How Divergent Skills Affect the Online Participation Divide

At the conclusion of my travels in Canada and Europe, I’ve made my way to Lugano for ECREA2018. We start with the first of two keynotes, by Eszter Hargittai, whose focus is on the digital divide in online participation. The fundamental question here is who benefits the most from Internet participation, and who does not: do participation divides facilitate social mobility or reproduce social divides?

The key point here is that digital divides cannot be solved by mere connectivity: getting online does not equate to using the Internet effectively and efficiently. Rather, such uses continue to be moderated by socioeconomic status, technical and social contexts, personal Internet skills, and the types of uses being made. Internet skills here include especially an awareness of what is possible, and the ability to create and share content, amongst a long list of others – and it is important to focus on such skills because users’ skills levels can be addressed by a variety of interventions more quickly than a variety of more intractable factors.

Users’ skill levels can be studied using direct observation (e.g. in lab settings) as well as through surveys, interviews, and other methods. Such studies often find that even young adults, falsely understood to be ‘digital natives’, have highly variable Internet skills; the broader population’s skills are even more widely diverging. Survey data show that age and skill are very far from closely correlated; a more significant factor here is socioeconomic status, and this pattern has persisted even though overall usage skills in the general population have increased over the past ten years. Further, according to their self-reporting, men’s usage skills continue to be higher than women’s – even though this may be the result of systematic over- and underreporting, respectively.

It is also important to consider all this across the different (social media) platforms people might be using. Different platforms attract users of different socioeconomic status and skill level, and this means that the voices of particular groups of users may be overrepresented on these platforms. Which groups are we excluding as we focus on the data from such platforms, then?

Finally, then, skills matter crucially in facilitating users’ active participation. One of the most egregious examples of this is Wikipedia, one of the most popular Websites and sources of information today – yet it is predominantly edited by male users of a particular sociodemographic background, and this manifests in the attention paid to particular types and categories of information, and the coverage of particularly gendered topics. Most research into Wikipedia has sought to explain this by examining the community culture or the dynamics of contribution within the site; however, this inherently excludes non-contributors, and a focus on the skills required to undertake specific editing tasks on the site provides a better opportunity to identify the specific bottlenecks that prevent women and users from more diverse backgrounds from editing Wikipedia.