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This paper introduces the 'Decolonising the Internet' themed special issue which includes research presented at the 23rd annual Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference (2022). The conference theme centred on decolonisation, highlighting the persistence of colonial practices but also the resistance they generate. Focusing on the internet as entailing colonial appropriations, reproducing inequalities, and foreclosing alternative ways of being, the conference theme asked participants to consider not only the ways in which the internet walks on the path forged by colonialism, but also how research practices are implicated in reinforcing the same exploitative patterns. This special issue includes seven papers that cover new and innovative approaches to studying decolonising the internet, including contexts related to LGBTQIA + digital spaces, neighbourhood and local surveillance, data colonialism, misinformation and conspiracies, and inclusion and access problems for Indigenous peoples. The papers in this issue also focus on various geographic locations in the Global South, including Africa, South America, and the Asia Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of social network sites and online communities has offered new possibilities for older adults to stay socially connected and older adults comprise a growing user group of social media. This paper examines the relationship between older adults' online social engagement and social capital based on a national survey of adults aged 60 and over. Findings show that older adults who engage more often in specific online social activities (i.e., asking questions on social media, looking at photos of family members/others) enjoy greater bridging social capital (both in offline and online contexts) than those who do so less often. Furthermore, Internet skills moderate the relationship between online social engagement and social capital. Specifically, older adults with greater Internet skills benefit relatively more from engaging in specific online social activities more often with respect to online bridging. The paper discusses the implications for digital inequality scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a large literature on the determinants of generalized trust, few studies have explored the impact of internal migration and attempted to tackle potential endogeneity issues. Using nationally representative data from the latest five rounds of the China General Society Survey, this paper estimates the impact of internal migration on generalized trust by exploiting arguably exogenous, historical changes in the GDP growth target set by the government and the share of migrants at the county level. We find evidence of a significant negative impact of internal migration on generalized trust. We also investigate the moderating role of Internet use, and find that whilst Internet use significantly attenuates the negative impact on generalized trust of internal migration, this moderating effect is much stronger for urban-to-urban migrants than it is for rural-to-urban migrants. The results further indicate that internal migration in China has led to the deterioration of subjective well-being, changing perceptions of fairness, increased likelihood of downward social mobility, and deterioration in social relations, which we interpret as potential mechanisms behind our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Living alone has been indicated as a key variable to explain loneliness in older adults. In contemporary society, where technology has become one of the main means of communication and personal interaction, has the internet influenced the relationship between living alone and loneliness? This paper aims to answer this research question by using a sample of 64,297 individuals who were surveyed in SHARE project wave 6 – in European countries with different welfare regimes (Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Poland, Czech Republic; Slovenia, Estonia, and Croatia). The results of the regression analysis evidence the moderating role of the internet on the relationship between living alone and feelings of loneliness in individuals aged 50 and over, so that the impact of living alone on loneliness is diminished for internet users as compared to their peers who do not use the internet. The results therefore reinforce the importance of policies aimed at fostering e-inclusion as a way of reducing the loneliness of older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relevance of Georg Lukács' 1923 book History and Class Consciousness in the context of digital capitalism. It does so by analysing how Lukács' concepts of the dialectic of subject and object, ideology, reification, reified consciousness matter today in the context of big data and digital capitalism. The essay shows that History and Class Consciousness' critique of reification, ideology, and reified consciousness remains highly topical in the age of digital capitalism and big data. Lukács' analysis allows us to critically analyse how social media, big data, and various other Internet technologies are used as tools of reification. At the same time, Lukács reminds us that only human praxis can establish alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While internet connectivity is a key promise of progress and the rule of law, criminal contestation of state control over territory is considered one of the main obstacles for development. This article provides the first known quantitative approach to the link between urban lawlessness and internet provision. Taking the Santiago Metropolitan Region (SMR) – the capital of Chile – as a case study, the authors discuss the origins of Red Zones (areas where telecommunication companies do not provide fixed broadband). A first hypothesis is based on the corporate excuse given by telcos for Red Zones: criminal activities – and not just socioeconomic discrimination – are a force majeure that impede internet connectivity in specific neighbourhoods. An alternative hypothesis acknowledges criminal governance in Latin American cities, admitting the possibility of criminal redistribution being favourable to internet connectivity where state control is contested. Employing a random effects regression model with panel data from 52 boroughs during the 2012–2020 period, the two hypotheses are tested. Contestation of the territorial control by the state is significantly and positively correlated to fixed broadband connectivity in the SMA. In contrast, lower connectivity is linked to higher presence of poor households, favouring a profit-based explanation for the Red Zones. The results hold when replacing the percentage of contested territory per borough with the murder rates. This research contributes to heterodox views within institutional economics and highlights the need of state-led redistribution in order to retake control of contested territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies recoding practices on the Chinese internet that reframe controversial contents in a socialist discourse to circumvent censorship. Drawing on three cases of 'socialist recoding' for critical discourse analysis (CDA), this article finds different patterns of recoding strategies and power relations manifested in these practices, depicting the nuances of censorship-evading practices in different responses to censorship including but not limited to resistance, negotiation, and problematisation. This article argues that these recodings negotiate terms of censorship and mediate power relations through meaning-making, indicating a permanent instability of authority in internet governance in China. By showing the potentialities of nuanced and pluralised meaning-(re)making practices in contesting and negotiating internet governance and established norms and values more widely, this study advances existing understandings about nuances in China's contested internet and contributes to the broader debate about the decentring and destabilising of authority in contested cyberspace worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines, with ethnographic lenses, the emergence of shared networks in the Tseltal and Zapoteco communities in Chiapas and Oaxaca (Mexico). 