Persisting Effects of Internet Skills on Online Participation

Millions of people contribute to online content daily, allowing them to share their ideas and influence public conversations. Some have attached much enthusiasm and hope to such activities as they may result in a variety of benefits, including cultural empowerment, engagement with the political process, and collective knowledge production. While these considerations cast the Internet as a potentially equalizing platform, research has shown that certain groups of people are more likely to participate in such online activities than others. All existing research on this topic has relied on cross-sectional data, making it impossible to make causal arguments about what results in more or less online engagement. That is, while research has found, for example, that Internet skills are related to online participation, the cross-sectional nature of the data makes it difficult for scholars to disentangle the causal effect between the two variables, that is, whether higher skills result in more participation or whether more participation leads to higher skills, or both. In this paper, we draw on a unique panel survey data set that includes data about the same 547 young adults from 2009 and 2012 to address these questions. We consider how demographic factors, socioeconomic status as well as various Internet experiences such as veteran status, frequency of use, autonomy of use, self-efficacy and Internet skills may influence people’s participation online, from editing Wikipedia to taking part in online forum discussions, posting reviews and voting on others’ content. We find that far from being universal, only a small portion of respondents have ever participated in several of these types of online activities, and some have never engaged in any of them. Despite the study’s focus on young adults who have grown up with digital media, not only is participation not universal, there are systematic differences in the types of people who are more or less likely to participate. We show that young adults with higher levels of Web-use skills are more likely to engage in various online production activities than their less-skilled counterparts. In particular, those from more privileged backgrounds, i.e., whose parents have higher levels of education, are more likely to contribute their voices to online conversations. This paper makes a special contribution to the growing literature on Internet skills by examining how three different measures of this concept relate to online engagement. We look at a universal Internet skills measure, we include a measure of Internet self-efficacy, and we test the effect of a more nuanced measure of Web-use skills. We find that self-efficacy and skill have independent effects on the outcome of online engagement suggesting that research on people’s online know-how should not collapse these conceptually different variables. The paper ends with the policy implications of the findings for achieving a universally empowered Internet citizenry. Findings suggest that simply having grown up with digital media does not result in either universal know-how about the Internet nor universal online engagement suggesting that interventions are important to make sure that people from all backgrounds have the necessary skills to take advantage of all that the Internet has to offer.