Jeremy Schulz

COVID-19 has put a spotlight not only on digital inequalities but on the formation of digital skills. With the pandemic, the abrupt transition of schools to distance learning in continues to underscore the key importance of digital skills for students who will increasingly need digital skills to navigate new educational terrains and adapt to its demands. This study examines fundamental issues in the formation of digital skills and argues that access to the Internet and digital devices are insufficient if students lack digital skills to use them and benefit from them. To explain why we analyze the relationships and learning channels that are central to students acquisition of digital skills. We examine the interrelationships between four essential “channels” through which students acquire digitals skills: through self direction; through peers; through family; and through formal instruction and interaction with teachers. Drawing from original survey and interview data among disadvanta...

<jats:p> Analyzing diverse and rich data on the COVID-19 pandemic, this issue of the American Behavioral Scientist offers important insights into health and risk assessment in a time of unprecedented crisis in the 21st century. This issue explores health, emotions, and well-being vis-à-vis the pandemic and its societal impacts. Across the articles, we see the complex ways that this global health crisis has consequences for individuals and groups as they engage in risk assessment and grapple with the secondary effects of the pandemic. Within this issue, we observe the importance of information exchange, networks and relationships, emotional and economic well-being, and risk perception. All of these phenomena converge in the myriad ways that the COVID-19 pandemic forces people to reevaluate everyday activities in consequential life realms. As the issue as a whole illuminates, human emotions and risk assessment are powerful forces that prompt practices and behaviors even in a time of public health crisis. </jats:p>

This article confronts the question of how we might renew the political economy of communication for an era of communicative abundance rather than scarcity. Drawing on Jodi Dean's concept of "communicative capitalism," I argue that, if capitalism has become more communicative, then the reinvigoration of political-economic critique necessitates the analysis of, engagement with, and support of the labor that generates profits in the media and communications industries. The setting of the 2014 International Communication Association conference, at the Sheraton in Seattle, offers a useful way to introduce the topic of my contribution. Fifteen years ago, in December 1999, this hotel had a line of riot police protecting the front entrance as the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was besieged and ultimately undone by protests against neoliberal globalization. Around the time of the WTO demonstrations in Seattle, critical political economy of the media offered acti...

Sponsored by the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association, this volume brings together nine studies of the digital public sphere. The contributions illuminate three key areas of digital citizenship, namely political engagement, participation networks, and content production. In the first section, authors address relationships including: new media and efficacy, YouTube and young voters, political interest and online news. In the following section, the contributions speak to the importance of participation in social, scholarly, familial, and support networks. Subsequently, in section three on production, two contributions offers insight into unequal production, more specifically, gendered digital production inequalities and the varied responsiveness of microbloggers to different kinds of media events and issues. As a whole, the contributions revisit old questions and answer important new queries about netizenship and the digital publi...

Sponsored by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Section of the American Sociological Association, Volume 10 of the Communication and Information Technologies Annual, Digital Distinctions & Inequalities, brings together nine studies of this increasingly important form of inequality. Drawn from four continents, the research provides a global overview of the current state of the field in different cultural contexts. As a whole, the volume illuminates the complexities of digital inequalities as they are manifested in groups and societies EURO"even when access is widespread. In their depth and breadth, the volume'EURO(t)s contributions provide an indispensable guide to emergent forms of digital inequality as it rapidly evolves.

Sponsored by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Section (CITAMS) of the American Sociological Association, Volume 10 of the Communication and Information Technologies Annual, Digital Distinctions & Inequalities, brings together nine studies of this increasingly important form of inequality. Drawn from four continents, the research provides a global overview of the current state of the field in different cultural contexts. As a whole, the volume illuminates the complexities of digital inequalities as they are manifested in groups and societies even when access is widespread. In their depth and breadth, the volume contributions provide an indispensable guide to emergent forms of digital inequality as it rapidly evolves. Section I: New Perspectives on Digital Stratification Section II: Diversities of Usage, Social Class, and Capital Section III: Emotions and Dispositions Section IV: Open WI-FI and Mobile Networks Section V: Public Policy

Marking the 25th 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...

