This document is the author's final manuscript accepted version of the journal article, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer review process. Some differences between this version and the published version may remain. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. Citizenship has always been a dynamic notion, subject to change and permanent struggle over its precise content and meaning. Recent technological, economic and political transformations have led to the development of alternative notions of citizenship that go beyond the classic understanding of citizenship relating to nation states and rights. Civil society actors play an important role in this process by organising themselves at a transnational level, engaging with issues that transcend the boundaries of the nation state and questioning the democratic legitimacy of other transnational actors such as international organisations or the corporate sector. They also allow citizens to engage with such 'unbounded' issues and attempt to construct a transnational public sphere where such issues can be debated. It is often assumed that the Internet plays a crucial role in enabling this transnational public sphere to take shape. Empirical analysis of discussion forums and mailing-lists developed by transnational civil society actors shows however that the construction of such a transnational public sphere is burdened with many constraints. To speak of a unified transnational public sphere is therefore deemed to be problematic. In this regard it was also concluded that the transnational cannot be seen or construed without taking into account the local, the national and enforceable rights in order to materialise the ideas and hopes being voiced through civil society.

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This article contributes to a better understanding of patterns of social support in relation to digital inequalities. Based on an extensive qualitative study, the diversity of support networks and supports seeking patterns are unveiled. A typology of six patterns of help-seeking is presented and described: the support-deprived, the community-supported, the supported through substitution, the network-supported, the vicarious learners, and the self-supported. The article also critically engages with the often unnuanced academic literature on social support. The research and the typology reveal that the quality of support, as well as the availability of potential or actual support, is not only influenced by socio-economic factors. Rather, the strength of the relationship and the level of intimacy between individuals is an important predictor of support-seeking. As such, this article shows that mechanisms of in/exclusion are highly social, as they entail a diversity of formal and informal support-seeking patterns, which in turn have an important influence on the adoption and use of digital media. The article argues that understanding such mechanisms is rooted in reconciling micro-level interactions to macro-level patterns of inequalities. To show the specificity of social support within digital inequalities research, and to demarcate the concept from definitions of other academic disciplines, the concept of social support for digital inclusion is introduced. It is defined as the aid (emotional, instrumental, and informational) that an individual receives from his/her network in his/her use of digital technologies.