About this Research Topic
The Covid-19 pandemic made explicit an aspect that tacitly underlines contemporary, everyday life: the blurring boundaries between digital and analogue spaces and the consequent reconfiguration of identities, relationships, and institutions. Indeed, the boundaries between the public and the private, between what happens face-to-face and on the internet, and between the actual and the virtual are increasingly blurred. Our personal identities, social interactions, public policies, social services and, more generally, how time and space are built happen now in a collapsed, ambivalent context, one where individuals are asked to define their own biographies, relationships and ties, institutions, services and policies within the blurring boundaries that constitute our digitally-mediated world.
This Research Topic welcomes scholars from the following areas: digital media, social media, education, migration, and urban ecology to reflect on the issues mentioned above by papers addressing theoretical analysis, empirical research, and literature reviews.
Some examples of possible themes include:
• institutions and social services
• identities and biographies
• planning and management of public services
• educational processes and policies
• social Interactions
• interaction and urban ecology
• migration and social services
• how 'economically developed' and 'economically developing' societies are structuring and managing these blurred lines
• emotion and social interaction
• work, employment, and organization
• measurements of 'boundaries' and measurements of 'blurring'
• cross-national and cross-cultural differences in boundary and blurring phenomena
• boundary and blurring phenomena in different historical periods.
Abstract submissions up to 500 words are encouraged but not mandatory. Different article types are welcome, from Original Research (12,000 words) to Brief Research Report (4,000 words). Please also explore how these themes connect to the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Keywords: Sociology, Digital society, Social Media, Digital Media, Public Policy
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.