Eszter Hargittai: Back in the early 2000s, my advisor in graduate school, Paul DiMaggio and I suggested the term digital inequality, to use instead of digital divide, to signal the spectrum of differences among people after they go online. So I actually kind of wish that people would not use second level digital divide, and third level of digital divide at all, and just would stick to digital inequality when they’re not talking about access differences. 

Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling The Web, a podcast of the web science trust. I am Noshir Contractor and I will be your host today. On this podcast we bring thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society and how society in turn is shaping the web.

Today, we welcome to the podcast, Eszter Hargittai. You just heard her talk about her work about digital inequality and web science.Eszter is a professor and holds the chair in Internet Use and Society in the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich, where she also heads the Web Use project research group. Her research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media, with a particular interest in how differences in people’s web skills and digital literacy influence what they do online. She is one of the most highly cited researchers in Web Science with more than 40 of her articles being cited over a 100 times, and overall she’s been cited over 27,000 times. She has also edited three widely acclaimed books dealing with how we do research. In 2019, she was elected as a Fellow of the International Communication Association. In addition to her academic articles, she has published numerous Op-Eds in a wide variety of prestigious outlets. Welcome, Eszter. 

Eszter Hargittai: Thank you. It’s great to be here. 

Noshir Contractor: I’m delighted to have you here, because what you study at the cusp of looking at how web literacy is so important in terms of understanding and advancing web science is something that we all need to be thinking much more about within the area of web science. As I see it, a fundamental premise of your scholarship and public advocacy is that gaining access to the web and internet, does not in and of itself, solve the problem of the so-called digital divide. Tell us how you got interested in this topic, and came to this premise that has been so pivotal in your work.

Eszter Hargittai: So I was in college back in the 90s. And that was the time when the internet was starting to diffuse beyond academic circles. I actually started college when it was not yet automatic that you got an email address, but I asked for one. And so I started spending quite a bit of time online, and then studied abroad in Geneva, my junior year, which was 1995-96. And interestingly, this was very close to where Tim Berners Lee developed the web. And this got me quite interested in understanding how people keep in touch, especially since I was thousands of miles away from both my family and my college — many of my college friends, I was interested in how people keep in touch through this medium. But also realized pretty early on that just because people gained access to it didn’t mean that they would use it equally the same. And I continued to see this just in my own life with people around me. And as a sociologist, which is what I was getting a degree in, and someone interested in social inequality, I started wondering how the ability to use the internet and the web and to understand the web, so web-use skills, how this related to people’s background.

Noshir Contractor: And I remember that when the word digital divide first gained currency, most people equated digital divide as being associated with whether you had a computer or not, whether you had access to the internet or not. And then subsequently whether you had access to the web or not. And you were amongst the first advocates to say that that’s a very superficial definition of digital divide. 

Eszter Hargittai: This phrase, digital divide, I think, lost a lot of utility as the internet diffused to a larger segment of the population. And as people started incorporating the web into their lives, it was no longer that meaningful to talk only about the digital divide as such, which is, as you said, about access differences. 

And so I suggested in one article that I called the “Second level digital divide,” I suggested that web use skills were also very important to how people were integrating the web into their lives. Now, I will say in retrospect, I kind of wish I had not introduced that term. I think it has led to a lot of confusion in the literature. People now even talk about the third level digital divide. But back in the early 2000s, my advisor in graduate school, Paul DiMaggio and I suggested the term digital inequality, to use instead of digital divide, to signal the spectrum of differences among people after they go online. So I actually kind of wish that people would not use second level digital divide, and third level of digital divide at all, and just would stick to digital inequality when they’re not talking about access differences. And in some ways, I’m almost upset with myself that I introduced what ultimately I think has become rather a lot of confusion into literature. 

Noshir Contractor: It’s a nice dilemma, to have something that you popularized, that you then want to backtrack and retract after the cat is out of the bag, so to speak. In your own work, you have used many different kinds of approaches to help understand these digital inequalities. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of studies and creative approaches you’ve used to help tap into measuring the extent to which these digital inequalities might surface?

Eszter Hargittai: My dissertation actually was about people’s web use skills. And I did this by interviewing people in person and collecting some survey data from them, but then also observing them as they use the web. So giving them questions, so-called tasks to perform, and then recording what they did, and later analyzing what they did, and quantifying what they did. And then ultimately, what I did was I took the measures of what were actual skills, right, because I had data on their actual ability to, to solve tasks online, and then looked at what survey questions correlated with those actual skills. And this is how I came up with a proxy measure of web use skills, that has since fortunately been used by lots of others, and continues to be a helpful measure. What I have found interesting in the literature is that many people go about coming up with these proxies from more of a psychometric measure perspective. But while psychometric measures are helpful for intangible things, like if you want to measure trust or privacy, that’s not really the best approach to study something like web use skills, because web use skills is a trait in people that we can, in fact, measure objectively as a skill. And so then we should, and then come up with proxies. The reason I suspect people haven’t done this too much, having done this work myself, is that it is a lot of effort. 

