Jan A.G.M. Van Dijk

University of Twente | UT · Department of Communication Science

The creative industry is a sector where digitisation inevitably changes work practices and the skill requirements are high. The rapid digitisation makes it imperative for workers to acquire digital skills beyond mere technical use. The aim of this study is twofold: (1) to offer a deeper analysis of the nature and level of 21st-century digital skill...

Skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, communication, problem solving, collaboration, operational skills, and information management, have become increasingly important for 21st-century employees. These skills are often referred to as 21st-century skills and influence how employees handle novel situations. They are indispensable in an econo...

Cognitive intelligence is rarely discussed in the context of digital inequality for practical and normative reasons: substantial difficulties around measurements and the fact that it cannot (easily) be changed. In the current contribution, cognitive intelligence is studied in relation to resources and appropriation theory which explains digital ine...

In organizations, it is increasingly about utilizing the intellectual and social capital of employees. Communities of practice (CoPs) are organized to take full advantage of the intellectual and social capital. In this study, the focus is on social capital and the aim is to improve it in CoPs by understanding individual's community network position...

Main statements • Currently, digital inequality reinforces existing social inequality. • The digital divide cannot be closed completely. When the whole world population would reach access to the digital media such as the Internet, inequalities of digital skills, usage and outcomes or benefits remain and even tend to grow. • Until recently, digital...

BACKGROUND Older adults want to preserve their health and autonomy and stay in their own home environment for as long as possible. This is also in the interest of policymakers who try to cope with growing staff shortages and increasing healthcare expenses. Ambient Assisted Living technologies (AAL) can support the desire for independence and aging...

Background Older adults want to preserve their health and autonomy and stay in their own home environment for as long as possible. This is also of interest to policy makers who try to cope with growing staff shortages and increasing health care expenses. Ambient assisted living (AAL) technologies can support the desire for independence and aging in...

With population aging and the expected shortage of formal and informal caregivers, emerging technologies for assistive living are on the rise. Focusing on the perspective of the prospective users of these technologies, this study investigates the perceived drivers and barriers that influence AAL adoption. An online survey among 1296 Dutch older adu...

This study takes a qualitative approach to studying how the socio-cultural context might foster beneficial Internet use for different educational groups. As the approach taken in digital inequality research is often a quantitative one, most studies yield primary determinants of obtaining positive outcomes that do not suffice in offering explanation...

The main aim of this study was to measure the actual levels of digital skills among professionals in the creative industries. Therefore, the levels of the following four types of digital skills were examined by means of a performance test: information, critical-thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Authentic tasks were developed for eac...

This study brings attention to the determinants of 21st-century skills and 21st-century digital skills. The following skills are investigated: technical, information, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills. To understand differences in the level of these skills among workers, we need to know the fact...

‘Van Dijk continues his 25-year leadership in digital divide research, from motivations and attitudes, access to adoption, use and skills, through to outcomes and solutions. His integrative model organizes these issues into a thoughtful, critical and readable story.’ Ronald Rice, University of California, Santa Barbara ‘Jan van Dijk can be conside...

Contrary to optimistic visions of a free internet for all, the problem of the 'digital divide' – the disparity between those with digital media skills and access, and those without – has persisted for close to twenty-five years. In this textbook, Jan van Dijk considers the state of digital inequality and what we can do to tackle it. Through an acc...

In Europe, the creative industries (CIs) are experiencing growth rates well above the average of the EU's total economic growth. However, a lack of consensus regarding how these industries work impedes the development of effective policy. In our research, we suggest a process approach to characterize the CIs. This characterization is more flexible...

This study employs a qualitative approach to examine whether and why some societal groups are disadvantaged more by their Internet use than others do. Due to the quantitative nature of most digital divide studies, thorough explanations for why different outcomes exist are lacking. Interviews were conducted with 48 Dutch families selected on the bas...

The current workplace increasingly asks for workers with highly digitally skilled knowledge who produce and distribute ideas and information. As such, understanding the factors behind differences in the level of various 21st-century digital skills is of decisive importance. This study aims to examine (1) the level of 21st-century digital skills amo...

This study uses a domestication approach to digital inequality. The aim is to uncover whether and why less-educated families benefit less from Internet use than highly educated families. The predominantly quantitative approach of digital divide research provides little explanation as to why digital inequalities exist. Interviews were conducted with...

The creative industries workforce requires employees that use ICT applications to solve the knowledge related tasks at work. The aim of this research is twofold: (1) to see if previously cited twenty-first century digital skills are suited to the creative industries workforce and (2) to investigate the extent to which skill development get attentio...

For a long time, a common opinion among policy-makers was that the digital divide problem would be solved when a country's Internet connection rate reaches saturation. However, scholars of the second-level digital divide have concluded that the divides in Internet skills and type of use continue to expand even after physical access is universal. Th...

