Digital Divide in Time of Crisis in Europe: do the Rich get Richer, the Poor get Poorer?

The analysis proposed in this essay investigates the Matthew effect in the context of a social context already heavily affected by the financial crisis.The hypothesis guiding this work, therefore, is that are witnessing a widening of the existing gaps, with the “poor” suffering a more pronounced process of exclusion from the network society in spite of the generalized increase in ICTs diffusion. That phenomenon can be analyzed both at a micro level, focusing on the individuals, and at a macro level, focusing on the digital divide between countries. We adopt a diachronic macro perspective, comparing the changes in levels of digital exclusion between the different member states of the European Union (EU) starting from 2007, the year preceding the beginning of the economic crisis, until 2014. The use of extensive data from Eurostat, the official statistical office of the European Union, allowed to highlight the dynamic nature of this phenomenon over time, while the development of relative indexes allowed to monitor the persistence of the first level of digital divide from a comparative perspective.