Noshir Contractor: So just to make this concrete, this is so interesting. What would be an example of a task that you might give someone to do on the web as part of these studies? And what would be examples of specific web use skills that you are looking to see whether they use those or not?

Eszter Hargittai: So one area that’s pretty hot these days is algorithm literacy. And so I’ve seen people try to come up with survey measures without the actual skills and the actual skills would involve sitting down with someone and seeing how they navigate, say, YouTube and how they look around the site to see whether they understand why their videos on the side showing up. Like, do they understand recommendations? Do they understand where those recommendations come from? Do they understand different feedback that they give to the site how that might influence what then the site gives them? So that would be a concrete example of actual behavior and skills you could measure and then come up with survey proxies for that. 

Noshir Contractor: And what kind of differences do you see in skills amongst people?

Eszter Hargittai: Skills vary very much across the population. A very consistent finding across time at this point and also across different national samples is that education is very much related to skills. So people who are more educated also tend to have a better understanding of the web and have higher level web use skills. 

A less obvious finding has been that there’s considerable variation, even among young people, right. So there’s a lot, there are a lot of assumptions in the media, but also just generally, you talk to a person on the street that people who are young are automatically savvy with the web, because they grew up with it. And so I didn’t think this was the case, but I then studied this scientifically, collecting data on young people’s web use skills, again, both in-person observations and also survey measures, and found that even within young adults, there is quite a bit of variation. 

And even within young adults, socioeconomic status matters. And young adults who come from more privileged backgrounds will have higher levels of skills. One other thing I’d like to say about age is that another assumption is that older people are necessarily worse than younger people. It is the case that once you get into ages 70s, 80s, and, higher, people’s web use skills do drop. However, if you look at people 50 and under, and certainly 40 and under, there really is not actually an age correlation with skills. 

Noshir Contractor: This is really an important finding. Because, as you pointed out, there is a lot of conventional wisdom that assumes that, Oh, young kids know exactly what to do on the internet. And I’m glad that you brought that up. Some of the other areas that you’ve looked at include gender differences, nationality, education, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and so on. In particular, I also want you to help us understand something that is so important across web science. And that is the impact of disability status in terms of web using skills. And I know that you’ve done some really interesting work in that area.

Eszter Hargittai: Disability status is not something that a lot of work has looked at in web use studies. So with my collaborator, Carrie Dubrovsky, we have, using early 2000s data, have looked at how people with disabilities compared to people who don’t have disabilities, in their web use skills and what they do online. So from before, we have found that people with disabilities had lower level skills. But more recent data actually suggests that people with disabilities have caught up. And we no longer find this, what we would call a digital disability divide, although back to that whole digital divide issue. 

And then beyond this, we’ve also found that in some cases, people with disabilities are actually more active on the web. So they participate in online activities where they make their voices heard, in some cases more than their non-disabled counterparts. 

Noshir Contractor: Well one of the reasons why this disability inequality might have diminished is because there has been a concerted effort to make the web more accessible across different sectors of society. To what extent are the results and findings that you’re reporting, an acknowledgement that our efforts to make the web more accessible are in fact yielding payoffs?

Eszter Hargittai: Yes, so I think one could legitimately see it as a sign of that. It seems that if people with disabilities are able to be actively engaged online, that means that the web is in fact more accessible. One of the challenges of this area of work is national samples only have so many people, only capture so many people with disabilities. So it would be helpful to have a better understanding of how different types of disabilities relate to online behavior. And for this, we’d need much larger samples on people with disabilities. So it would be nice if there were resources to do more targeted sampling of those populations. But overall, it’s fair to say that certainly, some parts of the web have become quite accessible to different types of people.

Noshir Contractor: So there is some encouraging news out there, but I’m sure you agree that there is much more that remains to be done, even as new as new technologies come on the web, including things like virtual reality, and augmented reality, and, and so on. 

Eszter Hargittai: Exactly. And I think it also concerns partly educating the public, who are not necessarily disabled, right, so just to give one example, Twitter has the alt text when you upload an image, which means that you can say in text form what’s on your image. And I always do this when I upload images, but I suspect the vast majority of people don’t do it, not because they don’t care to, it’s partly, and this is where we’re back to web use skills, they don’t actually know it’s possible. 

Noshir Contractor: Who do you think is responsible, or should be responsible for helping educate the public? You have obviously done a lot in uncovering this as a scholar and a public intellectual. Do you see a role for some organizations, maybe the platform providers themselves to help inform and educate the users about these kinds of digital skills? 

