Norris, Pippa 2001, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, the Internet Worldwide, Cambridge University Press

Digital divide is understood as multidimensional phenomenon encompassing three distinct aspects. The global divide refers to divergence of Internet access between industrialized and developing countries. The social divide concerns the gap between information rich and poor in each nation. The democratic divide signifies the difference between those who do, and do not, use the panoply of digital resources to engage, mobilize, and participate in public life. (p.4) If investment in digital technologies has the capacity to boost productivity, advanced economies such as Sweden, Australia, and the United States at the forefront of the technological revolution may be well placed to pull even farther ahead, maintaining their edge in future decades. A few middle-level economies like Taiwan, Brazil, and South Korea may manage to leverage themselves profitably into niche markets within the global marketplace, servicing international corporations based elsewhere by providing software development or manufacturing silicon chips. But most poorer societies, lagging far behind, plagued by multiple burdens of debt, disease, and ignorance, may join the digital world decades later and, in the long-term, may ultimately fail to catch up. (p.5) Hargittai, Eszter 2003, The Digital Divide and What To Do About It in Jones, Derek C., New Economy Handbook, Academic Press, CA Digital Divide: The gap between those who have access to digital technologies and those who do not; or the gap between those who use digital technologies and those who do not understood in binary terms distinguishing the haves from the havenots Digital Inequality: A refined understanding of the digital divide that emphasizes a spectrum of inequality across segments of the population depending on differences along several dimensions of technology access and use.

There are factors beyond mere connectivity that need to be considered when discussing the potential implications of the Internet for inequality. In addition to relying on basic measures of access to a medium, we need to consider the following more nuanced measures of use: 1. Technical means (quality of the equipment) 2. Autonomy of use (location of access, freedom to use the medium for ones preferred activities) 3. Social support networks (availability of others one can turn to for assistance with use, size of networks to encourage use) 4. Experience (number of years using the technology, types of use patterns) These four factors together contribute to ones level of skill. Skill is defined as the ability to efficiently and effectively use the new technology. Here, I consider these five components which should guide our analyses of digital inequality at the individual user level. See also: http://www.blackwellsynergy.com/links/doi/10.1111%2F1468-2257.00215? cookieSet=1 http://aectmembers.org/m/research_handbook/Chapters/05.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/group/siqss/itandsociety/v01i05/v01i 05a03.pdf