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There are substantial inequalities in access to and use of the Internet. These inequalities build on enduring social and economic inequalities that have themselves been rooted in previous rounds of the development of electronic technologies and have largely resisted public policies designed to remedy them. Rapid developments in the use of the Internet have great potential for commercialization and democratization, but digital inequality means that this potential is not always exploited to the advantage of the poorer sectors of the community. Recent public policies have attempted to remedy digital disadvantage, but there is little evidence that they are fundamentally transforming them. Constant innovation enables the more advantaged sectors to advance their position, while many are still excluded from compensatory attempts at catch up. An increasing body of experience suggests ideas for new approaches, but the magnitude of the challenge of eroding digital inequality should not be underestimated.

While the field of digital inequality continues to expand in many directions, the relationship between digital inequalities and other forms of inequality has yet to be fully appreciated. This article invites social scientists in and outside the field of digital media studies to attend to digital inequality, both as a substantive problem and as a methodological concern. The authors present current research on multiple aspects of digital inequality, defined expansively in terms of access, usage, skills, and self-perceptions, as well as future lines of research. Each of the contributions makes the case that digital inequality deserves a place alongside more traditional forms of inequality in the twenty-first century pantheon of inequalities. Digital inequality should not be only the preserve of specialists but should make its way into the work of social scientists concerned with a broad range of outcomes connected to life chances and life trajectories. As we argue, the significance of digital inequalities is clear across a broad range of individual-level and macro-level domains, including life course, gender, race, and class, as well as health care, politics, economic activity, and social capital.

International audience Marking the 25 th anniversary of the "digital divide," we continue our metaphor of the digital inequality stack by mapping out the rapidly evolving nature of digital inequality using a broad lens. We tackle complex, and often unseen, inequalities spawned by the platform economy, automation, big data, algorithms, cybercrime, cybersafety, gaming, emotional well-being, assistive technologies, civic engagement, and mobility. These inequalities are woven throughout the digital inequality stack in many ways including differentiated access, use, consumption, literacies, skills, and production. While many users are competent prosumers who nimbly work within different layers of the stack, very few individuals are "full stack engineers" able to create or recreate digital devices, networks, and software platforms as pure producers. This new frontier of digital inequalities further differentiates digitally skilled creators from mere users. Therefore, we document emergent forms of inequality that radically diminish individuals' agency and augment the power of technology creators, big tech, and other already powerful social actors whose dominance is increasing.

Introduction -- The evolution of the digital divide -- Why does Weber still matter? -- Digital stratification: class, status group and parties in the age of the Internet -- Life chances and the third level of digital divide -- Concluding remarks and recommendations

Ellen Helsper goes beyond questions of digital divides and who's connected or not. She asks why and how social and digital inequalities are linked, as she reveals the tangible outcomes of socio-digital inequalities to everyday lives in an expert exploration of contemporary theory, research and practice in socio-digital inequalities. She makes an urgent call to broaden our horizons, to expand our theoretical and methodological toolkits, and work collectively to achieve a fairer digital future for all.

This article examines how digital inequalities give rise to privacy practices and resource acquisition strategies among disadvantaged youths. Based on in-depth interview data, the article probes the hidden costs of digital inequality among high school students in an agricultural belt of California. The analysis pays special attention to high-achieving students engaging in capital-enhancing activities such as schoolwork and college applications necessitating the use of digital resources. The findings examine the emotional costs paid by disadvantaged strivers whose privacy is compromised in their struggles to obtain the digital resources critical to college admissions, scholarship, and financial aid applications—almost all of which must be completed online. More specifically, the data show how youths facing a dearth of digital resources must manage their lack of physical privacy and digital footprints, as well as adaptively disclose private information to resource gatekeepers. When underresourced youths seek digital resources necessary for capital-enhancing activities, they must weigh the benefits of access to resources against the emotional costs of potentially shaming disclosures. In this way, for these youths lacking resources but with high educational aspirations, privacy and resource acquisition are negotiated processes that require emotional labor.

As the Internet is becoming a fundamental aspect of the society serving as a de facto platform for social and business activities, traditional offline activities and services have remarkably migrated to the web. The presence and interaction of users on these platforms has created a large amount of digital trace which is being effectively exploited by businesses targeting users on these platforms. One of the main players in this regard is online advertising which is the underneath business that drives the majority of the most important online services such as social media, search engines, map services, etc. This has made online advertising a crucial Internet service in its own right. While the benefit of using these digital resources has been accepted widely pushing governments and organizations to improve their Internet coverage, there are major challenges that limit the society from enjoying their benefits. Together with transparency and privacy, digital inequality is the main challenge that the society faces today. In this thesis we propose a set of inexpensive and large scale methodologies that leverages datasets from online advertising systems to measure and characterize digital inequality on the web. Our methodologies consider various demographic, geographic and interest categories at global scale that advances the knowledge of the scientific community to better understand the challenges in the interplay between online services and users, specifically digital inequalities. ; Telematics Engineering ; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain ; pub