Eszter Hargittai: I definitely think it has to be this multi method approach, so to speak. First,, we shouldn’t ignore educational institutions, right? So we, we have to move beyond this assumption that young people know understand the web anyway, so we don’t have to teach them, because that’s wrong. But then, of course, the largest segment of the population is not in educational institutions, and you don’t want to ignore them. So where else can we help? So certainly, libraries and community centers can play a role, and they often do play a role, they offer workshops.

Part of it would be on platforms to recognize that their users come with different abilities to their platforms. It’s a question of usability, right? So I don’t think it’s realistic for them to do a little skill enhancement programs. Rather, they should recognize that these skill differences exist and then address that in how they put together their platforms.

Noshir Contractor: You’ve talked several times about how important and how creative one has to be to do research on topics like this on the web is, in some ways, qualitatively different and more challenging, from doing research in-person, pre-web days, for example. And I’m absolutely fascinated by the titles that you used for three books that you have, edited, and or co-edited. Starting with a book titled Research Confidential in 2009, followed in 2015, by a book titled Digital Research Confidential, and a book in 2020, called Research Exposed. That sounds like a tabloid feel to the whole thing. Tell us about why you thought about these titles and what you want to convey by these titles. And obviously, the content of these books. 

Eszter Hargittai: I should say that the titles came from other people. So I owe others credit. The idea here, that studying the web requires being creative, as you noted, and in all sorts of ways, while the web generally offers all sorts of opportunities, it also offers challenges, or comes with challenges. And I felt like there just weren’t enough write-ups of how empirical social science actually gets done in terms of the day-to-day reality, right, so there are lots of methods books, lots, I mean, infinite number of methods, but but they usually tell you the ideal type of a project or what what you should strive for. But anyone who has actually done empirical work, knows that nothing ever works exactly as you plan, that it’s much more messy, and there are just so many issues that come up. But we don’t tend to write about those in academic writeups. So I wanted there to be a venue where people were just genuinely honest about all the challenges they encountered, but then also share how they dealt with them. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have amazing contributors to these volumes, who have been very generous with their time in sharing their experiences of all sorts of projects, studying the web, whether from big data, log data, to using more traditional methods, like interviews to understand how people use the web, to web scraping, So there are lots of different types of methods in all of these volumes. 

Noshir Contractor: And I think that what you just described is very well captured in the subtitle, so the second part of the titles of each of these books were, in the case of the first book, it was solutions to problems most social scientists pretend they never have. And the second which was called the secrets of studying behavior online, and the most recent how empirical social science gets done in the digital age. So you’re pointing out that your focus is not on aspirational methods, but how it actually gets done, and how people then deal tactically with the messy aspects of the challenging aspects of doing research on the web. 

Eszter Hargittai: Exactly. It’s the behind-the-scenes realities, it’s the ugly sides, the difficult sides that not only do, do people not write up in articles, partly because there’s just not usually room for these things in articles. But also, because they may be deemed as embarrassing, but, but part of the idea is precisely to acknowledge head-on that this is the messiness is part of the research project, there is no such a thing as a perfect research project. Those subtitles very much capture exactly what the books are trying to do.

Noshir Contractor: Fantastic. Well, one of the things that you’ve also been doing lately, is taking advantage of this pandemic situation that we find ourselves in, and have used that to initiate a really large data collection effort about COVID-19, and collecting nationally, representative sample data across three countries, tell us a little bit about what the study is, and also about the book on COVID and digital inequality that you are writing as an academic trade book for MIT Press.

Eszter Hargittai: So, back last spring, when the world went into lockdown, I was wondering how to, how to cope just like everybody else was. And it became quite clear very quickly that, that the web, digital media were going to be very important in this whole situation. And suddenly everybody was commenting on this. But I was someone who had been studying this for 20 years. So I felt like okay, doctors were doing more than their share by treating people. What could I do as a social scientist, and I felt like, I can contribute by trying to understand the social side of this and as an expert in, in studying people’s web uses, trying to understand how the web played a role in all of this. So with my team at the University of Zurich, wonderful group of junior scholars, we decided to do some surveys. And so early April, we fielded a national survey in the US and then mid April, one in Italy, and one in Switzerland. And then in early May also two more in the US. And so the book that I’m writing about digital inequality, and COVID, looks at the early days of the pandemic, and really the lockdown time, and how people were using the web at the time. And perhaps not surprisingly, but I think it’s very important to document, traditional markers of inequality like socioeconomic status, again, play a role in the extent to which people were able to pivot to the web for things that they needed done. But as we discussed earlier, in this conversation, some groups that we might not expect to do well, like people with disabilities, were actually doing quite well compared to others in their engagement online.

