Second-Level Digital Divide: Differences in People's Online Skills

Much of the existing literature on the digital divide – the differences between the haves and have nots regarding access to the Internet – limits its scope to a binary classification of technology use by only considering whether someone does or does not use the Internet. To remedy this shortcoming, in this paper I look at the differences in people’s online skills. In order to measure people’s online ability, I assigned search tasks to a random sample of Internet users from a suburban county. Findings suggest that people search for content in a myriad of ways and there is a large variance in whether people are able to find various types of content on the Web and how long they take to complete online tasks. Age…