Society and the Web in a Post-lockdown World: Innovations for Cities, Citizens, and Netizens
A special issue of Future Internet (ISSN 1999-5903). This special issue belongs to the section "Techno-Social Smart Systems".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 December 2022) | Viewed by 795
Special Issue Editors
Interests: computational social science; complex networks; network science; network analysis; data science; social media analysis
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: participatory surveillance; social media; public health; data science
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue is dedicated to attracting groundbreaking proposals and courageous data-driven case studies to forecast new perspectives for our society, much beyond the so-called smart cities framework, with the long term ambition of contributing to rethinking and reshaping our cities and the way we live in them, especially in a post-lockdown word. Our aim is to attract multidisciplinary contributions that propose new applications, innovative frameworks, and novel paradigms that have been designed, tested, and validated for our evolving cities. In fact, during the current pandemic, governments introduced many limitations to our mobility, our freedom to interact with other citizens, and to our working habits, in order to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. As a consequence, our cities have seen the emergence of many previously underestimated weaknesses of urban and suburban design that have triggered many inequalities when citizens need to access to services that are still linked to a physical place (e.g., schools, hospitals, transportation facilities).
This vulnerability is particularly striking because we can also observe that the idea of living in a hyperconnected world is delusional to many, and that lockdown strategies had a strong impact on mental health, with the resurgence of psychological disorders: long-term quarantines induce an increase in the number of patients that suffer of mental health disorders, such as fear, anxiety, and depression, and that such issues can consequently amplify the risk of uncontrollable disease spreading.
On the other hand, pure technological solutions can suffer from many other limitations and risks that we cannot underestimate. For example, as pointed out in May 2020 by the UN Secretary-General, the pandemic is unleashing a “tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering”, with the support of conspiracy theories and misinformation that have contributed to a general anti-foreigner, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim attitude, with migrants and refugees attacked because they are considered as a source of the virus. The adoption of hate speech and offensive language on social media is widely condemned, even if countermeasures that do not significantly limit our freedom of speech are hard to define and adopt through national regulations.
Prof. Dr. Giancarlo RuffoDr. Daniela Paolotti
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- urban informatics
- spatial computing
- 15-minute cities
- foundational economy
- connectivity and inclusivity
- mitigating offensive language vs. freedom of speech online
- information cascades: social contagion dynamics in networks and online communities
- conspiracy theories, echo chambers, filter bubbles, opinion polarization
- understanding social, economic, and geographical segregation
- migration, mobility, and smart working
- online life: isolation or hyperconnectivity?
