In today’s contemporary society, parents need to prudently integrate digital devices into their children’s lives to nurture, and not hinder their holistic development. Normatively, a four- to six-year-old child is expected to achieve numerous developmental milestones, as outlined in the nurturing early learners (NEL) framework. The NEL framework classifies these milestones under various learning domains, skills and competencies, namely Aesthetics and Creative Expression, Discovery of the World, Language and Literacy, Motor Skills Development, Numeracy, and Social and Emotional Development. Through qualitative interviews conducted with 21 parents (14 mothers and 7 fathers) online who spoke about their four- to six-year-old children, this study investigated how parents wielded digital devices to foster their children’s development in these key domains, but deliberately ring-fenced their children from pernicious use.

This research aims to examine the explanatory and predictive power of seven theoretical models based on neutralisation theory, perceived risk theory, the theory of interpersonal behaviour, the theory of reasoned action, the theory of planned behaviour, the theory of self-regulation, and the norm activation theory. A total of 247 usable data were collected through a survey and analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling. The in-sample and out-of-sample predictive power of each model was assessed. The results indicate that there are different factors influencing consumers’ intentions to pirate digital products. Among the seven theories, the theory of interpersonal behaviour ranks first, and perceived risk theory last in terms of explanatory and predictive power. This study is the very first to examine the explanatory and predictive power of seven different theoretical models using advanced PLS-SEM techniques.

Machine learning ethics research is demonstrably skewed. Work that defines fairness as a matter of distribution or allocation and that proposes computationally tractable definitions of fairness has been overproduced and overpublished. This paper takes a sociological approach to explain how subtle processes of social-reproduction within the field of computer science partially explains this outcome. Arguing that allocative fairness is inherently limited as a definition of justice, I point to how researchers in this area can make broader use of the intellectual insights from political philosophy, philosophy of knowledge, and feminist and critical race theories. I argue that a definition of injustice not as allocative unfairness but as domination, drawing primarily from the argument of philosopher Iris Marion Young, would better explain observations of algorithmic harm that are widely acknowledged in this research community. This alternate definition expands the solution space for algorithmic justice to include other forms of consequential action beyond code fixes, such as legislation, participatory assessments, forms of user repurposing and resistance, and activism that leads to bans on certain uses of technology.

Communication is fundamental for preventing and managing youth mental health, and for effectively maintaining and improving their emotional wellbeing. Nevertheless, crucial challenges to communication in this context remain. In recent years rapid technological change has produced increasingly complex forms of communication, which hold out great promise in this area. Emoji have the potential to play a key role in the communication of mental health-related information in areas such as: self-disclosure, engagement, treatment intervention, and mental health education. However, compared with their roles in other fields (e.g., computer science, communication, marketing), emoji in the mental health domain have been largely overlooked by both communication scholars and health care professionals alike. Building on their cognitive, emotional and interpersonal aspects, this paper outlines potential applications for emoji in the field of youth mental health, while also pointing out challenges to their use. It then offers recommendations for mental health organizations, public health organizations, social media platforms, high-tech companies, and the Emoji Unicode Consortium..

Are there concealed ways of using a learning management system (LMS) among educators in higher education? This paper argues that it is the case, and uses a sociomaterial bottom-up perspective to understand how a group of educators used a new LMS that was implemented at a Nordic university. Understanding an implementation as a constitutive entanglement, a sociomaterial research lens is applied to explain that in an implementation current technology usage evokes previous knowledge and assumptions about technologies and shapes the engagement with new technologies. This study found that when educators engaged with a new LMS, they viewed it as complex and needed to perform strategies that reduced technology complexities into practices that they knew. This engagement formed three sociomaterial pedagogical practices. A sociomaterial perspective might cast new light on how we understand the outcomes of technology implementation processes in educational contexts.

This study explored the relationship between publicly displayed information and the right to privacy in Zambia and Tanzania. The purpose was to examine whether the behavior displayed by individuals in public environments reveals and undermines their quest for the right to privacy. I asked participants to observe and document the type of clothing an individual wore, the logos or monograms on their clothing or bags, and words spoken in public. This information was then used by Google to identify individuals online. Findings suggest that there is still a disconnect between what people display in non-digital and what they post on social media. However, there is also a growing trend of people leaving a trail of digital footprints that relate to their publicly displayed behaviors.

