Week 7: Digital divide and socioeconomic status

The six reading materials assigned for this week talked about digital divide. The authors’ focuses were on finding variables that is interrelated to digital divide. Many found socioeconomic status to be a significant factor that influences digital divide. The fact that age, gender, education, race, and economic status of a person influence his or her online behavior was mind-blowing. As young, educated, raised in an urban setting, and more importantly socializing within a peer group, the thought that Web 2.0 can be unfairly distributed has not struck me that hard. Reading the materials, however, left me with a gloomy idea that digital world is no different to real world.

As one of the authors mentioned in his article, it seems like online community is just a replica of the reality. The supporting evidence of online community being a replica of the reality can be found in other studies as well. We read in one of our reading materials that educated Caucasian males have more influence and credibility on blogs. Such phenomenon is consistent with reality, which dominant and active member of the society is well-educated Caucasian male. As the readings of this week suggest a strong influence of high education, male, and Caucasians on the Web 2.0, the dominance of educated Caucasian male bloggers on the web seems obvious. Another example of online community being a replica of the reality can be found in the case of virtual reality. In 2005, a severe virtual plague called “the corrupted blood” occurred on a virtual game world, the World of Warcraft. Even though it was a virtual plague, the users’ behavior was fairly similar to real world humans, that the scholars have studied the incident for a future reference (Lofgren and Fefferman, 2007). As with the online participation, which less educated, female, old, and minorities had limited chance and recourses, characters who were first to die during the epidemics were low level users with less money and HP, and physically old or infirm non-player characters. These examples show that the level of online participation and the human behavior online does not differ much from that of the real world.

If the online world is just a replica of the reality, online participation cannot help in developing democracy because the participators, resources, and values on the Web 2.0 are still the same with the real world.

Even in this pessimistic situation, there is an opportunity to better the situation. One author questioned if the low participation level of educated females’ were caused by parental influence (“Web is a dangerous place with sexual predators”). This potential research question is inline with social cognitive theory (SCT) that environment influences cognition, and cognition influences behavior. It would be interesting to study how much the environmentally influenced cognition has a relation with the digital divide. The environment of less money or education, ethnic group is hard to change, but if it is a cognition problem influenced by environment that is limiting the participation, it may be easier to change than the environment itself. For example, being a female is a status that is hard to change, but her perception and behavior of participating online can change if she is less told to, or fight against the saying such as "women should be more careful of the online world".  Thus, studying cognition and digital participation should have some implication on online being more democratic place.