## Introduction to the Special Issue on Inequality in the Digital Environment
* _The reproduction or mitigation of social inequalities_. In Western countries non-white peoples and women have had fewer privileges, less prestige, and less power than white males. These privileges have been codified in laws and routinized in everyday behavior. However, the digital environment is a new space, where laws are irrelevant, and anonymity can make the granting or prohibiting of social privileges difficult. Certainly scholars explore these topics and many more. However, it is my belief that the social processes above are underexplored in comparison to technological and economic processes in the information society. This special issue is one step towards rectifying this imbalance. This special issue will explore the reproduction and mitigation of social inequalities. Given the emphasis on the digital environment, we re-label these social inequalities as digital inequalities. The five pieces of research in this special issue explores digital inequality along three major dimensions, race, gender, and disability. If there is one overriding question that permeates all five pieces is: In what ways are the historical inequalities shaped in the physical environment reproduced or mitigated in the digital environment? Two papers explore racial inequality. [PERSON]'s [9] article \"African Americans and Network Disadvantage: Enhancing Social Capital through Participation on Social Networking Sites\", shows how African American with less social capital than whites in the physical environment use ICTs to redress this imbalance. [PERSON]'s article illustrates a means through which the unique properties of the digital environment can be leveraged to overcome trenchant historical inequalities. While [PERSON]'s article points to ways the effects of race are mitigated, [PERSON] and [PERSON] [10] in their article \"Racial Exclusion in the Online World\" look at an example where racial inequalities are reproduced. Specifically, [PERSON] and [PERSON]'s work describes ways that white supremacist ideology maintains the marginalization of non-whites in the digital environment. Two articles explore the experiences of people with physical or intellectual disabilities. [PERSON]'s article \"Digital Differentiation in Young People's Internet Use--Eliminating or Reproducing Disability Stereotypes\", explores how assistive technologies may, instead of mitigating differences between Norwegians with or without physical disabilities, exacerbate differences [11]. [PERSON]'s methods give voice to a group that can be marginalized. Moreover, the findings from her study highlight the importance of technology designed to a person with disability's sense of self. Meanwhile, [PERSON], [PERSON] and [PERSON], in their review article \"Internet Access by People with Intellectual Disabilities: Inequalities and Opportunities\", have compiled research on the barriers that people with intellectual disabilities face, ways to work around those barriers, and the potential benefits of ICTs to people with those disabilities [12]. As they point out, the majority of people with intellectual disabilities are not using the Internet to the same degree as others. Thus, the exclusion that can characterize the lives of people with disabilities in the physical environment reasserts itself in the digital environment. A fifth study, by [PERSON], explores the important issue of intimate partner violence online [13]. [PERSON]'s article, \"Virtual Relationship Violence and Perspectives on Punishment: Do Gender or Nationality Matter?\" employs a survey administered to students in Poland and the United States to compare rates of intimate partner violence by gender. [PERSON] finds evidence that the disproportionate rates of intimate partner violence directed towards women found in the physical environment are reproduced in the digital environment. [PERSON]'s findings are a call to social workers and professionals who work with youth to focus on the role of new technologies in perpetuating gender inequalities.