Is the digital divide reversing?

I think this is an interesting thought piece / editorial.  I’ve noticed in the last year that the research and polls coming out from market research and survey firms like Pew, EKOS, and Nielsen are showing some of the curve that’s discussed here.  It’s an important thing to think about, especially in public libraries and school libraries where serving a broad range of socio-economic demographics is part of our core service mission.

Is the digital divide reversing?

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2013/01/04/is-the-digital-divide-reversing/

Snippets:

“Out of a batch of recent polling data from EKOS is some evidence that the relationship between internet usage and income might be reversing.

“Historically,” EKOS pollster Frank Graves said Friday, “the relationship between internet consumption and socioeconomic status … was always positive. One of the strongest predictors of who was on the internet and how much time they spent there and the range of things they did was how much education they had, how much income and whether they had a good job or not.”

In other words, this is the phenomenon that was generally referred to as the “digital divide.”

“The whole idea that the group that were offside on the digital world were increasingly, much more economically vulnerable and the people on were more affluent and economically able,” Graves said. “So the fact that it’s working in the opposite direction now, even though it’s not a huge relationship, is quite a jarring difference from what we would have seen in the past, where this was actually the other way around.”

Age does play a factor, Graves said. . . .“If Internet 1… was very much connected to better socioeconomic status, it appears that Internet 2 and social media are not.””

As always it’s interesting to look at the mine canaries in the earliest data to see if there are challenges to libraryland assumptions about income and digital access.

Stephen