Online social networking skills: The social affordances approach to digital inequality

Abstract

This paper sets out to develop a theoretical framework for examining implications of digital media uses for digital inequality in the domain of social interaction. First, by drawing on the social affordances perspective, this paper seeks to establish an additional dimension of digital skills, namely, online social networking skills. Furthermore, to explore the implications of interactional ICT use for digital inequality, this paper theorizes how people’s online social networking skills may condition their uses of various digital media for communication (i.e. communication multiplexity) and proposes two propositions for future empirical examination.