This chapter provides additional justifications for the human right to free internet access. It shows that today internet access is practically indispensable for having adequate opportunities for the exercise and enjoyment of socio-economic and cultural human rights. Examples from around the globe provide evidence for the internet’s practical systemic indispensability for human rights to, for example, education, health care, housing (adequate standard of living), finding work, and participation in cultural life. Specific attention is paid to the differing ways in which internet access matters in developed countries (where internet access is already widespread and public services generally available) versus developing societies (in which internet access is often lacking and universal public service provision is precarious. In developed countries, internet access greatly increases opportunities to use socio-economic human rights, thereby putting those who involuntarily remain offline at risk of social, economic, or cultural exclusion. By contrast, in developing countries internet access is sometimes the only way for at least some realisation of people’s socio-economic human rights.

Who engages with art? This chapter outlines methods for art companies to gain a better understanding of the socioeconomic background of their audience. We also present a cross-country comparison on participation rates in the arts to illustrate the patterns of cultural consumption around the world. To get a better understanding of the audience characteristics, this chapter also summarizes the findings of several participation studies on the socioeconomic characteristics of art attenders across countries and over time.

This chapter explores Britten’s investment in composing for young people – the most obvious outworking of his well-known belief that the composer had a ‘duty to society’. It positions this part of his oeuvre within the context of a number of interconnected contemporary critical debates: about national education reform; about the supposed impact of sound reproduction technologies on the public’s listening habits; about the arts’ imagined capacity to nurture ‘responsible citizens’; and about the contested consequences of industrialisation for local culture and community. It then examines two different ways in which Britten responded to cultural critics’ concerns about the socially alienating conditions of modern life: whereas Noye’s Fludde sought to foster community through promoting amateur performance, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra encouraged a different kind of cultural participation premised on ‘active’ listening. More broadly, these compositions reveal how arts education became a vehicle for debating, making sense of, and regulating the social changes that took place in mid-twentieth-century Britain.