This article presents logistic models examining how pandemic anxiety and COVID-19 comprehension vary with digital confidence among adults in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic. As we demonstrate statistically with a nationally representative data set, the digitally confident have lower probability of experiencing physical manifestations of pandemic anxiety and higher probability of adequately comprehending critical information on COVID-19. The effects of digital confidence on both pandemic anxiety and COVID-19 comprehension persist, even after a broad range of potentially confounding factors are taken into account, including sociodemographic factors such as age, gender, race/ethnicity, metropolitan status, and partner status. They also remain discernable after the introduction of general anxiety, as well as income and education. These results offer evidence that the digitally disadvantaged experience greater vulnerability to the secondary effects of the pandemic...

The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally, the unusual conditions of the pandemic—unlike other crises—have impacted almost every facet of our lives. The pandemic has deepened existing inequalities and created new vulnerabilities related to social isolation, incarceration, involuntary exclusion from the labor market, diminished economic opportunity, life-and-death risk in the workplace, and a host of emergent digital, emotional, and economic divides. In tandem, many less advantaged individuals and groups have suffered disproportionate hardship related to the pandemic in the form of fear and anxiety, exposure to misinformation, and the effects of the politicization of the crisis. Man...

Drawing on Gina Neff’s concept of venture labor as the “explicit expression of entrepreneurial values by non-entrepreneurs,” this research brings together voices from multiple social science perspectives including communication, sociology, and media studies. Together, the contributors grapple with how the work of media making is changing with the introduction of new media technologies, the economic ideologies that support the work of the production of popular communication, and the precarity of media work in a digital media landscape. The authors ask, What are the risks and rewards of tying an increasingly insecure form of work to economic risks, opportunities, and rewards, on the one hand, and the good life, on the other hand?

In Venture Labor , we encounter resourceful and skilled groups of professionals dealing with a complex mixture of economic and noneconomic opportunity, risk, insecurity, and creative fulfillment. To navigate this shifting and fluid landscape, these professionals choose from among a set of contrasting strategies. Some of these strategies entail insecurity and risk, while others maximize opportunities for desired creative work or the chance to acquire economic wealth. In examining these strategies, Venture Labor unravels the mysteries of work under a form of individualizing capitalism still in its infancy.

Sponsored by the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association, this volume examines wide-ranging aspects of culture, communication, and [new] media broadly defined. Themes include the interplay between [new] media and any of the following: culture, communication, technology, convergence, the arts, cultural production, and cultural change in the digital age. Contributions shed light on emergent phenomena that -sociologists, particularly those studying media or communication, culture scholars will find intriguing.

2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide.” Although a quarter century has passed, legacy digital inequalities continue, and emergent digital inequalities are proliferating. Many of the initial schisms identified in 1995 are still relevant today. Twenty-five years later, foundational access inequalities continue to separate the digital haves and the digital have-nots within and across countries. In addition, even ubiquitous-access populations are riven with skill inequalities and differentiated usage. Indeed, legacy digital inequalities persist vis-à-vis economic class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, aging, disability, healthcare, education, rural residency, networks, and global geographies. At the same time, emergent forms of inequality now appear alongside legacy inequalities such that notions of digital inequalities must be continually expanded to become more nuanced. We capture the increasingly complex and interrelated nature of digital inequalities by intro...

In this article, we argue that new kinds of risk are emerging with the COVID-19 virus, and that these risks are unequally distributed. As we expose to view, digital inequalities and social inequalities are rendering certain subgroups significantly more vulnerable to exposure to COVID-19. Vulnerable populations bearing disproportionate risks include the social isolated, older adults, penal system subjects, digitally disadvantaged students, gig workers, and last-mile workers. Therefore, we map out the intersection between COVID-19 risk factors and digital inequalities on each of these populations in order to examine how the digitally resourced have additional tools to mitigate some of the risks associated with the pandemic. We shed light on how the ongoing pandemic is deepening key axes of social differentiation, which were previously occluded from view. These newly manifested forms of social differentiation can be conceived along several related dimensions. At their most general and ...

