The Great Equalizer : Does the Internet empower the Unemployed?

The ongoing digitalization affects all aspects of life, from the private to the professional sphere - on an individual, organizational and societal level. However, little is known about how marginalized groups, such as the unemployed, use the Internet in general or social media in particular and how they use them to build more strategic social relationships for finding new employment or their societal inclusion. In our contribution, we argue that there are different usage patterns along the interdependencies between recreational and instrumental use. Based on qualitative research performed with unemployed persons in Germany, we de-bate the usage of the Internet as compensating instrument for coping with unemployment and facilitating reentry into the job market. We particularly show that different usages of the In-ternet depend on socio-economic status, personality traits, motivational characteristics as well as different degrees of Internet literacy and experience.