Giovanna Mascheroni

Global Nomads' Network and Mobile Sociality: Exploring New Media Uses on the Move

This paper explores the convergence of communication and travel and the emergence of a mobile and network sociality, through investigating new communication practices based on the internet and mobile phone enacted by backpackers while on the move. These global nomads produce and maintain mobile spaces of sociality, founded on a complex intersection of face-to-face interaction and mediated communication, co-presence and virtual proximity, corporeal travel and virtual mobilities. Personal communities become a mobile phenomenon, relocalized in a plurality of online and offline social spaces. It is thus argued that network relationships are reshaped and mobilized through reconfigurations of co-presence, proximity and distance in relation to the use of new media. Exploring new media uses on the move can thus provide a useful insight into the emerging social model of the network and mobile society.

The mobile Internet: Access, use, opportunities and divides among European children

Based on data collected through the Net Children Go Mobile survey of approximately 3500 respondents aged 9–16 years in seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania and the United Kingdom), this article examines the diffusion of smartphones among children and contributes to existing research on mobile digital divides by investigating what influences the adoption of smartphones among children and whether going online from a smartphone is associated with specific usage patterns, thus bridging or widening usage gaps. The findings suggest the resilience of digital inequalities among children, showing how social inequalities intersect with divides in access and result in disparities in online activities, with children who benefit from a greater autonomy of use and a longer online experience also reaching the top of the ladder of opportunities.

“Girls are addicted to likes so they post semi-naked selfies”: Peer mediation, normativity and the construction of identity online.

This paper examines how children aged 11-16 in three European countries (Italy, UK and Spain) develop and present their online identities, and their interactions with peers. It focuses on young people’s engagement with the construction of an online identity on social media through pictures, and explores how peer-mediated conventions of self-presentation are appropriated, legitimated, or resisted in pre-teens’ and teenagers’ discourses. In doing so, we draw on Goffman’s (1959) work on the presentation of self and “impression management” to frame our analysis. Mobile communication and social network sites serve an important role in the process of self-presentation and emancipation, providing “full-time” access to peers and peer culture. Our findings suggest that there are gender differences and the presence of sexual double standards in peer normative discourses. Girls are positioned as being more subjected to peer mediation and pressure. Boys blame girls for posing sexy in photos, and negatively sanction this behaviour as being aimed at increasing one’s popularity online or as an indicator of “a certain type of girl.” However, girls who post provocative photos chose to conform to a sexualised stereotype as a means of being socially accepted by peers. Moreover, they identify with the pressure to always look “perfect” in their online pictures. While cross-national variations do exist, this sexual double standard is observed in all three countries. These insights into current behaviours could be further developed to determine policy guidance for supporting young people as they learn to manage image laden social media.

Parenting the Mobile Internet in Italian Households: Parents' and Children's Discourses

Drawing on the rich literature on parental mediation of childrens use of digital and mobile media, this paper discusses the findings of an explorative study conducted in Italy, aimed at understanding how families appropriate smartphones in relation to the households moral economy, their domestication of ICTs and the parenting style adhered to by parents. The aim of the paper is threefold: understand (1) how are social legitimations for or against childrens use of smartphones constructed; (2) how do parents make sense of their mediation of childrens mobile internet use drawing on different interpretative repertoires; and (3) how children negotiate, resist or evade parental justifications by producing alternative narratives.

Media representations and children’s discourses on online risks: Findings from qualitative research in nine European countries

Prior research has pointed to cross-national variations in media attention for online risks, which are then mirrored in parental concerns regarding the internet. However, little is known so far about how the discursive environment around opportunities and risks of the internet for children shapes the very context in which children’s own perceptions are developed and their online experiences are situated. The aim of this contribution is threefold: (1) to understand how and to what extent children’s perceptions of online risks incorporate media representations, parental worries and discourses circulating among peers; (2) to identify any age- or gender-specific patterns in the appropriation and conversion of media, parents’ and peers’ discourses; and (3) to identify whether there are cross-cultural variations in risk perceptions.

