Digital Competencies and Capabilities. Pre-adolescents Inside and Outside School

The investment on key-competences in last years was one crucial European strategy to face the new challenges of the knowledge society and of the digital convergence and to guarantee the active citizenship and social inclusion. The first answer has been given in Lisbon 2000’s, when eight main objectives have been presented; they were focused on the improvement of skills in educational paths of the main agencies (i.e. school and family). Hence, the digital competence, included in Lisbon strategies, can be interpreted in a double meaning: as basic skill (focused on the digital literacy) as soft skill (focused on the digital learning). Starting from here, this proposal will construct a theoretical description of the digital competency and its impact to socialization processes of pre-adolescents, considering the influence and the strategies applied by agencies of the social capital. This issue will be analysed through the re-reading the capabilities approach by Sen and Nussbaum (2011), according two perspectives: 1. the first is connected to the development of digital competencies during the learning process of preadolescents; 2. the second is focused on the relational and communicative styles of their socializing agencies, that influence the relationship of children with media, with social and cognitive consequences.

"on the one hand, some digital competencies linked to age are gained mainly through personal use of the media and therefore focused on those devices and activities preferred spontaneously at that age, without any sociocultural mediation on the part of adults (such as knowledge of browsers, operational systems and hard disks, probably linked to the use of tablets and smartphones and used mainly for research purposes, watching video material and listening to music). This correlation is particularly evident respecting the dimension of access, i.e. the first dimension of digital competencies, focused on the shared knowledge of the units of analysis we interviewed. On the other hand, more sophisticated competencies of access, such as the knowledge of sites for sharing files or music and of Blue Ray, which are linked to activities like reading daily newspapers (also on-line) and the use of e-mail and web telephone services, as well as e-commerce, depend directly on the impact of the sociocultural profile of origin, often giving rise to intra-generational cultural gaps. If we shift our attention to the critical dimension4 of digital competencies, the family sociocultural profiles we referred to earlier have a lesser impact on the development of abilities in the pre-teens weinterviewed. We can therefore assert that across-the-board competencies do not always depend on the family’s sociocultural influence, and neither do they develop starting from the youngster’s direct media auto-socialization. It is therefore possible to hypothesize that other forms of cultural mediation, such as that of teachers, may intervene in the development of such competencies." (Cortoni, 2016, pp. 180-181)