The importance of 21st-century digital skills has been well established. However, research often fails to examine how various skills relate to each other. Through a survey of a sample of 1,222 professionals working in the creative industries, we tested, by using path analysis, whether six 21st-century digital skills have a sequential and conditiona...

Employees with high levels of 21st-century digital skills are beneficial for organizations characterized by rapid technological changes and complex knowledge bases. Although a number of instruments have been used to measure digital skills, they do not consider the broad range of 21st-century skills. Additionally, available measures are limited by t...

In this textbook, Jan van Dijk considers the state of digital inequality and what we can do to tackle it. Through an accessible framework based on empirical research, he explores the motivations and challenges of seeking access and the development of requisite digital skills. He addresses such key questions as Does digital inequality reduce or rein...

The Internet opens up many new business prospects for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). However, there are still many SME entrepreneurs who are reluctant to go online despite this opportunity. The main purpose of this research is to explore facts about the internet access among Indonesian SME entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, there is only a little...

The temporal dimension of acceptance is under-researched in technology acceptance research. Yet, people’s perceptions on technology use may change over time when gaining user experiences. Our 6-month home study deploying an interactive robot provides insight into the long-term use of use interactive technology in a domestic environment. We present...

With a growing number of available communication channels and the increasing role of other information sources, organizations are urged to rethink their service strategies. Most theories are limited to a one-dimensional focus on source or channel choice and do not fit into today's networked communication landscape. The goal of this paper is to prov...

The question is whether citizens are sufficiently involved in the development of the facilities used to support e-Government, so they can safeguard the quality of these facilities. It is a relevant issue, as the projects in which these facilities are created often provide insufficient functionality. Based on a sample test, we selected evaluation re...

Data quality management is a great challenge in today’s world due to increasing proliferation of abundant and heterogeneous datasets. All organizations that realize and maintain data intensive advanced applications should deal with data quality related problems on a daily basis. In these organization data quality related problems are registered in...

Recently, several digital divide scholars suggested that a shift is needed from a focus on binary Internet access (first-level digital divide) and Internet skills and use (second-level digital divide) to a third-level digital divide in which the tangible outcomes of Internet use are highlighted. A plethora of studies have been conducted to identify...

Many independent studies in social robotics and human-robot interaction have gained knowledge on various factors that affect people’s perceptions of and behaviors towards robots. However, only a very few of those studies aimed to develop models of social robot acceptance integrating a wider range of such factors. With the rise of robotic technologi...

Research on why people refuse or abandon the use of technology in general, and robots specifically, is still scarce. Consequently, the academic understanding of people’s underlying reasons for non-use remains weak. Thus, vital information about the design of these robots including their acceptance and refusal or abandonment by its users is needed....

Access to digital media is defined as the full process of appropriation of technology by users. It starts with motivation and attitudes and moves on to the process of finding physical access. Then, having learned sufficient digital skills, users will realize a particular frequency and diversity of usage of digital media. In all these phases signifi...

Through a survey with a representative sample of Dutch Internet users, this paper examines compound digital exclusion, that is, whether a person who lacks a particular digital skill also lacks another kind of skill; whether a person who does not engage in a particular way online is also less likely to engage in other ways; and whether a person who...

This study aims to contribute to emerging human-robot interaction research by adding longitudinal findings to a limited number of long-term social robotics home studies. We placed 70 robots in users’ homes for a period of up to six months, and used questionnaires and interviews to collect data at six points during this period. Results indicate that...

Dealing with data quality related problems is an important issue that all organizations face in realizing and sustaining data intensive advanced applications. Upon detecting these problems in datasets, data analysts often register them in issue tracking systems in order to address them later on categorically and collectively. As there is no standar...

The increasing mere presence of robots in everyday life does not automatically result in gradual acceptance of these systems by human users. Over the past years, we have conducted several studies with the goal to provide insight into the long-term process of social robots in domestic environments. This paper presents our overall conclusions from th...

To gain insight into the success and possible bottlenecks in the criminal justice domain, good and trustworthy management information is required. This paper presents a case study of a data space system that facilitates the monitoring of data flows within as well as between organizations involved in the Dutch criminal justice system. To build such...

This paper focuses on the relationships among traditional literacy (reading, writing and understanding text), medium-related Internet skills (consisting of operational and formal skills), content-related Internet skills (consisting of information and strategic skills) and Internet usage types (information- and career-directed Internet use and enter...

A common description of a social robot is for it to be capable of communicating in a humanlike manner. However, a description of what communicating in a 'humanlike manner' means often remains unspecified. This paper provides a set of social behaviors and certain specific features social robots should possess based on user's experience in a longitud...

In this investigation, a multifaceted model of Internet appropriation that encompasses four types of access— motivational, material, skills, and usage—is tested with a representative sample of the Dutch population. The analysis indicates that while the digital divide policies’ focus has moved to skills and usage access, motivational and material ac...

