Digital inequalities have been exacerbated for many marginalized populations during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is no different for one of the most marginalized populations in the United States, ...incarcerated people. Due to the pandemic, in-person visitations as well as educational and vocational programming were, and in many cases remain, suspended across numerous correctional facilities, leaving incarcerated people even more socially isolated than before the pandemic. Although an increasing number of facilities provide prison tablets for entertainment and communication purposes, high prices for electronic messages, video visitations, books, and entertainment content leave incarcerated people and their families unable to pay for these services. As best practice examples from California, Maine, New York City, and Pennsylvania demonstrate, connecting prisons to the internet and allowing incarcerated people secure access to the internet is possible, and long overdue. The pandemic has highlighted these issues and provides an opportunity to overhaul outdated ideas about prison communication.
Research into digital inequalities has shifted from a binary view of Internet use versus non-use to studying gradations in Internet use. However, this research has mostly compared categories of users ...only. In addition, the role of attitudes in digital inequalities has been largely overlooked. This article addresses these limitations by performing a systematic analysis of factors that distinguish low Internet users from non-users, regular users, and broad users. In addition to socio-demographic characteristics, we examine attitudinal variables. Results drawn from multinomial regressions indicate that attitudes play at least as large a role as socio-economic factors in determining the likelihood of belonging to specific (non-)user categories. This identifies positive attitudes toward technologies and the Internet as a crucial step toward Internet adoption. Hence, digital inequality research needs to consider factors other than traditional socio-economic ones to draw a complete picture.
Research into reasons for Internet non-use has been mostly based on one-off cohort studies and focused on single-country contexts. This article shows that motivations for being offline changed ...between 2005 and 2013 among non- and ex-users in two high-diffusion European countries. Analyses of Swedish and British data demonstrate that non-user populations have become more concentrated in vulnerable groups. While traditional digital divide reasons related to a lack of access and skills remain important, motivational reasons increased in importance over time. The ways in which these reasons gain importance for non- and ex-user groups vary, as do explanations for digital exclusion in the different countries. Effective interventions aimed at tackling digital exclusion need to take into consideration national contexts, changing non-user characteristics, and individual experience with the Internet. What worked a decade ago in a particular country might not work currently in a different or even the same country.
Researchers on digital divides have identified demographic and attitudinal factors associated with inequalities in access, skills, and patterns of Internet use, primarily around age, income, and ...education. While the attitudes and values of Internet users and non-users have been studied over the years, they have rarely been used to identify broader 'cultures of the Internet' and their role in shaping digital divides. This paper builds on research in Britain, which focused on patterns of attitudes underpinning Internet cultures, to explore the degree that similar or distinctive cultures have developed in the USA, and whether and how they are useful in explaining digital divides. This study utilizes original data drawn from a telephone survey of residents across the State of Michigan that adapted survey items and methods from the Oxford Internet Survey of Britain. Based on these survey responses, the paper identifies and describes the cultures of the Internet among Michigan residents, as an exploratory case of the US as a whole, and shows how these cultures shape digital divides in Internet access and social media use. The robustness and explanatory power of these explorations of Internet cultures argue for further research on the United States and for comparative research with other nations.
Research shows that digital divides and inequalities are related to lower socioeconomic status and detrimental to social and economic capital acquisition. Other studies show that use of information ...and communication technologies in the classroom can lead to worse academic performance. Nevertheless, many universities require that students own or buy a laptop, and many offer financial aid for students who cannot afford to buy one. As such, laptop ownership may be crucially tied to academic performance. Based on a large data set of incoming freshmen at a large public university in the United States, this article shows that not owning a laptop is negatively associated with overall college performance, even when controlling for socioeconomic background. Whereas we find that laptop ownership is not necessarily responsible for the higher performance of individuals in our broader sample, it could be beneficial to nonowners, which has implications for university policies seeking to provide institution-wide access to laptops and for universities’ broader interactions with students who do not own a laptop.
Gig Work, Telework, Precarity, and the Pandemic Schulz, Jeremy; Robinson, Laura; McClain, Noah ...
