## Introduction to the Special Issue on Inequality in the Digital Environment  
**[PERSON]**  
Department of Sociology, Rhode Island College, 600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence, RI 02903, USA; E-Mail: [EMAIL_ADDRESS]  
_Received: 9 November 2013; in revised form: 19 November 2013 / Accepted: 19 November 2013 / Published: 26 November 2013_  
**Abstract:** The purpose of this special issue is to explore social inequalities in the digital environment. The motivation for this issue is derived from the disproportionate focus on technological and economic aspects of the Information Society to the detriment of sociological and cultural aspects. The research presented here falls along three dimensions of inequality. Two papers explore the ways that race orders interaction online. A second pair of papers explores the experiences of technology users with physical and mental disabilities. A final paper looks at gender, and the higher rates of intimate partner violence experienced by women online. Taken as a whole, these five papers highlight some of the ways that the digital environment can reproduce or mitigate inequalities that have been molded and routinized in the physical environment. **Keywords:** digital divide; digital inequality; social stratification  
Since the 1970's, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become increasingly important to organizations and people. These technologies have increased our ability to process information (the microprocessor computer chip, the personal computer) and communicate information (satellites, e-mail, and mobile phone). These technologies have spread horizontally across the globe, and vertically into more aspects of everyday life, creating what is often called the Information Society. Scholars have worked to understand the transformations that have coincided with the wide scale adoption of ICTs. Several scholars have produced models of the Information Society that can be considered canonical. These models succumb, in my view, to a degree of _techno-economic determinism_. By this I mean that the understandings they provide imply that the most important changes in the information society are technological and economic, and that other transformations in other spheres of life necessarily follow. [PERSON]'s classic work _The Coming of the Post-Industrial_Society_ pointed out the decline of manufacturing in the United States and the shift of economic growth to the information industry [1]. [PERSON] _Network Society_ trilogy added to this notion, famously exploring the battle between the regions, corporations, and people highly interconnected in the \"space of flows\", and people less involved with ICTs in the \"space of places\" [2]. More recently, [PERSON], in his _Wealth of Networks_ wrote that the proliferation of the Internet and the personal computer has given rise to a \"networked information economy\" where individuals have freedom to produce both for market and for non-market purposes [3]. The media is also implicit. Through the media we are bombarded with messages about companies producing the latest \"must have\" gadget, the most recent advances in processing power, which nations are best positioned to grow in the global information economy, and so on. To be sure, this particular lens through which to understand our times is not incorrect. Instead, it is incomplete. If we can think of the interconnected information and communication technologies that dominate our Information Society--the computers, the mobile phones, the computerized appliances, and the Internet that runs through all of these technologies - as creating a new environment, then we can conceptualize a distinct space where social interaction can occur. We can explore this \"digital environment\", and judge the extent to which micro and macro level social processes from the physical environment are rearticulated in this new environment. Some of these social processes are:  
* _How we develop our individual and group identities_.