The Digital Divide: Status Differences in Virtual Environments

With the introduction of the Internet, many people saw the beginning of a new era; an era of democratization, of status equalization, and of freedom of speech for everyone. The accessibility of other places and people via the medium of computers, as well as the absence of many social and status cues, would make it possible for people to reach out to other people across the national and social borders that govern our face-to-face interaction. We would turn on our computers – and instantly be connected not only with our offices, our colleagues, and our families and friends, but also with people all over the world with whom we would make exciting new acquaintances. This hype about the Internet as a world-embracing technology that will remove many barriers (national, cultural, etc.) and equalize status differences between people has a large resemblance to the widespread ideas about the telephone when it began to be widely used about a hundred years ago. At that time, the limitlessness was seen both as a positive and negative feature of the new technology. So, for example, it would bridge cultures, but it would also be like an open door and would make it possible for dishonest people from the lower class to make phone calls into honorable American homes. Claude Fischer, who has written a history of American telephony [1], has argued not only against some of these, nowadays merely amusing, fears and hopes, but also against the belief that telephone technology has significantly changed American society. The reason why it did not, Fischer argues, is because people did not change their communication behavior with the advent of the telephone and start to communicate with strangers far away, but instead used the telephone to maintain already existing, mostly local ties. The same kind of hype, as already mentioned, has also accompanied the early days of the Internet. This has partly been negative, a warning against opening the internet door to anyone, entering in any disguise; but partly it has also been positive, suggesting that the anonymity and accessibility of the Internet will change