Well-being in the Digital Age: Introducing the Special Issue of Communication Technology and Well-being (Part II) [Editor’s Note

In this world of competitive business environment where every thing is getting supersonic speed, the old business trends are not finding them to provide the most suitable business solutions. Business world is becoming global market and the business rules, business processes and techniques are also required to be updated. The new threats and challenges are emerged as the outcome of globalization though the opportunities are also enhanced. The one of the major challenges of the business world is handling of huge data volumes to find relevant data and then to extract relevant and meaningful information to design planning and strategy to get the maximum benefit in any business domain. Although it seems to be Electronic commerce (e-Commerce) is a general concept which covers any form of business transaction or information exchange executed using information and communication technologies (ICT's).E-Commerce includes electronic trading of goods, services and electronic material e-Commerce systems include commercial transactions on the Internet but their scope is much wider than this e.g Electronic Market, Electronic Data Exchange (EDI), Internet Commerce. It is the commercialization and popularization of the Internet that has put e-Commerce towards the top of the public and political agenda but e-Commerce using electronic markets and EDI have been an established part of the business scene for at least a decade prior to the 'Internet era'. This article is provides an account of electronic commerce with respect to the link with various stake holders.

As the world is moving into the digital age, it is vital to understand how well education is preparing children and young people for their future lives in the digital age. This chapter, therefore, explores children’s and young people’s attitudes and perspectives on the use of digital technologies in education and on how education is preparing them for their future in the digital age. Data collected through the DigiGen project in five European countries will be the subject of an in-depth qualitative study. This will focus on children’s and young people’s access to and the availability of digital technologies at school and outside the school for school purposes; their information gathering and evaluation, content creation and use of digital technologies for interaction and communication; their attitudes towards the use of digital technologies, including the most liked and disliked aspects, benefits, challenges, and risks; and their perspectives on their teachers’ willingness to teach with and about digital technologies. The second focus is on the different age groups between 9 and 16 in the five European countries. By addressing these key issues, the research aims to provide valuable insights into children’s and young people’s perspectives on their education as preparation for their future in the digital age.

Designing for youth across the Gulf: Fishbowl on how today's methods, theory and findings can support tomorrow's designs

Assessing the Impact of Digital Age as a Change Agent for Higher Institution in Cameroon

Connectivity in social and economic spheres using mobile technology is a global phenomenon. This kind of communication is more significant for Southern Countries: a mean to develop, a way to come out of poverty, and a path towards an equitable society. This relationship between new communication technologies and society is complex, primarily due to their multidimensional effects in personal and social lives. Absence of a proper policy guideline and infrastructure to nurture the mobile communications' potentials can leave the users at risk of privacy violations in an increasingly flattened world. Youths of the developing societies, who have a very high representation in ICT usage hence face greater risks in terms of privacy violation and involuntary personal data commodification. This paper, as a part of a multi-year study, specifically looks into the vulnerability of Bangladeshi youth population using mobile devices, for voice and data communications. Bangladesh, one of the emerging economies in South Asia, has a thriving Telecom/ICT industry with an ever growing number of users, majority of them being young. Based on a nationwide representative survey, we have found the level of trust on existing mobile telephony to be significantly higher than the Internet across the country among all respondents, amid the absence of any clear privacy and security framework at the national level. This paper moreover shows that a significant number of the younger generation (both male and female) are unaware about the concept of privacy in the 'Digital Age' and also have little or no idea about possible risks involved with sharing any voice or data communication.

This paper discusses the issues and thoughts on the impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) towards some of today’s buildings – form and function. ‘Form follows function’ is perhaps one of the world famous dictums in architecture that many would agree on its feasibility in the theory of basic building designs. However, the emergence of the new ‘Information Age’ had suggested otherwise. Spaces had become more intelligent and interactive while circulation is becoming more fluid and flexible. Building forms tend to be more invisible as users turn to the World Wide Web for routine activities that was once achievable only through physical interaction. Nowadays activities such as shopping, meeting, schooling, chatting and even a visit to the library is virtually possible. As computers and human are adapting more towards each other, buildings are just becoming a matter of platform to store the software and hardware. In the digital world, architects face a daunting task of reclaiming the original image and identity of what we see as a ‘building’. Regardless of any invasion of new technology, buildings should serve its purpose as a reflection of the place’s image and identity. This paper would hope to provoke new thoughts in architectural approach as we reach the dawn of an information society.

