Access - a guided reading list with key texts

Citation: Livingstone, S., Stoilova, M., and Rahali, M. (2022). Access: a guided reading list. CO:RE – Children Online: Research and Evidence.

Useful starting points

  Berker, T., Hartmann, M., Punie, Y. & Ward, K.J. (eds) (2006). The Domestication of Media and Technology. Open University Press.

This is a definitive statement of domestication theory, setting out how technology adoption is hardly the end of the story but rather, the beginning of the process of material and symbolic appropriation of technologies within diverse households. As the contributors to this edited volume argue, to understand the role of technology in family life, we must explore the dynamic process of ‘taming’ the ‘wild’ digital objects to understand how people actively make them meaningful in context.

Helsper, E.J. (2017). A socio-digital ecology approach to understanding digital inequalities among young people. Journal of Children and Media, 11(2), 256–260.

Access to the digital environment is explained in terms of individual, social and community contexts, going beyond accounts of individual access to technology or even digital skills. Socio-digital ecologies are proposed and argued to shape how young people engage with the digital and the particular outcomes that result. Thus it is not enough to provide technology, or educate to raise skill levels, without taking into account children’s biography and context.

Nikken, P. & Opree, S.J. (2018). Guiding young children’s digital media use: SES differences in mediation concerns and competence. Journal of Child Family Studies, 27, 1844–1857.

This article follows Bourdieu’s theory of social cultural capital to argue that parents will differ in concerns and mediation practices, since systematic distinctions in social, cultural and economic capital among parents may affect a family’s affinity with media.

Further reading

 Banaji,S., Livingstone, S., Nandi, A. & Stoilova, M. (2018). Instrumentalising the digital: adolescents’ engagement with ICTs in low- and middle-income countries. Development in Practice, 28(3), 432–443. https://doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2018.1438366

 This study draws on adolescents’ digital media use and development interventions in low- and middle-income countries to critique assumptions about the role and significance of new media in empowering children and adolescents in the global south.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction : A social critique of the judgement of taste. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Bourdieu examines everyday life in terms of an interplay between structure and agency where people are consistently and constantly working to produce their classed position from three available resources: economic, social and cultural capital. 

Brites, M.J. & Ponte, C. (2018). Reasons and circumstances that lead to the non-use of media by young people and their families. Comunicação e Sociedade, 34, 411–429.

This article tackles the underdeveloped area of media resistance among young people and families, from the point of view of deep mediatisation, disconnection studies and also social capital traditions to show how lack of use is not always a matter of lack of access.

Helsper, E.J. (2017). The social relativity of digital exclusion: Applying relative deprivation theory to digital inequalities. Communication Theory, 27(3), 223–242. 

Scholars working in the field of digital inequalities will benefit from Helsper’s elaboration of relative deprivation theory. The ‘social relativity of digital exclusion’ framework will enable researchers to determine how individuals and communities come to value ICTs through a process of everyday comparisons.

Katz, V.S. (2017). What it means to be ‘under-connected’ in lower-income families. Journal of Children and Media, 11(2), 241–244.

Katz argues that access to technologies should be understood in terms of a continuum of connection, with some users being ‘underconnected’. The reasons for ‘underconnectedness’ can be inconsistent and low-quality internet connectivity, limited functionality of devices or opportunities to use them, or by having mobile-only access. This affects how meaningful digital connectivity is to children’s everyday lives. For families (problematically) defined by their deficits – in income, parental education, minority status, and so forth – their frequent and intense technology engagement should be treated as an asset by initiatives to reduce digital inequality.

Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Second Edition with an Update a Decade Later. University of California Press.

This account demonstrates the way social class influences parenting. Accumulative advantage suggests that those with more parental capital continue to profit as they get to later stages in their life, increasing their advantage over others.

Mascheroni, G. & Ólafsson, K. (2014). Net Children Go Mobile: Cross-National Comparisons. Educatt. 

This report presents how children across several countries in the EU access the internet (with a focus on access, use, divides) from the results of the Net Children Go Mobile project. It presents access and use looking at different parameters: where children use the internet, age of first use, which device and apps are used, ownership, and also parents’ use of the internet. Although it is largely empirical, it represents a prioritisation of the main factors that define access and associated inequalities.

Ragnedda, M. (2018). Conceptualizing Digital Capital. Telematics & Informatics, 35(8), 2366-2375.  

Ragnedda defines Digital Capital as the accumulation of digital competencies and digital technologies, and examines the acquisition of digital capital in relation to social, economic, personal, political and cultural capitals. 

Silverstone, R. and Haddon, L. (1996). Design and the Domestication of Information and Communication Technologies: Technical Change and Everyday Life, in Silverstone, R. and Mansell, R (eds.) Communication by Design. The Politics of Information and Communication Technologies. Oxford University Press, pp. 44-74. 

Technology domestication theory discusses how the household adopts communication technologies and creates the household's "moral economy" in relation to the public sphere. The process of technology domestication includes four phases: "appropriation", "objectification", "incorporation", and "conversion".  By using "moral economy", the theory defines the household as an economic unit which produces and consumes technologies, and which is influenced by its own family members' histories and politics. 

Tondeur, J., Sinnaeve, I., van Houtte, M. & van Braak, J. (2011). ICT as cultural capital: The relationship between socioeconomic status and the computer-use profile of young people. New Media & Society, 13(1), 151–168.

The article deals with the topic of digital divide by investigating whether and how differences in access and computer use relate to children’s inequalities in terms of cultural capital.

Vicente, M.R. & Lopez, A.J. (2010). A multidimensional analysis of the disability digital divide: Some evidence for internet use. Information Society, 26(1), 48–64.

This article proposes a framework for discussing digital divides in relation to disability that incorporates multiple internet-related dimensions such as access, affordability, motivation and attitudes, and skills. 

Warschauer, M. (2006). Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom. Teachers College Press.

Warschauer provides a detailed exploration of the micro-processes of power, privilege and exclusion operating in the classroom in the context of national efforts to introduce technology into learning. The result is a nuanced and critical analysis of what is meant by access to technology, rejecting diffusion or marketing approaches, along with much government policy.