From the Digital Divide to Digital Inequality: A Secondary Research in the European Union

The digital divide is nowadays evolving to digital inequality, i.e., the socio-economic disparities inside the 'online population'. This paper examines two main dimensions of the digital inequality, namely 'skills' and 'autonomy' of Internet users. The level of formal education was selected as a representative variable of the skill dimension, as well as the density of population in different geographical areas as a representative variable of the autonomy dimension. The research was focused on the member states of the European Union (EU). The data, provided by Eurostat, included the daily use of computers for the last three months and the average use of the Internet at least once per week. The findings state that the EU already faces the problem of digital inequality to an extended rate, since there are significant disparities among the European countries with regard to the aforementioned variables.