The growing attention to digital sustainability can arguably be linked to climate change and digital transformations as major megatrends rapidly altering our collective present and future. The current Russian-Ukrainian war and the recent pandemic, however, have both raised uncertainty over the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) achievement and the role of technology and innovation for sustainability. Without ignoring the dramatic consequences for people, the Ukrainian war can be deemed as a significant shift in geopolitics and global energy policies, with a short-term return to fossil fuel and commitments to renewable and clean energy transitions. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst for a more pervasive diffusion and adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) transforming our lives and notions of sustainability. By considering the disruptive impact triggered by the pandemic, this paper aims at advancing awareness and knowledge of digital sustainability and at drawing a coherent framework of arguments including ethical and epistemological issues, taking into account the approach of complexity science. This will be essentially carried out by considering digital sustainability as “the convergence of digital and sustainability imperatives that involves a trans-disciplinary approach of deploying digital technologies in tackling sustainability issues” (Pan and Zhang, 2020). Across different interpretations reflected within business and management debates (Sharma, et al., 2021), this definition gives meaning to the concept or construct by specifying operations that must be performed in order to measure or manipulate the concept (Berrío-Zapata, et al., 2021). This paper will focus on the profound transformations of our view of reality by ICTs acting as instrumentarian technologies, and the need to avoid determinism, rethink science-technology relations, and consider the distributed morality of multi-agent ecosystems as significant aspects to further a debate on the trans-disciplinary nature of digital sustainability, including the potential negative impacts of digital technologies on society, economy and environment.

This article aims to explain why young people engage politically with their preferred candidates during electoral campaigns. It uses an original survey conducted on first-time voters — as a group of heavy Internet users — in the 2019 Romanian presidential elections to identify determinants of such a behavior. Our statistical analysis argues and tests the explanatory power of three categories of determinants: importance of politics, information, and general political participation. We find that online engagement with a preferred candidate is an extension of young people’s regular activities on social media. It is driven by a genuine interest in what happens in politics and is the result of high levels of information. Online engagement of young people is not random, cannot be associated with boredom, and goes beyond clicktivism.

Using the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, activists have given new impetus to aspirations of ‘leaderful’ organizing. Disavowing the centralization of leadership and rethinking the history of the struggle for civil rights, many have sought to develop and revamp models of decentralized leadership. Digital networking features prominently in these models, but the literature suggests its role is ambiguous: while social media provide affordances for decentralized leadership, they may also induce the centralization of leadership. To examine such leadership dynamics, we adopt a computational approach. Drawing on a dataset of roughly 18 million tweets collected over a 30-month period, we examine two aspects of leadership dynamics: the concentration of leadership (i.e., inequality in terms of centrality within networks) and the consolidation of leadership (i.e., the degree to which central figures retain prominence over time). Engaging with the measurement of network inequality by differentiating temporal aspects of concentration and consolidation, we show that leadership dynamics fluctuate strongly over time. Aside from a select few individuals, there is little consolidation of leadership: new voices can consistently rise to prominence. Beyond providing an examination of online leadership dynamics within the Movement for Black Lives, this paper shows how computational analyses can be adopted in ways that do justice to the dynamic and diverse nature of movements.

Police body-worn cameras (BWCs) have emerged in response to calls for greater police transparency and accountability. Leveraged as techno-regulatory tools with the potential to influence officer behavior, BWCs may also afford officers opportunities to review video footage prior to writing incident reports, which has implications for how police-public interactions are documented in official records. In this study of BWC adoption by a police agency in the United States, we examine how officers’ ideological perspectives on BWCs, technological limitations, and policy-related concerns influenced their decisions about whether and how to review video as part of their report writing practice. In conclusion, we argue that police practitioners and policy-makers should provide clearer policy guidance to officers about how BWC footage should be used in the report writing process and that police administrators, policy-makers, and researchers should directly consider the role that technology might play in regulating officer behavior, even in unintended ways.