ten - Young Europeans’ online environments: a typology of user practices

Summary

Introduction

The internet is sometimes discussed as something external, with a given set of characteristics that have positive or negative effects on children. However, ‘the internet’ cannot be a meaningful indicator of young people's everyday experiences. Online services are so heterogeneous that we can expect substantial inter-individual differences in how young people use the internet and the kinds of online environments they experience.

The EU Kids Online network tried to avoid the simple construction of ‘the’ internet in conceptualising opportunities and risks resulting from a transactional process between the set of available online services and their young potential users, within a given social and cultural context (see Chapter 1). Young people's online environments, or ‘media ecologies’ (see Chapter 5), are – at least partly – constructed by their own behaviours and practices. To satisfy the overall objective of the EU Kids Online network we need to analyse children's activities and practices, asking the question: what do children do with the internet?

We present some conceptual considerations and empirical evidence from existing studies followed by an operationalisation of the main indicators used in the analysis and their interrelations. Types of online usage are identified by means of cluster centre analyses and we investigate individual and country-related determinants of patterns of usage.

Conceptual and methodological considerations

The analyses follow the so-called repertoire-oriented approach to research on media use (see Hasebrink and Popp, 2006). The concept of media repertoires refers to how users combine different media to create comprehensive patterns of media use. Media repertoires are the result of multiple single situations of selective – particularly habitualised – behaviours, which represent the typical structure of an individual’s everyday life. Media repertoires are composites of many media contacts, including a variety of different media and content.

The concept of media repertoires is related to the arguments in Chapter 5, which refer to a holistic approach to media use (Haddon, 2003), and develop the notion of media ecologies (Horst et al, 2009). A European study of children's changing media environments attempts to identify patterns of media use ( Johnsson-Smaragdi, 2001), and Endestad et al (2011) study media user types and their relationship to social displacement.