Trends in the use of new technologies on the example of Polish users

Abstract

ICTs are playing an increasingly important role in most modern societies. In the current research on the state of development of the information society, on the one hand, access to the Internet and the saturation of households with modern devices are taken into account. On the other hand, the analyses include the level of diversity of Internet activity declared by people using the network. This allows describing demographic and social factors that contribute to digital exclusion resulting from the lack of access to technologies or the lack of competence to use them. These studies are based on the opposition does – does not use Internet technologies or their functionalities, which is an insufficient division for understanding the complexity of digital exclusion. The use of k-means clustering and two-step clustering in research on the use of new technologies will allow to overcome this dichotomy and characterise social categories that use new technologies at different levels and apply them in their everyday practices. This will enable a better recognition of the phenomenon of digital exclusion in Poland. The analyses were based on a set of data collected as part of Social Diagnosis in 2015.