Over the past decades, waves of political contention involving the use of information and communication technologies have swept across the globe. The phenomenon stimulates the scholarship on digital communication technologies and contentious collective action to thrive as an exciting, relevant, but highly fragmentary and contested field with disciplinary boundaries. To advance the interdisciplinary understanding, Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age outlines a communication-centered framework that articulates the intricate relationship between technology, communication, and contention. It further prods us to engage more critically with existing theories from communication, sociology, and political science on digital technologies and political movements. Given the theoretical endeavor, Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age systematically explores, for the first time, the influence of mobile technology on political contention in China, the country with the world’s largest number of mobile and Internet users. Using first-hand in-depth interview and fieldwork data, it tracks the strategic choice of mobile phones as repertoires of contention, illustrates the effective mobilization of mobile communication on the basis of its strong and reciprocal social ties, and identifies the communicative practice of forwarding officially alleged “rumors” as a form of everyday resistance. Through this ground-breaking study, Shifting Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Age presents a nuanced portrayal of an emerging dynamics of contention—both its strengths and limitations—through the embedding of mobile communication into Chinese society and politics.

The research showed (1) Necessity, (2) Challenges, and (3) Solutions in teaching mathematics. At the same time, teachers, learners, and stakeholders were encouraged to develop soft skills and hard skills that intervened positively to ensure the quality of education in line with regional and global educational trends to achieve the goal of education for all in the new millennium. However, surveys clearly show that limited digital technology and inadequate digital materials were at the root of the problems. Practical observations provided a fair number of results and some points showed the relationship between the quality of teaching and learning in supportive strategies. The research questions were: (1) What are the requirements for teaching mathematics at the high school in the digital age? (2) What are the challenges of implementation of mathematics teaching at the high school in the digital age? (3) What are the solutions for teaching mathematics at the high school? The research methods through quantitative data were collected from principals, deputy principals, deputy directors, technical team leaders, mathematics teachers, and high school students through questionnaires in Khmer language to investigate the link between teaching management and mathematics learning where N (principals, teachers, students) = N (90,158,933). The results of the analysis on ( )1 2 3 x =2.96 , x =3.26 , x =3.32 and F(2 , 36) = 8.534, p < 0.05 showed that the conceptual framework expressions for the three independent variables were quite different and teaching mathematics was challenging more than solutions and needs which were lower than finding solutions. In this sense, teaching materials and teaching talent were the main keys to improving the quality of education while the situation was not good; it was unsuccessful because the support or implementation of information and communication technology and technology was still limited and the use of teaching strategies showed positive and negative effects as arguments for further study on the application of teaching methods.

The concept of information freshness has developed over the last few years into an active and rapidly growing area of research. It has become known as the Age of Information (AoI). After its initial formal introduction, it became clear that it was very relevant (if not crucial) for numerous applications, ranging from autonomous vehicle systems, the Internet of Things, real-time computing to database access, caching, and wireless communications. More importantly, the combination of the transmission delay and sampling rate that are involved in the formulation of the AoI concept has made it clear that there are far-reaching consequences in the relationship between signal processing, information theory, and control theory at a fundamental level. In this Special Issue, we received contributions that span the full range of applications and theoretical foundations of the AoI concept, which, in fact, is also a performance metric and an analysis tool. Of special interest is the role of AoI in bridging different disciplines and the use of AoI in the analysis and optimization involved in important applications.

How to develop a novel type of strategic alliances to move ahead: Business ecosystems grown, developed and powered by FiZ

