The Digital Citizen(ship). Politics and Democracy in the Networked Society By Luigi Ceccarini. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021. 200p. £75.00 (hardcover)

The Digital Citizen(ship) (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021) by Luigi Ceccarini is a timely and informative book. As internet is now a potential instrument of active citizenship (p. 152), Ceccarini reflects on the opportunities (and the risks) connected with this instrument for the society at large. The importance of discussing the impact of the digitalization process is testified by its spread in the world. The data provided by Ceccarini (p. 22) show how relevant internet is and also its potential in non-Western areas such as Asia and Africa, where only 55.1 and 39.3% of the population uses it, compared, for example, to the 94.6% in North America or the 87.2% in Europe. The growth in the internet usage has been accompanied by the diffusion of social networks, which in few years became the most relevant media companies in the Western World and whose owners are now global political players. In particular, what Ceccarini highlights is that the digital citizens, despite the information abundance that charac-terizes the internet era, have relatively few alternatives when it comes to social networks, whose market concentration is very similar to a monopoly. In 2009, there were 17 leading social networks in each country considered, in 2017 the figure had fallen to five (p. 24). Despite this concentration, in chapter 6 Ceccarini shows that, unsurprisingly, social network users in Europe went from 18% in 2018 to 48% in 2019, meaning that digitalization has heavily affected daily habits of citizens. Yet, social networks are not merely entertaining tools. Social networks and websites in very few years almost reached television among the most relevant sources of information among European citizens. The gap between television (82%) and social networks and websites (41%) was more than 40% points in 2014 and it has reduced to 14