Empirical Analysis of the Digital Divide from the Perspective of Internet Usage Patterns: A Case Study of Nanjing

There is a well-known ‘‘digital divide” in the tendency to connect to the Internet, but whether there is similar differentiation among Internet usage is still worthy of further exploration. Studies on the geography of the digital divide are more concentrated on the national and regional scale, with a lack of research on the micro-scale. This paper builds up an index system, uses the factors, clustering and regression to analyse the Internet usage level on spatial distribution and attributes characteristic influence factors, based on 2012 survey questionnaires about personal information usage. The result shows that there is a weak distinction in comprehensive Internet usage among Internet users from different social-economic groups, but differences in online activities are relatively significant and individual social-economic attributes and properties of location and housing of residents have a significant impact of different usage patterns.