Abstract

Society has arrived in the digital era. The continuous transition from an analogue into a digital world provides many benefits for of our daily lives. Yet, digital access is still unevenly distributed and ac-companied by unequal use of digital resources, resulting in social disparities. Especially senior citizens are lagging behind in making use of the digital media environment – despite having the necessary ac-cess to IT. To understand the causes and consequences of digital inequalities, we propose and empiri-cally validate a digital divide cascade targeted at the retired senior audience in the context of online health information use. We analyze the role of the prior workplace experiences have on exploratory IT behavior. The results demonstrate how the digital divide ultimately leads to unequal health knowledge. We thereby contribute to the discussion of seniors’ use of digital resources and derive implications for practice and policy.

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