Bloggers Vs. "AOL Users": A Digital Divide of Use and Literacy

Ethnomethodology suggests that paying attention to errors yields insight into everyday behavior patterns missed by other analyses. This paper presents data from a research project using grounded ethnographic and linguistic analysis to understand blog comment threads where blogging "natives" - bloggers and their readers - identify "strangers" comments as errors. Through this analysis, a previously unrecognized digital divide becomes visible. Strangers lack natives' understanding of the Internet's structure. Their references to online literacy elements also differ. Taking the demographics of natives and strangers into account, gender appears to be a factor in this divide. Affirming recent suggestions that digital divide studies should transition to a focus on usage patterns and quality, not access quantity, this study suggests digital literacy education should focus more intently on domain name comprehension and other literacies specific to new text forms.