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This chapter analyzes the link between the digital divide, infrastructure regulation, and disaster planning and relief through a case study of the flood in San Jose, California triggered by the Anderson dam’s overtopping in February 2017 and an examination of communication failures during the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California. This chapter theorizes that regulatory decisions construct social and disaster vulnerability. Rooted in the Whole Community approach to disaster planning and relief espoused by the United Nations and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, this chapter calls for leadership to end the digital divide. It highlights the imperative of understanding community information needs and argues for linking strategies to close the digital divide with infrastructure and emergency planning. As the Internet’s integration into society increases, the digital divide diminishes access to societal resources including disaster aid, and exacerbates wildfire, flood, pandemic, and other risks. To mitigate climate change, climate-induced disaster, protect access to social services and the economy, and safeguard democracy, it argues for digital inclusion strategies as a centerpiece of community-centered infrastructure regulation and disaster relief.

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which digital inclusion functions as a super social determinant of health, particularly within the arena of family carework and healthcare for vulnerable disabled US communities. The focus on vulnerable populations, including the elderly, chronically ill, young disabled, neurodivergent, and/or medically complex children and the families that care for them, is a useful case to present a compelling argument for the need to take seriously digital inclusion to maximize health, safety, and well-being for growing populations of Americans today. The authors argue that digital inclusion is an increasingly influential social determinant of health and a key dimension of health equity that offers important benefits and potentials, especially for vulnerable patient populations, for whom in-home and family-centered care are necessary parts of health maintenance, prevention, and well-being. The chapter ends with a discussion of ways that the US government can mitigate digital barriers and facilitate equitable access to broadband internet and e-health resources that address the intersections of digital, health, and care inequalities, with significant impacts in all three dimensions.

This chapter seeks to understand the intersection between eGovernment, social media, and digital inequalities by examining the disparate flow of information during the COVID-19 pandemic. Developed economies are increasingly transitioning to digital interfaces for information dissemination and provision of services. The authors explore the potential of, and challenges facing eGovernment by looking at the use of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter employs a case study approach to probe the dynamics of government-initiated efforts at information dissemination through the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) website and social media account on Twitter. The analysis in this chapter uses NodeXL to examine communication roles played by government and non-governmental actors within this slice of the Twittersphere centered around CDC@gov. As the findings demonstrate, non-governmental actors played key roles in the dissemination of public health messaging. The authors analyze these data with an eye to the potential of social media for public health communication and extrapolate that understanding to the use of digital access and social media for the provision of accurate, official information in other circumstances. While the COVID-19 pandemic was a global health crisis, individuals and households face individual or local crises every day. This angle of vision allows the chapter to conclude with recommendations pertaining to government-led information dissemination for the public good during crisis and non-crisis situations alike. In the concluding section, the authors probe the degree to which eGovernment can also address digital inequalities including connectivity, device, and literacy gaps. The authors offer solutions needed for eGovernment initiatives in light of challenges posed by digital inequalities to ensure that digital information sharing and services are accessible to all.

The ubiquity of the internet has extended immense informational power to patients around the world who previously had abysmal knowledge about the disease they are suffering from. With a large amount of information in their hands, these educated and well-informed patients are cultivating deeper relationships and engagement with their physicians through meaningful interactions. This study aims to investigate the influence of patients’ internet usage and their interactions on their intentions to revisit and foster relationships with their physicians.

A survey-based questionnaire was administered at four government hospitals in Pune, involving a sample size of 400. The study intends to use structural equation modelling (SEM) to examine the hypothesized relationships identified within the research analysis.

The findings of this study indicate that patients report higher levels of satisfaction and intention to revisit when they have a strong interaction with their physician.

This study provides valuable inputs to the hospital authorities and health-care-related policy makers. This study also contributes to the overall body of literature on health care information system, behavioural aspects of patients and doctors as well as other health-care-related staffs in hospitals.

The study adds values to the overall body of literature for both hospital information system, patient interaction and health care policy. To date, no research has examined the association between patient–physician interactions conducted through internet channels and subsequent behavioural intentions. Moreover, the study investigates the behavioural aspects of patients and health-care staffs, which adds value towards the body of knowledge in the extant literature.

With the development of digitalization and interconnection, there is a growing need for enterprise customers to ensure the compatibility of the third-party components they are using in the manufacturing process, thus raising the integration requirements for the Industrial Internet platform and its third-party developers. Therefore, our study investigates the optimal integration decision of the Industrial Internet platform while considering its access price, the integration cost, and the net utility derived by enterprise customers from the third-party components.

We model a two-sided Industrial Internet platform that connects customers on the demand side to the developers on the supply side. We then explore the integration decision of the Industrial Internet platform and its important factors by solving the optimal profit function.

First, despite the high integration cost of third-party developers, the platform still chooses to integrate when enterprise customers derive high utility from the third-party components. Second, due to the compatibility effect, charging the enterprise customers a higher price may reduce the platform profits when these customers derive low utility from the third-party components. Third, the platform profits will increase along with the integration cost of third-party developers when it is low in the case where enterprise customers derive low utility from third-party components.

Our findings offer insightful takeaways for the Industrial Internet platform when making integration decisions.

With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.

