Digital Disempowerment in the Digital Age: An empirical Research from the Life Course Perspective

The increasing digitization of public as well as private services is progressively posing a threat for individuals and communities that do not possess the necessary skills to handle the new digital ecology. As shown by recent studies (Helsper & Reisdorf, 2017; Helsper & Van Deursen, 2015; Mariën & Schurmans, 2013), understanding how social and digital inequalities are intertwined requires taking into account that the digital divide is more than a mere issue of access and skills. Digital and social exclusion are multidimensional social processes reflecting broader types of inequalities; as such, technology and society are not to be studied separately but approached through the lens of their co-constitutive relationships (Ito & al. 2010).  Henceforth, contextualised approaches need to be developed in order to redefine those at-risk of being digitally excluded. Indeed, despite several exercises conducted with the ambition of developing more comprehensive user typologies (Rogers, 2003; Livingstone & Helsper, 2007), limitations such as a lack of theoretical framework, an overemphasis on the quantitative aspects of usage, the individualisation of problems that are social by nature (Mariën & Prodnik, 2014), soften the inputs of these interesting and valuable contributions.  This paper aims at identifying the crucial aspects that define an autonomous and independent use of digital media with the underlying hypothesis that in today’s digital society, autonomy leads to empowerment while a lack of autonomy leads to vulnerability and an increased risk of being digital excluded.  From an empirical standpoint, this paper brings a significant contribution to the field insofar as it considers experiences with digital tools and services from a life course perspective. Concretely, this paper is based upon 45 in-depth interviews with respondents equally distributed across three specific life-stage: Life stage 1 (18-30 years); life stage 2 (31-50 years); life stage 3 (51-70 years) and distributed equally across gender and educational level (no high school degree obtained a high school degree, obtained a degree un higher education). The strength of this approach is that it allows to move beyond the emphasis on quantitative data to study from a qualitative analysis that (1) digital inequalities are highly related to life stages; and (2) various aspects define the daily digital needs and wants within a specific life stage.  The results show significant divergences and convergences in terms of digital autonomy and experiences. Moreover, the results demonstrate how individuals re-socialize digital media, that is to say that individuals no longer confine themselves to a unique medium but use a number of tools to create a range of personal repertoires of communication media allowing them to achieve specific communication needs. In other words, digital inequalities are no longer defined by access to tools, but by access to services, independent of the tools they are offered on. Also, the results suggest that digital inequalities depend on the relationships wrought by and between individuals. The notion of support resources, and the capabilities to grasp the benefits of these support resources, have shown to be a determining factor of digital inequalities.