This research brings together digital inequality scholars from across the Americas and Caribbean to examine efforts to tackle digital inequality in Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, the United States, and Canada. As the case studies show, governmental policy has an important role to play in reducing digital disparities, particularly for potential users in rural or remote areas, as well as populations with great economic disparities. We find that public policy can effectively reduce access gaps when it combines the trifecta of network, device, and skill provision, especially through educational institutions. We also note, that urban populations have benefitted from digital inclusion strategies to a greater degree. This underscores that, no matter the national context, rural-urban digital inequality (and often associated economic inequality) is resistant to change. Even when access is provided, potential users may not find it affordable, lack skills, and/or see no b...

This issue of the American Behavioral Scientist probes digital inequality as both an endogenous and exogenous factor shaping key life realms and social processes. These include aging and the life course, family and parenting, students and education, prisoner rehabilitation, and social class. The relationships between digital inequality and these life realms are explored in different institutional and national contexts. By drawing connections between digital inequality and these distinct—yet interconnected—life realms, this issue marks a new frontier in the study of digital inequality.

ABSTRACT Norton's forcefully argued manifesto will appeal to the many students of politics and society who are alienated from the relentless foundationalism, essentialism and positivism of variable-oriented political science. Weaving together philosophical critique with empirically grounded argument, she fights on behalf of the many heterodox students and scholars who have broken with a bankrupt research paradigm. Her heroic mission is to bolster those research programs which respect social life's multivocality, complexity and contingency and do not treat social reality as a collection of preexisting factums awaiting discovery by the unbiased observer. Yet Norton's polemics fall short because she refuses to engage her adversaries on their own territory and prefers to fire slings and arrows from the safe distance of philosophy and metatheory. Her preference for this kind of argumentation means that she often slips into the very kind of "abstract, universalistic" theorizing which she decries in the work of her essentialist and positivist opponents. By recruiting Hegel, Nietzsche, Lacan, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Derrida, etc. as allies in her struggle against the essentialist-positivist fallacies of the mainstream, Norton effectively limits her readership to those students and scholars already conversant with and sympathetic to the concerns of these thinkers. She opens the book with a group of theses (1-23) dealing with culture and social inquiry. Here Norton enlists arguments from anthropologists and philosophers in order to dispose of essentialist and positivist straw men. First on the chopping block is the unsupportable proposition that "Culture" and "cultures" both exist independently of language, time, social practice and relations of domination. A number of equally essentialist generalizations about identity, power and institutions are then dispatched. But it remains unclear who would endorse such propositions besides the authors of the frequently mentioned book Designing Social Inquiry. The next block of theses (24-50) concern institutions, identities, politics and power. Here she veers between uncontestable propositions such as "living within a culture entails a complex of relations to its practices and institutions" and overreaching propositions such as "there is no culture without resistance and critique." These latter propositions have no place in a book that aims to combat the universalist and absolutist formulations of mainstream social science. Norton's methodological commentary, by far the most promising section of the book, begins with thesis 51: Facts do not Speak for Themselves. Here she pursues her constructionist agenda in a more fruitful way by unmasking the methodological myths of mainstream political science. Facts, she contends, actually issue from interpretative operations and "truth regimes" even if they are presented by mainstream political science as unconstructed datums. In the heart of this section, Thesis 64: , she questions the alleged rigor of variable-oriented research built around measurable properties and units of analysis. Here she rehearses familiar arguments about the rhetorical, performative and ritualistic dimensions of social science research, Norton's goals would have been better served had she gone after the fundamental premise of variable oriented research, namely that decontextualized abstractions can stand in as proxies for social action and interaction. Moreover, on closer inspection the propositions which appear the most subversive turn out to accord well with the prevailing methodological wisdom. The weaknesses of falsifiability, replicability and predictive success as criteria for theory testing are well-known within the community of variable-oriented social science practitioners. Her caveats about conflating causality and correlatedness, for example, would elicit no dissent from even the most blinkered partisan of "normal science." Moreover, for an empirically-minded reader, such weaknesses as those Norton diagnoses pale in comparison to the shortcomings of variable-oriented research analyzed by Ragin (1987) and Abbott (1997). The real strength and contribution of 95 Theses is apparent when one takes a step back from the particular arguments and considers the purpose of the book as a whole. Norton's multifaceted arguments and examples show how mainstream political science appears to an observer standing at the margins of the discipline's positivist core. From her heterodox standpoint, she succeeds in baring the normally cloaked lines of power and authority which sustain the core's activities. Most importantly, she demonstrates that students of politics and society pay a steep price when they are unable to deal honestly and...

