Engl. transl.: Transformations of digital inequality among adolescents: evidence from three surveys in Northern Italy

Based on unique datasets collected by the author in three northern Italian regions’ schools (8000 students), the article describes how youth’s family background currently relates to their Internet use practices. The results show that nowadays the only indicators that show a linear relationship with social stratification are the use of the Internet for in-depth information searching and the breadth of Internet uses carried out frequently. Other variables such as the use of social networking sites, production of online content, gaming and the time spent online seem to have become widespread irrespectively of young people’s social origins. A third set of variables, concerning how pervasive the use of one’s smartphone is in social and personal life, shows an inverse relationship with social stratification: those that are more advantaged show a lower pervasiveness. Therefore, today the digital profile of students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds is characterized by a low level of information searching, low breadth of Internet uses and high pervasivity of mobile devices. On the one hand, this poses a challenge to traditional digital inequality theory; on the other, it calls for critical education interventions to prevent addictive behaviors.

[...] belonging to a more culturally advantaged social context increases the probability of using the net to search for information. [...] However, when one moves on to other types of web use, the "advantage" of children coming from more privileged family contexts disappears completely. The case of active content production is an interesting example: the frequency of such practices (such as managing one's own site or blog or publishing self-produced material online) shows no association with the educational qualification of the parents. [...] Even the frequency of use of social networks appears to be transversal with respect to social affiliations and this transversality highlights, in the end, the little explanatory usefulness that this indicator now has. In this sense, we can read a "normalization" of online social practices where - as in offline ones - a quantitative indicator of relationality says little in terms of social differentiation. [...] It also emerges from this research that the highest daily online permanence is no longer found in the most privileged social classes. (Gui, 2015).