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Abstract
Blogs were the original poster child of digital democracy as an egalitarian public forum. Some scholars have challenged this theory of equality based on race and ethnicity, but no empirical analysis of American adults has questioned a class-based divide over time. Blogs, as a form of digital content production, appear to mirror other technological innovations in which a small elite group of users begin to incorporate them in their daily living after which the innovation spreads quickly to the general population, as with basic Internet access. However, the author argues that unlike this consumptive practice, blogging fits into a productive framework that requires more resources. Furthermore, most studies on blogging and inequality, in general, derive from samples of college students, which make it difficult to understand class issues. By drawing on 13 national surveys of American adults from 2002 to 2008, this study incorporates class differences and finds that an educational gap in blogging persists, rather than narrows, even among people who are online. Race and ethnicity do not have a relationship with class in accounting for the inequality.
Notes
Similar to this argument is that youth are early adopters, and the elderly are not as apt to embrace a new technology, but as digital natives start to age and the elderly eventually adopt or die, this gap will also disappear.
When a gap is stated throughout the paper, it is statistically significant at p < 0.05.
This inequality is based on the aggregate of the surveys over the time period. The number of Blacks blogging is so small each year that the trend of Blacks blogging more than Whites is only significant by using the cross-sectional analysis, although, in the individual surveys, Blacks do blog more than Whites.