From the end of the 1990s onwards the digital divide, commonly defined as the gap between those who have and do not have access to computers and the Internet, has been a central issue on the scholarly and political agenda of new media development. This article makes an inventory of 5 years of digital divide research (2000-2005). The article focuses on three questions. (1) To what type of inequality does the digital divide concept refer? (2) What is new about the inequality of access to and use of ICTs as compared to other scarce material and immaterial resources? (3) Do new types of inequality exist or rise in the information society? The results of digital divide research are classified under four successive types of access: motivational, physical, skills and usage. A shift of attention from physical access to skills and usage is observed. In terms of physical access the divide seems to be closing in the most developed countries; concerning digital skills and the use of applications the divide persists or widens. Among the shortcomings of digital divide research are its lack of theory, conceptual definition, interdisciplinary approach, qualitative research and longitudinal research.

In a representative survey of the Dutch population we found that people with low levels of education and disabled people are using the Internet for more hours a day in their spare time than higher educated and employed populations. To explain this finding, we investigated what these people are doing online. The first contribution is a theoretically validated cluster of Internet usage types: information, news, personal development, social interaction, leisure, commercial transaction and gaming. The second contribution is that, based on this classification, we were able to identify a number of usage differences, including those demonstrated by people with different gender, age, education and Internet experience, that are often observed in digital divide literature. The general conclusion is that when the Internet matures, it will increasingly reflect known social, economic and cultural relationships of the offline world, including inequalities.

The purpose of this article is to propose a fruitful analytical framework for data supposedly related to the concept of the socalled "digital divide." The extent and the nature of this divide depend on the kind of access defined. Considering the possession of hardware, growing divides among different categories of income, employment, education, age, and ethnicity can be proved to have existed in the 1980s and 1990s according to official American and Dutch statistics. If only by effects of saturation, these gaps will more or less close. However, it is shown that differential access of skills and usage is likely to increase. The growth of a usage gap is projected. Multivariate analyses of Dutch official statistics reveal the striking effect of age and gender as compared to education. The usage gap is related to the evolution of the information and network society. Finally, policy perspectives are discussed. Keywords access to information technology, digital divide, digital skills, information inequality, information society, knowledge gap, network society, policies of information equality, S-curve of adoption, usage gap, usage of information technology THE MULTIFACETED CONCEPT OF ACCESS There are heated debates occurring in the United States and in Europe concerning questions of whether there is a

Because of the growing amount of information on the internet and people's increasing dependence on information, internet skills should be considered as a vital resource in contemporary society. This article focuses on the differential possession of internet skills among the Dutch population. In two studies, an in-depth range of internet skills are measured by charging subjects assignments to be accomplished on the internet. Subjects were recruited by applying a random stratified sampling method over gender, age, and education. While the level of operational and formal internet skills appeared quite high, the level of information and strategic internet skills is questionable. Whereas education appeared an important contributor to all skill levels, age only appeared a significant contributor to operational and formal skills. The results strengthen the findings that the original digital divide of physical internet access has evolved into a divide that includes differences in skills to use the internet.

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