اینترنت و شکاف آگاهی: یک مطالعه تئوری و تجربی The Internet and Knowledge Gaps: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation

The knowledge gap hypothesis is often mentioned in the public debate on the social consequences of the Information Society. Thereby optimistic scenarios of the future, like those, for example, of Bill Gates (1995) or Esther Dyson (1997), which are based on the assumption that the information society necessarily means an informed society for everybody, are called into question. But pessimists (e.g. Tapscott, 1996: 13; Golding, 1998: 141ff.; Glotz, 1999: 224ff.; Kubicek and Welling, 2000) are worried for quite opposite reasons. They are afraid of an increasing digital divide, meaning a social gap between the information rich and the information poor – those without access to the computer and the Internet (Negroponte, 1995) – or between ‘users’ and ‘losers’ (Eichmann, 2000: 259ff.). It is predicted that the Internet threatens to divide society into two classes: the information elite on the one hand and those not linked to the Net on the other (Rosenthal, 1999). These concerns seem to be politically important because the underlying assumption is that information and knowledge translate into social power; inequalities in knowledge thus lead to exclusion from social resources and inequalities in social power (McLeod and Perse, 1994). Nevertheless, in the policy context (NTIA, 2000) or in media debates (O’Malley, 2000), there is hardly ever reference made either to the theoretical background of the much cited knowledge gap perspective (Bonfadelli, 1994; Viswanath and Finnegan, 1996; Gaziano and Gaziano, 1996; Kwak, 1999) or to specific empirical evidence supporting the knowledge gap hypothesis. Not only is there a lack of solid empirical data that could demonstrate, for example, the advantages of Internet access over the use of the traditional mass media, but even from a theoretical perspective it is also rather unclear if the policy postulate of Internet access for everybody will be the necessary factor for success in the future – or if access to media or Internet information will be relevant at all. On the contrary, it could be suggested that, above all, growing access and thereby increased availability of information will result in the creation of an information elite and new knowledge gaps due to the Internet (Rosenthal, 1999: 69ff.), as was formulated by the knowledge gap hypothesis for the old mass media. Therefore, this article has a twofold objective: the background and development of the knowledge gap perspective as well as its implications for online communication are outlined in the first, theoretical part of the article. Then the second part discusses some still controversial questions concerning differential access and use of the Internet on the basis of two new empirical Swiss surveys.