Is the Digital Divide Really Closing? a Critique of Inequality Measurement in a Nation Online

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce Report “A Nation Online: How Americans are Expanding their Use of the Internet,” computer ownership and Internet use are rapidly becoming more equally distributed across households in the United States. The authors of “A Nation Online” use two statistical arguments to support this claim: 1) annual rates of increase for computer and Internet use are increasing most quickly for poor households, and 2) “Gini” coefficients for inequality of computer use are decreasing. These analyses critique these arguments and show that patterns that the authors attribute to decreasing inequality are instead explained by two factors: 1) computer and Internet use is increasing, and 2) households with higher incomes began using computers and the Internet earlier than households with lower incomes. Reanalyzing these same data using odds ratios indicates that computer ownership and Internet use may actually be spreading less quickly among poorer households than among richer households. If current trends continue, poor households will eventually have the nearly universal levels of computer and Internet use currently seen among richer households, but this “catching-up” could take two decades. ____________________ Steven P. Martin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. [email protected] I want to thank John Robinson and Alan Neustadtl for their invaluable advice and creative suggestions for this study. 2 IS THE DIGITAL DIVIDE REALLY CLOSING? MARTIN IT&SOCIETY, Vol. 1, Issue 4, Spring 2003 http://www.ITandSociety.org Is the “digital divide” going away? The United States has shifted from a Clinton administration strongly focused on a digital divide to a Bush administration largely dismissive of it. This changed political environment has led to numerous reassessments of the evidence for and against a gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in terms of computer and Internet access (Compaigne 2001; Cooper 2002) and the extent to which the digital divide is a temporary phenomenon that will fix itself (Samuelson 2002). In its 2002 report, A Nation Online : How Americans are Expanding Their Use of the Internet (U.S. Department of Commerce 2002), the U.S. Department of Commerce examined levels and trends in inequality of computer use across various groups of Americans. The findings were emphatic and reassuring; Computer and Internet use are increasing most rapidly among the poor and other disadvantaged groups, and the digital divide is closing quickly. This study challenges the sanguine assessment of A Nation Online with respect to inequality in computer and Internet access, arguing that the key findings in A Nation Online depend on two types of statistical analyses— estimates of relative rates and “Gini” indices designed by the authors. Such analyses are not necessarily wrong, but they are clearly misleading when applied to trends in inequality, because they are inherently asymmetrical. When applied to questions of who owns computers or uses the Internet, these analyses consistently and automatically show that inequality is decreasing. However, when one reframes the analyses in terms of who does not own computers, they show with equal certainty that inequality is rapidly increasing. The authors then emphasize the results that indicate a decrease in inequality and downplay the equally valid results that indicate an increase in inequality. One alternative, appropriate measure that is inherently symmetrical and invariant with respect to the definition of the outcome variable is the odds ratio (to be described later.) The data in A Nation Online are reevaluated using odds ratios to measure trends in inequality in computer and Internet use. While not clearly pessimistic, the results are certainly not as optimistic as those published in A Nation Online, and they indicate that the closing of the digital divide is far from a foregone conclusion.