'Shared networks' are first-mile signal-sharing practices that articulate interconnection infrastructure and values of coexistence to, in the cases studied, extend the internet to areas where the services of existing larger internet service providers are unsatisfactory or unavailable. It argues that by infrastructuring their own local networks and interconnecting to the global internet, Tseltal and Zapoteco people are effectively internet codesigners, building Latin-Centric Indigenous networks and shaping internet governance from below. When comunalidad values, supported by unlicensed frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, towers, radio antennas, houses' rooftops, routers, and cables, intersect with the values of the internet service providers and their policies, hybrids emerge. Shared networks are a result of what these hybrids enact and constrain, as well as evidence of the vivid struggles for a more inclusive and pluriversal internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(How) are Chinese actors contributing to increased state influence in Internet standard-making? In its open and private-based dimension, the Internet is possibly the twenty-first century's epitome of the liberal international order in its global spatial dimension. Therefore, many see deep normative challenges deriving from the rise of powerful, non-liberal actors such as China. In particular, China and Chinese stakeholders are often portrayed as supporters and promoters of a multilateral Internet governance model based on digital sovereignty aimed at completely replacing the existing multistakeholder, private-based model. Academic views on this topic have become less dichotomous throughout the years, especially as China's position on it has become more nuanced. However, this academic and policy debate is still open. This article analyses Chinese stakeholder actions in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the key venue for Internet standard-making. Through network analysis, this article maps the engagement of Chinese stakeholders in selected working groups of the IETF over time. Through expert interviews, this article interprets the drivers, evolution, and impact of such engagement. This research yields two main findings: first, it shows that the Chinese government does not have full control of its domestic private actors, among which there is both collaboration and conflict. Second, it concludes that Chinese stakeholders have increasingly accepted the existing functioning of IETF standard-making as they grew influential within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the areas that the advent of the Internet has changed most profoundly is the relationship that human beings have with their past. Sources that would once have been barely accessible after a difficult and taxing search are now available to one and all, and can be compared to more traditional texts. The article sets out to show how knowledge of Mao's China and the Cultural Revolution in particular will benefit significantly from the immense pool of recordings and video clips available on the Internet. With the resources afforded by the Web, a brand–new way of linking up words and images, text and visual sources, has become possible, providing the study of history and memory with unexplored tracts of promising terrain. But the importance of this emerging material is not just to do with historical knowledge and methodology. Its main contribution is political: the persecutors and the victims of those years have spoken out, they have deposited their memories online, exercising a faculty that the Cultural Revolution and post–Maoist political institutions had denied them for decades. Through the bottom–up perspective that the Internet provides, the historical protagonists have been able to bear witness in potential perpetuity without needing the researcher's mediation. By speaking directly to the public, the witnesses cease to be merely pieces of the past. They are not just victims or perpetrators who condemn past deeds, but, as the actors who made and endured history, they can turn themselves from passive historical figures into active political agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the nationalist imagination structures cyberspace from the bottom up, or what I call user-generated nationalism. It also looks at the interplay between nationalism and other, non-spatial modes of social identification. My analysis of a month of tweets indicates that religious, racialized, and partisan identities are quite pronounced online, but they also tend to be conflated with nationalism. I argue that nationalism is not simply banal itself: because of its fixity in place and political correctness, it is used to lend legitimacy to and 'banalize' other identities. This dynamic is key to understanding the explosion of right-wing populism around the 'world of nations' – especially the success of populist leaders in normalizing religious, racialized, and partisan identifications – and the central role being played by digital media in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies about the link between income and Internet access tend to focus exclusively on the demand side, or, when considering the supply side, to neglect any possible role of local and informal institutions. This research pays attention to the relationship between income distribution and Internet access within metropolitan areas of the Global South, with a special emphasis on local and informal institutions that could shape the ways by which this relationship works. Using a mixed-methods approach, two Latin American metropolitan areas are analysed: Santiago (Chile) and Medellín (Colombia). Although income is clearly linked to household Internet access in both cases, there are supply-side differences that can influence the income-connectivity nexus. The author proposes to introduce the concept of 'institutionally generated network disadvantage'. Examples of formal and informal institutional factors are redlining, informal housing, socio-spatial segregation, tax exemptions and local public provision of services. The urban poor seem to be the most affected by institutionally generated digital exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]