Children Go Online - Final Report
The final report from the LSE’s Children-Go-Online research project is now out.
Easily the most prominent of the ESRC’s e-society projects so far, the report has generated ample headlines: see the BBC News website and the Guardian.
The project examined a complex range of issues, chief amongst them the risks to children that arise from them having web access - and the risks they face if they do not have (high quality) web access. The core conclusion is, perhaps, unsurprising but sensible nonetheless:
In our view, the risks do not merit a moral panic, and nor do they warrant seriously restricting children’s internet use because this would be to deny them the many benefits of the internet. Indeed, there are real costs to lacking internet access or sufficient skills to use it. However, the risks are nonetheless widespread, they are experienced by many children as worrying or problematic, and they do warrant serious attention and intervention by government, educators, industry and parents.
Two findings are particular interesting about the report. The first is that they offer a detailed picture of how children in the UK use the internet, moving us beyond the straightforward access/no access picture of the digital divide. Instead, the focus moves to becoming one of quality of access - not just the existence of a connection, but its location, speed, the number of people it is shared with, the length of time spent online, the range of sites used and, ultimately, the user’s ability to find what they want on the web. As they put it:
Unlike for the adult population, very few children and young people are wholly excluded as 98% have used the internet at some time. But inequalities remain. A few children and young people have not used the internet. A minority use it only infrequently. And, even among frequent users, many make only narrow use of the internet. Lastly, there are some dropouts as users cease to use or have access to the internet. For children and young people, therefore, the digital divide has become a continuum of digital inclusion and exclusion, with the locus of inequality shifting from technology access (haves and have-nots) to quality of use.
The second item of interest flows from this and concerns the role of parents in all this - in terms of encouraging web use, setting the parameters for it and assisting their children in making use of the web. They argue:
Parents’ experience of the internet matters: Daily and weekly users have parents who also use the internet more often and are more expert. These parents consider their children more advanced in using the internet and trust them more to know what they are doing online. By comparison with the parents of low and non-users, they also consider the media generally – and the internet in particular – as more beneficial for their children.
These two findings then link into a bigger picture concerning risk, opportunity and inequality.
The first issue here concerns safety. The researchers highlighted many of the dangers faced by children using the web and concluded the gap in knowledge between parents and children - both technical and in terms of what children were doing when online - needed to be bridged.
The second relates to education. For most children now, the internet has become the primary tool for locating material required to complete coursework tasks. Clearly if some have better access than others this creates an advantage that needs to be addressed.
The third is that those at greater risk - of harm and of disadvantage - are, for the most part, those who are already at a disadvantage economically. There is, therefore, a real risk that a vicious cycle will be at play, with economic disadvantage fuelling a relative digital deprivation, in turn contributing to educational disadvantage, in turn contributing to labour market disadvantage and so reinforcing economic disadvantage.
