Digital Inequalities in European Post-Soviet States

Abstract

This chapter observes developments in the complicated area of European post-Soviet states since the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the advent of the World Wide Web in relation to digital inequalities, so as to establish a framework of comparison for a deeper analysis covering European post-Soviet states by comparing Internet penetration, adoption, and use trends among different post-Soviet states. This allows for an understanding of forms of digital inequalities in terms of access and uses among European post-Soviet states. The countries are studied as individual states, and as two main blocks of Baltic states and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in Europe, to facilitate further categorisation of inequalities between the two blocks in terms of policy and practice and divides and inequalities in digital skills and use of the Internet, particularly in communication. The findings indicate clear differences in the region in terms of digital inequalities but, more interestingly, that the ranking of countries in different aspects remained more or less the same between 2014 and 2018. Either this stalemate can be interpreted as a common slowdown in the efforts towards digital diffusion and mending of digital inequalities between these years affecting the region or that the potential for development within the current environment has reached an impasse that requires a more fundamental societal change to be overcome.