Inbook,
Media access: Social and psychological dimensions of new technology use
chapter Divides in Succession: Possession, Skills, and Use of New Media for Societal Participation., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, Mahwah, NJ, US, (2004)
Abstract
(From the chapter) This chapter develops a dynamic view of using the
new media for the participation in society. Most everyday notions
and many scientific analyses of the so-called "digital divide" are
static views of social inclusion and participation. It is presumed
that problems of new media access are solved when everyone has a
computer and a network connection and is able to work with them.
This is seen as a single event in history after the technical and
commercial introduction of a particular kind of technology, in this
case the personal computer and the Internet. In doing this, one also
reveals a technical view of new media access: a hardware and software
orientation. Access is a matter of having and being able to operate
a computer and an Internet connection. How they are used, and for
what purposes, receives much less attention. Finally, one tries to
explain the differences observed in new media access by the usual,
in this respect rather shallow, demographic variables of income,
education, age, gender, ethnicity, and urban or rural background.
In this way, one misses the opportunity of going deeper in the analysis.
Perhaps new (in)equalities emerge in the information society and
in new media access not fitting these classical distinctions. To
start with, I present a dynamic model of new media access in four
successive stages. This serves as the backbone of this chapter. Subsequently,
this model is filled with further conceptual distinctions and the
latest empirical data of new media access in the United States and
Europe, in particular the Netherlands, the author's native country
and the source of a large-scale survey with multiple regression models
of factors behind the demographic variables just mentioned. In the
third section I return to the interpretations in public opinion of
the inequalities of new media access described. This means further
criticism of the static, technical, and superficial demographic views.
Then I deal with scientific explanations on the basis of empirical
multivariate analyses and theoretical elaborations of concepts like
social and cultural capital and the primary and positional goods
of information and communication in an information and network society.
The whole analysis in this chapter is directed to societal participation
in the public sphere. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all
rights reserved)
Tags
- ability
- characteristics;
- computer
- computers;
- demographic
- digital
- divide*;
- factors*;
- human
- imported
- interaction*;
- internet*;
- level;
- society;
- sociocultural
- technology
