DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

Mostly they're older -- 59% of U.S. seniors don't go online. Also, nearly 60% of U.S. adults who never completed high school don't use the Internet. And they're mostly poor -- nearly 40% of people with an annual household income under $30,000 don't go online. (Pew notes that people with an annual household income under $20,000 are especially unlikely to use the
Internet.)

The racial aspect of the home broadband gap has narrowed, but not vanished. According to Pew: "By 2010, while national home broadband adoption had slowed, growth in broadband adoption among African Americans jumped well above the national average, with 22% broadband adoption growth since the previous year.

Mobile devices are making a dent in the U.S. digital divide.

"Groups that have traditionally been on the other side of the digital divide in basic internet access are now using wireless connections to go online," said the report. "Among smartphone owners, young adults, minorities, those with no college experience, and those with lower household income levels are more likely than other groups to say that their phone is their main source of Internet access."

[Phone access limited tech means that the user is having a distincly different internet experience. They are viewing only. So much of the internet involves having the ability to create and have interactions online.]
http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/13/tech/web/pew-not-using-internet


Among adults who do not use the internet, almost half have told us that the main reason they don’t go online is because they don’t think the internet is relevant to them. Most have never used the internet before, and don’t have anyone in their household who does. About one in five say that they do know enough about technology to start using the internet on their own, and only one in ten told us that they were interested in using the internet or email in the future.
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Digital-differences/Overview.aspx?cnn=yes

We have a lack of voices. Online
[If people are having such meaningful connections online then are these people missing out in some way. If people are beginning to expect those experiences--thoughtful discussion, unbiased advice-- as something exclusive to the internet then are people who expect these connections as face to face experiences missing out. To use a metaphor, Do they become the group still frequenting last month's popular bar? (this begins to answer question of how social media changes the way we experience the real world).

Who uses Twitter as their main means of online interaction? Are they limited.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/08/16/129235517/how-black-people-may-or-may-not-use-twitter
The reason that the article is about black people is because these participants in these hashtags are using the service in a unique way," Manjoo says. "And I think that one of the reasons why I wasn't interested in how white people use Twitter is because I haven't seen groups of white people use it in this very interesting way."
[References article]
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2010/08/how_black_people_use_twitter.html
Then there's the apparent segregation in these tags. While you begin to see some nonblack faces after a trending topic hits Twitter's home page, the early participants in these tags are almost all black.
Does this suggest a break between blacks and nonblacks on Twitter―that real-life segregation is being mirrored online?

In April, Edison Media Research released a survey which found that nearly one-quarter of people on Twitter are African-American; the firm noted this was "approximately double the percentage of African-Americans in the current U.S. population." That survey has been widely cited as an explanation for the popularity of blacktags, but as Fred Stutzman later pointed out, Edison's survey had a high margin of error, and thus didn't really tell us much about how many black people use Twitter. In general, it's difficult to get demographic information about Twitter users―you don't have to tell the service your age, race, ethnicity, or geographic location when you join. As such, when we talk about black Twitter users, we're usually talking about people who've chosen photos of black people as their avatars. This lack of reliable demographic information has hampered many efforts to get to the bottom of this phenomenon.

When he looked up the users, he noticed that a lot of them were black. It's in exactly these kinds of tight-knit groups that Twitter memes flourish, Meeder says. "It's my impression that these hashtags start in dense communities―people who are highly connected to each other," Meeder says. "If you have 50 of these people talking about it, think about the number of outsiders who follow at least one of those 50―it's pretty high at that point. So you can actually get a pretty big network effect by having high density."

Omar Wasow, a co-founder of BlackPlanet.com and a contributor to Slate's sister publication The Root, was one of several black people who told me that he rarely sees the people in his timeline joining these hashtags. "If you're not a teen or twentysomething and probably working class, you're likely not following these people, and you're out of the loop," he says. Like me, Wasow says he only notices these conversations when they hit Twitter's trending lists.

[Could there be some sort of online segregation? This happens often in work place environments and in school's. Think" The Black Kids Table." I'm not surprised by this idea. But what can this mean for the internet. Well, if its true.]




Consequences of digital divide

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

Separately, the commission will help send digital literacy trainers this fall to organizations like the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some of the financial support for this program, part of a broader initiative called Connect2Compete, comes from private companies like Best Buy and Microsoft.

These efforts complement a handful of private and state projects aimed at paying for digital trainers to teach everything from basic keyboard use and word processing to how to apply for jobs online or use filters to block children from seeing online pornography.

F.C.C. officials and other policy makers say they still want to get computing devices into the hands of every American. That gaps remains wide ― according to the commission, about 65 percent of all Americans have broadband access at home, but that figure is 40 percent in households with less than $20,000 in annual income. Half of all Hispanics and 41 percent of African-American homes lack broadband.

But “access is not a panacea,” said Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft. “Not only does it not solve problems, it mirrors and magnifies existing problems we’ve been ignoring.”

A study published in 2010 by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children and teenagers whose parents do not have a college degree spent 90 minutes more per day exposed to media than children from higher socioeconomic families. In 1999, the difference was just 16 minutes.

Despite the educational potential of computers, the reality is that their use for education or meaningful content creation is minuscule compared to their use for pure entertainment,” said Vicky Rideout, author of the decade-long Kaiser study. “Instead of closing the achievement gap, they’re widening the time-wasting gap.”


http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/why-people-click/201301/homeless-young-adults-use-facebook
The surprise to us was that nearly 75% of homeless young adults reprorted using social networking sites. We also found little differences in what they use it for.

This left us wondering: has the digital divide gone away?



Applying her argument to Android and iOS users, we can see the differences between these users show that “while all population segments may have become increasingly connected, serious divides persist with the most disadvantaged trailing behind the more privileged in significant ways” (Hargittai 2008: 938

It’s a very optimistic, but now faded notion, to see the internet as “The Information Superhighway.” In reality, the highway is turning more into “The Information Toll Road” as technology evolves.

Even though Instagram was launched in 2010 through the iTunes store, Android users didn’t get to access until 2012. This two-year gap created a distinct user base and sense of entitlement amongst the iPhone Instagram community. The user base was even further isolated through the way in which Instagram acts as a social network. There is no online access to the app or photos through their website. The only way users can browse and share photos is through their cellphone. Therefore, Android users couldn’t access this “gated community,” allowing them to be further alienated and seen as unwanted intruders storming the gates of the sacred iPhone community.



Haggart Pdf
"Use refers to actual use not simply access to it" paraphrase
"dichotonomous approach is no longer sufficient as so many now have access"
"gaps between economic groups' internet use (is it internet use) widens over time"
"socioeconomic status is a factor in one's relationship with Ict"
"ability to pass on advice whether online on over the water cooler is a factor"

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.