[Commlist] New book: Enhancing Digital Equity. Connecting the Digital Underclass” (Palgrave)

New book “Enhancing Digital Equity. Connecting the Digital Underclass” 
(Palgrave)
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For a free preview https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030490782 
<https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030490782> ____

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*Here’s the blurb*____

This book highlights how, in principle, digital technologies present an 
opportunity to reduce social disparities, tackle social exclusion, 
enhance social and civil rights, and promote equity. However, to achieve 
these goals, it is necessary to promote digital equity and connect the 
digital underclass. The book focuses on how the advent of technologies 
may become a barrier to social mobility and how, by concentrating 
resources and wealth in few hands, the digital revolution is giving rise 
to the digital oligarchy, further penalizing the digital underclass. 
Socially-disadvantaged people, living at the margins of digital society, 
are penalized both in terms of accessing-using-benefits (three levels of 
digital divide) but also in understanding-programming-treatment of new 
digital technologies (three levels of algorithms divide). The advent and 
implementation of tools that rely on algorithms to make decisions has 
further penalized specific social categories by normalizing inequalities 
in the name of efficiency and rationalization.____

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*Reviews____*

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“/The "digital divide" debate needs a radical update for an age of 
algorithmic power and intensifying inequality. In this accessible and 
well-organised text, Massimo Ragnedda provides this and more, enriching 
our understanding of how inequality works today and what digital equity 
might mean. Timely and important!”/ ____

(Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory, 
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK).____

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“/Division, exclusion and inequality: these issues have long been the 
focal point for social scientific work. In a changing world, we now need 
to understand their continuities and reformulations. This sparky and 
ambitious book takes on this challenge and produces insights that will 
be of interest to anyone who seeks to genuinely understand how the 
social world works today.”/ ____

(David Beer, Professor of Sociology, University of York, UK)____


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