TY  - JOUR
A1  - Verwiebe, Roland
A1  - Bobzien, Licia
A1  - Fritsch, Nina-Sophie
A1  - Buder, Claudia
T1  - Social inequality and digitization in modern societies
T2  - SocArXiv : open archive of the social sciences
N2  - The digitization process has triggered a profound transformation of modern societies. It encompasses a broad spectrum of technical, social, political, cultural and economic developments related to the mass use of computer- and internet-based technologies. It is now becoming increasingly clear that digitization is also changing existing structures of social inequality and that new structures of digital inequality are emerging. This is shown by a growing number of recent individual studies. In this paper, we set ourselves the task of systematizing this new research within the framework of an empirically supported literature review. To do so, we use the PRISMA model for literature reviews and focus on three central dimensions of inequality - ethnicity, gender, and age - and their relevance within the discourse on digitization and inequality. The empirical basis consists of journal articles published between 2000 and 2020 and listed on the Web of Science, as well as an additional Google Scholar search, through which we attempt to include important monographs and contributions to edited volumes in our analyses. Our text corpus thus comprises a total of 281 articles. Empirically, our literature review shows that unequal access to digital resources largely reproduces existing structures of inequality; in some cases, studies report a reduction in social inequalities as a result of the digitization process.
KW  - age
KW  - digitization
KW  - ethnicity
KW  - gender social inequality
KW  - social inequality
Y1  - 2023
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62678
PB  - Center for Open Science
CY  - [Charlottesville, VA]
ER  -