Internet adoption and usage patterns are different: Implications for the digital divide
By Avi Goldfarb, Jeffrey T. Prince. Information Economics and Policy, 2008
440 citations recorded by the source corpus.
There is a well-documented "digital divide" in internet connection. We ask whether a similar divide exists for internet usage. Using a survey of 18,439 Americans, we find that high-income, educated people were more likely to have adopted the internet by December 2001. However, conditional on adoption, low-income, less-educated people spend more time online. We examine four possible reasons for this pattern: (1) differences in the opportunity cost of leisure time, (2) differences in the usefulness of online activities, (3) differences in the amount of leisure time, and (4) selection. Our evidence suggests this pattern is best explained by differences in the opportunity cost of leisure time. Our results also help to determine the potential effects of internet-access subsidies.
Subfields: Media Technology, Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a2a05d06e57649154306eaebbe2151008e7b4ad9
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Citations in the corpus
- Technology and Education: Computers, Software, and the Internet (2015, neutral): “19 See Hoffman and Novak (1998), Mossberger et al. (2003), Warschauer (2003), Ono and Zavodny (2007), Fairlie (2004),Mossberger et al. (2006), and Goldfarb and Prince (2008) for examples of previous studies of disparities in computer and Internet use within countries.”
- Does the Internet Make People Happier (2011, neutral): “Our paper is also related to the literature on the digital divide (Di Maggio et alii, 2004; Goldfarb and Prince, 2008; Prieger and Hu, 2008; Drouard, 2011).”
- The digital production gap: The digital divide and Web 2.0 collide (2011, background): “However, some researchers have found that while high-status people have higher adoption rates than their low-status counterparts, they tend to stay online for less time (Goldfarb and Prince, 2008).”