Noshir Contractor: Well, we’re going to look forward to reading this book when it’s, when it’s published. One of the things Eszter that you managed to do in the abundance of spare time you have given everything we’ve already talked about, is spend time dealing with outside the academics. You’ve been a very active public intellectual in terms of general audiences, op-eds, etc. But also, in talking with policymakers. Tell us a little bit about how webs science can shape policy in terms of influencing policy makers in these kinds of contexts. What has been your experience? And what are lessons that we can learn on how to do that more effectively?

Eszter Hargittai: Academically, our, our work is important and interesting, and hopefully insightful. But ultimately, it’s very helpful if we can then influence policy, where our findings can be translated into real world outcomes. And so at the very core of my work is this point about, don’t assume that young people automatically digitally savvy, don’t assume that once people get connected, they, they will have equal, even access. And definitely will not have equal skills in using the web. It’s very important to get this out to policymakers. it’s important to keep in touch with very different constituents and colleagues, right? So it’s important to attend different conferences, it’s important to write op eds.

So op-eds, are a really terrific way to get your message out to a broader public. But it’s a very different writing, from writing academically, just incredibly different. That’s something I had spent time on it, I think, was a really good use of time.

I have been affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Kline Center for Internet and Society, and they do really well in connecting with the policy world. Through them, I spoke with the Obama transition team in 2008.

Noshir Contractor: One of the things that you have actually taken on and as a passion is to write about academic career advice. You have columns and blogs in places like Inside Higher Ed, etc. And so as we wind down this interview, what kind of advice would you give webs science scholars at different stages in terms of what they should, what priorities they should be having, what they should be thinking off what they could be mindful of both from a scholarly point of view, but also in terms of public engagement?

Eszter Hargittai: Actually, it’s been very interesting, as I’ve worked on this COVID Digital inequality book, I’ve actually found myself reaching out to people I knew from graduate school who are not in my specific field. So I was getting a PhD in sociology, and I’ve been reaching out to, for example, people in economics, political scientists. They could help with things that weren’t as obvious for me to tackle. Too often, I’ve seen junior scholars be hyper focused, and that if x is not doing their exact work there, that they can’t be relevant. I think this is, this is really a shame. Because you have so much to learn from people who are not necessarily doing what you’re focusing on. 

Web science is, by definition, interdisciplinary. So I think it is extremely important for people to cultivate networks of others in web science who aren’t necessarily from their own discipline, right? So if you’re mostly doing social science, be sure to be talking to the experts who are more in computer science or who if you do more traditional methods, talk to the computational social science, computational communication science, people and you can learn so much from collaborating with people who have different methodological backgrounds, for example. 

Noshir Contractor: Excellent advice. And then in closing, one last question, we spend a lot of time today talking about the pandemic and of course 2020, 2021 has had in addition to the pandemic several other global cultural reckonings, etc. Taken together with the pandemic, what is the one thing that you think would have been different in this entire experience that we are going through still, for better or for worse, without the web?

Eszter Hargittai: The web cannot be taken out of the COVID conversation, right? So the — us experiencing this is so much about web-based communication. I’d like to think mostly for the better, because of the connections we made the not not having to feel as isolated, if you were able to connect with others for social purposes, many, many people being able to continue their work, even remotely, these are all positive aspects. Negative aspects are, would be, the potential for very quick dissemination of misinformation, of disinformation. Recognizing this, then we need to think about ways to counter that. And so yes, that’s a potential negative, but the positive also, of the racial justice issues that happened last summer in the United States, people’s ability to connect with like-minded others to be able to organize in support of those experiencing injustice. The web is very important to this. 

So generally speaking, I think it’s important to recognize that the potential of any technology, including the web, depends on multiple factors. It depends on how governments respond to them, how they support them or restrict them. It depends on what actions the business sector takes. And then it very much depends on how users approach these technologies. Ultimately, though, I believe that it has been for the positive. 

Noshir Contractor: Fantastic. Well, thank you, again, Eszter for taking time to talk with us and to enlighten us about the nuanced ways in which one should be looking at digital inequalities in society. Notice I didn’t say digital divide. But also more importantly, thank you for your incredible scholarship over the last decade here and more where you’ve really helped understand and advance the process of doing research on the Web and also as we’ve just discussed, advocating for it to the general public and policy-makers, so thank you and I look forward to the next decade of research from you.

Eszter Hargittai: This has been a delightful conversation, Nosh, and thank you so much.

Noshir Contractor: Untangling the Web is a production of the Web Science Trust. This episode was edited by Molly Lubbers. I am Noshir Contractor. You can find out more about our conversation today in the show notes. Thanks for listening.