The American behavioral scientist (Beverly Hills),
07/2024, Volume:
68, Issue:
8
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This issue examines technology-driven economic developments during the global COVID-19 pandemic in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Specifically, the articles cover the ways that gig work, the ...platform economy, and remote work have evolved during the course of the pandemic. The issue leads with articles that chart the interplay of the platform economy with various facets of the pandemic from the inequalities and risks faced by gig workers to market forces shaping the commercialization of hosting platforms. The following articles concentrate on the ways in which specific structural conditions—digital infrastructure as well as the structure of the economy—influence the unequal distribution of telework in Uruguay and the relationship between informality and remote work opportunities across Latin America. The last two articles explore remote work in Asia and North America. In the first of these two articles remote work in Japan is examined in order to investigate the cultural sources of resistance to the adoption of remote work. In the concluding article, the remote work preferences of U.S. adults are analyzed as a function of technology usage (videoconferencing versus instant messaging) as well as sociodemographic and occupational attributes.
An important contribution of digital inequalities research has been the discussion of nuances in ways that people (dis)engage with information and communication technologies (ICTs). One such practice ...is proxy Internet use (PIU): indirect Internet access by asking others to do things online for them or on their behalf. Whereas there is a good amount of research on those who are on the receiving end of PIU, users-by-proxy, little is known about “proxy users” who provide PIU. Analyses of nationally representative survey data from Slovenia (N = 1047) collected in 2018 show that 51% of Internet users reported to have acted as proxy users in the past 12 months. Multivariate analyses unveil that those Internet users who report a wider array of personal, economic, social Internet uses as well as those with higher levels of operational Internet skills are more likely to act as proxy users.
THE PARTICIPATORY WEB Blank, Grant; Reisdorf, Bianca C.
Information, communication & society,
05/2012, Volume:
15, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper makes three contributions: first, we suggest a clear, concise definition of Web 2.0, something that has eluded other authors, including the Tim O'Reilly the originator of the concept. ...Second, prior work has focused largely on the implications of Web 2.0 for producers of content, usually corporations or government agencies. This paper is one of the few analyses of Web 2.0 from the point of view of users. Third, we characterize the creative activity of Web 2.0 users. In addition to their active content production, they are unusually active users of the Internet for entertainment. In multivariate models predicting Web 2.0, the most consistently important variables are technical ability, comfort revealing personal data and, particularly, Web 2.0 confidence. These variables suggest that despite the apparent simplicity of FaceBook or of typing a book review on Amazon, ability remains very important in the eyes of users. For many, there appears to be something daunting about contributing to Web 2.0 activity and many potential users remain, rightly or wrongly, uncertain of their ability to make a contribution. We conclude that the study of Web 2.0 can tell us much about how the Internet is unique, and that it warrants a significant scholarly attention.
Proxy internet use has been identified as a viable strategy for achieving tangible internet outcomes and overcoming digital exclusion. In this study, we distinguish between proxy users who perform ...online activities for others and users-by-proxy, for whom activities are performed. We present a conceptual extension of the model of compound and sequential digital exclusion. We propose 18 hypotheses to understand how proxy use and use-by-proxy mediate the effects of internet skills on internet uses and outcomes. The model was tested using a path analysis based on data from a nationally representative sample of 535 internet users in Slovenia (males: 48.6%; age range: 18–84 years; M = 42.0 years). The results showed positive pathways between operational and creative skills, proxy use, internet uses, and outcomes. Internet users with high operational and creative skills, who were proxy users, expanded their online engagement and increased their tangible outcomes. Conversely, creative skills were negatively associated with use-by-proxy, which had no significant effects on internet uses and outcomes. Overall, our findings reveal a multidimensional aspect of indirect internet use and its importance in achieving digital equality, highlighting the importance of framing proxy internet use within established models of digital exclusion.
•Proxy use and use-by-proxy were studied in a sequential model of digital inclusion.•Operational and creative skills were positive predictors of proxy use.•Proxy use had a positive effect on use-by-proxy, internet uses and outcomes.•Creative skills were negatively associated with use-by-proxy among internet users.•Use-by-proxy had a limited potential for fostering inclusive digital engagement.
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