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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify enablers and inhibitors to the adoption of mobile internet services by socioeconomically disadvantaged people: an understudied population adversely affected by digital inequality.Design/methodology/approach A qualitative study combining a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. In total, 32 socioeconomically disadvantaged people explored mobile lottery services and subsequently were asked a series of semi-structured questions about their perceptions of the technology.Findings Users’ attitudes toward mobile internet services were ambivalent. They experienced some advantages of smartphones (including escaping spatiotemporal constrains, fashionableness, privacy, and cost-effectiveness) and conceived of mobile internet services in terms of social advantages (including their ubiquitous nature, fitting in socially and fear of being “left behind”). However, they also experienced barriers and concerns, such as limited mobile data packages, external barriers from mobile services (including security concerns, complex online help tutorials, irrelevant pop-ups, and a lack of personalized services) and internal psychological barriers (including technophobia, self-concept, and habitus).Research limitations/implications The findings are of limited generalizability due to the small size of the sample. However, the study has implications for understanding the acceptance of technology among socioeconomically disadvantaged people.Social implications The study has social implications for bridging digital inequality in terms of socioeconomic status.Originality/value While previous studies have primarily focused on enablers of adopting mobile internet services by active users, this study reveals both the promise of and the barriers to the use of such services by inactive users who comprise an under-served population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This article aims to highlight the main limitations of the emancipatory potentials of digital inclusion policies and ICTs as such. Increasingly, empowerment is put forward as one of the main goals of digital inclusion. By applying user-centric and participatory approaches, assumptions are made that individuals will be empowered and as such, will be re-included in society. Design/Methodology/Approach: These assumptions, however, tend to ignore the social, economic, political and technical conditions within which individual choices are made and within which individuals must inevitably act. Instead of attempting to narrow the existing social gap between class divided societies, and of probing the limitations given at the macro-level by questioning the wider social structure, digital inclusion policies tend to individualize problems that are in fact social in their nature. Findings: This contribution will therefore aim to identify the key causes of structural (dis)empowerment and how these resonate to digital inclusion. The article positions itself within the political economy of communication research tradition and aims to confront the structural consequences of social inequalities, existing social hierarchies and power structures against mechanisms of digital inequalities and against the implementation of digital inclusion policies. Originality/Value: By proceeding from a critical perspective, it aims to demonstrate the limitations of user-centric and micro-level approaches, while questioning their normative interpretations of digital empowerment which tend to be reductionist in their essence and instrumental in their aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]