Subjective Obstacles

In our study we examine the characteristics of the spread within soci-ety of information technology in general, and the internet in particular. We look at factors hindering its diffusion, especially the roles of mate-rial or cultural considerations in keeping the large group of people who do not use the internet away from the information society. For our analysis we primarily use data collected in the past three years under the World Internet Project (WIP). According to the results of the WIP, 25 per cent of Hungarians aged 14 and over used the internet in the autumn of 2003. In the past three years the penetration of internet use has exhibited a linear increasing trend. The spread of internet use in Hungary had not reached the point of inflection. The dynamic period of diffusion was yet to come. We investigate to what extent internet use is explained by ‘cultural capital’ or ‘financial status’. We shall make use of an overall path model for this task. The model reveals that cultural capital has the lead among direct ef-fects, since the strength of path between cultural capital and internet use is beta of 0.45, while the path from financial status to internet use receives a beta of only 0.09. In summary, we may contend that cultural reasons behind the (non-)use of the internet have a substantial explanatory power