Reading between the Lines

We know that socio-economic and environmental factors lie at the root of health, safety, and opportunity inequalities across societies. The increasing convergence of off- and online worlds seems to deepen these patterns: platforms advertise loans more intensively to young people who are already in financial trouble; social media recommend polarizing narratives to people that already feel deprived of opportunity; and social media feeds show higher proportions of unreliable health information to groups already at risk. Today, understanding the impact of people's living environments requires researchers and practitioners to focus on both the offline and online world. This proposal proposes a unique mixed-method approach to exploring vulnerability and resilience at the interface of Rotterdam’s off- and online society. The proposed research will build on existing research infrastructures such as Rotterdam’s Health Monitor and digital research methods to study societal processes on social media and will leverage action research and ethnographic approaches to build learning communities that explore and address digital inequalities from a human-centered perspective. This project's potential scientific and societal breakthroughs lie in new methods and approaches to study health, safety, and opportunity at the interface of the online and offline society, and – potentially –evidence of what interactions between these worlds look like. Furthermore, we will set up learning communities that will (1) increase media literacy through peer-led interventions, and (2) develophandbooks, toolkits, and citizen manifestos that will inform researchers and policy-makers on how to safeguard health, safety, and opportunity in the digital society.