About Inequalities and the Digital Divide

Alum Jen Schradie is on a Sciences Po podcast with Sergei Guriev discussing the Digital Divide!

From Jen:

As a digital scholar, It's been both fun and challenging to track digital inequalities because they're changing so rapidly!

From the 1990s to 2000, Twitter was launched, YouTube was diffused... and so there was all this utopianism around, how anyone can, be a content producer, but I sought to really look at who are these people creating online content.

I do want to challenge this idea that everyone is online.

There's a lot of arguments around how, especially among youth, too much digital technology can impact, negative, have a negative impacts on mental health. But it's actually, people that have less internet access that have, lower self-reports of social well-being.

My research switches the causal arrow and really looks at how do societal differences shape the use of technology itself.

People who are in more precarious work positions, are much less likely to feel safe posting online something that might be perceived as as controversial.

Listen to the podcast here!