Learning Outcomes
Understand:
- Social networks and social media
- Socioeconomic status and technological constraints are important part of usage context
- The role of community or government funded initiatives in bridging the digital divide
Remember:
- Digital Divide
- Literacy
- Socioeconomic status
- Social networks
Apply:
- Given a user group, determine to what extent they may be affected by the digital divide
- Describe how and in which contexts a given social media site / social network is used
Preparing for the Session
The context of social media
Social media and social network sites change rapidly, and this is reflected in who goes on those sites, what content is created, how the networks are used, and what the demographics of this user group is.
A useful definition of social networks is that they allow the user to:
- create a public or semi public profile on a bounded system
- make lists of other users with whom they want to be connected or with whom they share a connection
- view and traverse (surf) lists of connections
(source: boyd & Ellison, 2007 – note that I’ve omitted the restriction to web sites. This paper was published in the year the first iPhone came out)
You need to be careful with papers about the use of social media, because most of their data comes from students. Students are not a representative sample of young people. This survey from the Pew Internet and American Life project is well designed and thoroughly researched. While it’s old in Internet years, it shows how quickly both the landscape of popular websites and their use changes.
If you look at the tables and graphs, you will note that behaviour is analysed by age (younger teen, older teen, adult), sometimes gender, but also race (white, Black, Hispanic).
IMPORTANT: Race does not determine intelligence or personality. Race stands for the socioeconomic characteristics of people with a certain heritage and skin colour. Both in the UK and in the US, people of colour (e.g. African Americans, people from an Indian / Pakistani background, First People / Native Americans) are much more likely to be economically disadvantaged than White / Caucasian people.
The context of individual skills
Literacy, in the context of technology and IT systems, is often used as a catch-all phrase for the answer to the question “How well can a person use and deal with X?” To see an example for basic computer literacy, I recommend reading
Poynton, T. A. (2005). Computer literacy across the lifespan: a review with implications for educators. Computers in Human Behavior, 21(6), 861–872. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2004.03.004
The catch-all concept of literacy quickly becomes problematic when you want to define it more closely and measure it. What are the relevant skills? What does it mean to be literate? Even for the ability to read and write, from which the original term literacy derives, the definition is not clear. To illustrate the complexities involved, here are some definition of grade reading levels used in the US: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/achieveall.aspx
The social context
Describing a person’s social context is so complicated that there is an entire discipline (sociology) which is partially devoted to this question. If you want to start simple, and if you want a variable that is often used in both the research literature and in policy and government literature, look at the concept of socioeconomic status (SES).
There are no very clear definitions of the term, but it roughly describes a person’s standing in society. An example of somebody with very high socioeconomic status is Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Homeless people rank near the bottom. A person’s status can change – Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, advanced from a relatively low status as a refugee to a very high status as a billionaire.
Bringing it all together: The Digital Divide
The digital divide is, roughly speaking, the distinction between those who have technology and skills and those who don’t. Many factors determine the side of the divide that a person finds themselves on – this is where all aspects of context come together. For example, a person with no hands or blind people may be severely limited in how they can use computers. A person who doesn’t know how to protect themselves online might be scared to go online in the first place. And a person who doesn’t earn enough to buy a computer or doesn’t have a home where they can keep a valuable device can’t use it to apply for badly needed services.
A useful introduction to the digital divide is provided by Wikipedia. Should you want to cite the concept in your own work, however, look for more specific papers and reports that are relevant to the context you are looking at.
Core Papers
If you want to know more about the critical analysis of social media, and how social media is used, look no further than danah boyd. I recommend picking and reading one of her key papers.
You should also read both the papers referenced above:
- Lenhart, A., Purcell, K., Smith, A. & Zickuhr, K. (2010). Social Media and Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults. Pew Internet Project.
- boyd, d.m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x
When reading the boyd and Ellison paper, look at the social networks listed, and make a list of new social networks that have emerged since then. Papers about new social networking services come out as soon as a new contender emerges – see for example this paper on Snapchat:
Piwek, L., & Joinson, A. (2016). “What do they snapchat about?” Patterns of use in time-limited instant messaging service. Computers in Human Behavior, 54, 358–367. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.08.026
Those of you who have taken the HCI course may want to follow up on the concept of the digital divide.
Michael Gurstein discusses the digital divide in a political and civic context.
Gurstein, M. (2003). Effective use: A community informatics strategy beyond the Digital Divide. First Monday, 8(12). doi:10.5210/fm.v8i12.1107
If you want well-researched data on the extent and form of the Digital Divide, I can recommend reports by Pew Research (US) and Ofcom (UK). The recent report on Libraries by Pew Research emphasises how important libraries are in ensuring everybody has digital skills.