دانلود رایگان مقاله نظریه اجتماعی استفاده از اینترنت: اثبات یا رد در میان بومیان دیجیتال

Abstract

This paper tests a theory of social uses of the Internet (López-Sintas, Filimon, & García-Álvarez, 2012), inspired by the work of Bourdieu (1984, 1986, 1989), outside the Spanish national context in which it was initially formulated. Using the OECD's PISA 2012 data for Germany and Norway, it specifically seeks to uncover differences in patterns of Information and Communication Technologies usage among fifteen-year olds and the factors structuring those differences. Simple Correspondence Analysis has been used as the method of investigation. The results of the analysis show similarities between usage spaces in Germany and Norway; where the first, dominant dimension represents the frequency of digital use and the secondary dimension represents the type of frequent digital use. Furthermore, in both countries gender, migration background, family structure, the parents' level of education, material access to the Internet at home, and the number of books at home explain no more than 8.6 percent of the variance in digital usage. At face value, these results suggest that the theory of social uses of the Internet should be rejected when applied to the adolescents in the countries under investigation. The paper argues, however, that the results should rather be interpreted as an indirect corroboration of the theory, with age being one of the most significant aspects of an individual's social standing affecting digital use.

7. Discussion and conclusions

The research question posed in this paper was whether the differences in social standing among adolescents perpetuate digital usage inequality in that age group. Thus, the aim of this study was to test a theory of social uses of the Internet (Lopez-
Sintas et al., 2012, p. 119) in this age group. Adolescents were chosen as a single age group to be investigated in order to avoid the potentially obscuring strong effects of age that might make other components of social standing (i.e., social status) seem as less important in the structuring of digital use. The theory of social uses of the Internet integrates the concepts of scale of consumption and linkage needs (Douglas & Isherwood, 1979) with Bourdieu's theory of taste (Bourdieu, 1984; 1986; 1989) and suggests that there is a homology between an individual's social standing and Internet use, in that social differences are reflected in different patterns of Internet use (Lopez-Sintas et al., 2012
, p. 121). This paper contributes to the debate on digital usage inequality by testing the social theory of Internet use outside the Spanish national context in which it was initially formulated: i.e. in Germany and Norway. The testing was done using PISA 2012 data on digital usage by fifteen year-olds from these countries. These two European countries, although they share with Spain many characteristics regarding the level of economic, social, and technological development, are at the same time different enough to provide an environment in which it was not self-evident whether the theory would be corroborated, rejected, or modified. Moreover, while the national contexts for testing the theory might differ, the analytical approach of the present paper follows the work of Lopez-Sintas et al. (2012)
by adopting Geometric Data Analysis (Le Roux & Rouanet, 2004; Le Roux & Rouanet, 2010) as the method of investigation.