In this article I draw on material from in-depth interviews with car owners and dealers to investigate the meanings and uses of a new luxury SUV, the Hummer H2, for affluent California hyper-consumers. The study identifies several distinct orientations towards the H2, considered both as a status symbol and a branded commodity. The mediating roles played by the vehicle in the personal and impersonal relationships of Hummer owners, enthusiasts and observers are examined. Competing theories of social differentiation and conformity pressures are analyzed in light of the data regarding the responses of owners and non-owners towards the vehicle.

This collection sheds light on the cascading crises engendered by COVID-19 on many aspects of society from the economic to the digital. This issue of the American Behavioral Scientist brings together scholarship examining the various ways in which many vulnerable populations are bearing a disproportionate share of the costs of COVID-19. As the articles bring to light, the unequal effects of the pandemic are reverberating along preexisting fault lines and creating new ones. In the economic realm, the rental market emerges during the pandemic as an economic arena of heightened socio-spatial and racial/ethnic disparities. Financial markets are another domain where market mechanisms mask the exploitative relationships between the economically vulnerable and powerful actors. Turning to gender inequalities, across national contexts, women represent an increasingly vulnerable segment of the labor market as the pandemic piles on new burdens of remote schooling and caregiving despite a varie...

As the rapid rate of the adoption and normative use of information technologies accelerates, sociologists must expand the sociological imagination to explore a host of questions related to mediated communication. From Twitter to YouTube, the media convergence anticipated at the close of the millennium is coming into being. Blogs, vlogs, Web browsing, e-mail, and old time television, radio, and phone are all increasingly accessible via digital technologies. Furthermore, not only can we consume these digital media, but we can now produce them easily and quickly. Yet, sociological methods have not kept pace with the profound changes in communication ensuing from the Information Revolution. Although the quotidian use of new media continues to grow by leaps and bounds, there is little consensus on how we can best collect and analyze new media data. This chapter begins to address these issues by examining how ethnographic methods have been adapted to explore new media and digital communic...

Purpose Telemedicine has been advancing for decades and is more indispensable than ever in this unprecedented time of the COVID-19 pandemic. As shown, eHealth appears to be effective for routine management of chronic conditions that require extensive and repeated interactions with healthcare professionals, as well as the monitoring of symptoms and diagnostics. Yet much needs to be done to alleviate digital inequalities that stand in the way of making the benefits of eHealth accessible to all. The purpose of this paper is to explore the recent shift in healthcare delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic towards telemedicine in healthcare delivery and show how this rapid shift is leaving behind those without digital resources and exacerbating inequalities along many axes. Design/methodology/approach Because the digitally disadvantaged are less likely to use eHealth services, they bear greater risks during the pandemic to meet ongoing medical care needs. This holds true for both m...

This article examines the effects of digital inequality in conjunction with curricular tracking on academic achievement. Capitalizing on an original survey administered to seniors (fourth-year secondary school students), our survey data ( N = 972) come from a large American public high school with a predominantly disadvantaged student body. The school’s elective tracking system and inadequate digital resources make for an excellent case study of the effects of a differentiated curriculum and digital inequalities on academic achievement. Multilevel random-effects and fixed-effects regression models applied to the survey data reveal the important role played by digital inequalities in shaping academic achievement as measured by GPA. As the models establish, academic achievement is positively correlated with both duration of digital experience and usage intensity regarding academically useful computing activities, even when students’ curricular and class placement are taken into accoun...

This work examines evolving forms of ethnographic practice generated in response to advances in mediated communication. It chronicles phases in the transformation of offline ethnography, beginning with pioneering virtual ethnographies concerned with identity work and deception. Subsequently, analysis illuminates cyberethnographic redefinitions of traditional methodological concerns including fieldwork, participant observation, and text as data. It concludes with an examination of current cyberethnographic practice.The work closes with the argument that the methodological adaptations made by ethnographers indicate the increasing salience of mediated communication in the social world. The research sheds light not only on issues connected to methodology but invites larger methodological and ethical questions that will grow ever more pressing as the information revolution continues to unfold. We suggest that just as ethnographic practice continues to benefit from its encounter with medi...