Digital inequalities and why they matter

AbstractWhile the field of digital inequality continues to expand in many directions, the relationship between digital inequalities and other forms of inequality has yet to be fully appreciated. This article invites social scientists in and outside the field of digital media studies to attend to digital inequality, both as a substantive problem and as a methodological concern. The authors present current research on multiple aspects of digital inequality, defined expansively in terms of access, usage, skills, and self-perceptions, as well as future lines of research. Each of the contributions makes the case that digital inequality deserves a place alongside more traditional forms of inequality in the twenty-first century pantheon of inequalities. Digital inequality should not be only the preserve of specialists but should make its way into the work of social scientists concerned with a broad range of outcomes connected to life chances and life trajectories. As we argue, the significance of digital inequalities is clear across a broad range of individual-level and macro-level domains, including life course, gender, race, and class, as well as health care, politics, economic activity, and social capital.Keywords: computer-mediated communicationdigital dividegenderraceehealth Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes on contributorsLaura Robinson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Santa Clara University and Affiliated Faculty at the UC Berkeley ISSI. In addition to holding a postdoctoral fellowship on a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation-funded project at the USC Annenberg Center, Robinson has served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Cornell University and Visiting Scholar at Trinity College Dublin. She is the CITASA Chair for 2014–2015. Her research has earned awards from CITASA, AOIR, and NCA IICD. Robinson's current multi-year study examines digital and informational inequalities. [email: laura@laurarobinson.org]Shelia Cotten is Professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University. She has served as the Chair of CITASA. Her work has been funded by The National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Aging. Cotten's work addresses key social problems with sociological tools related to technology access, use, and impacts/outcomes. She has published on a number of topics including the XO laptop program in Birmingham and the use of ICT resources to improve older Americans’ quality of life. The body of her work was recognized by the CITASA Award for Public Sociology in 2013. [email: cotten@msu.edu]Hiroshi Ono is Professor of Human Resource Management at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include: economic sociology, work and labor markets, and international business. His work has won a number of awards such as the Best Paper Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter Top 20 Paper Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research. His papers have appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Science Quarterly, and Social Science Research, among others. [email: stdhono@gmail.com]Anabel Quan-Haase is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University, where her work and teaching focus on digital technologies and their intersection with society. She was president of the Canadian Association of Information Studies and is currently a council member of the American Sociological Association's section on Information and Communication Technology (CITASA). Her book Technology and Society was first published 2013 with Oxford University Press. [email: aquan@uwo.ca]Gustavo S. Mesch is a Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Haifa. His main research interests include technology and society, digital inequalities and the social diversification hypothesis, online social networks and social capital, Cyber-crime, and computer-mediated communication. He is the co-author of Wired Youth (Taylor & Francis, 2010). [email: gustavo@soc.haifa.ac.il]Wenhong Chen is Assistant Professor at the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas Austin. Her research has been focused on the social implications of digital media and communication technologies. She has published more than 30 articles, including publications in Social Networks, Human Communication Research, and the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Chen is the guest editor for Information, Communication & Society on the special issue the Internet in Chinese societies. She co-edits the book Networked China: Global Dynamics of Digital Media and Civic Engagement (Routledge 2015). [email: wenchen2006@gmail.com]Jeremy Schulz is currently a Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. Previously, he held an NSF-funded postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University after earning his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. His recent publications include ‘Talk of Work’ published in Theory and Society and ‘Shifting Grounds and Evolving Battlegrounds', published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. He has also done research and published in several other areas, including new media, theory, qualitative research methods, work and family, and consumption. [email: jmschulz@berkeley.edu]Timothy M. Hale, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist at Partners’ Center for Connected Health and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his doctorate in medical sociology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in 2011. His current research examines how new information and communication technologies are transforming existing models of health care, emerging digital health lifestyles, and digital inequalities. His work has been published in the Journals of Gerontology, Journal of Health Communication, Journal of Medical Internet Research, and Information, Communication and Society. [email: tmhale@mgh.harvard.edu]Michael J. Stern is an expert in web survey design, self-administered questionnaire development, mode effects, measurement error, digital inequality, and use of innovative technologies in survey data collection. Stern has published widely and has significant interest in how different segments of society effectively use information and communication technologies and what this means to future of web and other technologically based surveys. Stern is a Fellow in NORC's Center for Excellence in Survey Research. In this role, his focus is on building and improving web survey practices and experimentally testing new and innovative procedures and technologies. [email: sternm@cofc.edu]ORCIDAnabel Quan-Haase http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2560-6709