The Role of Skill in Internet Use

October 16, 2006
Eszter Hargittai | Northwestern University

Today’s college students have constant access to information and communication technologies. Yet we know very little about how students are incorporating digital media into their everyday lives. Recent innovations are making lots of opportunities available to students, but there exists little systematic analysis of young people’s actual online behavior. This presentation will look at the types of sites and online services that a diverse group of college students (mostly first-years) are using and how their engagement differs by socio-economic background and user attributes. The presentation will also include a description of an upcoming large-scale training intervention to improve users’ online abilities.

Speaker Details

Hargittai’s main research interests are the social and policy implications of information technologies with particular focus on how IT may contribute to or alleviate social inequality. For years she has argued that resolving access differences will not solve all differences regarding IT uses, because skill differences will remain even among users. Instead of using the term “digital divide”, she prefers to draw attention to the continuum of inequalities suggested by the term “digital inequality”. She is currently working on a project looking at a diverse group of college students’ IT uses with particular focus on their online abilities. Using an experimental design, she will be implementing a training intervention to test how we can improve users’ Internet skills.In her work, she has looked at differences in people’s Web-use skills, the evolution of search engines and the organization and presentation of online content, political uses of information technologies, and how IT are influencing the types of cultural products people consume.Hargittai’s work has been featured on CNNfn, BBC Technology News, the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, the San Jose Mercury News and several other national dailies. She has been blogging since May, 2002 and is a member of the widely read group blog Crooked Timber.Hargittai received her Ph.D. (2003) in Sociology from Princeton University where she was a Woodrow Wilson Scholar. She is spending the 2006/07 academic year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.For more information, see http://www.eszter.com.