Sonia Livingstone

Media literacy and the challenge of new information and communication technologies

Within both academic and policy discourses, the concept of media literacy is being extended from its traditional focus on print and audiovisual media to encompass the internet and other new media. The present article addresses three central questions currently facing the public, policy-makers and academy: What is media literacy? How is it changing? And what are the uses of literacy? The article begins with a definition: media literacy is the ability to access, analyse, evaluate and create messages across a variety of contexts. This four-component model is then examined for its applicability to the internet. Having advocated this skills-based approach to media literacy in relation to the internet, the article identifies some outstanding issues for new media literacy crucial to any policy of promoting media literacy among the population. The outcome is to extend our understanding of media literacy so as to encompass the historically and culturally conditioned relationship among three processes: (i) the symbolic and material representation of knowledge, culture and values; (ii) the diffusion of interpretative skills and abilities across a (stratified) population; and (iii) the institutional, especially, the state management of the power that access to and skilled use of knowledge brings to those who are ‘literate’.

Children's Use of the Internet: Reflections on the Emerging Research Agenda

As domestic access to the internet reaches the mass market in industrialized countries, this article identifies and evaluates the emerging research agenda, focusing particularly on children and young people. The nature of childrens internet use generates public anxieties which both guide and undermine research, complicating the already challenging study of children within the privacy of the home. The body of empirical work reviewed is still small, but already key questions of academic and policy significance are being addressed regarding the opportunities and dangers of internet use. Such opportunities include communication, identity and participation, and education, learning and literacy; dangers arising from exclusion and the digital divide, and from certain kinds of use relating to inappropriate or undesirable contact, content and commercialism. In each of these domains, research strengths and gaps for future research are identified. The article concludes by noting areas of theoretical consensus and uncertainty framing the research agenda in this field.

Balancing opportunities and risks in teenagers’ use of the internet: the role of online skills and internet self-efficacy

Many hopes exist regarding the opportunities that the internet can offer to young people as well as fears about the risks it may bring. Informed by research on media literacy, this article examines the role of selected measures of internet literacy in relation to teenagers’ online experiences. Data from a national survey of teenagers in the UK (N = 789) are analyzed to examine: first, the demographic factors that influence skills in using the internet; and, second (the main focus of the study), to ask whether these skills make a difference to online opportunities and online risks. Consistent with research on the digital divide, path analysis showed the direct influence of age and socioeconomic status on young people’s access, the direct influence of age and access on their use of online opportunities, and the direct influence of gender on online risks. The importance of online skills was evident insofar as online access, use and skills were found to mediate relations between demographic variables and young people’s experience of online opportunities and risks. Further, an unexpected positive relationship between online opportunities and risks was found, with implications for policy interventions aimed at reducing the risks of internet use.

Handbook of new media : social shaping and consequences of ICTs

Introduction - Leah A Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone The Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs PART ONE: THE CHANGING SOCIAL LANDSCAPE Introduction - Sonia Livingstone The Information Society Revisited - Frank Webster Creating Community with Media - Nicholas W Jankowski History, Theories and Scientific Investigations Politics and New Media - Sara Bentivegna Interpersonal Life Online - Nancy K Baym The Electronic Generation? - David Buckingham Children and New Media New Media and New Literacies - Douglas Kellner Reconstructing Education for the New Millennium Primary Issues in Internet Use - Ronald E Rice Access, Civic and Community Involvement, and Social Interaction and Expression PART TWO: TECHNOLOGY DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT Introduction - Leah A Lievrouw New Media History - Patrice Flichy How to Infrastructure - Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey C Bowker Exploring Models of Interactivity from Multiple Research Traditions - Sally J McMillan Users, Documents and Systems Determination and Contingency in New Media Development - Leah A Lievrouw Diffusion of Innovations and Social Shaping of Technology Perspectives PART THREE: NEW MEDIA AND ORGANIZING Introduction - Noshir S Contractor Smart Agents and Organizations of the Future - Kathleen M Carley New Media and Organizing at the Group Level - Andrea B Hollingshead and Noshir S Contractor The Social Construction of Technology in Studies of the Workplace - Mich[gr]ele H Jackson, Marshall Scott Poole and Tim Kuhn New Media Implementation and Industrial Organization - Fran[ce]cois Bar with Caroline Simard PART FOUR: SYSTEMS, INDUSTRIES AND MARKETS Introduction - John Ure The Development and Use of Online Newspapers - Pablo J Boczkowski What Research Tells Us and What We Might Want to Know New Media and New Economy Cluster Dynamics - Philip Cooke Globalization and the Structure of New Media Industries - Terry Flew and Stephen McElhinney Information Society, Trade and Industry Policy - Anders Henten and Knud Erik Skouby The Economics of Information and Industrial Change - Don Lamberton The New Economy - Peter Lovelock and John Ure Internet, Telecommunications and Electronic Commerce? Universal Access to the New Information Infrastructure - Heather E Hudson PART FIVE: POLICY AND REGULATION Introduction - Bella Mody, Harry M Trebing and Laura Stein The Governance of Media Markets Wired Cities and Transnational Communications - Dwayne Winseck New Forms of Governance for Telecommunications and the New Media New Global Media and Communication Policy - Laura Stein and Nikhil Sinha The Role of the State in the Twenty-First Century About Scarcities and Intermediaries - Stefaan G Verhulst The Regulatory Paradigm Shift of Digital Content Reviewed The Real Digital Divide - Oscar H Gandy Jr Citizens versus Consumers Labour and New Media - Gwen Urey PART SIX: CULTURE AND NEW MEDIA Introduction - Mark Poster Cultural Studies and Technology - Jennifer Daryl Slack and J Macgregor Wise Discursive Displacement and the Seminal Ambiguity of Space and Place - Michael R Curry Power and Political Culture - Timothy W Luke Social Relationships and Identity Online and Offline - Don Slater

The challenge of changing audiences : or, what is the audience researcher to do in the age of the internet?

