Wednesday, December 2, 12:00 noon
Frist Multipurpose Room B
Digital Inequality
Paul DiMaggio
In the Internet's early years, some observers believed that the new technology would reduce social inequality in at least two ways. First, by reducing the price of information, it would make information more available, and therefore level the playing field. Second, because young people appeared to have the inside track in mastering and using the new technologies (and because youth is negatively associated with wealth and uncorrelated with other indicators of socioeconomic status), some felt that the advantage of the young would likewise reduce certain kinds of inequality in access to and use of information. By contrast, other more jaded observers predicted that the well to do and well educated would use their resources to extract more benefit from the Web than for their less prosperous and well schooled neighbors, reproducing or even exacerbating inequality rather than moderating it.
Now that the commercial Internet is almost 15 years old, which of these two groups of prophets proved more prescient? Based on research that I and my students have carried out, I will address three issues. First, what is the status of the digital divide? Which divides (i.e. inequality in accessw to the Internet between which groups) have persisted and which have moderated over time, and why? Second, once people go on-line, how does social inequality shape their experience --- how they use the Internet and what they get out of it? Third, what difference does it make? What evidence addresses the question of whether access to and use of the internet does (or does not) improve people's life chances and ability to participate in their communities?
Speaker Bio: Paul DiMaggio is A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard and taught for 12 years at Yale (in the Sociology Department and School of management) before coming to Princeton in 1992. At Princeton, he has been Chair and Director of Graduate Studies of the Sociology Department, co-founder and research director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Organization, and a member of the Executive Committee for the Center for Information Technology Policy. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and David Riesman Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, DiMaggio has written extensively about culture, information technology, and social inequality. Recent papers include, "Make Money Surfing the Web? The Impact of Internet Use on the Earnings of U.S. Workers" (with Bart Bonikowski) in American Sociological Review (2008); and "From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use: A Literature Review and Agenda for Research on Digital Inequality" (With Eszter Hargittai, Coral Celeste, and Steven Shafer), published in Social Inequality, edited by Kathryn Neckerman (NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004). He co-teaches an undergraduate course on the Internet and Public Policy with Professor David Dobkin at the Woodrow Wilson School.
