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This chapter analyzes what happens to media use when everyday life is suddenly disrupted, focusing on how the COVID-19 pandemic transformed work, socializing, communication and everyday living. The empirical case is changing media use in Norway during the pandemic, building on a qualitative questionnaire survey conducted in early lockdown, and follow-up interviews eight months later. Expanding on the ideas of destabilization of media repertoires developed in the former chapter, this analysis discusses transforming media repertoires as more digital, as less mobile (but still smartphone-centric) and as essentially social. The chapter further explains new concepts for pandemic media use practices, such as doomscrolling and Zoom fatigue.

Rapid digital transformation underway represents both a risk and an opportunity for both policymakers and firms. This can address the risk and seize the opportunity by leveraging FDI to grow digital capabilities and competitiveness through a three-part strategy. First, launching Digital FDI enabling projects (DEPs) to create “digital friendly” investment climates through enabling policies, regulations, and measures. Second, using a “SMART” test as a heuristic before a full-fledged DEP is launched, which benchmarks their economy’s digital Skills, Market functioning, Access through connectivity, Restrictions, and Trust, and provides tools to tackle limiting factors. Third, reviewing FDI trends in six sectors that are important to grow the digital economy (two of which are proposed as essential, namely Communications and Software & IT services), with graphical evidence that can guide policymakers to prioritize policy reforms and investment promotion where they are relatively weak. Throughout, particular attention should be paid to growing the digital capacity of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A Sustainable Technology Board – modeled after the Financial Stability Board but oriented to cooperation over new technologies – could further help address techno-competition and other concerns over Digital FDI.

Despite the pendulum swing from utopian to dystopian views of the Internet, the direction of the popular and academic literature continues to lean toward its liberatory potential, particularly as a tool for redressing social inequality. At the same time, decades of digital inequality scholarship have shown persistent socioeconomic inequality in Internet access and use. Yet most of this research captures class by individualized income and education variables, rather than a power relational framework. By tracing research on how fear, control, and risk manifest itself with inequalities related to digital content, digital activism, and digital work, I argue that a narrow stratification approach may miss the full cause and effect of digital inequality. Instead, a class analysis based on power relations may contribute to a broader and more precise theoretical lens to understand the digital divide. As a result, technology can reinforce, or even exacerbate, existing patterns of social and economic inequality because of this power differential.

The world is changing rapidly and unexpectedly. COVID-19 is a warning sign that future generations need to be prepared for the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world where more complex situations remain to be seen. Students from all walks of life should have equal access to quality education that can equip them with skills to cope with new challenges. Although the inclusion of students with special needs in Thailand has allowed them to have academic and social interaction with non-special needs students in higher education institutions, little is known regarding how COVID-19 has impacted them and how they have navigated online learning. What are the learning challenges that college students with special needs face? Digital learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic can be an even more significant challenge for students with special needs. However, some of them may feel online learning is a lifeline and a nice learning accommodation. Is it possible that they may want to continue to stay in remote accommodations, even if face-to-face classes resume? Would any of the practices return to normal and be fruitful for the VUCA world? Using data collected through in-depth interviews, this chapter identifies learning challenges confronting special-needs college students through the lens of a right-based approach and how inclusive digital learning can turn these challenges into opportunities and help these students flourish in a VUCA future. This chapter begins with a brief historical background of inclusive education policy in Thailand's higher education institutions. The chapter then, using a case study of KU, Thailand, identifies and discusses existing challenges and problems currently facing special needs learners and analyses how universities can help them to deal with and overcome such challenges. Finally, the chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges of how inclusive digital learning can play a pivotal role in elevating the learning experience and outcomes of Thai college students with special needs in the VUCA World.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and social distancing mandates forced many young Australians to radically alter everyday interactions. Physical co-presence and embodied experience, a previously taken-for-granted dynamic of territorially embedded everyday lives, and interactions with urban surroundings, were reconfigured. Digital technology, while bringing people together for work, study, or socialising, is seen to dissolve material space, and mitigate geographic isolation. But what role does co-presence and embodied, spatially embedded experience play for young people living in the city? This chapter draws on the voices and experiences of young Australians aged 18–24 during the pandemic to clarify and understand the role of the digital in their everyday lives, how they negotiated disruptions to education, work, and managing relationships during the pandemic to articulate the relationships between digital lives and embodied experiences in the city.

This chapter is based on the findings of the empirical material gathered in Finland and Sweden through interviews with education and audiovisual (AV) media actors and policymakers in 2017–2018. The aim of the chapter is to discuss the innovation systems of the education sector and Finland and Sweden in general, compare the sectoral innovation models of the two sectors, and conclude with discussing the resulting challenges for policymakers. Our results show that a new EdTech sector employing the competences of the education, information and communication technology, and AV media sectors has begun to emerge and actors in the both countries have eagerly taken actions to boost its development as a business and export field. We discuss the reasons and consequences of this development.

This chapter aims to encourage tourism researchers to widen their scope of method when studying tourist behavior. It does so by debating tracking mobility and planning exercises as meaningful complements in researchers’ method repertoire. Both methods have been found to reflect tourist behavior in a more accurate way than do, for example, surveys and interviews, which rather mirror what tourists say they do, instead of reflecting what they actually do. This chapter presents studies in which tracking mobility and planning exercises have been used, and elaborates on their importance for theory building in future tourism research. Findings show that both methods score high in ecological validity. The chapter gives concrete assistance for future research studies that would like to include methods like these in their examination of tourist behavior. The contribution of this chapter lies in its recommendations to using varied methods, and in its support in the theoretical understanding of tourism.