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“Challenging Orthodoxies in Digital Inequality: young people’s practices online” – Abstract for this year’s ESA conference in Prague

This paper showcases a comparative study of young people from two very different educational communities: a top private school in central London, with a wealthy multi-ethnic intake, and a vocational college in a white working class area of England’s south coast. The study deployed uniquely innovative digital methods and traditional qualitative methods to investigate how its research cohort used the Web, online encyclopaedias, social networks, and search engines to inform themselves about highly politicised and contested topics such as immigration. By operationalising the sociological youth (a competent social actor who is able to reflect on his/her practices) this research challenges the current orthodoxies in digital inequality scholarship (which mistrusts young people and divides them into binary categories such as savvy or naïve or skilled and unskilled) . The study’s research methods afforded an opportunity compare the cohort’s self-reported practices with observational data from web proxy servers, history files, and search engine queries.

The data shows young people’s Web usage emerges from the tensions between how they want to use the Web, how they have learnt to use it within their peer groups and families, how they have been taught to use it, how they have been allowed to use it, and how these tensions are played-out in context of their contingent social reality. A theoretical analysis of the data (that synthesizes STS theory and social and cultural practice theory) suggests we need to rethink how we frame digital inequality otherwise our interventions could be ineffective or indeed counterproductive.

Posted in About My Research, Abstracts.


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