An African American Weblog Community's Reading of AIDS in Black America

In the mid 1990s, researchers and public policy officials observed a chasm between individuals who had access to computers and the Internet, and those who did not. This gap was termed the “digital divide”. Over the last decade, the digital divide has become an increasingly elastic concept that includes disparities in access to computing infrastructure (NTIA 1995) as well as differences in digital skills (Hargittai 2002) and information literacy (Warschauer 2002). Key sociodemographic variables like income, ethnicity and education are viewed as having a differential impact on Internet use.