→ Special Issues

The growing research on the complicated facets of digital inequality refutes the claims by technodeterminists that the spread of information technologies automatically mitigates the effects of exclusion and deprivation, says Laura Robinson.


The two special issues on “Wiki Politics” hail information technologies as a major force in today’s society and culture. To their credit a number of the contributors recognize the dilemma of unequal power and vary in their analyses of the revolutionary aspects of new media. However, in some of the contributions, one cannot help noticing the thread of technoutopianism, which appears to laud information technologies as the cure-all for many of society’s ailments. In some of them we hear reverberations of an extreme technodeterminist stance that idealistically rhapsodizes about the newly egalitarian forms of politics, commerce, and socializing that information technologies have made possible, predicting that society’s playing field will no longer be tilted in favor of the socially well-connected, the rich, and the culturally well-endowed. The diffusion of such technologies through the population, some seem to claim, will lead inexorably toward a horizontal society shorn of hierarchies.


While it cannot be denied that such developments as e-commerce, blogging, and internet-mediated political activism have altered the contours of the social and political landscape significantly for some, what is lost in such technoutopian effusions is the insight that, whatever benefits the privileged derive from their encounters with information technologies, these benefits are not diffused equally to society as a whole.


Ironically, the special issues provide an illuminating example in which technology provides a new venue in which inequality is reproduced rather than overturned. Although they largely tout the liberatory potential of new technologies, the composition of the contributors to the two special issues of “Wiki Politics” undermines claims of generalizability of the internet revolution for all. The list of contributors suffices to demonstrate the dominance of men selected to speak as producers in the information technology community. Only one of eighteen contributions is from women (two if you count one female author out of seven in a second piece). A glance at the list of authors and contributors also reveals the dominance of individuals from economically privileged groups, as well as the preponderance of nationals from wealthier countries and the dearth of individuals of different races.


The emancipatory claims made by some of the contributors would be much more compelling if the essays incorporated the perspectives of people who stand at the margins of the internet revolution rather than at its core. The absence of a plurality of voice or authorship suggests that many of the declarations of revolutionary change are in fact issuing primarily from the people who occupy positions of power and privilege. This paradox makes clear that in many ways dominant forms of power remain resistant to the promise of digital equality because offline social inequalities are replicated online.


The inequalities that divide society offline often translate into equally complex inequalities in access to and production of new media. The uneven distribution of economic, social, and cultural resources within developed nations and between the developing and developed world, means that a large percentage of the global population lacks basic or adequate access to the internet, let alone the resources to participate as producers. Even in developed countries with high levels of internet use, the information technology revolution has largely bypassed the marginalized, the socially excluded, and the most economically deprived.


Although studies of digital inequality are moving away from a binary “have” versus “have not” divide, in terms of bare access to information technologies, it is hard to avoid concluding that huge disparities remain even in developed nations with high levels of internet penetration, such as the United States. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s report on user trends in 2007, there is still significant variation in basic access to the internet. Only 55% of individuals from households with less than $30K annual income, 60% of rural populations, 40% of individuals with the lowest levels of educational attainment, and 32% of those 65 and over use the internet “at least occasionally.” When we look at internet connectivity in a global context, disparities in basic access plummet even further indicating the vast the gradations of information inequality across different regions and continents.


Equally important, while earlier diagnoses of the digital divide highlighted the fault line between those with and without access, it has become clear that the gap between privileged and underprivileged users is every bit as consequential as the gap between users and nonusers. The Pew Internet and American Life Project has recently released a report on user typologies that sorts the U.S. population into various groups, depending on their degree of access or wired-ness. According to the study, only 8% of Americans qualify as members of the wired elite “deep users” or “omnivores,” individuals who are actively participating in the advancement of information technologies known as Web. 2.0. The report describes 49% of Americans as belonging to the “few tech assets” population that has a much more passive relationship with information technologies, similar to the relationship between TVs and TV viewers.


Access to the internet is of unequal quality, depth, and duration. Serious barriers to access hinder many of the respondents in my current study of information literacy among youth in the United States, part of the Digital Youth Research funded by the MacArthur Foundation. My respondents who rely on public access report considering themselves fortunate to obtain a short internet session on a shared terminal instead of a leisurely session on a personal laptop. What technodeterminists fail to understand is that for such economically disadvantaged populations, every hour spent online is an hour that must be sacrificed from meeting pressing needs such as gainful work or the fulfillment of family responsibilities. While teenagers growing up in economically secure circumstances may report taking the internet for granted, many of my most underprivileged respondents regard the internet as a luxury, which costs them time and other resources that they cannot afford.


Most important, a number of my most underprivileged respondents struggle with the most basic operations familiar to their peers who are experienced users of the internet. My research indicates that youth who rely on internet access via third parties are at a disadvantage relative to their counterparts who enjoy at-will or high levels of quality access in the comfort of home. Significantly, comparing different groups, my findings show that unequal quality of access results in significant differences in the acquisition of more sophisticated online practices and better internet-relevant skills that further enhance the quality of time spent online. In sum, not only are there enormous differences in basic access but also in the quality of access and the ensuing benefits that users derive from it.


What technodeterminism fails to recognize is that the internet presumes a basic portfolio of symbolic competencies that are not evenly distributed across society. Research into modes of technology appropriation among differently situated individuals demonstrates that people vary greatly in the “efficacy” with which they use information technology resources and the “payoffs” they receive from their use of new media (DiMaggio et al. 2004:38,46). According to this study, more advantaged people tend to get more out of their internet-mediated activities, both because they employ the internet more skillfully and because they use it for capital-enhancing purposes more than do their less advantaged counterparts. While wealthier and more culturally sophisticated users tend to spend much of their time online in activities that boost their economic well-being as workers or consumers, or enhance their effectiveness as citizens and community members, less privileged people spend more time on activities that do not yield the same “payoffs.”


The growing research on the complicated facets of digital inequality refutes the claims by technodeterminists that the spread of information technologies automatically mitigates the effects of exclusion and deprivation. In some ways, the internet not only replicates offline inequalities but actually can accentuate the impacts of disadvantage. Power differentials replicate themselves online; far from being a panacea, the unequal use of new media is powered by and results in other forms of stratification. New technologies introduce yet another avenue through which the well-endowed can gain an edge in the competition over society’s limited resources.


This being said, virtual structure versus digital agency is not a question of total revolution or total domination. Stratification in new media environments is no less complicated than it is in the “real world.” Both online and offline, a host of factors plays a role in determining how power is distributed, reproduced, and contested. Often there is no binary divide between absolute power and powerlessness, but instead a range of overlapping possibilities as on- and offline experiences become extensions of one another. Individual agency can be vibrant, even revolutionary, especially if aided by powerful tools provided by new media. However, the egalitarian promise of information technologies can only be realized in an equitable manner if we address the social and economic disparities that make the offline world so inegalitarian.

Special issue: gender and new media, recent articles
Tags: gender, laura robinson, web2.0

|  Print This Post

• del.icio.us
• Digg
• Furl
• Netscape
• Yahoo! My Web
• StumbleUpon
• Google Bookmarks
• Technorati
• BlinkList
• Newsvine
• ma.gnolia
• reddit
• Windows Live
• Tailrank