twenty - Understanding digital inequality: the interplay between parental socialisation and children's development

Summary

Introduction

Across Europe, economic restructuring and immigration from disadvantaged countries show that relations related to inequality are dynamic and persistent. Given the diversity of European countries, in social, cultural and economic terms, the gaps between rich and poor take various forms and occur to differing degrees. However, in all countries social inequalities are a major concern in social politics. Political economists point to the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that continue to affect the communicative rights and competencies of considerable numbers of citizens (Murdock and Golding, 2004). Hence, the increasing emergence of a society that is mediated, experienced and encountered more and more through the internet is raising continuous questions about whether and how vulnerable families are getting the best out of the social, informational, educational and cultural opportunities of online technologies (Livingstone, 2009).

The younger children are, the more parental education is required for them to use the internet safely and exploit its potentials. Since lower parental educational status often leads to less confidente parental mediation, we need to provide the resources for children to draw on to build competencies for using the internet and coping with online risks. As children get older, they achieve more unrestricted access to and use of the internet, and parents tend to refrain from intervening in their personal time and space (see, for example, Wang et al, 2005; Livingstone and Helsper, 2008; Bauwens et al, 2009). However, the degree of liberty children enjoy and how they deal with it is often the product of a particular family culture. Drawing on sociological and psychological theoretical perspectives, this chapter investigates two research questions:

How does parents’ formal education influence children's internet use?

How does children's development (by age) interact with their family background in terms of an autonomous and competent use of the internet?

The interrelation between these two processes, that is, parental socialisation and development by age, helps us understand the interplay between children's activities in dealing with the internet and how their parents mediate this.

Building on existing empirical work, first, we discuss the persistent importance of social inequality in information and communications technology (ICT) use in industrialised countries; second, we propose a theoretical framework that includes children and parents’ individual agency and how they are interlinked with respect to their societal status.