there are difficulties in applying these to an environment in which the online and offline intersect in shifting ways. This paper discusses some real-life ‘digital dilemmas’ to identify the emerging consensus among researchers. We note the 2012 guidelines by the Association of Internet Researchers, which advocates for ethical pluralism, for minimizing harm, and for the responsibility of the researcher where codes are insufficient. As a point of contrast, we evaluate Markham’s (2012) radical argument for data fabrication as an ethical practice. In reflecting on how researchers of the digital media practices of youth resolved their dilemmas in practice, we take up Markham’s challenge of identifying evolving practice, including researchers’ workarounds, but we eschew her solution of fabrication. Instead, we support the emerging consensus that while rich data is increasingly available for collection, it should not always be fully used or even retained in order to protect human subjects in a digital world in which future possible uses of data exceed the control of the researcher who collected them.

Digital dilemmas: the state, the individual, and digital media in Cuba

Digital dilemmas: the state, the individual, and digital media in Cuba

Self‐Regulatory Trajectories in the Shadow of Public Power: Resolving Digital Dilemmas in Europe and the United States

Although industry self‐regulation has developed into a preferred regulatory strategy for the digital economy, self‐regulatory solutions adopted in the U.S. and the European Union differ considerably. We argue that variation in the shadow of public power—the public sector tools employed to induce industry collective action—sets the two on distinct self‐regulatory trajectories. Legalistic self‐regulation dominates in the U.S. and coordinated self‐regulation in Europe. Expectations derived from the model are evaluated in case studies of online content regulation and personal data privacy protection.