La fracture numerique

caged in
La fracture numerique (digital divide) is exposed in a survey of young adults in the US. The survey looked at patterns of use with respect to the social networking sites Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster. The main headlines are that “gender, race and ethnicity, and parental educational background are all associated with use, but in most cases only when the aggregate concept of social network sites is disaggregated by service…” So, as we suspected we have a picture of unequal participation related to user background. The author concludes, here, that differences in the adoption of social networking services will contribute to digital inequality. A similar theme was identified here by Jackie who refers to the social graph (here).