Mediated communication is no longer simply or even mainly mass communication (‘from one to many’) but rather the media now facilitate communication among peers (both ‘one to one’ and ‘many to many’). Does this mean that the concept of the audience is obsolete? Or does the growing talk of ‘users’, instead of audiences, fall into the hyperbolic discourse of ‘the new’, neglecting historical continuities and reinventing the wheel of media and communications research? Undoubtedly, the challenge of a moving target, and hence a changing subject matter, faces us all. This article explores the ways in which, although the argument for the active television audience may have been taken as far as possible, new interactive technologies put ordinary people’s interpretative activities at the very centre of media design and use. Hence, it considers how far existing theories and methods for researching audiences can be extended to new media and how far some significant rethinking is required.

Active participation or just more information? Young people’s take up of opportunities to act and interact on the internet

Given increasing calls for children and young people to participate via the Internet in civic and political activities), this article examines how far, and with what success, such participation is occurring among UK teenagers. Findings from a national survey conducted by the UK Children Go Online project show that young people are using the Internet for a wide range of activities that could be considered ‘participation’, including communicating, peer-to-peer connection, seeking information, interactivity, webpage/content creation and visiting civic/political websites. The findings are closely examined using path analysis techniques to identify the direct and indirect relations among different factors that may explain how and why some young people participate more than others. The results suggest that interactive and creative uses of the Internet are encouraged by the very experience of using the Internet (gaining in interest, skills, confidence, etc.) but that visiting civic websites depends primarily on demographic factors (with older, middle-class girls being most likely to visit these sites). Finally, cluster analysis is used to identify three groups of young people – interactors, the civic-minded and the disengaged – each of which is distinctive in its social context and approach to the Internet.

On the Challenges of Cross-National Comparative Media Research

Funding bodies and policy imperatives increasingly favour comparative research. Stimulated also by the phenomena of globalization and the concomitant rise of globalization theory, researchers in media, communication and cultural studies increasingly find themselves initiating or invited to collaborate in multinational comparative projects. Given the growing prominence of comparative media and communications research, this article examines the claims made for such research in order to foster a more explicit and critical understanding of the research aims, process and findings. Adapting Kohn’s fourfold typology of models for comparative research, a range of epistemological debates regarding cross-national comparison are juxtaposed with the practical experiences of media and communications researchers in order to reveal the key research decisions and their consequences for substantive conclusions.

Predicting personal debt and debt repayment: Psychological, social and economic determinants

While personal debt has grown rapidly in the United Kingdom in recent years, posing problems for individuals, families and society, little empirical research has been conducted to date on everyday experiences of debt. The present paper reports on the findings of an in-depth survey of the social, economic and psychological factors related to debt. Discriminant function analysis and multiple regression analysis were used to address three questions: what discriminates debtors from nondebtors; what determines how far people get into debt; and what determines how much of their debts people repay? Sociodemographic factors were found to play a relatively minor role in personal debt and debt repayment. Disposable income did not differ between those in debt and not in debt, although it predicted how far people were in debt and was most important in determining debt repayment. Attitudinal factors (being pro-credit rather than anti-debt, or seeing credit as useful but problematic) were found to be important predictors of debt and debt repayments. Further psychological factors, focusing on economic attributions, locus of control, coping strategies and consumer pleasure were found to be important, and a range of specific economic practices were also related to experiences of debt.

Critical Reflections on the Benefits of ICT in Education.

In both schools and homes, information and communication technologies (ICT) are widely seen as enhancing learning, this hope fuelling their rapid diffusion and adoption throughout developed societies. But they are not yet so embedded in the social practices of everyday life as to be taken for granted, with schools proving slower to change their lesson plans than they were to fit computers in the classroom. This article examines two possible explanations – first, that convincing evidence of improved learning outcomes remains surprisingly elusive, and second, the unresolved debate over whether ICT should be conceived of as supporting delivery of a traditional or a radically different vision of pedagogy based on soft skills and new digital literacies. The difficulty in establishing traditional benefits, and the uncertainty over pursuing alternative benefits, raises fundamental questions over whether society really desires a transformed, technologically-mediated relation between teacher and learner.

Teen girls, sexual double standards and ‘sexting’: Gendered value in digital image exchange:

This article explores gender inequities and sexual double standards in teens’ digital image exchange, drawing on a UK qualitative research project on youth ‘sexting’. We develop a critique of ‘postfeminist’ media cultures, suggesting teen ‘sexting’ presents specific age and gender related contradictions: teen girls are called upon to produce particular forms of ‘sexy’ self display, yet face legal repercussions, moral condemnation and ‘slut shaming’ when they do so. We examine the production/circulation of gendered value and sexual morality via teens’ discussions of activities on Facebook and Blackberry. For instance, some boys accumulated ‘ratings’ by possessing and exchanging images of girls’ breasts, which operated as a form of currency and value. Girls, in contrast, largely discussed the taking, sharing or posting of such images as risky, potentially inciting blame and shame around sexual reputation (e.g. being called ‘slut’, ‘slag’ or ‘sket’). The daily negotiations of these new digitally mediated, heterosexualised, classed and raced norms of performing teen feminine and masculine desirability are considered.