Social inequality and digitization in modern societies
- 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 includeThe 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.…
Author details: | Roland VerwiebeORCiDGND, Licia BobzienORCiDGND, Nina-Sophie FritschORCiDGND, Claudia BuderORCiDGND |
---|---|
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/k2zwh |
Title of parent work (English): | SocArXiv : open archive of the social sciences |
Subtitle (English): | a systematic literature review on the role of ethnicity, gender, and age |
Publisher: | Center for Open Science |
Place of publishing: | [Charlottesville, VA] |
Publication type: | Preprint |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2023/05/25 |
Publication year: | 2023 |
Release date: | 2024/03/06 |
Tag: | age; digitization; ethnicity; gender social inequality; social inequality |
Number of pages: | 23 |
Organizational units: | Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Sozialwissenschaften / Fachgruppe Soziologie |
DDC classification: | 3 Sozialwissenschaften / 30 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie / 300 Sozialwissenschaften |
Peer review: | Referiert |
License (German): | CC BY-ND - Namensnennung, keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International |