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The public/private distinction is one of the fundamental categories of modern social life. Historically, the two functioned as a dichotomous pair both theoretically and practically. During the height of the separation of public and private, 'private' was code for the home, personal, and non-professional contexts; 'public', on the other hand, stood for the professional world outside the home. This dichotomous treatment of public and private informed many aspects of social life ranging from gender relations and the division of household labor to the development of suburbs as purely residential (private) areas geographically separate from the public sphere of work. Recently, however, this dichotomous vision of the public/private divide has become outdated. It no longer accurately describes the ways in which public and private operate in contemporary social life; where the two spheres were once separate, there is now significant overlap and interaction. This breakdown in the public and private divide has occurred at many levels and has a strong relationship with the development and ubiquity of information and communications technologies such as mobile telephones and the Internet. This paper describes the ways in which public and private are changing and proposes a new way of theorizing the public/private distinction, as a continuum rather than as a dichotomy. This way of thinking about public and private reflects contemporary social life much more accurately than does the dichotomous conception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-use of the Internet has often been researched within the topic of digital divides. The focus of these studies lay mainly on differences in socio-economic backgrounds and resources. This paper goes one step further by attempting to describe various groups of non-users in two highly developed European countries: Great Britain and Sweden. Results from descriptive analyses, multivariate regressions, and principal components analysis with two waves of comparable data from 2007 and 2009 show a more heterogeneous non-user population in Great Britain and a slightly more homogeneous one in Sweden. Socio-economic factors play a bigger role in influencing who is going online in Britain than in Sweden. Education, occupational status, and household income are significant determinants in both countries. The most important determinants of Internet adoption are age and occupational status. The analysis of a 25-55-year-old sub-sample shows that non-users from this age group feature different socio-economic characteristics from older age groups. Middle-aged British non-users share two specific socio-economic characteristics: low income and unemployment; 25-55-year-old Swedish non-users tend to have low incomes, be unemployed, and be single. Non-users' self-assessment of reasons for non-use do not seem to be consistent with the 'raw data'. Non-users mainly state that they are not interested in the Internet. Many non-users share sceptical attitudes about the Internet, which influences interest in them. There needs to be more detailed research to know exactly which people are not using the Internet and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]