## 1 Introduction  
Norwegian authorities' policy aims at securing an information society for all, emphasizing the importance that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be used by everybody,including people with disabilities [1; 2]. Achieving this goal involves making ICT accessible and usable according to the individual person's needs and preferences. While the body of research on young people's use of ICT is quite comprehensive, research addressing digital differentiation in young people's use of ICT is still in its early days. This might be due to a common notion that young people are the Web generation and online experts. There is, however, a concern that increasing Internet penetration will exacerbate digital inequalities among young people and that exclusion from digital networks will be one of the most damaging exclusions. This applies especially for vulnerable and marginalized subgroups of young people [3], _i.e._, young people who are put aside and not accounted for, not recognized and made unessential [4]. One such subgroup of vulnerable and marginalized young people is young people with disabilities [5; 6].  
While adolescents' socio-economic and cognitive resources shape their use of the Internet, either as an information medium or as an entertainment medium, such differences are less clear-cut for adolescents' use of the Internet as a social medium [7; 8]. This article particularly highlights the Internet-connected computer as a social medium, and it illuminates emerging differentiations in this kind of ICT use among young people. This illumination reveals how digital differentiations are created by use or non-use of assistive ICT by young people with disabilities. The investigation elaborates on how anticipations and stereotypes of disability establish an authoritative definition of assistive ICT and the digital consequence this creates for young people with disabilities. The object of the article is to provide enhanced insight into the field of technology and disability by illuminating how assistive ICT sometimes eliminates and sometimes reproduces stereotypes of disability and digital differentiations. Enhanced knowledge about these conditions is of vital importance in providing accessible and usable ICT according to the needs and preferences of young people with disabilities.  
A digital differentiation perspective looks into differences and implications of differences in ICT use among those who are perceived to have equal access to ICT [7; 9; 10]. Digital differentiation is conceptualized as dynamic phenomena, and the adoption and use of ICT is interpreted as a social phenomenon. A digital differentiation perspective usually perceives the characteristics of the users as more important in shaping ICT adoption than the characteristics of the technology. However, the current study finds that for some of the participants with disabilities, the characteristics of the technology itself are vital in providing or inhibiting access to the Internet and thus to participating in the digital information society. In this article I elaborate on how digital differentiations and inequalities are not only social but are also relational, _i.e._, a mutual interaction between an individual's social characteristics and ICT's technical characteristics. Thus, ICT and the Internet become an intervening catalyst in people's social sphere.  
Before elaborating on these issues, I provide a brief insight into my theoretical point of departure and previous research in the field. Then I describe the current study's methodological approach before analysing and discussing the study's findings regarding digital differentiation. The article's closing discussion expands on technology's significance in young people's negotiations of impairment and perceptions of disability.