Information and communication technology appears to have had a profound impact on language use in Japan. An important issue arising from this is said to be the increase in the use of Chinese characters (kanji) outside the official standard. This development has made a re-appraisal of the existing script policy necessary in order to accommodate the changes in kanji usage. To determine the nature and extent of the changes, it is necessary to compare the use of kanji in the information and communication technology era with that in the past. However, not many longitudinal surveys of texts have been done making it difficult to determine the extent to which kanji use has increased and deviated from the existing standard after the development of information and communication technology. This paper is based on a longitudinal study carried out to determine the changes in the proportions of kanji use during the information and communication technology era and before, with a special focus on the use of kanji outside the Joyo List (the current guide for kanji use in all public, non-specialist writing). The study examined the changes in kanji proportions by using topic-controlled news texts published in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun from the 1940s to the 2000s. The study found that the proportion of non-Joyo kanji was minimal right across the period that was investigated and that it remained stable after the development of information and communication technology. The study also found that the proportions of general kanji used in the information and communication technology era was higher than that in the past. However, there were also some unexpected results. Kanji use at the end of the era was lower than what it was at the beginning. Also, apart from an increased use in the 1980s, kanji use remained fairly stable from the 1960s to the 2000s. Although the findings in the study are limited to news texts written about a particular topic, they were generally supported by past research based on other topics and other types of media.

One of the most potentially radical aspects of the Blair government’s agenda for public services is its proposal to exploit information and communications technologies (ICTs) to ‘re-engineer’ government. New Labour’s programme of modernisation is designed for an ‘information age’. It is based on the conviction that ICTs can be harnessed in new ways to speed up administrative processes, ‘join-up’ fragmented services, and provide new, more effective means for government and public to transact and interact. If these aims can be fulfilled, they would indeed amount to a revolution in government. They point to a programme of reforms that, in one important way at least, is quite different from those that have gone before. By exploiting the power of ICT, they offer to square an apparently unsquareable circle: to drive costs out of public services while by the same means enhancing their effectiveness and quality. As we shall see more clearly as this chapter unfolds, the New Labour government is offering not only to reburnish the tarnished promise of government computing, but in harnessing the power of IT to the new telecommunications, it is also attempting a technological fix for the seemingly ineluctable tensions between efficiency, effectiveness, quality and democracy. If, indeed, it can really set this agenda successfully in train, New Labour may also have begun to recast relationships between citizen and state, based around new conceptions of the role, organisation, delivery and transparency of public services.

Wraz z rozwojem cyfryzacji następuje silne i równoczesne splatanie się technologii komunikowania z życiem codziennym. Nowe media i wynikające z nich możliwości odgrywają zasadniczą rolę zarówno w sektorze medialnym, jak i w przestrzeni społecznej. Jednocześnie, wraz z rozwojem technologicznym, pojawiają się nowe, skuteczne formy dotarcia do odbiorców i użytkowników mediów. Należy postawić jednak pytanie: czy zachodzące zmiany wspomagają edukację i transformację społeczną, w tym również w obszarze zdrowia, czy może jednak tworzą dysonans poznawczy? Jaką rolę w tym procesie odgrywają seriale telewizyjne? Stają się one bowiem kanałami dotarcia do masowego odbiorcy, a przedstawione w nich idee, wartości i informacje przybierają akceptowalną i przyswajalną przez odbiorców formę. W dobie zalewu informacjami oraz nieprzetworzonymi faktami taki „oswojony” przekaz staje się efektywny i skuteczny.

Stealing thunder as a crisis communication strategy in the digital age

The electronic journal Digithum is designed for academics, professionals and students from the various fields relating to the humanities and social sciences and is published with the following aims in mind: The distribution/publication of editorial articles or research results in the following subject areas: The knowledge society: analysis of the transformations taking place in the digital age in terms of the humanities and social sciences. By information or knowledge society, we mean the current state of evolution of society, where generalised use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the production and exchange of information determines the evolution and transformation of social life, politics and the economy - especially, but not only, in developed countries. The transformation towards the knowledge society is having effects on the foundations of the organisation and structuring of societies in a way that involves a range of processes that are configuring a new social context or environment. These processes are linguistic, cultural, political and economic globalisation; the conversion of information into a raw material, and the re-establishing of social identity. The repercussions of information and communication technologies (ICT) on studies, teaching and the dissemination of the humanities and social sciences. ICT applications in studies, teaching or the dissemination of the humanities and social sciences. Promoting, in the academic community and amongst its readers, regular debate on the journal's subject matter, which, in principle, is to be related to the dossier. Digithum also reserves space for the distribution of certain articles which, though not strictly fitting into the aforementioned subject areas, due to their quality or relevance represent an important contribution to fields of study in the humanities and social sciences.