ABSTRACT
In spite of the initial enthusiasm about the Internet's capacity to facilitate access to information and thus expand access to education, jobs and better healthcare, research showed, very early, that the new technology exacerbates inequality rather than ameliorates it (DiMaggio, 2001). It became increasingly obvious that access to the Internet is dependent on various characteristics such as socio-economic status, gender, race, age, and ethnicity, and these differences are likely to reinforce inequality in opportunities for economic mobility and social participation (DiMaggio et al., 2004). Arguing that mere access is not enough to ensure equal take-up of opportunities, the theorists of the second-level digital divide (Hargittai, 2002) tried to move the debate onto factors of digital inequalities from a technological deterministic view of material access, to social and cultural factors that shape patterns of use (Selwyn, 2004). In addition, the conflict perspective of digital inequalities states that without the development of Internet competencies, as a particular set of skills, access to the Internet may in fact foster enduring social inequalities (Witte and Mannon, 2010).
