Skill Matters: How Web Savvy and Other Factors Influence Online Behavior

Much enthusiasm surrounds the potential of the Internet to improve people’s lives in numerous domains from health matters to education, from creative expression to financial independence, from political engagement to on-the-job performance. While it is easy to come up with hypotheticals on how the Web may improve people’s life chances, we know relatively little about the extent to which such potential is being met and who is more or less likely to benefit from the various opportunities. Drawing on unique data collected about a diverse group of young American adults’ Internet uses, this presentation will look at predictors of various types of online engagement and participation. In particular, the talk will point out variation in people’s online skills and how differences in Web know-how influence what people do online.

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./ppIn 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.