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• W3202003281 abstract "We write this editorial from our homes as the greater Sydney region of Australia experiences an extended lockdown due to the increasing risks of the Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2—coronavirus or Covid-19—on our relatively isolated population. While we are hopeful that, by the time of publishing, the immediate impacts of Covid-19 are significantly reduced, we are confident that several elements, notably within the digital space, will remain. In this strange and new circumstance, where our nonessential businesses have been shut and social gathering has been curtailed, Australians experienced the further intertwining of digital technologies with our lifeworld. According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA, 2020), nearly the entire adult population were logged on (99%). This is a notable increase from 2019s 90% (ACMA, 2020). In this boosted virtual realm, locals shopped, searched, video-streamed and, yes, even gambled from the comfort of their homes (ACMA, 2020). They rejected pre-existing communication channels in favour of Facebook messenger and Zoom as a means of communicating with their loved ones, peers and work colleagues (ACMA, 2020). In terms of news consumption alone, 78% of Australians sourced their content online, 60% was undertaken on smartphones and Instagram and WeChat increased their news sharing capacity to 37% and 29%, respectively (Newman et al., 2021). The shift towards increasingly digital lives and societies as experienced within Australians is broadly reflective of the world in which we find ourselves. In Asia, tech giants Bain, Google Temasek and Bain & Company (2020) reported that Internet usage in Southeast Asia (SEA) had experienced 40 million new users in 2020, with 400 million now part of the virtual grid. Food delivery, groceries, education and entertainment, led the charge of emerging trends for digital media and online users within the region. North America joined Australia with an 18% increase in in-home data usage and average data usage rates exceeding 16.6 gigabytes (Johnson, 2021). The areas of media and communication that enjoyed the highest level of increased interest include online gaming and education, with the downloading of educational apps exceeding 1000% in March 2020 alone. As more businesses and institutions shift their activities online, the Eurozone experienced an increase of 57% in the volume of mobile data traffic in mid-June 2021, leading to congestion concerns (European Commission, 2021, p. 2). Among member states, we see the combination of increased Internet and communications technology and access spurring a small number (8%) but a significant shift towards digitisation (International Telecommunication Union, 2021, p. 3). A communicable group of states, the European Union used the Internet to predominantly send and receive emails, find information about goods and services, internet messaging and online news (Eurostat, 2020). Across the African continent, a 50-fold increase in Internet usage spawned hope of a prosperous future (Allen, 2021). The region welcomed the 1.7 million jobs and contribution of (US) 144 billion to the economy, signalling the potential improvement to people's lives and livelihoods (Allen, 2021). Yet, we do not need a list of increasing statistics to indicate that life as we once knew it has changed dramatically as we increase our dependency on digital technologies and networked communication protocols. These statistics and percentages do, however, provide insight into the burgeoning growth and escalating dependency on internet technologies the world over in the wake of a pandemic that indicate where the rapid growth, dependency and change is occurring most. They also provide one part of a very broad picture, lacking in an analysis of the social, cultural and political repercussions of increased digitalisation. This is a space of disruption, innovation and new frontiers, each presenting their own challenges and opportunities for the role of appropriate regulation. It is in the cultural, social and political that we revisit the work of Mark Deuze's (2011, p. 143) adage, ‘we live in media, rather than with media’. Living in media is a state where media consumption shapes our realities and identities (Deuze, 2011, pp. 137–138). It is a condition in which media, as both an institution and a technology, has become synonymous with the very act of living as our daily routines are increasingly dependent on the steady advancement of media technologies. A ‘living in media’ way of thinking has the potential to set the narrative to focus on the convenience and connectivity the digital realm has provided; the very aspirations harboured by the young and the hopeful in Silicone Valley who ran with the ideals of an accessible and free, virtual space for all. But do the potential benefits outweigh the risks of these increasingly digital, connected, commercial, and in many ways automated digital experiences of our lives today? Digitisation has several positive impacts, such as connectivity, free and swift access to information, the blurring of lines between consumer and producer allowing for a liberalisation of information exchanges. Our realities continue to be shaped by media—its technologies and its content—yet these digital lives are not solely based on technical affordance. Media mediatises, and in doing so, can modify our behaviours to suit the technologies we have adopted (DellaVigna & Gentzkow, 2010). This is not to say that technologies are determinist in nature, resulting in a networked panopticon of sorts. However, technologies can be considered as artefacts and, as such, shaped by politics, take on the characteristics of the social and economic environment they are embedded in (Winner, 1980). These factors could determine status quo usages of digital technologies, thus modifying behaviour tacitly. For example, if a particular society is driven by consumerism and harbours increased levels of digitisation, it may be no wonder why an individual's very first act conducted upon waking is to look at their phone. In the same environments, we see social connections have deviated: relationships and dating, for example, were once solely physical experiences. Now, progressing beyond the chatrooms and websites promising to meet our match, many singles (and, perhaps, not