Análisis comparativo sobre nativos, migrantes digitales y brecha digital profunda en México y Uruguay, 2016

The digital divide is conceived as the inequality in access, skills, use, and availability of digital devices or platforms. In the current context of daily tasks’ digitization, this inequality is gaining more and more relevance. The present work aims to analyze the dimensions of accessibility, motivation, and use of the Internet in Mexico and Uruguay from the deep digital divide interpretive framework proposed by Van Dijk (2005). This analysis focuses on the socioeconomic factors associated with this inequality, such as socioeconomic status, generational group (natives or digital migrants), and gender. The main findings showed there continue to be digital gaps in both countries. For example, in Mexico, the use of the Internet is equitable between sexes, but not between socioeconomic strata. Meanwhile, in Uruguay, the digital divide is smaller, there is a greater proportion of users in the high strata and over 45 years of age (classified as digital migrants), but there is a group of people who do not use the Internet because they are not interested. These results advance the study of the digital divide from a more detailed and international perspective for the Latin American region.