Hargittai, Eszter, ed. Handbook of Digital Inequality. Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021. 386 p. Hardcover $265.00 (ISBN: 9781788116565); ebook $65.00 (ISBN: 9781788116572). LCCN: 2021-946075.

Abstract

It’s the 21st century, and the “digital divide” first noted by sociologists and political economists in the 1980s has not disappeared. It persists. In the United States, for example, over 30 percent of the Native American population lacks access to broadband infrastructure with even minimally adequate speeds. Large parts of the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the American Rescue Plan target unequal access to high-quality internet, affecting the lives chiefly of rural and urban poor. These disparities also hold true across much of the world.