17 May 2023, EDDY meetup on Digital Divides

The European Digital DemocracY network (EDDY) is having its second online meetup on Wednesday, May 17th at 15h00 (Berlin) on the theme of Digital Divides, featuring Eva de Valk (Dutch Policy Officer for Digital Inclusion) and Jan van Dijk (University of Twente). See below for a description of the topic and speakers.

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Yours sincerely,

The EDDY core committee
(Jan Maly, Arianna Novaro, Tessel Rensenbrink, and Frederik Van De Putte)

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Topic of the meeting: Digital Divides

A key problem for the development and use of digital tools to enhance democratic participation is that not everyone has equal access to such tools, and not everyone is equally skilled to use them. While the young, educated, and rich may have no trouble downloading and using a new voting app, this may be a genuine struggle for other groups in society. Digital divides are well-documented, and have been shown to reflect and even worsen other socio-economic inequalities. In this meeting we will discuss questions about the possibility of digital democracy in light of the digital divides.

About the speakers

Jan A.G.M. van Dijk is Professor of Communication Science at the University of Twente. He has has done social scientific research on social aspects of ICT and the digital divide since the mid 1980s, and (co)authored books such as The Network Society (1999, 2006, 2012), Digital Democracy (2000), and The Deepening divide, Inequality in the Information Society (2005). In his presentation he will briefly reflect on the history of the subject, and explain his theory of digital inequality and their relation to social inequalities in broad terms.

Eva de Valk recently became Senior Policy Officer on "Digital Inclusion" at the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, The Netherlands. Before she worked as a journalist at Sillicon Valley and coordinated the Technology section of NRC Handelsblad, a major Dutch newspaper, with a specific focus on ethical and political issues related to AI and technological innovations. In her presentation, she will outline what the Dutch government is currently doing to mitigate the digital divides, and what still needs to be done both in terms of concrete policy actions and research.