The Digital Edge. S. Craig Watkins
“it was like holding the Internet in your hands.” It turns out that in the United States, a population of unlikely early adopters, blacks and Latinos, were already holding the Internet in their hands. The key question, of course, is, what kind of Internet were they holding? Going online via a mobile platform emerged as the norm among populations that historically have not been associated with the class of early technology adopters.
These different pathways to the online world also structure different opportunities to participate in the online world. Predictably, homes with access to broadband Internet accrue several advantages compared with homes without broadband. Households with broadband, for instance, are much more likely than those without to use the Internet for a wider array of activities—social, educational, political, and recreational. Youth with home access to broadband have more opportunities than youth without to build rich interest-driven learning ecologies that promote digital exploration, experimentation, and content creation. It is not that youth without home broadband access are unable to build interest-driven learning ecologies, but rather that they must be especially resourceful to do so. Throughout this book we explore how Freeway students designed a number of creative and flexible solutions to ensure greater access to and participation in digital media culture.
The mobile lives of black and Latino youth raise a number of interesting questions regarding the ever-shifting currents of the digital divide and represent, more generally, what we call a mobile paradox. On the one hand, the adoption of mobile phones and the mobile Internet among African Americans and Latinos suggests that they are early adopters and mobile trendsetters in the United States. On the other hand, the conditions that shape black and Latino teens’ mobile practices suggest that they continue to grapple with the social and economic challenges associated with life in the digital edge.
Even as black and Latino youth are early adopters of mobile, they are less likely than white or Asian youth to grow up in households with access to broadband Internet and the associated benefits. Home broadband expands the opportunities for young people to develop the social networks and technical competence that are associated with more robust forms of digital media practice, production, and participatory cultures. Put another way, the opportunities to cultivate more dynamic forms of digital literacy and social capital are severely limited when young people must rely on broadband Internet access through school, a public library, or someone else’s house.21
The mobile path to the online world for Latino and black youth also raises some concerns. Smartphones can be a tool for youth creativity, learning, and civic engagement (i.e., Black Lives Matter, The March for Our Lives). However, there are credible concerns that teens who are restricted to mobile phones for home Internet use may also be restricted to social worlds, media literacies, and cultural practices that rarely, if ever, afford access to the social and technical currencies that power whole new kinds of learning pathways and opportunities in the networked world. From a more technical perspective, mobile Internet connections lag in comparison with the high-capacity Internet connections associated with broadband or fiber optic cables in terms of data, speed, and network capacity.22 This explains, for example, what is call the “homework gap,” or the recognition that students who only have mobile phone access to the Internet at home are severely limited in their ability to execute school assignments. In short, homes with mobile-only Internet are at a social, technical, and educational disadvantaged compared with their broadband counterparts.
Historically, early adoption of consumer technologies has been viewed as an indicator of a privileged status. However, the early adoption of the mobile Internet by blacks and Latinos tells a more complex story. More specifically, their early adoption of the mobile Internet reflects the degree to which social and economic inequalities persist even when they appear to have diminished.
Anytime/Anywhere: The Transformation of Teen Media Consumption
Predictably, the increase in mobile media ownership contributes to the increasing amount of media young people consume in a typical day. In its 1999 study, The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that American youth spent about seven hours a day consuming media.23 By 2015, a Common Sense study that included similar methods to and one of the authors from the Kaiser report found that teens averaged about nine hours a day of media use.24 A decade after its first study of young people’s media use Kaiser summed up its key takeaway this way: “The story of media in young people’s lives today is primarily a story of technology facilitating increased consumption.”25 Several studies also report significant racial and ethnic differences in young people’s media consumption. The Common Sense study finds that African American youth spend about eleven hours a day with media compared to nine and eight hours, respectively, among their Latino and white counterparts.26
A 2010 Kaiser study found that Latino and black youth were significantly more active on their mobile devices than white youth, suggesting that mobile adoption in the digital edge has been in the making for some time.27 For instance, Latino and black youth spent more time texting and talking with their mobile phones than their white counterparts.28 The racial gap in mobile media consumption was even wider. Compared with white children and teens, black and Latino youth were heavy consumers of media content via mobile devices. Both black and Latino youth spend more time than white youth using mobile to consume music, games, and video.29 Mobile is the ultimate media consumption platform and easily provides teens with what Nielsen Media Research calls “entertainment Nirvana.”30 The consumption of entertainment media was a major impetus in the coveting of mobile devices among many of the students in our study.
The twin brothers Miguel and Marcus wanted mobile devices to access Facebook and play games. Selena wanted mobile so that she could listen to her favorite bands and post pictures on social media. Sergio believed that a mobile device would keep him connected to his favorite bands. The role of mobile as a platform for media consumption was clearly evident from the initial focus group that we conducted with students. Many of them echoed a similar sentiment: “I use my mobile for everything.” Translation: “I consume much of my media entertainment via my mobile device.” For many young people, their participation in pop culture is increasingly facilitated by their adoption and use of mobile content including, among other things, music, video games, apps, video, memes, social media, and photos. But the significance of mobile in the lives of teens extends well beyond the media that they consume.
Mobile, for example, is a source for peer community and social identity. In their adoption of mobile, teens align themselves with certain peer groups, tastes, cultures, and what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu refers to as “distinctions” in their acquisition of peer-inflected forms of cultural capital.31 Among young people, mobile technologies are clear markers of social status.32 Students at Freeway noticed when their peers acquired a new mobile device. When Diego received an iPhone as a gift from his mother, his standing in his peer group immediately rose. Students without handheld devices, like Miguel and Marcus, experienced varying degrees of frustration and social isolation from their peers. Whereas technology is often decried for making young people less social, a new reality has emerged: not owning a connected device may actually lead to greater social isolation from peers.
Several factors—social, structural, and financial—provide greater perspective on the rising rates of mobile media consumption among black and Latino teens. Over the course of our fieldwork we noticed that many of the students at Freeway lacked access to enrichment opportunities outside of what the school provided. As we discuss in chapter six, many families at Freeway did not have the resources—money or the time—to invest in costly or time-consuming after-school learning and enrichment activities for their children. This partially explains the higher amounts of leisure time among youth in lower-income households and lower amounts among youth in higher-income households.33 Consequently, youth from lower-income households find themselves with substantial amounts of free or unstructured time on their hands. Equipped with a rising number of screens, including handhelds, some children and teens may be filling some of that free time consuming mobile games, videos, music, and social media.
A conversation between one of our researchers and Gabriella, a young sophomore student in our sample, highlights how unstructured time, boredom, and access to a mobile screen can lead to increased media consumption. Discussing her use of social media, Gabriella says, “I would say that I am addicted