The New Frontier of Digital Inequality. The Participatory Divide

This article focuses on the relationship between digital participation and the digital participation divide. The first concept refers to the use of the Internet to produce cultural goods that are subsequently shared on a global scale; the latter, refers to the inequalities generated by the uneven distribution of these creative uses of the Internet in a given population. Empirically, our work focuses on the role of digital skills and sociopolitical attitudes toward the Internet in explaining the digital participation divide, as they are considered precursors of digital participation. Results suggest that the same mechanisms that previously sustained digital divide are now fostering digital participation divide; however, we argue that the negative social consequences of this divide exceed those of its predecessor