The Digital Edge. S. Craig Watkins
media and production literacy skills that young people develop.
Parental Persistence
During our time in the school the economic recovery from the Great Recession was plodding along slowly for lower-income households. Faced with limited prospects for meaningful employment, many of the families experienced periodic disruptions in their home Internet access. Still, most families managed to offer some degree of access to computers and the Internet at home. Diego’s family experience was not atypical among our study participants.
Diego was a senior, smart, and deep into games. (In chapter six we discuss his games-based interests and activities in detail.) He and his younger brother lived in a Spanish-language-dominant household. They spent weekdays with their mother and weekends with their father. When it was a struggle to keep up with rent and utilities, Diego’s mother would opt to overlook the monthly payment for Internet service. Diego described the times without home Internet as frustrating, “because you feel disconnected from the world,” he told one of our researchers.
Most of the parents in our study worked in lower-wage, lower-status service occupations. Still, nearly all of them placed substantial value on digital media and made sacrifices to ensure greater access to computers, the Internet, and mobile devices in their home. Parents overwhelmingly viewed the Internet as a necessary bridge to educational enrichment and better future opportunities. As one mother told us, “You have to know how to use computers in today’s world. If you don’t it’s really hard to find a good job.”
Diego’s mother illustrates the parental sacrifices that we observed. She spoke very little English and worked in a middle school cafeteria. Though it was a constant struggle she insisted on trying to keep up with the monthly payments for home Internet access. Diego often joked about how little his mother used technology. “She has no idea how to use Facebook,” he noted during a conversation with one of our researchers. Further, she did not use a mobile phone. Still, she had a full appreciation of how important technology was in the lives of her two sons and worked diligently to provide them access to a computer and the Internet at home. She patiently saved money and was able to surprise Diego with a brand new iPhone for Christmas. When he showed one of our researchers the phone after the holiday break, his eyes still sparkled from the elation the unexpected gift stirred.
One aspect of life in the digital edge that is little noticed is the extraordinary effort that some parents display to secure a richer technology and literacy environment for their children. No one needs to tell these parents that technology is important in education and the paid labor force. They understand better than most how low educational attainment or a lack of knowledge about computers and the digital economy limits your prospects for higher-wage, higher-status employment and social mobility. How these parents persist to create a more favorable media, technology, and literacy environment for their children deserves more detailed attention than even we give to the matter. Faced with limited financial resources, these parents make important investments in the lives of their children even as they face extraordinarily challenging odds.
Why the Home Broadband Internet Gap Matters
As the discussion above explains, several families in our study struggled to sustain access to home broadband Internet. The presence of broadband in the home is associated with a number of important outcomes related to young people’s participation in the digital world. During the period of our fieldwork, 73 percent of U.S. households adopted broadband Internet, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).13 Adoption varied along some predictable categories. For example, the lowest-family-income households (48 percent) were less likely to have access to home broadband than the highest-family-income households (95 percent). Similarly, white households (77 percent) were more likely than black (61 percent) or Latino (63 percent) households to have home broadband.14
About 28 percent of the 122 million households represented in the NTIA’s study did not use broadband at home. The NTIA identified several reasons why some households were nonadopters of broadband Internet. The main reason given for nonadoption was “don’t need it, not interested.” We saw no evidence of this viewpoint in our study. This is likely due to one main fact: the presence of school-aged children in all of the households in our fieldwork. A child in the home has long been a good predictor of whether technologies like computers, gaming platforms, or the Internet will be available in the home. As we noted above, all of the parents that we met understood the basic benefits of computers and the Internet.
The second reason cited by the NTIA—broadband is too expensive—was a common refrain among the households in our study that were nonadopters of broadband. Among the families in our study, economic difficulties were a constant barrier to the acquisition of nonessential household-related goods and services. Another reason cited by the NTIA—the presence of an inadequate computer—consistently appeared in our conversations with students. Many of the Freeway students in our study had home access to computers and mobile phones. However, as these devices aged, an upgrade to a new computer or phone was not a certainty. As we discuss in chapter two, for instance, students often had to make do with dilapidated mobile devices and household computers; thus, their home access to a more robust Internet experience was severely limited.
The broadband gap in the United States matters for several reasons. Students who have broadband access only at school or in public spaces like a library may not have sufficient time to tinker, play, or develop the repertoire of digital skills and social capital that are often associated with more dynamic digital media practices. Additionally, young people who lack access to high-capacity digital networks are more likely to be only consumers rather than producers of digital media content. Home broadband users are much more likely than nonusers to create and share content, two key features in the participatory cultures that are a significant aspect of the networked world. This has implications for the quality of young people’s engagement with media as well as their prospects for cultivating more advanced thinking and digital making skills.
The absence of home broadband has serious educational implications too. Students who do not have reliable access to broadband Internet face serious limitations in their academic endeavors and preparation for a knowledge economy. Whether it is in school or out of school, we live in a world that takes for granted the ability to collaborate with others, work with networked documents, and use mobile and cloud-based platforms.
Living in homes and attending schools that are short on financial and technological resources requires one to be creative and flexible. Freeway students were constantly adapting their Internet use to changing or uncertain circumstances—a lost or broken mobile device, social media filters at school, or no Internet connection at home. Students who did not have Internet access at home or via their own mobile device mined other options, including computers at school, public Wi-Fi, and the devices of friends. This last method—relying on devices from friends—was especially interesting and reflects the creation of what we call an informal sharing economy.
The student-powered “sharing economy” that we detected was marked by a series of practices that involved trading, co-owning, and partnering with peers to use handheld mobile devices like smartphones and iPods. The swapping and sharing of mobile handhelds created a distinct community of trust while also providing access to the media content coveted by many teens. The decision to share devices and passwords embodies the resilience that characterizes how students navigated the daily realities of life in the digital edge. We discuss this informal sharing economy in greater detail in chapter two.
Further, students became experts at finding Wi-Fi hotspots when they could not afford mobile data plans. Some students even acknowledged that they figured out ways to use neighboring Wi-Fi connections even when they were not open to the public. A few students turned the computers at Freeway into their personal platform during the after-school hours. And others leveraged good relations with teachers to earn weekend borrowing privileges that allowed them to use laptops and digital editing software at home. In other words, even when access to a