In the current contribution, we investigated how (1) the levels of operational, formal, information, and strategic internet skills changed between 2010 and 2013, and how (2) the observed skill patterns differ across gender, age, and education. All internet skills are measured among representative samples of the Dutch population in 2010, 2011, 2012,...

Vasterman en Wijfjes hebben ons rapport De weg naar Haren gedetailleerd op de snijtafel ontleed. Veel van hun kritiek is nuttig voor de discussie over de rol van de sociale en traditionele media in sociale bewegingen en mobilisaties, de relatie tussen sociale en traditionele massamedia en het verschijnsel mediahype bij deze relatie. Hun evaluatie d...

With the rise of electronic channels it has become easier for businesses to consult various types of information sources in information-seeking processes. Governments are urged to rethink their role as reliable information source and the roles of their (electronic) service channels to provide efficient service support. This article addresses how go...

During the 1990s, researchers and policy makers began discussing the presence of a so-called ‘digital divide,’ a distinction of people who do and do not have access to information and communication technologies. The concept of the digital divide stems from a comparative perspective of social and information inequality and depends on the idea that t...

We investigate types of Internet activities among a representative sample of the Dutch population from 2010 to 2013. We examined usage patterns of seven types of Internet activities (i.e., information, news, personal development, commercial transaction, social interaction, leisure, and gaming) and related these patterns with gender, age, education,...

There are similarities between e‐government services and commercial e‐services, but also a number of basic differences, given that they are public services that should be available to everyone. E‐government services are evolving from one‐way operations with a supply‐side and technical orientation to two‐way operations with a demand‐side and a socia...

The need for anonymity preservation within the justice domain requires the introduction of a trusted third party as an intermediary, while integrating individual databases within its boundaries. After the trusted third party encrypts records, it is no longer possible to perform checks on the data quality and correct data anomalies. Therefore, this...

Please feel free to request a copy! Digital Skills systematically discusses the skills or literacies needed in the use of digital media, primarily computers and the Internet. Following the work of van Dijk's The Deepening Divide: Inequality in the Information Society, it uses conceptual analysis and empirical observations to show what digital skil...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to unexplore the area of information and communication technology (ICT) use in organizations related to the assumed productivity gains by the use of ICTs. On the one hand, the paper focus on the losses of labor time that are caused by malfunctioning hardware or non-functional software, and on the other hand, t...

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...

This study added communication Internet skills to an existing skill framework of operational, formal, information and strategic skills. We investigated how people deal with inadequate skill levels by identifying support sources. Furthermore, we investigated which of the Internet skills actually matter for attaining beneficial Internet outcomes and...

As the employment of robots for long-term evaluations in home settings are just starting to be robust enough for research purposes, our study aims at contributing to human-robot interaction research by adding longitudinal findings to a limited number of long-term social robotics home studies. We placed 70 commercially available robots within people...

In the first chapter, we introduced a list of the following digital skills: operational, formal, information, communication, content creation, and strategic skills. These skills were applied to several media. In this chapter, this range of skills is further elaborated in the context of the Internet, including World Wide Web services like email, soc...

In the chapter 3, we established that the consequences of insufficient levels of digital skills are exclusion from the contemporary and future information-based society. These skills are the key to the information society. Therefore, there is a strong need for policies that attempt to compensate for low levels of these skills, especially policies a...

In chapter 2, we elaborated six types of Internet skills that the general Internet user needs to participate in an online environment. These skills are important because an increasing number of organizations in society are moving their services online and expect that all of their consumers, citizens, workers, and students have sufficient skills to...

This book has shown that the command of digital skills is the most crucial factor in the process of the appropriation of new information and communication technologies. When these skills are inadequate or absent, new media cannot be satisfactorily or effectively used. Motivation may be the main driver in this process of appropriation and physical a...

In this book, we attempt to draw a broad social picture of the backgrounds and consequences of the digital skills as defined in the previous chapter while we have mainly focused on Internet skills. Although skills are often linked to training or education, we take a more social-scientific or sociological approach. We will show that solutions beyond...

The second way to overcome digital skill divides is the first to come to mind. It is the education or training of users to acquire these skills. Apparently, people first consider the obligations of users, ignoring the responsibility of designers. As argued in the previous chapter, this is not justified. However, is education the solution for digita...

For the purpose of good and trustworthy management information for the government, our research institute has built a data space system that makes it possible to periodically monitor data flows within as well as between organizations of the justice domain. The aim of this system is to get insight into the success and possible bottlenecks in the cri...

In this paper we present the concepts and implementation of a data space system for the management of data from heterogeneous sources in the criminal justice field. Our system exploits domain knowledge in the field of justice to streamline and to relate the content of different databases in the chain. In our system, domain knowledge is encoded in a...

