New Media & Society· 2013Q1
The digital divide shifts to differences in usage
- 1,604citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2013year
Short summary
People with lower education and disabilities spend more hours online daily than higher-educated and employed individuals, using the internet for leisure, social interaction, and gaming.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Individuals with lower education and disabilities spend more hours online daily than higher-educated and employed populations.
- The primary online activities for these groups include leisure, social interaction, personal development, and gaming.
- A validated cluster of internet usage types includes information, news, personal development, social interaction, leisure, commercial transaction, and gaming.
- The study identifies usage differences based on gender, age, education, and internet experience.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
In a representative survey of the Dutch population we found that people with low levels of education and disabled people are using the Internet for more hours a day in their spare time than higher educated and employed populations. To explain this finding, we investigated what these people are doing online. The first contribution is a theoretically validated cluster of Internet usage types: information, news, personal development, social interaction, leisure, commercial transaction and gaming. The second contribution is that, based on this classification, we were able to identify a number of usage differences, including those demonstrated by people with different gender, age, education and Internet experience, that are often observed in digital divide literature. The general conclusion is that when the Internet matures, it will increasingly reflect known social, economic and cultural relationships of the offline world, including inequalities.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. New Media & Society, 2013 · DOI ↗
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Field: Media Technology
Media TechnologyEngineering