Perpetual contact as a communicative affordance: Opportunities, constraints, and emotions

This paper draws on qualitative data collected as a part of a comparative study on children and teenagers’ uses of smartphones in nine European countries to explore the meanings and emotions associated with the enhanced possibility of “full-time” contact with peers provided by smartphones. It argues that full-time access to peers—which interviewees identify as the main consequence of smartphones and instant messaging apps on their interactions with friends—is a communicative affordance, that is, a set of socially constructed opportunities and constraints that frame possibilities of action by giving rise to a diversity of communicative practices, as well as contradictory feelings among young people: intimacy, proximity, security as well as anxiety, exclusion and obligation. Understanding the perceptions and emotions around the affordance of “anywhere, anytime” accessibility, therefore, helps in untangling how communicative affordances are individually perceived but also, and more importantly, socially appropriated, negotiated, legitimised, and institutionalised.

Utilisation des réseaux socionumériques par les jeunes européens

L’utilisation des reseaux socionumeriques est sans doute l’activite en ligne qui enregistre actuellement la croissance la plus rapide parmi les jeunes. Cet article presente de nouvelles conclusions pan-europeennes du projet EU Kids Online sur la facon dont les enfants et les jeunes exploitent les possibilites des reseaux peer-to-peer offertes par les reseaux socionumeriques, en se basant sur une enquete menee aupres d’environ 25 000 jeunes (1 000 enfants de chacun des 25 pays de l’Union europeenne). Globalement, 59 % des jeunes internautes europeens âges de 9 a 16 ans disposent de leur propre profil sur un site de reseau social. Malgre des craintes, couramment exprimees, de voir la vie des jeunes entierement exposee en public, la moitie ont moins de cinquante contacts, la plupart des contacts sont des personnes que l’enfant connait deja personnellement, et plus de deux tiers ont des profils prives ou partiellement prives. L’objectif de l’analyse est donc de comprendre quand et pourquoi certains enfants cherchent a elargir leurs cercles de contacts en ligne, et pourquoi certains preferent devoiler leur intimite plutot que proteger leur vie privee. L’etude montre que les differences demographiques entre les enfants, les facteurs culturels dans les differents pays, et les affordances specifiques des reseaux socionumeriques ont tous une influence sur l’elaboration des pratiques en ligne des enfants en matiere de vie privee, d’identite et de connexions sociales.

European research on children’s internet use: Assessing the past and anticipating the future

In this article, we reflect critically on the research agenda on children’s Internet use, framing our analysis using Wellman’s three ages of Internet studies and taking as our case study the three phases of research by the EU Kids Online network from 2006 to 2014. Following the heyday of moral panics, risk discourses and censorious policy-making that led to the European Commission’s first Internet Action Plan 1999–2002, EU Kids Online focused on conceptual clarification, evidence review and debunking of myths, thereby illustrating the value of systematic documentation and mapping, and grounding academic, public and policy-makers’ understanding of ‘the Internet’ in children’s lives. Consonant with Wellman’s third age, which emphasizes analysis and contextualization, the EU Kids Online model of children’s online risks and opportunities helps shift the agenda from how children engage with the Internet as a medium to how they engage with the world mediated by the Internet.

“I Can Share Politics But I Don’t Discuss It”: Everyday Practices of Political Talk on Facebook

The article explores how a group of young people in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom experience and manage informal political talk on Facebook. Based on 60 interviews with 14- to 25-year-olds with diverse interest and participation in politics, it understands political talk as a social achievement dependent on the situational definition, shaped by the perceived imagined audiences, shared expectations, and technological affordances. Results show that young people construct different interactional contexts on Facebook depending on their political experiences, but also on their understanding of the affordances of networked publics as shaped by the social norms of their peer groups. Many youth define Facebook as an unsafe social setting for informal political discussions, thus adhering to a form of “publicness” aimed at neutralizing conflicts. Others, instead, develop different forms of “publicness” based on emergent communicative skills that help them manage the uncertainty of social media as interactional contexts.

Rules of Engagement: Family Rules on Young Children’s Access to and Use of Technologies

This chapter reports on a study conducted in seven countries in which young children’s (aged under 8) digital practices in the home were examined. The study explored family practices with regard to access to and use of technologies, tracing the ways in which families managed risks and opportunities. Seventy families participated in the study, and interviews were undertaken with both parents and children, separately and together, in order to address the research aims. This chapter focuses on the data relating to parental mediation of young children’s digital practices. Findings indicate that parents used a narrow range of strategies in comparison to parents of older children, primarily because they considered their children too young to be at risk when using technologies. However, children’s own reports suggested that some were able to access online sites independently from a young age and would have benefitted from more support and intervention. The implications of the study for future research and practice are considered.