Panayota Tsatsou: Digital divides in Europe

Recensione del testo di Panayota Tsatsou dal titolo "Digital divides in Europe" pubblicata dall'autorevole rivista Information, Communication and Society. Over the past 15 years, digital divide scholarship has diffusely focused on economic and technological dimensions (in terms of physical availability of devices and conduits), often disregarding any socio-cultural considerations and proposing simple, dichotomous models, building on the classic “haves vs have nots” distinction. When articulating more complex models, trying to explore broader social and human considerations and questioning the causes of digital divides, existing literature has often proposed abstract frameworks, without empirically testing them. With regard to the European information society, moreover, little attention has hitherto been devoted to regional differences and to the persisting gaps between the West/Northern and the South/Eastern areas. This book addresses such insufficiencies, building a complex framework that relies both on socio-cultural variables and decision-making (i.e. policy and regulation) considerations: on the one hand, it draws on the notions of everyday life (elaborating on Schutz's “lifeworld”) and of resistant culture; on the other hand, it adopts a sociological approach to policy and regulation, also relying on people's evaluations of its efficiency. The focus of the book is the Western-Southern divide in Europe, with specific consideration of three countries: Greece, Portugal, and the UK. Although Greece and Portugal show a growing adoption of ICT, they still lag behind the UK and other EU member states with regard to standard ICT and digital inclusion indicators. Each country is examined from its unique perspective, starting from socio-historical considerations and providing a detailed account of national digital divides and the ICT market, policy and regulation, and national social culture.