Digital Divide in the Population of Serbia

This paper considers a new kind of social polarization, which comes together with the global process of growing ICTs and transition towards information society. This phenomenon, known as digital divide, equally affects different entities like populations, regions, countries or companies. Monitoring and measuring digital divide becomes the common goal, also implementing the results in new strategies for minimizing them. After giving some recommendations for overcoming digital divide in one country, the model for measuring five types of digital divide and the total digital divide in the domain of population is proposed. The model is applied on the population of Serbia, calculating five sub-indices and the compound digital polarization index for the years 2009 and 2010. Conclusions suggested that the process of minimizing digital divide in Serbia is on, although still very slowly. Keywords: social polarization, information society, digital divide, measuring digital divide, digital polarization index