so single) swipe left and right on their dating and hook-up apps (Hobbs et al., 2017). Hook-up apps especially are a useful example that demonstrates how our behaviours have changed through our social and cultural adoption of technologies. That is, a consideration of media's impact necessitates an exploration of how much technologies afford or hamper human agency, and what facets of society this should be considered in, when the majority of the world is impacted by a shift in behaviours brought on by a pandemic and complimented by advancing media technologies. Within the political realm, at the crux of media and politics, academics and practitioners have, among other things, focused on what these digital technologies afford or impede audiences to do in terms of political participation (Stromer-Galley & Wichowski, 2011). Equally, attention has been drawn to whether media is, or continues to be, the liberating force it was once promised to be (Iosifidis, 2011). For some, the advancement of information and communication technology (ICT) has been coined ‘liberation technology’ with the potential to expand political, social, and economic freedom (Diamond, 2010, p. 70). Digital media has also been touted as the protagonist of the communicative aspects of a well-flourishing democracy because it supports audience participation in political processes (Laidlaw, 2015). That is, once so-called passive audiences have an opportunity to engage in a virtual Habermasian public sphere, a concept which considered well-informed debate, conducted by a sphere of private people engaging in public discourse over public issues, sacrosanct to the operations of a well-flourishing democracy (Jürgen Habermas, 2015). While Habermasian deliberations on an ‘access to all’ public sphere were later scathingly criticised by the likes of Fraser (1990) and others who articulated its nature as inherently exclusive, the improved political exchange was said to have been spiked by the free flow of information made possible through open-access technologies that appeared to remove the shackles of a one-way-flow communication from elites to audiences, allowing for relatively unfettered speech (Winseck, 2019). However, others assume the democratising functions of the Internet have been exaggerated (Carpentier, 2011; Hay & Couldry, 2011; Iosifidis, 2011). These once-touted liberations technologies (and, in particular, the Internet) has also been seen as a source for control (Laidlaw, 2015) where management systems, regulation and design erode a sense of liberty and data procurement impacts a fundamental right in liberal democracies to privacy (Bauman & Lyon, 2012, pp. 4–6). The Internet, its plethora of social media platforms, and other usages can be an exchange in which censorship, blocking, and agents' behaviour are becoming a regular fixture of digital engagement. In that vein, the concept of a virtual Habermasian public sphere, or a digital public sphere (Schäfer, 2015), could be considered as elitist now as it was in its physical iteration, a space for some and not for all to engage in politics, with media life silencing many over a few. The global pandemic has further fuelled the immersive digital communication experience as users, institutions and governments continue to rely on online interactions to replicate our everyday lives. Nonetheless, when contemplating the affordances of digital communication technologies for political, cultural and economic participation, the discussion is not complete without a consideration of access. For example, statistics may provide scope in terms of how many individuals may be impacted by increasing their engagement with digital technologies; however, many individuals remain outside of this space with the exception of digital exclusion. While Internet usage is up in Australia, the state's inclusion rates have fallen over the past 2 years (Australian Digital Inclusion Index, 2020, p. 5). Those from low-income households, the unemployed, and those lacking a tertiary education have been impacted, with the divide widening between the have and have nots (Australian Digital Inclusion Index, 2020, p. 5). Nguyen et al. (2020, p. 2) detected a 46% increase in digital communication broadly across the United States. Notably, these increases derive from a digital environment where 44% of the population lacked broadband access, giving rise to the question of digital inequalities (Nguyen et al., 2020, p. 3). This digital inequality trend continues in other parts of the globe. According to the World Bank (2020), half of the population in Central Asia is not connected to the Internet, further impeding an individual's ability to work, communicate or gain access to telehealth and community services in an increasingly pandemic-driven digital realm. Policymakers focusing on African countries have extensively focused on digitalisation to develop growth opportunities and regenerate economies (Duarte, 2021). While it is noted that countries, such as Rwanda, have invested heavily in digital infrastructure—with 90% of the state now having broadband access and 75% of the population using smartphones—the digital divide on the continent, with only 28% of the entire population using the Internet, may prevent the reaping of rewards from an influx of digital technology (Duarte, 2021). However, the digital divide, in terms of access percentages to digital technology, is but one part of exclusion for some groups of users of others. Prescribing to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) definition of the digital divide, articulated as ‘the gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas at different socioeconomic levels with regard to both their opportunities to access ICTs and to their use of the Internet for a wide variety of activities’, requires moving beyond defining digital inequalities as solely a plug in, plug out, user-based statistic. To understand the full scope of inequality, one must move towards an experiential or experienced-based understanding of inequality to include the various abuses impeding an individual's ability and right to experience digitisation. And this means consideration of a plethora of cyber attacks, cyber wars, and unlawful actions impeding on an individual's ability to engage in public discourse and to remain safe while doing so. Media technologies have given rise to human abuses that contravene human rights as defined