Is digital upskilling the next generation our ‘pipeline to prosperity’?

The British government is claiming digital skills will deliver economic growth to the country and social mobility to young people: its ministers call it ‘a pipeline to prosperity’. While declaring this pipeline, the government assumes the needs of the economy and young people’s needs are (or should be) synchronised. We challenge this assumption and the policy it sustains with data from questionnaires, workshops and interviews with 50 young people from communities in South Wales (including a former mining town and a deprived inner city area) about digital technology’s role in their everyday life. We use a new typography to compare the reality of their socially and economically structured lives to the governmental policy discourse that makes them responsible for their country’s future economic success. To explain these young people’s creative and transgressive use of technology, we also make an empirically grounded contribution to the ongoing theoretical debates about structure and agency.

Davies and Eynon (2018) identify five groups (non-conformists, pc gamers, academic conservatives, pragmatists and leisurists) based on young people's dominant orientation to digital technology. "young people mobilised digital technologies in a variety of contrasting ways that, because they defy discursive construction, require a sociological explanation. While it is important to draw attention to the student’s own choices and behaviours, their agency, it is essential to simultaneously account for patterns in the data that suggest this agency had limits." (Davies and Eynon, 2018: 3973). "As can be seen from the typology, there are some individuals who go with flow and use technology in practical or habitual ways that suits their needs but with relatively little evidence of critical reflection. There are some who adjusted to ‘newness of the games’ by taking pleasure from more traditional embodied skills and practice like going off to play football in a park. Some were more defined by the constraints on their choices, while others, the data show, were more able to reflexively engage with their socio-technical class of conditions. Whether it was to reflexively strategise, or to habitually adjust to aspects of their lives they are relatively powerless to change, each group’s response is accommodated in the concept of reflexive habitus." (Davies and Eynon, 2018: 3974).