Contemporary research of the digital divide and digital skills is marked by a descriptive nature (van Dijk, 2006a). Inequalities are described using simple demographics of individuals who have more or less access to computers and the Internet and a different level of digital skills. The explanation of these differences has received far less attention. One of the reasons for this state of affairs is the predominance of individualistic notions of inequality. Like most social, scientific and economic investigations, digital divide research works based on so-called methodological individualism (Wellman and Berkowitz, 1988). Differential access to information and computer technologies (ICTs) is related to individuals and their characteristics: level of income and education, employment, age, sex, and ethnicity, to mention the most important ones. This is the usual approach in survey research, which measures the properties and attitudes of individual respondents. Making multivariate analyses of several individual properties and aggregating them to produce properties of collectivities, one hopes to find background explanations.
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