New indicators of social development: inclusion in internet communications and creativity on online platforms
The article is presenting research of involvement in the internet communication, activities and creativity on social networking platforms. The comparative analysis of empirical data collected in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Sverdlovsk is focused on digital communications intensity considered as an indicator of development of postindustrial social structures – networks and flows. The research reveals sustainability and wide spread of the internet and social networking platforms usage. However, the level of development of such new patterns of social life varies in different segments of society. Social structures revealed with the help of such indicators as involvement, activity and creativity in digital communications, are more developed in large cities and megapolises. Young people and the middle strata people are the leading groups in contributing to development of network and flow structures. Communicating on social networking platforms and generating intense flows of content, members of these social groups accumulate their virtual capital. Social differentiation based on unequal distribution of virtual capital is a new form of inequality. In relation to the inequality that was called the "digital divide" at the end of the last century, the new form appears as a digital divide of the second kind, where access to additional resources depends not simply on inclusion in communication networks, but on greater activity and creativity in them.
Figures
Ivanov, D., Asochakov, Y., Bogomyagkova, E. (2021), “New indicators of social development: inclusion in internet communications and creativity on online platforms”, Research Result. Sociology and management, 7 (2), 49-68, DOI: 10.18413/2408-9338-2021-7-2-0-5.
While nobody left any comments to this publication.
You can be first.
Bourdieu, P. (2002), “Forms of capital”, Journal of Economic Sociology, (5), 60-74. (in Russian)
Ivanov, D. V. (2012), “Toward a theory of flow structures”, Sotsiologicheskie Issledovania, (4), 8-16. (in Russian)
Appadurai, A. (1990), “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”, in Featherstone, M. (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity, SAGE Publications, London, UK.
Beck, U. (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage Publications, London, UK.
Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (1994), Riskante Freiheiten – Gesellschaftliche Individualisierungsprozesse in der Moderne, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M., Germany.
Beck, U., Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1994), Reflexive Modernization. Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.
Castells, M. (2000), The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed., Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, USA.
Florida, R. (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books, New York, USA.
Knorr C. K. (2003), “From Pipes to Scopes: The Flow Architecture of Financial Markets”, Distinktion, 7, 7-23.
Kuznets, S. (1955), “Economic Growth and Income Inequality”, The American Economic Review, 45 (1), 1-28.
Kuznets, S. (1968), Toward a Theory of Economic Growth, with Reflections on the Economic Growth of Modern Nations, Norton, New York, USA.
Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994), Economies of Signs and Spaces, SAGE Publications London, UK.
Sen, A. (1985), Commodities and Capabilities. Amsterdam, North-Holland, New York, USA.
Sen, A. (1987), The Standard of Living, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Urry, J. (2000), Sociology beyond Societies. Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century, Routledge, London, UK.
Van Dijk, J. (2020), The Digital Divide, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK.
This work is based on research supported by the Russian Science Foundation (grant number 21-18-00125). The author is also grateful to the Research Park of St. Petersburg State University ‘Center for Sociological and Internet Research’ for the empirical data collected (the project 106-16435).