As We Now Think

Yesterday, I wrote a post summarizing scholarship by Eszter Hartgittai on inequality on Facebook and MySpace. In this post, I want to discuss two more of her articles. I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with the research in this field, so I’m going to review of few more of her papers today. Over the next few posts, I plan on writing about the work of other researchers of social technology.

Among the work with which I am familiar, the book chapter The Digital Reproduction of Inequality best summarizes Hargittai’s work. In it, she introduces the central theme of much of her work: the ways in which offline privilege manifests itself in our online behavior.

This has been true for over a decade. Ten years ago, it was apparent in differential rates of access to the internet. Back then, advantaged groups were going online far more than others. According to Hargittai, ‘[i]n particular, men, younger people, whites, non-Hispanics, urban residents, the more highly educated, and those with higher income were more connected than their counterparts.”

This is almost certainly less true today than in 1998; the increase in overall connectivity is making privileged-group membership less important in predicted web access. However, differences in internet skill and activity are all too often split along those same lines.

Hargittai’s work makes a strong case that this difference goes deeper than simple formal education (although that is sometimes a crucial difference). Instead, she argues, our ability to navigate the internet is in part determined by the level of knowledge available in our social circles. We learn many of the ‘tricks of the trade’, as it were, from those with whom we have relationships. For a variety of reasons, individuals of high socioeconomic status are more likely to have accurate and plentiful knowledge in this domain.

Continue reading ‘More Research on the Web and Inequality’