This study was carried out to examine the volume and annual growth pattern of research on e-health literacy research, investigate the open-access types of e-health literacy research and perform document production by country and by sources. The study also mapped the keywords used by authors to represent e-health literacy research and performed an analysis of the clusters of the keywords to reveal the thematic focus of research in the area.

The research was guided by a bibliometric approach involving visualization using VosViewer. Data were sourced from Scopus database using a syntax that was tested and verified to be capable of yielding reliable data on the subject matter. The analysis in this study was based on bibliographic data and keywords.

A total number of 1,176 documents were produced during 2006 and 2022. The majority of the documents (18.90%) were published based on hybrid open-access processes, and the USA has the highest contributions. The Journal of Medical Internet Research is the venue for most of the documents on the subject. The 1,176 documents were described by 5,047 keywords, 4.29 keywords per document, and the keywords were classified into five clusters that aptly capture the thematic structure of research in the area.

e-Health literacy has experienced significant growth in research production from 2006 to 2022, with an average of 69 documents per year. Research on e-health literacy initially had low output but began to increase in 2018. The majority of e-health literacy documents are available through open access, with the USA being the leading contributor. The analysis of keywords reveals the multifaceted nature of e-health literacy, including access to information, attitudes, measurement tools, awareness, age factors and communication. Clusters of keywords highlight different aspects of e-health literacy research, such as accessibility, attitudes, awareness, measurement tools and the importance of age, cancer, caregivers and effective communication in healthcare.

This study has practical implications for health promotion. There is also the element of patient empowerment in which case patients are allowed to take an active role in their healthcare. By understanding their health information and having access to resources that help them manage their conditions, patients can make informed decisions about their healthcare. Finally, there is the issue of improved health outcomes which can be achieved by improving patients' e-health literacy. Visualisation of e-health literacy can help bridge the gap between patients and healthcare providers, promote patient-centered care and improve health outcomes.

Research production on e-Health literacy has experienced significant growth from 2006 to 2022, with an average of 69 documents per year. Many e-health literacy documents are available through open access, and the USA is the leading contributor. The analysis of keywords reveals the nature of e-health literacy, including access to information, attitudes, measurement tools, awareness and communication. The clusters of keywords highlight different aspects of e-health literacy research, such as accessibility, attitudes, awareness, measurement tools and the importance of age, cancer, caregivers, and effective communication in healthcare.

In today’s information and knowledge society, it is indispensable for citizens to acquire the requisite digital and information literacy (IL) skills to search information independently to meet their multiple and diverse information needs. As a result of digitalisation in the world, development and acquisition of digital and information skills is critical even for students and learners to retrieve digitised and online information to meet or achieve their curriculum-related accomplishments. The purpose of this study is to investigate the status of the digital and information literacies in South Africa from 2016 to 2022.

This qualitative study used a scoping review approach to collect data from research articles, conference articles and textbooks on digital literacy and IL – published in the years ranging between 2016 and 2022 from Google Scholar.

The major findings revealed that majority of the citizens especially students and learners lack digital and IL skills to recognise when information is needed, to find, locate, evaluate and use the retrieved information to meet an information need in a particular situation or context. Practical implications of this study include the alignment of curricula towards information and communication technologies to face the everchanging digital information technologies.

The study used scoping literature review research where empirical studies were retrieved and selected to address the objectives. This study provided significant approaches regarding promoting information and digital literacies in developing countries such as South Africa.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) recently relaunched Nigeria’s cashless policy initiative which seeks to reduce financial crime and tax avoidance, decrease cash dependency, advance the adoption of digital financial services (DFS), decrease the risks to the payment system and foster financial inclusion. This study aims to identify the unique challenges of going cashless in Nigeria, particularly in terms of infrastructural, exclusionary and cost implications of the policy on the average citizens.

The author applies a doctrinal research methodology to identify and reflect on key challenges of the cashless policy from the economic, regulatory and transactional perspectives.

The cashless policy initiative in Nigeria heralds value for financial integrity, financial policy regulation and user convenience. The mode of introduction, however, ushers in significant challenges and hardly considers Nigeria’s inadequate payment infrastructure, persistent financial exclusion, low levels of financial and digital literacy and capability, high cost of using DFS and pervasive proclivity for cash. As Nigerians adjust albeit inconveniently to the policy, the CBN can ameliorate the hardship by strengthening the payment infrastructure, particularly for digital payments, fostering consumer trust by safeguarding user funds and enabling consumer preferences.

Research materials include the national regulator’s policy documents and newspaper articles that have not been published in formal reports but non-the-less adequately mirror the policy intention of the CBN and the lived experiences of Nigerians.

This study identifies the practical steps and regulatory measures that the CBN can take to improve acceptance and meaningful and sustainable adoption of the cashless policy by the majority of Nigerians.

The recommendations that are proffered provide some rich insights to inform regulatory direction for the CBN to seamlessly phase-in the cashless policy and consequently drive down financial exclusion in Nigeria.

This study contributes to the policy discussion around the introduction of the cashless Nigeria project. The doctrinal research method highlights the policy intentions of the regulator in juxtaposition with lived experiences of Nigerians. This study offers recommendations to bolster financial inclusion, stability and integrity.