by the United Nations and countries that belong to the group of OECD nations. Cyberwars have been waged, bringing with them a surge in cyberattacks—deliberate attempts by unauthorised persons to access systems for theft, disruption, damage or other unlawful actions—which will increase in both number and severity (Fischer in Manzano, 2018). Cyber hacking has left individuals, businesses and institutions vulnerable to data breaches. For example, a recent Linkedin breach exposed the data of 700 million users, which is more than 92% of the total 756 million users (Lovejoy, 2021). In addition to the exposure of sensitive data, infrastructure, the private and public phone lines of dissidents, journalists and politicians, health services and social media profiles have been exposed to attacks, malware and misuse (Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 2021). It could be said that living in media is giving rise to new insecurities and vulnerabilities not considered when we plugged into the WorldWideWeb, yet are becoming overwhelming apparent as we move towards the contemporary social web. There is, of course, the consideration of the spread of misinformation and its impact on an increasingly politically polarised audience (Gentzkow et al., 2017). The consumption of hate speech, the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, and dezinformacija potentially impacting on our political outcomes. This is not to say that the Internet is solely to blame for increased percentages of polarisation (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Chen & Stilinovic, 2020). It indeed does not allude to notions of homogenised audiences being swayed wholeheartedly by the content they consume. However, when considering the impacts of misinformation, one should not neglect to explore how influenced audiences can be from the information they are exposed to online. According to Uscinski and Parent (2014) all audiences are susceptible to influence to a certain degree. Moreover, particularly when it is touted that misinformation is leading to a surge in vaccine hesitancy (Pan American Health Organisation, 2021), exploring the impacts of misinformation on our democracies, wider societal health and well-being is important, especially when the extent to which digital technologies, particularly social media platforms, play in political polarity is likely to grow in the coming years (Gentzkow et al., 2017, p. 12). Furthermore, we need to consider the most vulnerable of our global netizens when considering the impacts of an increasingly penetrating media life; younger audiences, the marginalised and those living under political autocracies in conflict with those who aim to harm them. This tension between permitting agents to engage with media unfettered versus the potential to cause harm lies at the crux of Internet regulation. It will be difficult to provide input into this push–pull relationship, but it is one worth exploring as more and more of the world's citizens become users and engage in their own media lives. In that vein, this issue of Policy & Internet addresses the arena of Internet regulation, self-regulation, the consumption of potentially harmful content, e-rulemaking and democratic deliberation, and internet domain disputes. In the first article, Deligiaouri and Suiter (2021) tackle epistemic democracy and online deliberation design while considering policy-related dilemmas and the specific challenges of deliberative e-rulemaking to develop a Policy Impact Tool for e-rulemaking initiatives. Medzini (2021) in the second article for the issue, builds upon the literature on regulatory intermediation to answer how and why European rule-makers rely on data protection officers to shape the self-regulation of private and public organizations regarding the processing of personal information. In the third article, Salter and Richardson (2021) argues that the language of multi-stakeholderism and technological solutionism obscures the administrative and commercial practices that facilitate the widespread distribution of abuse material. To illustrate this point, he describes the 2019 intervention of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection in the operations of ‘Trichan’, three websites that were amongst the largest purveyors of abuse material on the open web for 7 years. Min et al. (2021) seek to address whether the presence of a Free Trade Agreement between the United States and a foreign country significantly affect the outcomes of Internet domain name dispute arbitration cases, conducted within the framework of the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy. The final article, Thurman and Obster (2021) focus on the type of content accessible to youth in the United Kingdom. Their survey of 16 and 17 year olds reveals that more than 63% had seen pornography on social media platforms than on pornographic websites, suggesting the UK government was right to target such platforms in its latest proposals. Furthermore, that 46% of 16 and 17 year olds had used a VPN or Tor browser to access such materials, adding weight to concerns that restrictions on legal Internet pornography—such as age verification checks—imposed by a single country may be circumvented by those the restrictions are designed to protect. As a final note, in these uncertain times, it is also important to look towards the future. Beyond the transition of the past 12 months for Policy & Internet journal, we have also been working towards the next 12 of the journal. While it is difficult to plan anything with clarity and definitiveness, in the thick of a global pandemic, there are smaller steps that can be taken to continue our international network of scholarship and colleagues. In close conversation with our senior colleagues in the Department of Media and Communications (MECO) here at Sydney, we are working towards reinvigorating the biannual P&I conference, which will now emerge from Downunder through MECO. The moment of disruption in our digital lives we have outlined in this article has also prompted a strong scholarship response, which will feature in the coming issues of Policy & Internet of 2021 and 2022." @default.
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• W3202003281 title "Living <i>in</i> media and the era of regulation: Policy and Internet during a pandemic" @default.
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