GSU Lecture Socio-Digital Inequalities

This lecture discusses the benefits of sidestepping a strange disconnect between the research traditions studying inequalities in the offline and online spheres separately. Based on empirical evidence of cultural participation from a large-scale survey carried out in nine European countries (Horizon 2020 IN-VENT), a research group led by Predrag Cvetičanin has shown that only the inclusion of both online and offline practices in the analysis does justice to the complexity of contemporary cultural participation and provides a reliable basis for policymaking. The group has proposed a unified research framework for studying the impact of social and digital inequalities on four types of cultural practices: offline art-related practices, offline everyday cultural practices, online art-related practices, and online everyday cultural practices. In this presentation, the lecturer discusses the results obtained by such a study of “socio-digital inequalities” and explains the methodology used in the process. This includes the explanation of a broadened conceptualization of cultural participation, the group’s choice of indicators of social, cultural and digital inequalities, and the roles of different methods applied (multiple correspondence analysis, hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis, as well as multi-level and linear regression).