The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age

Based upon fieldwork at an ordinary London school, The Class examines young people's experiences of growing up and learning in a digital world. In this original and engaging study, Livingstone and Sefton-Green explore youth values, teenagers’ perspectives on their futures, and their tactics for facing the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. The authors follow the students as they move across their different social worlds—in school, at home, and with their friends, engaging in a range of activities from video games to drama clubs and music lessons. By portraying the texture of the students’ everyday lives, The Class seeks to understand how the structures of social class and cultural capital shape the development of personal interests, relationships and autonomy. Providing insights into how young people’s social, digital, and learning networks enable or disempower them, Livingstone and Sefton-Green reveal that the experience of disconnections and blocked pathways is often more common than that of connections and new opportunities.

"While our first impressions set up a host of possibilities to be explored as the research progressed, we grounded our analysis in the detailed descriptions of the texture of the experiences, and the various economic, social and cultural resources that the class could draw on – the houses they lived in, the bedrooms they had to themselves or had to share, or the kinds of technology bought for them by their parents. We also listened to the many expectations, hopes and anxieties that intertwined and held them and those around them, shaping their trajectories. This posed us with some tricky questions of research ethics in the digital age. We sought to recognise young people’s agency and voice, although the strong influences and constraints they faced demanded that we also attended to the views of their parents and teachers as well as of wider society, not least because these also found their expression in what the young people said to us. We began to think more of education and family as the two dominant institutions within and sometimes against which young people negotiated their present and future possibilities. Within this, friendships – pursued online and face-to-face, including in the in-between places in and around their home and locale – allowed for exploration and enjoyment of alternative modes of connection and disconnection." (Livingstone, 2016: 1; from: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture/2016/07/28/researching-the-class-a-multi-sited-ethnographic-exploration/) See also: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/parenting4digitalfuture/tag/the-class/