At the first sight, the claim that information and communication networks such as the Internet contribute to more inequality of information and communication seems rather odd. Aren’t networks particularly appropriate to diffuse and exchange information among all those connected? Isn’t the Internet a medium where you can retrieve most information fo...

Observational studies prove to be very suitable to provide a realistic view of people's Internet skills. However, their cost and time are a strong limitation for large-scale data gathering. A useful addition to the measurement of Internet skills would be the development of survey questions for measuring Internet skills. In this contribution, we ana...

The digital divide can be understood as inequalities in four successive types of access: motivation, physical access, digital skills and different usage. It isclaimed that the divide has shifted from the first to the last-called types of accessin the last ten years. The current, mainly European situation of all four accesstypes is amply described....

Digital media have made a strong appeal to people wanting to improve democracy right from the start. Four waves of utopian visions of the last 25 years are described. The concept of digital democracy is defined. Subsequently, six views of both representative and direct democracy are distinguished that favor particular applications of digital media...

Dit themanummer van het Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap bestaat uit zeven geselecteerde onderzoekspresentaties die tijdens het elfde Etmaal van de Communicatiewetenschap, het jaarlijkse congres van Nederlandse en Vlaamse communicatiewetenschappers zijn gepresenteerd. Christ’l De Landtsheer, Lieuwe Kalkhoven & Loes Broen concluderen onder de...

Het elfde Etmaal van de Communicatiewetenschap vond plaats op 24 en 25 januari 2011 aan de Universiteit Twente. Het congres dat onder auspiciën van de Nederlandse onderzoekschool voor Communicatiewetenschap NESCoR in samenwerking met de Vlaamse Communicatiewetenschap is georganiseerd, laat ieder jaar weer een momentopname zien van de meest recente...

The Internet increases the availability of health information, which consequently expands the amount of skills that health care consumers must have to obtain and evaluate health information. Norman and Skinner in 2006 developed an 8-item self-report eHealth literacy scale to measure these skills: the eHealth Literacy Scale (eHEALS). This instrument...

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...

Despite the amount of online health information, there are several barriers that limit the Internet's adoption as a source of health information. One of these barriers is highlighted in conceptualizations of the digital divide which include the differential possession of Internet skills, or "eHealth literacy". Most measures of Internet skills among...

Please cite this article in press as: van Deursen, A.J.A.M., et al., Rethinking Internet skills. The contribution of gender, age, education, Internet experience, and hours online to medium-and content-related Internet skills. Poetics (2011), doi: Abstract This paper focuses on one of the factors that appears to be important in several conceptualiza...

Research that considers Internet skills often lacks theoretical justifications and does not go beyond basic button knowledge. There is a strong need for a measurement framework that can guide future research. In this article, operational definitions for measuring Internet skills are proposed, applied in two large-scale performance tests, and tested...

In order to utilize the possibilities of information and communication technology within the public domain and thereby further develop the electronic government, it is necessary that civil servants possess sufficient levels of Internet skills. Higher levels of these skills among professionals in the public sphere might result in better Internet usa...

Although traditional and digital media skills contain many similarities, digital media literacy increases the differences observed in traditional literacy. On the one hand computers and the Internet make things easier as they enable systematic information retrieval from innumerable sources simultaneously. At the other hand computers and the Interne...

For many standard as well as emerging criminal law Web 2.0 applications, such as the development of mashups and dataspace systems, privacy preserving data integration is of crucial importance. In many organizations different databases contain different kinds of data concerning the same entity. This may have several good reasons. However, to have an...

This report for the European Commission evaluates if/how the European society had become an Information society during the first decade of the new millenium. At that time, "information society" had also been the name of the related EU programs and the DG. The report was, therefore, part of the evaluation of these efforts. It can be read publicly un...

This study extends the conventional and superficial notion of measuring digital skills by proposing definitions for operational, formal, information and strategic skills. The main purpose was to identify individual skill related problems that users experience when navigating the Internet. In particular, lower levels of education and aging seem to c...

Businesses and citizens demand a better and more client-centered way of service delivery from public organizations. As society becomes more complex, dynamic and diverse, public organizations need to adapt to this demand. Conversely, our perception is that public organizations might still treat their target groups as one. However, the need for clien...

In this paper, we have analyzed the complaint database of the National Ombudsman who handles complaints with regard to almost all government organizations in the Netherlands. We searched for trends with regard to complaints and handling of complaints during a period of 25 years. For this purpose, we have applied a combination of conventional databa...

Ambient intelligence (AmI) is a growing interdisciplinary area where the focus is shifted towards users instead of merely emphasizing the technological opportunities of AmI. Different methods are employed to understand the adoption of AmI appliances by users. However, these are often small-scale methods that are focused on specific subgroups. Large...